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If we want to understand the Bible and early Judaism and early Christianity on its own terms, rather than on the terms we are imposing, we need to rethink this category and talk more about something like one God rhetoric, where we. We see people talking about the one God the way that I talk about the Denver Broncos in the late 90s. There’s no other team. The Oakland Raiders. They’re not even a football team. Like, it’s the same kind of rhetoric. It’s not an actual philosophical assertion that the Raiders do not exist as a football team. I wish that were the case, but it’s not. And so I, I think we need to shift to talking about one God rhetoric. 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. How’s it going today, Dan?

Doing great. Doing great. Looking forward to today’s show.

All right. Excellent. Me, too. We’ve got a good friend of mine, David A. Burnett. How are you doing, David?

Hey, guys. I’m doing well. How are you?

Doing very well, thank you. We are going to briefly introduce David, and then we’ll get into things. David is a PhD candidate in New Testament and Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, working with Matthew Novinson. Is that correct?

That’s correct.

All right. He has completed other doctoral work toward a PhD in religious studies in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at Marquette University and served there as a graduate teaching assistant and research assistant and now teaches full time at St. Anthony School in Milwaukee. And how’s the weather treating you there these days?

Oh, man. Summers in Milwaukee are paradisical. Man, it is fantastic.

All right. It is. What is it? It’s 85 today, which is actually nicer than it’s been for the last few weeks around here. But David and I go way back. I think 2010 was that. That was in. And it was in Atlanta, right?

Man, I can’t believe it’s been that long.

But yeah, we met each other at a big geek festival called the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, which happens the weekend before Thanksgiving every year, and it switches cities. And you can find north of 10,000 biblical scholars who descend on the hotels in the conference center of this city during this conference. And In Atlanta in 2010, I was presenting a paper on, I think, monotheism or the gods or something like that, and I was presenting in the same session as a well established scholar named Larry Hurtado, who was. Was actually teaching at the University of Edinburgh for a long time. And he and I were kind of going at it a little bit in the session, disagreeing with each other a bit. But Larry and I and David began talking after the session and maybe you can tell what you were doing there and how we got to know each other.

Yeah, it was a blast, actually. I saw your paper in the program and me and my old friend Mike Heiser, may he rest in peace, were coming to hear your paper and to hear Larry’s. And I had always wanted to meet Larry Hurtado, and I had loved his work, like in college when I had read it and got really into the early high Christology stuff or not, you know. And yeah, so Heiser. Hurtado loved Heiser’s dissertation and kept trying to get him to publish it on the Divine Council, which was weird that.rd that.

He never published it.

I got on to Heiser all.

The time about the dissertation online and stuff.

Well, it may be published posthumously, so we are, we are currently working on that, but that’s, that’s for another time. Yeah, but yeah, so we were, we went to y’all’s session, loved your paper. And it was on Septuagint God, Deuteronomy.

And the conceptualization of God in the Septuagint or something like that.

I remember because it was good. I was like, this is a great paper. And I was, I was tracking, tracking, you know, and I was writing my master’s dissertation at the time and, and, and doing stuff with the gods and stuff we’ll talk about today. But yeah, so Mike introduced me to, to Larry and then talked to you. And then we got to talking and then the other session was starting, so me, you and Larry had moved out in the hallway and we kept talking. And then Larry Hurtado’s like, y’all want to go for a drink? And I’m like, yes, absolutely. And so, yeah, he, he takes us all for a drink. You know, I, Dan had his, like, ginger ale or whatever, and then, yeah, Sprite. There you go. And he bought me a Guinness and. And we just went at it and kept debating and talking and it was a really great memory. It was just. We had a. We had such a fun time with Larry and that. I just, I love having that memory. And that’s how our friendship started. And we’ve just kept talking ever since and would hang out at SBL and, you know, just had a great friendship after that.

And Larry tragically passed away a handful of years ago. But you mentioned the Early High Christology Club, which many of the people listening will probably not know about. But in your words, what was the Early High Christology Club of which Larry I think was a founding member?

Oh yeah, he was definitely a founding member. So I mean, I first learned about it when I was reading Lord Jesus Christ, his ridiculously epic tome on this. He, he had dedicated it to EHCC and I was like, what is this? And I had asked him about that and he’s like, oh, that’s the Early High Christology Club. And it was a group of scholars that take the view that from the first generation, the authors of the New Testament, for example, are already, already believe that Jesus is divine. He is, he is God or is a God or a divine being of some sort already from the get go. It’s not a late development like later in Christianity that already they’re attributing divinity to Jesus from generation one.

So, and this is, yeah, this is his, his mutation idea that this is something that as soon as as we have news of the resurrection spreading, this pops up really quick.

And he calls it a radical mutation of Early Jewish Monotheism. And he qualifies early Jewish monotheism to not really mean monotheism, but it’s like, yeah, but yeah, that’s.

And he’s, he published a few years ago, Baylor University Press published a collection of essays called Ancient Jewish Monotheism and Early Christian Jesus-Devotion. So he’s been one of the most prolific writers on the question of monotheism and early Judaism and the relationship of the Jesus conceptualization and the relationship of Jesus to God. But that’s pushing back against the idea that was very common and is still common among scholarship that the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke at least don’t seem to present Jesus as divine in the same sense as the much later Gospel of John seems to. So arguing that there’s kind of a development towards a divine Jesus. And Larry and others were saying, no, as soon as we have the resurrection and the story of the resurrection, we have whatever this is that treats Jesus as in some way divine, a part of God’s identity to pull from Richard Bauckham’s theory of divine identity.ucombe’s theory of divine identity.

I think that’s all very fascinating, but I would like to push us to talk about David’s scholarship because we could go, you two—I’m sure if we wind you up, you guys could go and talk about other people’s scholarship for forever, for eternity.

So you’re not lying.

Let’s dive in a little bit to you, David, and talk about a bit of what you’ve been working on.

Yeah, I appreciate that. So basically this dissertation has been a long time in the making. It’s tentatively called—and I had done an episode back on the Naked Bible Podcast years ago about this—but it’s tentatively called Resurrection and the Death of the Gods, and it’s about rival reception of the patriarchal promises of star-like seed that are given to Abraham and the argument of 1 Corinthians 15 , which is the most famous chapter in all of the New Testament on resurrection. For your listeners that don’t know that, if you want to go anywhere in the New Testament to learn about what the resurrection is all about for these early Jesus people, that is where you would start. Because now that—

And let’s hear, what does it say?

Yeah, so that chapter is fascinating for a million reasons. It starts out with the Gospel as the first most important thing that I taught you. You know, and this chapter is written in First Corinthians to combat supposedly a sort of loss of belief in or misunderstanding of the resurrection of Jesus. Because for Paul, he’s trying to get the Corinthians to understand that not only is this the most important thing that I taught you guys, but if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, then the whole Resurrection—which he puts a capital T on, it is an event for him—it is an apocalyptic, end-time, eschatological, world-turnover type of event that he says this is what it’s all about. He’s like, “If that didn’t happen, if Jesus wasn’t literally raised from the dead bodily”—and we’ll talk about what that means for Paul in a little bit—“but then the resurrection isn’t going to happen either, and all of our faith is pointless.”

So when—

When you say “the resurrection,” you’re talking about like us, like everybody?

Resurrection in an epic sense. Yes, this is a huge end of days, you know, righteous resurrected to life. What happens to the unrighteous, the wicked, that’s still up for grabs at this point. A lot of folks think destruction of the wicked, annihilation. Some folks think, you know, something like what we call hell. But I personally don’t think Paul was a universalist. I think that was a later development. There are texts in Paul that lend themselves to be read in that kind of way. Some people take—

What’s a universalist? I’m not sure I know what that is.

A universalist is the idea that everyone eventually in the end will be saved. And some people take some passages in Paul to say that. I definitely don’t think historically Paul thought that. Paul was, in one sense, a run-of-the-mill Jewish apocalypticist of the first century that, as a Pharisee, really believed in this thing we call the resurrection. And that event—he calls it that four times in 1 Corinthians 15 —the Resurrection. And it’s always an event. It’s always a title for an event. And this gets misunderstood sometimes. It might help to— —to mess up the language so we don’t take all the Christian baggage with us that happens later in the reception of Paul. But maybe call it something like “the arising” or something like that. That might be a good way to talk about it. Because there’s all kinds of things associated with this big event for him that he talks about in this chapter.out in this chapter.

And sometimes in— Especially in Christian theological conversations, especially in apologetic ones, it gets so overrun by this proof that he physically, bodily got up and that’s it, like, end of conversation. And it’s like there’s so— There’s so many other things going on in this chapter besides that that he attaches to this event. And so when he describes what’s taking place in the event, there’s a host of stuff that he talks about. Like one of those things that he talks about is this judgment and supposed destruction of what he calls the principalities and powers and rulers. This is in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 . This section there, 15:20-28. And this is his little section, kind of like Paul’s little apocalypse. If you want to look for a section in Paul’s letters where what does he actually think is happening in this whole resurrection event?

What is taking place? Because he talks about resurrection all the time, but he never sort of lays out, here is the event, step 1, 2, 3, 4. Well, if you want to know what that is, that’s the best place to go. I mean, that’s the sort of best outline he gives us. And— And there you have this weird destruction of the powers thing going on.

Yeah.

And verse 24.

Then, then, then comes the end. He hands over the kingdom to God the Father when he has brought to an end all rule and all authority.

Yeah, power.

And that— And that would be the, the principalities and every authority and power. These would be divine forces that are affecting the world, that have power within the world. And this is where you’re going to talk or in your dissertation, you’re going to talk at some length about what this is a reference to, aren’t you?

Exactly. Yeah. This is a huge part of my dissertation is where is this coming from? First of all, where is this and who are these powers and principality stuff? There is a great scholar named Emma Wasserman who’s written a book called Apocalypse as Holy War, and she has previous articles on this subject as well. And I think she’s dead right on this point. Is that traditionally the way in specifically Christian scholarship that has read apocalyptic stuff in Paul is this really staunch bifurcated cosmos, like you got the good guys up there, bad guys over here, and it’s just black and white, this big battle, good versus evil, and that’s it. That’s what it’s all about. But this language of principalities and powers is used all the time in Greek, Jewish literature for the gods of the other nations. So it’s used to talk about them all the time.

So it’s not— We’re not talking about earthly principalities. We’re not talking about the like human lords and leaders and kings and whatever. We’re talking about their gods.

Yeah. So yes, they are talking about the gods of the Gentiles. I think the gods of the nations specifically, I think is a category coming from Deuteronomy. But to answer your question— To answer your question, no, it’s good to answer your question. I personally think both are included. And there’s a passage in Isaiah that I would refer to, to this that maybe we can talk about. But go ahead, Dan.

I was going to say this is a vestige of the earlier divine council which Dan and I have talked about in a previous episode. So we see this in Deuteronomy 32 . We have references in Psalms 82 and elsewhere.ere. This idea that each nation is ruled by its own patron deity or by this time period, some kind of angel or some kind of divine being of some kind. And so this is how they account for the different forces and the different powers that are in play geopolitically around the world.

I think a lot of our listeners, and I would be a little surprised to hear that this, that these ideas of other gods still persist in the New Testament. It feels like an Old Testament sort of idea. But to hear that it’s like still sort of pervading through the New Testament is actually a little surprising to me.

As it should be. I mean, this is great because for a couple of years I had been dreaming up this conference on this topic on monotheism and its—hopefully—its demise in the study of antiquity. And finally it’s happening. And so one of my best friends, Josiah Bisbee, who is dissertating at Brown right now with his PhD at Brown University under Saul Olyan there, wonderful scholar in this regard as well of the Hebrew Bible, he pitched the idea to Saul. We met and Saul loved the idea and we are making this happen. And me and Josiah both said, if Josiah takes the late antiquity, because we’re going all the way into late antiquity after Judaism and Christianity are already a thing. He’s going to cover that section, I’m going to cover Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins. But we’re like, we need to get Dan to do the ancient Israel side and ANE side.

So we brought Dan on board. And so all three of us are sort of spearheading this conference at Brown that we are calling the Meanings and Ends of Monotheism. And “Ends”—the “s” is in parentheses. So the Meanings and End(s) of Monotheism. And this is a play off of a title of a famous Wilfred Cantwell Smith book called The Meaning and End of Religion, which was big in the 60s as a paradigmatic shift in religious studies, part of a wider paradigmatic shift to saying, can we even talk about religion existing in the ancient world? Was that even a thing? Because not in the modern sense. The way we talk about religion is like, well, you have your spiritual, you know, metaphysical stuff over here and then you have like politics and economics and all that stuff over here. And so that’s religion over there, you know, and then you have everything else over here. Smith and others are saying, no way. This distinction did not exist in the ancient world. And the way scholars talk about…

We’re scholars of religion. You, you can’t. You’ll find out real quick if you’ve read any primary literature at all from the ancient world, that all of these things are integrated. They have no concept. I’m barring some philosophical traditions like Epicureanism and others, but there’s no general sense in which politics, what we call religion or religio practices, cultic practices to divinities and all that, economics, social sphere, family sphere, individual thoughts about individuals, all of that is tied to the divine realm. It’s all a holistic thing. And so just like that book did, to say, hey, we need to think about not using this term religion to describe that in the ancient world. We’re saying that with monotheism. Yeah, we’re saying monotheism was not—surprise, trigger warning—it was not a thing in ancient Israel. It was not a thing in early Judaism, and surprise, it was not a thing in early Christianity either.

They believed that these other gods were real. They believed that they were active in the world. They believed that they were active in all sorts of ways in the world.

] David A. Burnett: And I did a paper at SBL on this last year, and I’m going to develop this further for the conference.

But there are conflicting views on what to do with these gods or what these gods are like in early Judaism. There wasn’t just one view. It’s not like all Jews agreed on.

This, you know, and a problem of taking our modern concept of monotheism, which is something that is developed since the 1700s, like, that’s when the term was coined in 1760 by a Cambridge Platonist named Henry More. We take that, that framework and we retroject it and impose it upon the Bible. And then the way we try to find ways to make it fit the framework, and then that then becomes a foundation for. For all kinds of different arguments, even though the. The categories upon which we’re basing these arguments are arbitrarily imposed on the text. And so we’re trying to say if we want to understand the Bible and early Judaism and early Christianity on its own terms, rather than on the terms we are imposing, we need to rethink this category and talk more about something like one God rhetoric, where we see people talking about the one God the way that I talk about the Denver Broncos in the late 90s.

There’s no other team. The Oakland Raiders, they’re not even a football team. Like, it’s the same kind of rhetoric. It’s not an actual philosophical assertion that the Raiders do not exist as a football team. I wish that were the case, but it’s not. And so I think we need to shift to talking about one God rhetoric. And because it’s serving a specific rhetorical function within the discourse that’s going on, it’s not. It’s not coming downstream from this conviction that no other gods exist. It is something that is being used to structure power and values in that world. And so this is going to take place in May at Brown University. We’re going to start advertising for it at the end of the year. But I’m really looking forward to this conference, too. And I’m really looking forward to, at some point, writing the paper that I’m going to be presenting, which I have not started yet.

I’m very excited about the conference. I’m hoping somebody, I, I think I know somebody who might be able to get me in. But we’ll, we’ll see. We’ll see if we can.

Well, I mean, I think it’s gonna be open to the. So I mean, as soon as the place is full, it’s full, you know.

We’re gonna stream it too.

And we’re gonna stream it as well. That’s right. It’s gonna be live streamed. So there’s already, I mean, I didn’t even know Dan was going to talk about it on his TikTok yet, but it’s like there’s already a lot of buzz generating about it already, which is really cool. And that’s what we want. I mean we want this to be a big rock in the pond in the study of antiquity. And the thing is for, for us, for people, weird people like me and Dan who are way deep into this stuff, this is not new. This is stuff we’ve been talking about for a very long time. And. But the problem is whenever the trickle down of scholarship actually reaches the public, it’s still filtered through all of these monotheistic categories. And we let the modern developed religions determine what we can and can’t say about antiquity. And that is a huge problem. And a lot of people don’t understand why it’s a huge problem, but it has a ton of ramifications.

Talk a little bit about why it is a huge problem.

Yeah, so for, for starters, it’s just bad history. I mean, if we care about the discipline of history at all, I mean if we really want to preserve doing good critical historical work, then.k, then. And one of this ties into, one of the reasons why it’s so bad is it misrepresents entire people groups, entire movements, entire religious movements, if you want to call them that. Whole people groups that come from these traditions that millions and millions of people come out of. We want, if you want to understand your history or if someone’s telling your story and your history, you don’t want to be misrepresented. You don’t want people to tell the wrong story. Because when you start looking at Christian origins in particular, which is my wheelhouse, early Judaism and Christian origins. When you start looking really carefully and critically at this, you can’t help but bump into and run into all the gods.

You can’t help it because what do you do in that God-saturated world and this weird thing with Jesus rising from the dead and he’s supposed to, what is he supposed to just go have party with these guys, or is he friends with them? You know, what’s going on? Well, according to Paul, no way. It’s bad. They are bad. They are not good and they need to be dealt with. Whereas there were other Jews, sort of maybe in their own day, that would have appeared more urbane and sophisticated. Part of the Greco-Roman polis that were going to festivals and other temples and places all the time, and it was commonplace for them. And if you want a great scholar to read about this, read Paula Fredriksen.

She.

Her work is fantastic on this. And I was going to mention her.

Paper, her recent one, Philo, Herod, Paul, and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish Monotheism.

Yes, I love it. Which is a great. It’s a fantastic paper. Yes.

So, sorry, I wanted to just go back because you were talking about. And I wanted to make sure that I understood the problem that you’re discussing is that if we look at the ancient times through the lens of modern religion, or if we have to make it comport with.

If we have to make our view.

Of ancient times comport with our own theology and with our own, like, modern sort of Christianity or religion or whatever it is that we’re looking at. Excuse me, we’re going to. We’re going to miss what was actually going on there. Is that the crux of what you’re saying?

100%.

And I think, I think building on.

That, exactly what I’m saying.

And that can harm things today because the same kinds of people who we’re silencing by looking at the Bible and saying it’s all monotheistic, we’re silencing a ton of people, those people like that are still around. And so in a sense, it’s also giving priority to groups today over and against the groups who might be more closely tied to what was probably a more prevalent view anciently. And so even today, even like in matters of legal issues, what is or is not a religion, or what is or is not Christian, maybe not in the United States, but around the world, those debates can have significant impact on the quality of people’s lives. And so when we try to conceptualize religion as one thing, or Christianity as one thing, or monotheism as one thing, that can frequently impact who has access to what power and resources. And when we’re allowing one group to exercise unilateral control of that discussion and defining things the way they want, and you know how much I hate definitions, Dan.

That can, that can.

I know, too.

That can cause problems.

Yeah, I mean, he said it great. I mean, I shouldn’t. It needs no repeating.

urnett: But the point there, I think that’s important as we look at Paul here, is that Paul is one voice among many, but especially as a Pharisee that sees that the gods of the other nations are a problem.

There’s something that needs to be dealt with. But he’s not the only voice in the 1st century in Judaism on this. And just to show you how stark of a difference it is, in a couple of my publications I talk about the Deuteronomic sort of cosmology, the Deuteronomic background to a lot of Paul’s thinking. And I have a stupidly long title for this book chapter I did called “A Neglected Deuteronomic Scriptural Matrix for the Nature of the Resurrection Body in 1 Corinthians 15:39-42 .” And what all that means is just when we go and look at— When Paul talks about the nature of the resurrection body and what it is like, he compares it to the celestial bodies. The sun, moon, and stars—and the stars differ from each other in glory, and so too is the resurrection. He talks about them being glorified beings and he relates them, the celestial bodies, to the terrestrial bodies under there, which is what you are now.

You’re human beings, the birds of the heavens, fish of the sea, blah, blah, blah. Those creatures are terrestrial beings; they’re called “flesh,” he calls them. They’re perishable. Whereas he says these glory beings are imperishable. He says you once bore the image of the terrestrial, but now you’re going to bear the image of the celestial. So he actually calls Jesus in that text a spirit. He’s a life-giving spirit, whatever that means. And he’s not a flesh being. He says flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, period, full stop. So whatever he means in this nature of the resurrection body, what is it going to be like? Because clearly he’s had pushback against— “What do you mean, bodily resurrection?” And here’s a huge problem here: in some Christian theological hot takes on this chapter, they’ve sort of framed the conversation in this, like, staunch dichotomy where you can only have one or the other.

You can only have one. These people that believe in just raw Platonism, that the body’s gross, it’s a prison-house, you need to get out of it and the soul needs to escape and go to spirit-land where the souls are and where the gods are unbodied—they don’t have bodies, all that body stuff is nasty, gross earthly stuff. It’s a prison. The really virtuous soul can ascend to the heights and join the gods. Right. And then the other version is Paul’s version where he thinks, no, you have a body. And it’s not like that astral stuff. You’re going to have a body, you’re going to be on a new earth, you’re going to be on the ground, you’re going to be eating chicken or whatever, you know, it’s like— And those are the only options. And that’s the way a lot of popular New Testament scholars who are also theologians like to frame the conversation. And I’m sorry to say this, but they’re dead wrong. Those are not the only options. There are lots and lots of other options, especially within Greek-speaking and Greek-writing Jews; they have lots of other options to go by.

And so you need to really get down into the weeds of what ancient Mediterranean people actually thought about the nature of the gods. What are they like?

Because it’s not as simple, you’re saying, as the contemporary dichotomy between immaterial and material. It’s not binary where you’re either 100% immaterial or 100% material. It’s more of a spectrum between those two poles.A. Burnett: That’s right.

Can you explore that a little bit?

Give us a couple of examples of some other contemporaneous ideas?

Yeah, I have a great example for you. And this came up in a recent Catholic Biblical Association meeting where I was debating a popular scholar on this very topic. So yeah, so an example of not making these false dichotomies. So to frame the example I’m going to give you and connect it to Paul is it’s very popular—and Dan knows this really well— It’s very popular in these debates about in Paul: who are the stoicheia tou kosmou that he mentions in his letters? This in Greek is like the elements of the world or the cosmos or the powers of the world. Is he just talking about like the four natural elements that, you know, in Greek literature they talk about a lot, or is he talking about actual beings and powers? You know, and there’s this again, the whole conversation a lot of the time in past scholarship is defined by those dichotomies, by those binaries, and Greek celestial science of the day and philosophy that’s all mixed up in the ancient Greco-Roman world was you could be all of those at once or neither.

So I’ll give you a great example of this. So this is from a famous text—one of my favorite texts that people who know me say I talk too much about this text— But Cicero has a text called De Natura Deorum, and it’s On the Nature of the Gods. And we are really lucky to have this text survive from antiquity because he talks about lots of other books by other Greco-Roman authors before him on the nature of the gods. Sometimes like 6-volume works or 12-volume works or whatever that we don’t have anymore. And so we have Cicero’s and it’s an amazing conversation of an Epicurean, a Stoic, and an Academic. They’re the inheritors of Plato’s school and they’re all like debating with each other on the nature of the gods. And we have the whole conversation as he construes it, and it’s brilliant. And so Velleius is the Epicurean and he says of Chrysippus, the Stoic, this is what he says about him. So he’s trashing the Stoics.

So he wants to go in on Chrysippus. And this is what he says in Book One, he says Chrysippus, who is deemed the most skillful interpreter of the Stoic dreams, musters an enormous mob of unknown gods. So he’s just gonna call—he’s just got all these gods that we don’t, you know, I don’t buy, you know. So who does he—what does he say are gods? Well, he lists them. Velleius lists them for us. He says this is what Chrysippus thinks are divine. He says some of the things he calls gods or divine are, quote, “fire or ether, all fluid and soluble substances such as water, earth, air.” So you have the elements there, right? And he keeps going. He says sun, moon, stars, and the all-embracing unity of everything or all things, and even those human beings who have attained immortality. So right there you have an example of Cicero portraying the Epicurean as getting on to Chrysippus.

For he thinks all these things are divine, all these things are gods. So it’s very common in that context. And going along with this, he goes on to talk about the debate between Platonists and Stoics, for example, where Platonists think, when they think of the gods, it’s like, no, they are asomaton, they are unbodied, they do not have bodies. And writing in Latin, he even quotes them in Greek, to be precise. He’s like, they say this. Well, the Stoic says they are wrong. And I’m paraphrasing here. But it’s like for any being that has motion, that has will and determination and all that, we know they have bodies, the gods have bodies.00:35:58.820] David A. Burnett: So, so a Stoic and Platonist can argue about that long before Paul and long after. And so when you’re a Greek-speaking Jew in that world, an educated one, especially one that thinks, a Pharisee who thinks that, oh, the resurrection, we’re going to become as the stars—and we’re going to talk about this.

They thought the stars were gods just, just like this. The Greeks and Romans thought this. Many of them, ancient Israel thought this. And so when you go and look at— And most Jews thought this as well. So of the period, all the literature we have seems to suggest this. But if you go and look at the source of this, this is where some of my work comes in is when you go look at Deuteronomy—and Dan’s written about this too. When you go look at Deuteronomy, it’s very clear that the celestial bodies are conceived as… When they think of the… When they look up and they see literally transcendent, like literally above them, every… The beings that rule the sublunar sphere. And this is stock ancient Mediterranean cosmology right here is they’re all gods up there, little G. You know, they’re all divine beings up there and they’re sort of tasked with running everything down here.

Interesting.

Yeah, that’s the, that’s the common belief. And Jews did not depart from that common belief. That is a common shared belief. Now everyone had their own narratives as to how that happened and they had their own interpretations. Are they good, are they bad? How do we relate to them as our own people with our own deity? You know, that was the conversation. So if you really want to get into the conversation in the first century, that’s the level at which the conversation is being had. Does that make sense? Yeah, there’s a…

And if I can, if I can butt in a little bit, there was a great book published a bit ago by Beate Pongratz-Leisten and she was the editor. It was called Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism.

Great.

One of those dichotomies that we use a lot is this notion that everybody was just going along okay with the gods and then suddenly something just stopped it immediately. And everything just did a 180 and we’re just going the other way. This idea that monotheism was just a nuclear bomb that just totally revolutionized the world and there’s absolutely no indication that any such thing whatsoever happened. No evidence; incremental elaborations. And as we have all this authoritative literature that we still have down to this day, still considered authoritative literature where we have precisely these ideas. Deuteronomy 4:19 . When you look up to the heavens and you see the sun, the moon, the stars, all the hosts of heaven, do not bow down to them. It says that Adonai gave these to the nations of the earth. In other words, these are the gods of the nations. And this is reflecting on Deuteronomy 32:8 and 9, where it says they divided up the nations according to the Bene Elohim, the children of God. And even in Judges, when you’ve got Deborah fighting against Sisera, what does it say in Judges 5 ?

It says, “Even the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” This is another reference to the gods. And so these authoritative texts are still there when 1st century Jewish people are interpreting this. And they have not just said, oh, well, there’s a line here. And from here on out we are understanding this completely differently. They’re still looking at this and considering these stars, these divine beings, the host of heaven, as the gods of the nations. dichotomy that frustrates me that we think there was one day where everybody just decided they were just going to suddenly believe something entirely differently. And everything that our parents and our grandparents and everybody before us believed, we’re just going to reject. That’s not how ideologies work. It is, really.

You know, it’s funny that people, you know, we have these vestiges. Even in our, in our, our modern lives, we still call a bunch of the heavenly bodies after Roman gods. Like, we still like those. They still bear those same names. So it makes sense that, like, at one point it wasn’t just named after gods. Those were the gods. Those. That’s, that’s who that was.

And they didn’t have the benefit of the scientific experimentation and exploration that we have today. So it was a lot more widespread to accept those traditions that Pumbaa couldn’t accept in the Lion King because he thought they were giant balls of gas burning millions of miles away. But. But he was corrected on that.

But we gotta remember the social aspect of this too. I mean, that when you think about, like, if you’re traveling in the ancient world, which only the rich people could do anyways, unless you’re just a slave in, in a, in a, you know, trail here. But the point is, when you’re traveling in the ancient world you go to some other city or just some neighboring city, and they have a god of that polis, you know, that. That god is over that. We call this cosmic geography. You know, the idea is that god is over that little region and they have their own language, they have their own traditions that are maybe hundreds of years old. And it’s totally different than ours over here, you know, we have our deity over here. We have our temple, we have our stories in our traditions. People didn’t go around, for the most part, people did not go around the ancient world saying, well, our God is the only one and all of y’all’s are fake and all of y’all are wrong. That’s not how they saw the world. When they go into some neighboring territory and the Bible is full of this, and Dan’s talked about it on the podcast. I’ve heard him talk about this.

When you go into some neighboring territory of some. That’s some other deity’s purview. And so, you know, that you’re in foreign soil was cosmic in their mind. You know, you’re going into a place that’s watched over and like, cared for or not by other deities, and you might be afraid, you know, it’s like, well, oh, wow, are they gonna. Are the people gonna do horrible things to me because they’re under the purview of that deity? You know, are they gonna hate me? Are they gonna like me? And so hospitality is wrapped up into this too. It’s like, oh, that god has a good reputation because his people are hospitable when we go in their territory, you see, so this is all. There’s social aspects to this too. And people want to tell stories. They want to know, like, well, where did their god come from? You know, where their guy come from? You know, so people tell these stories. So when we talk about, in religious studies and critical history, a lot of the time when students get introduced in grad school or undergraduate to syncretism, you know, religious syncretism, where this religion has pieces glommed on from that religion over there and that religion over here, that philosophy over here, it’s such a wooden way of talking about very fluid things in everyday social realia.

You know, it’s so. And you’re a Jewish people who may have your synagogue and some of them may be like real hardline conservative fundamentalists who are like, no, the Torah says we don’t go after those gods. We don’t worship those gods. That’s evil, idolatry, filth. But then you might have other sort of perceived as urbane, sophisticated folks who are like, no. And Paula Fredriksen brings this up is when you’re reading the Greek of Exodus in the synagogue and it says, don’t blaspheme God. In Hebrew, when Elohim is translated into the Greek, it’s the gods—that is, theoi, plural. Theoi, plural. Like, don’t blaspheme the gods.

And you might be in a synagogue, you might be in a synagogue that was built through contributions from somebody who worshiped another God.

Exactly.

And there might be a dedication on the wall to one of those other gods because they facilitated the building.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this, this, you see how this can destroy people’s categories? You know, it’s like, well, no, no, no, no, no. They’re Jews. You know, when you go in there, they only worship that one God. It’s like, well, sure, but it’s way more complicated than that. And there’s so many variegated positions on that. It’s just like, it doesn’t really take a lot of imagination to understand this. I mean, you just look at the religious landscape today, right, and we think there’s these radical evolutions, like, we’re talking about, like, oh, we’re so different in, in so many social regards than those weird, dirty, ancient people. You know, it’s like, no, sociologically speaking, we divide over the craziest, silly little things all the time in these religious traditions. And you have these plethora of different positions and the argument over which one is dogma and which one isn’t, it has everything to do with power.

It has to do with who’s in power, who wants to have power in that place, in that space, you know, so you can never divorce these questions of, like, what’s Paul’s eschatology or whatever, from all of the social and political aspects that are touching that, that.

Okay, before we get too far adrift, I want to ask the relationship of this to the patriarchal promise of a star-like seed, because that’s, I think, one of the next steps in your dissertation. So we’ve got this understanding that the stars are considered divine, the celestial bodies are considered divine. This is still operative during the periods of the New Testament. So what is the patriarchal promise here?

That’s right. So. So if you’re familiar with the stories of Abraham, the father of Israel, when he’s given a promise in Genesis 15 , he’s taken outside. It says, by the word of Adonai, which is very interesting. He’s a character in this scene. He’s taken out of wherever. We’ll talk about this in a second. It says he’s taken out and he’s told to behold the heavens. He says, number the stars if you can number them. And it says, so shall your seed be. And so this great promise, you can envision it, you know, Father Abraham looking at all the heavens. And traditionally, when we read this text, we think he’s looking up, right? He’s looking up at the heavens. He’s seeing all the stars. Oh, man, there’s so many, I can’t even count them.nt them. And. And what people will just innately, instinctively do. And it’s totally fine. I mean, it’s. It’s a pretty plain reading of the text will say, oh, he’s talking about how many seed he’s going to have, how big of a family he’s going to have.

He’s going to be the. He’s going to have tons and tons of offspring and he can’t even have children. Right? Him and Sarah couldn’t even have kids. So that’s like the miracle, right? That’s the whole miracle. Well, yes, that is a big part of it, but lots of early Jews that I would argue and others have argued. Matt Thiessen is another scholar who’s argued along similar lines in his book Paul and the Gentile Problem, which. But he cites my article a couple times in that book, so that’s good.

And he’s got a new book coming out called A Jewish Paul.

Yeah, a Jewish Paul. Yeah, we want to plug that. As if he’s not plugging it enough already. Just kidding, buddy, if you’re watching. So, yeah, so this, this idea, when they read this promise and it said, so shall your seed be, there are Jewish interpreters, ancient Jewish interpreters, and I would say it goes way back into ancient Israel as well, that did not interpret this just quantitatively, as in just how many there are. They also interpreted it qualitatively, what they would be like. So when they’re promised, so shall your seed be. A major Jewish interpreter, same time as Paul in the first century. A relative contemporary of Paul, writing from Alexandria, the famous Philo of Alexandria. When he comments on this text, he’ll be very clear and says the text does not say so many. It says so shall they be, which denotes all kinds of other things. Like glory and immortality and all of these things, the life of.

To take on the life of the stars, the astral beings. Because again, for them, for people like Philo and other authors in Judaism at the time of Paul and after, both Christians and Jews, even after in receiving these texts, they all think when that these beings up there are just that they are gods, they are divine beings, sometimes they’re called angels. Josiah Bisbee is doing great work on questioning what angels really meant in a lot of these texts. Because that can be a term for lower tier servant deities, you know, so, you know, angels are not like these little floating cupids with wings floating around, right? These are like divine beings that when they show up to some human being, they fall like dead men. You know, that like when they encounter God, they’re afraid they’re gonna die when, when God appears on the mountain. Well, humans act like they’re gonna die when they see these malakim and these angels as well. So divine beings are divine beings to humans.

You know, you’re. We’re little peons. They’re like the immortal, powerful beings up there. So when, when they see stars up there, they’re thinking, okay, well, if, if the promise to the patriarchs, to our fathers, that our identity as Israel as a people is going to be as the stars, that becomes generative of all kinds of interpretation in later Judaism, and in particular the idea that those stars, they rule over all of the heaven, all of the earth below. And this comes from the idea from Deuteronomy that Dan has already brought up and we’ve brought up, and this is what my book chapter was about, is that on 1 Corinthians 15 , is that that assumption that you will become like the stars in the heavens is an interpretation of the promises to the patriarchs. Because we know from lots of Jewish literature at the time, especially all over Paul, he never shuts up about it.about the promise to Abraham and the inheritance to come.

What is this big kleronomia, the inheritance of the cosmos? He talks about Romans 4 . And this is what my first article was about, is like, how in the world this. I’m going to introduce a problem here. How in the world in Romans 4 can Paul squeeze so much out of so little? He quotes Genesis 15:5 , “so shall your seed be,” from that star promise. And he squeezes into it the resurrection from the dead, becoming the father of many nations, inheriting the cosmos. It’s like, okay, bro, hold up, pause. How do you get all of that out of that? And there are scholars, you know, over the years who have pointed out like, oh, well, you know, maybe he just, there was an expansion of the land promise in the Second Temple period and that’s what he’s talking about. Or they’ll say, only a few of them that I’ve found. One, one in particular that was really helpful was Philip Esler has admitted, like, okay, we cannot squeeze all of that theological content into Genesis 15 here, this whole astral promise there. If the promise means “so numerous shall your seed be,” if that’s what it means, you’re not going to get all that content into it.

And this is what people do, translators, including scholarly commentators. You can look at all the commentaries for the past, like hundred years, which I’ve done slogging through, and you’ll find that every one of them, almost every single one, will insert the word “numerous” into their translations. And the text doesn’t say that. And what’s fascinating about it is that first-century interpreters like Philo catch this and make a huge deal out of it and say, yeah, it means way more than that. The author could have easily said, “so numerous shall they be.” But he doesn’t. He says, “so shall they be.” So then what are those stars? What does it mean to become like a star? Well, for lots of Jews, go to a book like Deuteronomy, go to Deuteronomy 4 and see that the sun, moon, and stars. It’s the famous “don’t make any graven images” passage, right? This is like Dan’s bread and butter right here. Wrote a whole book on it.

So I will default to him on all divine image stuff, you know. But I’ve said a couple things in print about this, but the point is in that passage in particular, the one that talks about not to make any graven images, when it says not to make any graven images, it has a terrestrial creature list and then a celestial one. When he talks about the terrestrial one, he says, “don’t make any graven images because you didn’t see my form in the cloud of the fire,” not of, you know, man or woman, beasts of the field, fish of the sea, birds of the heavens, blah, blah, blah. But then when he addresses the celestial, he says, “now look up to the heavens.” And it’s sort of like a similar image that you have with Abraham, right? It’s like, look up to the heavens and behold the sun, the moon, the stars, all the tsavaot, all the hosts of heaven. This is the word for God’s armies, his divine council, his celestial host that is around him; that’s what he calls the sun, moon, stars. He says, look at them. And he does not say there, “don’t make graven images of them.”

He doesn’t say anything about that. He says, “don’t worship them.” And he says, “those that were allotted to all the other peoples or nations under the whole heavens,” you see? So their idea of the gods of the nations that are allotted to them, way back in that Tower of Babel story, when they separated all the peoples by their languages and God’s talking to an “us,” you know, “let us separate their languages.“let us separate their languages. That’s what we would call the divine council that y’all have discussed before. And so Deuteronomy imagines those. When the sun, moon, stars, that’s the. The host up there, they’re allotted to the other peoples. But Adonai, my portion is Jacob, I’m the one that delivered them out of the fire of Egypt, you know, out of the furnace. I did that, you know. And. And also, by the way, he mentions in Deuteronomy 4 after that, he’s like, nothing greater has been done in this whole creation of Israel out of Egypt thing since the creation of man. This is significant because in my chapter, I try to argue that the list that Paul draws on when he wants to talk about what’s the resurrection body like?

Because we have lots of texts in Judaism, from Daniel to 1 Enoch to 4 Ezra to 2 Baruch, all kinds of texts that talk about the resurrection is all about becoming like the stars, right? Lots of them. And so it’s not surprising that we find that in Paul. But when. When he wants to describe what is that body actually like? What is that celestial body like? He has a creature list. And most people say, oh, that’s right out of Genesis, you know, it’s creation, blah, blah, blah. But I argue that, no, no, no, this is coming from Deuteronomy. And it’s the exact same creature list you find in Deuteronomy. It’s closer than the Genesis 1 , but in particular, because Paul’s one of those guys that thinks that the gods, those celestial bodies, they’re bad. Back in verse 20 through 28, they need to die. So who’s going to take over the show? Well, remember what he said back in Romans 4 , that seed of Abraham is going to inherit the whole cosmos. And so now they’re going to become like the stars, they’re going to become like the gods, and they’re going to rule the whole thing.

And if you think that reading is crazy, what does he say right after his whole nature of the resurrection body section, he tells you, flesh and blood cannot inherit what, the kingdom of God, the whole rulership thing of the whole cosmos. You can’t have flesh and blood for that. You need to become these pneumatic beings that are celestial. He literally calls the resurrected ones celestial bodies. And it’s the same term he uses for sun, moon, stars.

Did you just say. I just want to make sure that I caught this, that somehow the stars that are above us now, these, these gods, these celestial bodies above us now, they’ll be deposed and then replaced by the, the sort of the, you know, the followers of Jesus. Is that, is that the idea here?

It’s wild. It is wild, yes.

And that’s how Psalms 82 comes into play as well, because we have the deposition of the gods in Psalms 82 , where they will be made mortal and they will fall like any prince.

So I guess we’re going to move right into that then. So this is, this is at the crux of my argument. So, and I have published on this already, but I’ll develop it much further in the dissertation. You can find it in my 1 Corinthians 15 chapter. We’ll put it on my academia page in the description or whatever. We can do that and I’ll. You can have it for free. But the reason why Psalms 82 comes into play here is because a lot of scholars who are trying to figure out what is the relationship of all these Old Testament quotations that Paul quotes in his little apocalypse section that we were talking about 20 through 28, about this destruction of the powers and the rulers and all that, and this resurrection and inheritance of the kingdom of God.ance of the kingdom of God. You know, where is this all coming from? What’s the narrative? What is he drawing on? Well, the first part of this argument, say, well, that promise to Abraham of starlike seed. So it puts it in conversations with other Jewish authors who are looking forward to and imagining what that’s going to be like.

But Psalms 82 provides us with a narrative of that day, that final moment. So when we talked about the resurrection in Paul, we said that was an event, right? He only describes the resurrection four times as that event. And when he talks about what God does in it, he uses the term egeiro, like to raise up, to rise up. So when you go to Psalms 82 in Greek, it is fascinating, you see this sort of narrative bubble up where you have the judgment of the gods being discussed in Psalms 82 for not ruling in justice, not doing justice, they need to be judged. And whoever this God figure is of Psalms 82 that passes judgment on the other gods in the divine council, that’s up for grabs in the Second Temple period. People speculated. Okay, so is that. I’ll say Adonai, because we’re on Data Over Dogma.

Is that Adonai? You know, is that the God of Israel? Is that his, like, chief angel? Is that Melchizedek? Yeah, Melchizedek, the guy from Psalms 110 and Genesis 14 . So that there’s a famous text from the Dead Sea Scrolls called 11Q13 because it’s in Cave 11. We call it 11Q Melchizedek about this famous Melchizedek figure. And guess what it says about this guy. Now, this is dated, generally speaking, give or take, about 200 years before Jesus. Okay. Something around there, whatever. So that they take the Psalms 110 Melchizedek guy and they say. And they quote Psalms 82 and say he’s the God that is doing all the judging of the gods. And, yeah, it’s crazy. And there’s some lacunae in this text. So we don’t have the complete thing. Lacunae are the spaces that we have fragments, you know, and we got to try to use our scholarly imaginations to try to fill them in, you know?

Yeah. But in the context of describing this Psalms 82 , God as the Psalms 110 Melchizedek who comes and judges the other gods, this is where, remember, this is long before Jesus. This is where he saves the sons of light from Belial. Sort of the chief adversary guy, right? He destroys the sons of darkness in this great eschatological end time war. And destroys Belial and saves Israel, redeems Israel, you know, saves them from their sins.

Oh, wow.

And destroys the gods and quotes the God of Psalms 82 as the one who does this, being Melchizedek. So. And in some of those lacunae, what we find right afterwards is the quote from Isaiah 52 , which is the passage about the good news, the gospel being proclaimed. This is good news. You know, this is all going down. Yay. This is the great news. You know, our Melchizedek’s gonna come and destroy all the bad gods and save the sons of light and save us from our sins. Da, da, da, da. Well, what does Paul start this whole chapter with? In 1 Corinthians 15 , he’s like, hey, remember that most important thing about the good news that I told you about? That good news is all about this arising. And what we find in Psalms 82 , when you look at it, you have this whole plea from this God figure after the little introduction to Psalms 82 , that he’s like, oh, these gods are ruling unjustly.unjustly. They need. The whole earth is turning, teetering about and all that. You know, they need to be judged. They need to die like men.

They will fall like any of the princes. When that gets translated in Greek, it’s archontes. It’s the common term for the rulers that Paul uses all the time for those Deuteronomic gods of the other nations. This is the common term. This is the term that’s used right there in 1st Corinthians 15 for those archons that need to be judged, you know, so that’s. That’s the term that he uses too. And the psalmist ends the psalm in Greek, and it’s fascinating. The psalmist ends it after this God figure, you know, is just laying waste these gods in the. In the. In the. In the council, right? He says, arise, O God, and judge the whole earth, for the nations are your inheritance, right? So this whole arising in Greek is the same word that’s used for the resurrection, the anastasis. So Anasta. So it’s arise, O God figure, whoever this is, and do this, you know, judge the whole.

The whole earth, judge it all. That’s what a ruler does, right? That’s what you’re gonna. You’re gonna step up, you’re gonna take over. And the kleronomia, the inheritance. There’s that language from the Abrahamic promise. Remember Abraham’s promise that he would be the inheritor of the whole cosmos, according to Paul. So now you have this story in Paul in miniature of this one named Jesus, who arises to judge the other gods. And how does the chapter end? In the inheritance of the kingdom of God, becoming like the celestial bodies themselves, you see. So the narrative, I argue, is a common apocalyptic Jewish narrative of how they imagine the ideal eschatological scenario. And in large part, it comes from this narrative of Psalms 82 . So this is why it’s entitled Resurrection and the Death of the Gods, because not all Jews agreed with this.

You know, this would be a very radical position to take. You know, if you’re going. If you’re. If you’re a Jew of the polis in Corinth, especially if you’re rich and you can. And you’re going to the temples and you’re celebrating with all these other gods. And you got Paul going around saying, don’t you dare do that. That’s idolatry. You know, you’re going to perish if you do that. You know, we are going to become the rulers and they’re all going to die. It’s like, whoa, you know, he’s the extreme guy. You know, he’s the extreme one. He’s, he’s one that would have been like, whoa, hold up. When I tell, when I sort of introduce Paul to students, a lot of the time I like to think of him this way. I’ll say, imagine like the Yale, Harvard trained scholar, right? And he’s the one standing out in the corner saying the end is nigh, you know, with the big sign, you know, it’s like, then you’ve got somewhat of an idea of how crazy this guy is, you know, so that’s, that’s the image here.

Well, I, you know, I don’t know if Paul ever looked up at the stars. It just seems boring to me. Why would you want to even become one of those things? They just sit there most, I mean, other than a few of them that, you know, the travelers, the planets or whatever, they’re just sitting there. I’m not sure why you’d want to be that, but kind of an amazing, an amazing theology to think about that, that, that that is the inheritance that, that was promised to Abraham was, was.am was, was.

To be, you know, stars. I think it’s actually really great you brought that up because what is the appeal here? You have like, okay, do I just like sit up there as a star and keep going? What’s the deal? You know, but this is, that’s a really great point to bring up, because ancients, the way a lot of ancients thought about these star gods or whatever, and you see this a lot in ancient Greek literature is this becomes the basis of a lot of mimetic thinking about ethics. Virtue ethics comes from ideas similar to this. It’s like you copy the thing that’s most virtuous or whatever. So if you’re reading a Stoic or something and they’re talking about the motion of the stars, how they always keep their courses, you know, they never deviate, they’re always true. And you got those old pesky wandering stars, you know, those little suckers, you know, but, but the ones. If you never deviate your courses, you want to be like that, you want to have that, that you want to have that soul that is, that is virtuous, that maintains your place in the world, you know, to keep this perfect harmony in order.

Because what we’re talking about is imagining. How do we imagine cosmic order? What does that look like? You know, what is the ideal world? What is that like? And so in a lot of construals of those of answers to those types of questions in the ancient Mediterranean, the stars are very frequently involved in this because they imagine one not only the regularity of their courses, being someone who’s accepted their role and, and holding all of this in order, it’s also ruling in a sense of keeping the order of the whole world. That all of our seasons, when we plant our crops, when we don’t, when we’re supposed to go to the temple, when we’re not, it’s all determined by looking up; the heavens tell us when to do all of these things. You know, if you plant your crops in the wrong month and they don’t grow and everybody goes hungry and they all die, that’s not good. So, you know, you might want to order things properly.

Right. And the heavens tell you how to do that. And so that’s great. That’s a major part in the imaginary of eschatology.

And that’s also. You also have their ruling. And for a group like Pauline Christians, who are really among the. They’re under the boot of a large empire at the time.

That’s right.

The idea of overturning that world, that power structure and being the ones who are in charge, the one ruling, that’s got to be very attractive as well.

Incredibly attractive. That’s a, that’s a magnificent point. Is another presupposition to this study that you need to really feel the oomph of it is you need to know that there’s all kinds of narratives of Caesar and great rulers and great heroes who have had apotheosis. They go and become a star god. And this goes all the way back to the ancient Near East. You know, pharaohs are going up to heaven and joining the stars and becoming a star god amongst their brethren and blah, blah, blah. It’s just a common narrative of the powerful, the ones who have rule over the whole thing. Because why would Caesar need to go up and become a star when he dies? Because there’s stories about that too, because they rule everything down here. And if he’s the, the, the father of the whole world, the Pater Panton, which is a term used for him too, the father of all. That’s a term that Jews use for God. Right? That’s the term Paul uses for God as well. Father of all.

That’s a term he uses for Abraham as well.[01:09:15.990] David A. Burnett: By the way, I have an article coming out about that. But anyway, yeah, there’s… There’s this… This idea of apotheosis was… It was something reserved for those who were powerful, for those who were the most virtuous, the best. And of course, the ones in power were always the most virtuous. Right. You know, so they were always the best. They deserve a place up in the heavens, not you little guys down there. So you can imagine the appeal, if you’re just saturated with all this propaganda all the stinking time everywhere, you can imagine the appeal of the synagogue, of the God of those Jews. You know, the God of the Jews has made promises that not only will his people be blessed, but all the nations will be blessed too. And especially when you have a gospel like Paul’s, which is like the rising up of the poor, you know, and you’re reading the prophets and this God cares about the destitute and those who are ruled over by the empires, and he will raise them up, you know.

And so this whole idea of the arising was not just about weird celestial bodies, you know, it was also about who gets to take over and rule this whole thing and set it right. And they thought it would be them.

So I think that—is that it? I love that this is an unfamiliar couching of a familiar concept. Yeah, the idea of sort of the powerless gaining power, the, you know, the righteous powerless becoming the ruling class or becoming the rulers over the unrighteous, you know, powerful people. I think it’s great.

And we see this overturning is part of the Beatitudes, it’s part of the Sermon on the Mount, that in the kingdom of God it’s the other people who are in charge. It’s part of apocalyptic literature, which is all about God peeling back the fabric of creation and overturning everything. I think that’s one of the themes that underlies so much of what we see in Greco-Roman period Jewish literature, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, as well as in the New Testament. It’s so formative for the ideologies of early Christianity. And then early Christianity went ahead and became an empire itself. And so for some people, for some people, that was a fulfillment of some of that stuff. For instance, Augustine: this is a fulfillment. We are now in charge. Unfortunately, I think for many, it seems they became precisely what they had always been preaching against.

Yeah, right.

Well, just one last point about the social stuff is—

You’re never getting out of here, Dan.

Oh, it’s good.

Look, I love it. I love it. I mean, we… David, we’re gonna have to have you back on just because… Yeah, man, these conversations can go on forever. But yeah, to hit us with that, with that nice closing idea.

Well, I was just gonna say, you can imagine why this stuff catches on, you know, with these great apocalyptic tales where there’s this radical democratization of deification, that you can become like the gods too, you know, not just those guys over there. And we have the secret, you know, so, yeah, we may be poor, we may be downtrodden, but we’re really the sons of God. And we’re waiting on the unveiling, the Apocalypse where we’re revealed as who we really are. You know, that’s Romans 8 right there. So the, the whole idea, you can imagine how that’s appealing to those who have been not just downtrodden, but been under the boot of empire, who’ve been a lower social class. The God of the Jews is appealing to you. One law for the king and the peasant. And the peasant.1.770] David A. Burnett: You know, you can understand how that catches on. So it’s not, it shouldn’t be surprising that you have rich folks going to temples saying… …and like Philo saying, “Ah, the gods are virtuous, they’re fine.” He literally says that, you know, they’re good.

You know, they’re not the problem to us. Oh, the powers are the passions you need to overcome. That’s the real issue, you know, where others are like, “No, it’s those powers. Get rid of all of them.” You know, so that’s the appeal of this. You know, you got two different worlds that are coming into loggerheads in this early Jesus movement. And I think that’s largely what’s going on here.

I love it. I think that’s fascinating. David, where can people find your work? Where can they find you if they want to learn more about your…

Your work? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. My Academia page, I’ll just try to tell them, we’ll put it down in the description. And my Academia page has my articles and book chapters along these lines that are sort of previews to where the dissertation is going. And I’m on all the social medias. If you just look for David A. Burnett with the big, bald head guy, you’ll find me. So I’m on all the social stuff. So I’m on what was formerly known as Twitter, what, X? I’m not…

As long as it still exists.

Yeah, whatever. But Facebook, Instagram, all that stuff. So you’ll find me at those places.

Wonderful. Well, David, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate having you on. And it’s fascinating stuff. I love it.

Thanks, duo of Dans. Appreciate it.

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Bye, everybody.