A Beatitude Adjustment for Jordan Peterson

This is a case of someone trying to leverage the authority of the Bible to give permission to their specific group of followers to be monsters, because he knows they want to be monsters and they want Jesus’s blessing. And you don’t have Jesus’s blessing to be a monster. 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. And today we’re going to be doing some of said combating, aren’t we, Dan?

Oh, my gosh. This is going to be. This is going to be some fun combat.

We’re, we’re rhetorical combat, just to be clear.

I’ll tell you what we’re going after Jordan Peterson.

Friends.

It’s. I, I, I. You know, you don’t want to bury the lead on this one. The. The second half of our show. We’re coming for you, JP and we’ll.

We’ll.

We’ll see how. How good a job he does.

Cause he has been waiting around on your turf.

I gotta say, there is some trampling of. Of my purview. Yeah. That. That has occurred and I’m not happy about it. So. Yeah.

But before that, let’s do a chapter and verse.

Excellent. And what chapter and what verse shall we engage?

Well, we’re gonna probably talk about a couple chapters and definitely several verses. We’re going Beatitudes. The Beatitudes, which I. I recently learned is a word. I never knew what that word meant. I had always heard it in reference to the Sermon on the Mount, but I didn’t know what beatitude meant. But I have a thing called Wikipedia that is very useful.

And I, and it turns out that it’s. It’s from the Latin Vulgate. The word blessings or blessed that begins each of these little verses is beati in the Latin, which, Which means that the plural adjective.

But I got to say, I’m disappointed with something which is that in the original Greek, it’s. It’s makarioi. And the. It. It is a missed opportunity that these are not the makarioids. That’s all I’m saying.

Well, some scholars refer to them as makarisms.

Oh, okay.

So that is, that is an English word.

I feel like sayings that you say should be. Should be. Mac. Mac. Somethingisms. Anyway.

Well, I get, I get danisms is what. Is what I heard. But there you go, yeah.

Anyway, let’s talk about the Beatitudes. The Sermon on the Mount as a, as sort of a, as a sermon is kind of unique in form and in content for Jesus.

Wouldn’t you say?

Yeah, we, there’s only one gospel in which we have what we know formally as the Sermon on the Mount, and that is the Gospel of Matthew . We have a lot of parallel comments in Luke chapter six, in a sermon, which is generally referred to as the Sermon on the Plain.

So you got the flat sermon and you got the bumpy sermon.

Well, I, I was going to go in the direction of. He’s lecturing folks who are sitting in first class. But yeah, he’s Sermon on the Mount. We don’t know where, if this actually happened, I think most scholars would say the exact words that we see in Matthew are a literary product and not a reflection of an actual single historical event.storical event. But if something like this happened, it probably would have been somewhere in the north of the Sea of Galilee. As you and I will see next year, there is a church that is set up on, up high on a hill overlooking the northwest shores of the Sea of Galilee that is traditionally associated with the location of the Sermon on the Mount. A gorgeous area, very peaceful and relaxing place to go contemplate the Sermon on the Mount.

But it is, and like all of the places in and around that area, that church is very surely exactly where this historical event may or may not have happened.

It’s actually not a very old church. It is, it’s fairly recent, but there was a Byzantine era church that’s a little further down the hill. But yeah, pretty much everything in the land of Israel that you see is either something that was identified in the 4th century CE or was identified in the Byzantine era or in the Crusader era. So yeah, there’s not a ton that goes all the way back to the first century CE and certainly not this location. So because the text, all it says is it was the mount, right, he was on the mount and turns around, starts addressing everybody. And what we have here as the Sermon on the Mount is the larger sermon. That is, it’s kind of summing up what Jesus’s followers thought were essential for disciples to know. So like, if you had to take the whole Jesus movement and say, if you became a disciple of the Jesus movement in the first or second century CE, what was like your intro packet, what did you need to know about being a disciple?

The Sermon on the Mount is kind of the distillation of here’s what it takes to be a disciple of Jesus and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke. Some scholars have argued that the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is aimed at a more Jewish social setting, whereas the Sermon on the Plain in Luke might be aimed at a more gentile setting, Greco-Roman setting. And so one theory is that this was kind of the intro to Jesus discipleship before the Gospels were written down. And so the Gospel authors, Matthew and Luke, or at least whoever wrote those Gospels, whom we traditionally attribute to Matthew and Luke, took that little package up and kind of wove it into their narrative and said we’re going to take this little primer on being a disciple and we’re going to make it something that Jesus shared with the followers.

And so the opening segment, the exhortation at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount contains our Beatitudes. So this runs from Matthew 5:3 all the way down to Matthew 5:12 . So not a long.

Yeah, and this is the part where, I mean each of these has a sort of a standard form where it says blessed are the blank and the reason that they’re blessed. So it’s a kind of almost a call and response or it’s a standard form that he goes throughout each of these Beatitudes.

And this is not original to the Gospels in the sense that this formula of “blessed are” long preexisted the New Testament, goes back to Plato and even before we see this in the Psalms and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. So in the Greek the word is, you pronounced it makarioi. That’s Erasmian pronunciation. In modern Greek it would be makarii. But this is a translation of the Hebrew term which also means happy slash blessed. And so we see in places like Psalms 128:1 , I think “blessed are those who trust in the Lord” or something like that. And so this kind of two-line statement, couplet that begins with “blessed are” or “blessed is” and then goes on to explaining why is something that goes way back.

And there’s an interesting distinction. Sorry, I just wanted to dive in to drill down on one thing that you said, which is that there’s a difference between “blessed are” and “happy are.” In my mind that they could be, they could mean the same thing. But also the word blessed. Blessed could be, could contain a sense of a subject object sort of thing like there’s a blesser and those who become blessed by that Blesser.

Whereas you don’t need that relationship with the idea of happiness. Like you’re happy because of the thing and not because. So I’m wondering if that’s explored at all in this or if that’s a meaningful distinction for this to be blessed versus happy.

Yeah, the concept, it’s like fortunate, happy, privileged. And so that bleeds into the idea of being favored, divinely favored, blessed. So it certainly includes this kind of transitive property that this is something being bestowed upon you, but not necessarily. And so that’s. That’s open for some interpretation, I would argue. Okay. And so that’s why it’s a little difficult to. To translate. But blessed has become traditional, and so that’s how most translations go about it. But you could say fortunate, you could say happy. But yeah, blessed is. Is most popular. And the idea is that these blessings are bestowed by God. But I don’t think that’s necessarily inherent in the, in the text itself. But we see this in Egyptian literature, we see this in Jewish wisdom literature, we see this in Greek literature.

We see it in a number of different places. So they did not innovate it for the New Testament. Rather, they picked up this literary device, this literary genre and said, we’re going to represent this introduction to Jesus’ discipleship using this very popular, very famous, very widespread piece of gnomological literature.

This is, this is Jesus’s version of participating in a TikTok trend, something like that.

Yeah. One that had been going on for several centuries. And we can only hope that TikTok will go on for several centuries or not. And so they’re basically trying to distill down essential positions and doctrines in the briefest, the shortest possible form. And one thing I want to point out is that these are focusing on divine justice. These are focusing on what is right and what is just in the world. And so there’s a close relationship with morality, with ethics. This is supposed to heighten your ethical awareness and make people think about social justice, divine justice, cosmic order, and their place within all of that.

Yeah, unless you’re Jordan Peterson, but we’ll get to that. So. So should we just go through them?

Yeah, let’s. Let’s go with the first one.

So verse. Verse three starts with. And it’s translated in. I think. I think what I’ve got here is King James.

But it says, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Exactly. And this is paralleled in Luke, only it does not have the addition of in spirit. It just has blessed are the poor.

Well, that’s two very different things.

Yes, it is two very different things. Blessed. Let me see. This is Luke 6 , verse 20, and it says, blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. So in addition to leaving out the in spirit, it’s also a second person rather than a third person statement. Now, a lot of people try to make a big deal out of poor in spirit, as if this is only referring to kind of a. A psychological disposition and not to an economic socioeconomic status. Dan McClellan: I think the fact that Luke takes it one direction and Matthew adds the “in spirit” indicates that there’s a relationship going on here. And we actually see this phrase elsewhere in Jewish literature. In fact, it’s in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s in Hebrew where we have the phrase anve ruach, which means oppressed in spirit or poor in spirit.

And so this is basically translating from Hebrew this concept of poor in spirit, which can be a reference to humility, but can also refer to socioeconomic status. And so the scholarship that I’ve seen on this has suggested that this is an invitation to recognize the depraved state of the human condition—that there is poverty, there is misery, there is suffering. And so the one who is poor in spirit may be socioeconomically poor, but is also one who just recognizes the low state of the human condition. And recognizing that is important to understanding one’s life. In other words, you need to recognize the poor state of the human condition in order to have a foundation for living an ethical life.

I got to say, adding the “in spirit” feels like it makes it a much more nebulous concept. It becomes much trickier.

It is, yeah, I would agree with that. I think the idea here is not just like a kind of constitutional, here’s a precise little datum, but it is to some degree an invitation to contemplate these things. But it is at the same time, what the Beatitudes are doing is kind of overturning the conventions of the time regarding success in life. And having said that, I have to think of Conan the Barbarian. “What is best in life?” Jesus might, instead of saying to—you know, the quote says, “Well, to be poor in spirit,” that’s kind of the opening salvo. And it says, “For theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” which overturns expectations. It’s not the powerful, it’s not the wealthy, it’s not the haughty, it’s not the people who rule things here who will rule in the kingdom of heaven, but the kingdom of heaven overturns those expectations. And it’s—

I feel like Jerry Falwell and Joel Osteen would have some truck with this concept. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. This rather undermines the prosperity gospel because I think it is expanding the scope beyond just socioeconomic poverty, but it definitely includes the socioeconomic poverty. And so the idea is the real philosopher kings in the kingdom of heaven are those who recognize that we are all in a pitiful state and that the human condition—the baseline—is one of poverty: socioeconomic, moral, and other types. So, we’re starting off strong. We are hitting the ground running, and the next one is going to move in an orderly fashion to those who mourn. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” We have a Hebrew Bible parallel to the transition from the poor in spirit to those who mourn,

and that’s in Isaiah 61 . And it says here, the first three verses say: “The spirit of Adonai God is upon me, because Adonai has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed.” And this is that word that can also be translated poor. So anav, anve ruach, poor in spirit. “Proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of Adonai’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn.“rn. So we’re following kind of the. The order of operations that we see in Isaiah 61 . So this is not haphazard, this is not random. But the author of Matthew is putting these together in an order that would resonate with folks who know the Jewish scriptures. And the idea here is that if poverty is kind of one of the features of the human condition in general, the next one after that would be grief.

People are poor, people are suffering, people are oppressed. And then people grieve because death is also a natural part of everything.

And yeah, I think that there’s a. It is an interesting opening, as you say, to. To this concept, which is we’re starting off with a rejection of, like you say, the wealthy and the powerful and, and those who, you know, all the people who are sort of at the top of what you might consider a. A sociological pyramid of sort of who has it easy, who’s happy. Those people are not the ones that are being celebrated here or that are being blessed here.

Right.

Which I think is fascinating.

Yeah. And. And the, the second clause and the. The second beatitude, for they will be comforted that’s what we have there in Isaiah 61 , right? That the spirit of Adonai, God is upon me to comfort all who mourn, to provide for those who mourn in Zion. So this can have to do with personal loss, with death, but it’s also about the loss of the land. It is about the oppression under a larger empire. So the mourning can take different shapes, but God is there to comfort those who mourn. And so what is unexpected is what the kingdom of God is all about. The poor in spirit. The kingdom of heaven will be there as those who mourn turns out they’re going to be comforted. And this has kind of contemporary application, but there’s also an eschatological perspective. It’s also saying this is what’s coming in the future when God comes and the end times are here.

Basically, those who are, you know, kind of under the boot of what society accepts as, as happiness, as. As a blessed state should be happy, should be blessed. And in the end times, that’s when everything’s going to be overturned and they’re going to receive the recompense and they’re going to be shown to be the ones who are truly happy. They’re going to be shown to be the ones who will be comforted, who will, who will rule in the kingdom of heaven. And then we get to verse five.

Blessed, which we will have some contention with later.

Yeah, yeah.

In the. Later in the show. But for right now, yeah, it’s. It’s. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Yes. Talk, talk, talk. First about the, the word that is used there for meek. And then. Yeah, it is interesting because we’ve already had an inheritance of the kingdom of heaven. We know who’s inheriting that.

Now we’re inheriting the earth, which I find a little confusing because it feels like up until now, what we’ve been talking about is like after, in a sort of. In a later time, you get a thing. Why. Why are the meek inheriting the earth? Well, and what’s going on there?

This, this is something that is debated by some scholars, but in the Gospels, the. What’s coming, this promised salvation is not necessarily about flying into the sky to live in the clouds. It’s actually something that’s going to be on earth. And there’s an argument to make that the kingdom of heaven that the, the Gospel authors are kind of presenting, the kingdom of heaven is already here in some sense.1:48.480] Dan McClellan: And, and in the history of Christianity, there are folks who have interpreted the kingdom of heaven as, as underway, as. As having arrived on earth. So the kingdom of heaven and earth are kind of different sides to the same coin, but we are talking about the earth itself. There are debates about, does this mean political kingdoms? Does this mean the land? What does this mean? It’s. I mean, the, the text doesn’t really give us a lot of help there.

However, this is a quote from an Old Testament passage. Okay, this is Psalms 37:11 , but it’s being quoted from the Greek translation, which is in the Septuagint. It’s Psalms 36 . The Septuagint has different numbering. And so, okay, but in 37:11, we have that same word that is used for the poor in Hebrew, anawim, which is the oppressed, really, but it can also mean the humbled. And so the New Revised Standard Version translates, “but the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant prosperity.” And as. Oh, I think I, I think I flipped the versions. It’s 37:11. In the, in the Hebrew and in most English translations, it’s 37:11.

Dan, get your act together, will you?

I. The, the “Debunking Dan” TikTok account, I think needs to. I’m calling on the sock puppet to correct me there. But so when this is translated into Greek, they use this word praus, which means gentle, which means humble, which means meek. It’s not the, the word that they translate in the other parts where we talk about poor in spirit, that’s a different Greek word. So the, the interpreters of this psalm are understanding this to refer to somebody who is gentle, humble, meek. And the idea here is, is basically again, overturning those expectations. It’s not the proud, it’s not the arrogant, it’s not the violent. It’s the ones who are gentle, who are calm, who are reserved, who are meek, who will be the ones to inherit the earth, whether that is a reference to political kingdoms or geographical regions or whatever. So, once again, what’s expected is being overturned.

And this is supposed to allow believers to reflect on their current existence, to feel better about perhaps being in a position where they really don’t really have any power, but just accepting that and being gentle and kind and meek is how they can kind of generate a sense of contentment, of happiness. And we see this in, in philosophical treatises as well around this time period, talking about how kindness, gentleness, meekness is the sign of someone who has, has their crap together, has a real grasp of ethics.

Yeah, okay, we’ll get a counterpoint to that. In the second half of the show.

Yeah, yeah. And if you look at the rest of, of Psalms 37 , it says the wicked shall be cut off. Those who wait for Adonai shall and inherit the land. Yet a little while the wicked will be no more. Though you look diligently for their place, they will not be there. But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant prosperity. So even this psalm is kind of talking about when the Lord comes, they’re going to overturn things and the proud and the powerful are going to be. Keep thinking of pseudo-Spanish words like echado. No, they’re going, going to be kicked out. And it is the meek, the ones who, who are humble, who are going to take over man.

We already have like Latin and Greek and, and Hebrew here. We don’t, don’t bring Spanish into the mix. We’re already too confused here. All right, moving on. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.

And, and here we have another kind of a further development of this idea that this is recognition of the sad state of the human condition. If you are poor in spirit, if you are mourning, if you are meek, then you’re going to recognize that there is unrighteousness all around you and it’s going to hurt. It’s going to leave you wanting righteousness. And so we have this concept of hungering and thirsting after righteousness as a result of the human condition. And I want to go to Luke here, actually. So in Luke 6 , this follows after the blessed are the poor in the Sermon on the Plain, Luke 6:21 , blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. And so in Luke, again, we’re going away from kind of the Matthean poor in spirit, hunger and thirst after righteousness. And we’re back to kind of a more corporeal, kind of immediate. Those who have hunger, a more specific hunger for food, for you will be filled.

Remind me, between Matthew and Luke, which one do we think was written first and which second?

So Mark is first of all the Gospels. And then I think I am of the opinion that Matthew comes before Luke. But it’s not that they were like Matthew wrote his and Luke was like had Matthew and says, well, I’m going to improve upon this. It’s that Matthew is writing using Mark as a source, but also using other sources. And then Luke is writing probably a few decades later, a few years to a few decades later. And they have Mark and they have Matthew, but they also have their own independent sources. And so they’re probably pulling these things from other sources rather than just kind of directly piggybacking on what Matthew is saying. So it could be that Luke is preserving an earlier version of this. It could be that Matthew has editorialized where maybe they both had this manuscript that said, blessed are the poor, blessed are those who hunger. And Matthew was like, I can do better than this.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. There are arguments about that. We don’t have near enough data to say much more than could be one way, could be the other. I would. I would suggest.

I wanted to hit on something with this, with this verse six, with the hunger and thirst for righteousness or after righteousness thing, because I think you mentioned it. It’s very clear, like the following thing, that they will be satisfied makes it seem pretty clear that this isn’t hunger and thirst for righteousness in themselves, but rather those who hunger and thirst for righteousness in the world.

Right.

And don’t find it.

Right.

And then. And then finally, you know, we’ll be eventually satisfied that, you know, everybody got their comeuppance or whatever it is, but it doesn’t. It’s. Yeah, I think that’s fascinating that it’s not about, like, those who try to be righteous, but rather those who are out there wishing that everybody else was righteous.

I think. I think there’s a lot of. A lot of folks think that when they talk about righteousness that it has kind of a modern, legalistic sense that righteousness is like, right behavior. And in the New Testament, we are incorporating some Greek philosophical frameworks. It’s not. It’s not directly unmediated from ancient Israelite concepts, but in the ancient Israelite world, righteousness was a state of affairs where righteous meant that people were fulfilling their role. And there was harmony, there was social. was harmony, there was social. The. There was social order, there was cosmic order.

And so is there a sense of justice in that?

Absolutely.

As well?

Yeah. Like I said earlier, this is. This has a lot to do with divine justice. And in the Hebrew Bible, you have this idea that God is there to uphold cosmic justice. And then social justice and cosmic justice are intertwined. And if one is out of sync, then it will throw the other out of sync as well. And so social justice was these ideas that, you know, you’ve got to provide for the poor and the widow and the orphan and the oppressed. You’ve got to make sure that they’re not going through too much suffering because if the imbalance is too great, then that’s when everything gets thrown out of whack. And so, you know, earthquakes and floods and disasters and invasions and these kinds of things are in some ways conceptualized as the natural consequences of the social order and the justice of society being thrown out of whack. And so like in the Laws of Hammurabi, you have the kings are kind of viewed as the deity’s mediator on earth.

It’s their job to implement the deity’s will. And so to the degree that they uphold justice and righteousness, they are performing their duties well. So in the Laws of Hammurabi, you have Hammurabi starting off saying, you know, I’m, look at me, I’m awesome. I maintained the rights of the widow and of the poor, and I did. I’m doing all these things. And then you can look throughout all of the laws and you never find any law about the poor or the widow that’s actually like serving their interests. That was kind of social justice, was kind of the canary in the coal mine of cosmic justice. And so if you saw it getting out of whack, you knew that something bad was going to happen. So when they’re looking for thirsting after righteousness here, you’re exactly right. It’s not in themselves. They’re searching after a state of affairs that is in alignment with God’s righteousness. And it’s not going to be fulfilled until the eschaton, the end times.

It’s the second coming. It’s the institution of the Kingdom of God that is finally going to achieve a state of affairs that can be called righteous.

Well, if anything in this book can be said to be prophetic, I would say that 2,000 years later we have still not achieved a just order to society. So yeah, okay, yeah, I’ll give it to him.

And these days we’re still trying the same old tack, the same old approach of saying the wealthy need more power and money, then everybody else will. Everything will fall into place magically for everybody else. For some reason it still hasn’t worked.

But the justice. Trickle down.

Yeah, yeah, trickle-down righteousness. Yeah, yeah.

That hasn’t played out any better than the economic version.

No, no, no, no. It is epic fail in the parlance of our times. And then at the toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6 , verse 33, we have this statement in the NRSV: “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” So this idea of God’s righteousness is kind of the pinnacle of what discipleship is about. You’re trying to bring about a state of righteousness across the board.

Okay, I like that. And then we get to another one that I’m pretty fond of.r they will be shown mercy.

Yeah, this is. And the, the word here for, for mercy is, is a pretty generic one in Greek, but in Hebrew, chesed is, is a word that. It’s translated sometimes mercy, sometimes grace, sometimes loving kindness. But the idea behind it is to extend, basically to extend aid to. To someone who is unable to help themselves when it’s not even required of you. So from the point of view of the law, you know, there are certain things that you’re required to do. You have rights, you have duties. But when you see someone in need and you are not required by the law to help them, but you do it anyway, that is a biblical notion of mercy. That is extending grace, extending mercy when it’s not required. And so when we, we see talk about grace and mercy in, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, but also in the New Testament, it’s the idea that someone is helping someone else when they’re not obligated to, which, interestingly enough, was an obligation within ancient Judaism.

So it’s like, here’s the law. Also, you have to go above and beyond the law.

Yeah, you are, you are. You’re still not off the hook.

And I assume that that, that version of mercy, that sort of loving kindness, generosity idea of mercy is how we’re meant to understand the first part of the sentence as well. Blessed are the merciful. So that, that, that version of, of what mercy means applies to both of those instances.

Absolutely. So it’s basically what you send out into the universe you will get back, provided it’s, it’s mercy. Provided it’s that grace.

Which is interesting because this is the first time that what you, what you are, what you give is what you get. And the rest of these, it’s been, you know, you, if you are, if you are this, then you get this other thing.

And now you get it back reflected. You get this mercy reflected back to yourself.

Yeah. And, and we have elsewhere in the Gospels the idea that the more you forgive, the more you will receive forgiveness. So there’s, there’s a reciprocity to the concepts of forgiveness and mercy. But. Yeah, and, and this puts the lie to the argument that, you know, the. Particularly the Christian gospel. But. But any part of your responsibility to a biblical law where, like, this is what’s written and that’s all I’m responsible for. The reality is, if you’re really fulfilling it, it’s a pieces of flair thing. If you really internalize and believe in it, you’ll want to wear more pieces of flair.

Look, 12 is the minimum. Okay? But we hope that you’ll want to do more and we encourage that.

Yeah, well, why don’t you just make the minimum more?

I feel like you’re not understanding. All right, let’s move on. So the next one is blessed are the pure in heart.

For. For they will see God.

I like this one. This is a really cool one. A lot of people don’t see the connection here. But. But pure in heart, purity. The concept of purity in the New Testament and ancient Judaism had to do with cleanliness. And cleanliness had to do with the ability to enter God’s presence. So ritual instruments and ritual actors had to be cleansed, had to be purified, both ritually and physically, so that they could enter into the sacred spaces which were cleansed, so that God’s presence could dwell there. through 6: Who shall ascend the hill of Adonai, and who shall stand in his holy place? And the holy place is the temple, which is ritually and physically purified for the divine presence. Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false and do not swear deceitfully, they will receive blessing from Adonai and vindication from the God of their salvation.

Such is the company of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob. And I am of the opinion that this has reference to an ancient commandment that is found in places like Deuteronomy 16:16 and elsewhere, where all the males of Israel were commanded three times a year to go up to and. And most translations will say, appear before God and. And if you look in the Hebrew, the word there for appear is a little odd because it is the verb for to see, but it is vocalized. In other words, the vowels that were added to it in the medieval period, based on earlier traditions of how to vocalize the text, have it in the passive, so be seen. So we have the consonants that say, see the face of God. And we have the vowels that were added that say, appear before the face of God. And so I and other scholars have argued that what we have here was originally a commandment to go into the temple to see the face of God.

And that became theologically problematic. And so a tradition that read the verb in the passive became normative. And so now we read it as appear before God. But you see it as well in Isaiah 1 , verse 12, when who commanded you to trample my courts? When you come to. And if you translate it appear before me, it just totally muddles up the Hebrew, because the Hebrew is very clearly, when you come to see my face is what it says in the Hebrew.

So. And that became problematic just because I. I mean, I know that there are scriptures that say if you see God’s face, you’ll die. Or if you.

Yeah, that’s. That’s Exodus 33:20 , where Moses says, show me your glory. And God says, no, and says, no, no human can see me. Or the text says, no human can see my face. No, you. You can’t see my face because no human can see me and live. And this is the idea that the face of God is so brilliant and so shiny that it would kill you. And so God says, I’m gonna put my hand over your face. I’m gonna walk by. Then I’ll take my hand away. You’re gonna see my butt, but you will not see my face. And the text says my back, but backside is. Is, I think, a better translation. I’m only kind of joking. And so the. There was this idea that God was so brilliant and shiny that it would kill you to look directly at God. It’s. It was like the sun. You can’t look at the sun or, you know, you hurt your eyes, like I did when I was, like, 8 years old. And so the.

But if you are purified, if you are pure in heart, if you have that cleanliness, then you can withstand the. What is called the beatific vision, which we see in Psalms, where they’re talking about longing for the face of God, which is something that you can. If. If that ancient tradition is what I think it is, is something that you can only experience when you go into one of the temples which don’t exist anymore in the land of Israel. So I would argue that blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God is a reflex, is an echo of this ancient idea that you went into the temple to see God’s face or to be in God’s presence. to be in God’s presence.

All right, that’s cool. All right. Moving on to. Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called the sons of God or.

Cheese makers or just anything.

Yes, exactly. I think he said cheesemaker or, or is it the peacemaker, which is the, the, the pistol.

No. Yeah, blessed are the peacemakers. There. There are arguments about if this has a religious dimension or a political dimension, but that division didn’t exist anciently. That is something that was created between the medieval period and the Enlightenment.

So explain, explain the two, the division that you’re talking about.

So when we talk, we talk about religion and politics as like two separate social categories or dimensions. And so we will label stuff as religious and other stuff as secular or political or, or something like that. And that division was not a division that they recognized anciently. That is a creation of the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. And there are a couple of really good books that talk about this, how there was a time when there was no such thing as the concept of religion or secularity. The secular. One good book is Brent Nongbri, Before Religion. Another one is William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, that talk about the history of the development of the concept of religion. So those who say is peacemakers a religious concept or a secular slash political concept, that division didn’t exist in the first century.

Yes, it is those things.

So, so the answer is yes, but notice, okay, peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God. Children of God is a title that we see in the Hebrew Bible, Bene Elohim. In, in Hebrew, they’re represented as kind of problematic beings in Genesis 6 and elsewhere. But by the time of the New Testament, there’s another sense that has developed which is related to the notion that Israel is God’s son. And then when we get into Christianity, we have, for instance in the Gospel of John , this idea that those who believe in Jesus will become the children of God. And the idea is basically you’re adopted into God’s family. And so the way to achieve alignment with and incorporation into God’s family is to be peacemakers. So once again we have this reflection on the poverty-stricken, miserable state of the human condition. And we want to try to improve things by being peacemakers.

Yeah. Which is an interesting take considering that at very least a significant amount of this book is not about peace. So, so, yeah, it’s nice, it’s nice that we’ve now turned to, to peacemaking as a virtue.

And, and this is one of the reasons a lot of people understand the Gospels to have been brought together from disparate traditions; they’re not perfectly consistent internally.

Indeed. All right. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. I feel like we’ve already given the Kingdom of Heaven away, but that’s okay.

Well, this is not irrelevant because we started off with theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Now we’ve come back to theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. This is what’s known in literary circles as an inclusio. So it basically bookends our sense unit. So we start off talking about Kingdom of Heaven, we end with the Kingdom of Heaven, and we bring up the righteousness again. So we have those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. So one of the problematic features of seeking a better world for everyone and recognizing the pathetic state of the human condition is that in so doing you…60] Dan McClellan: In pursuing that better life, that righteousness, you will receive persecution. And that’s something that people can recognize today. Everyone who goes out to try to improve the state of affairs around them, not just for themselves or not just within themselves, persecution of some kind is inevitable.

And anciently, that persecution was a lot more organized and was a lot more harmful as well. And so here…

Yeah, I feel like there’s a whole thing here of, like, I feel like this is a dangerous scripture, this particular one, just because I see so many people using this scripture as… And saying that their version of righteousness, meaning their dogma, their series of rules, particularly as they pertain to marginalized groups, the LGBTQ segment of society, etc. They use this to say, oh, when people get mad at me for doing this, it’s fine, I’m being persecuted for my righteousness, but I’ll gain the kingdom of heaven for doing it.

How do we differentiate between what is good righteousness, that it’s okay to be persecuted for, and what is you just being a dick? And other people calling you out, not being persecution, but being just you being called out for being a dick. It feels like it’s a tough… it’s not clear.

Well, if we take the Beatitudes as kind of culminating in this statement, look at the prerequisites. Is this someone who is poor in spirit, who mourns, who is meek, who hungers and thirsts after righteousness, who is merciful, who’s pure in heart, is a peacemaker? If it’s not these things, then you know that it’s quite a fallacy to say if you’re righteous, you’ll be persecuted, therefore everyone who is persecuted is righteous. That is… Yeah, that is a logical fallacy.

That is a… yeah, that’s a hell of a modus ponens or whatever it is.

Yeah, I don’t remember the name of the exact fallacy, but logic class or whatever. Yeah, we’ve got a kind of a development, a trajectory from the most elementary of the virtues, humility, all the way up to the highest form of virtue, and that is being persecuted for the sake of righteousness. So I think the Beatitudes are culminating in this. And then we have that inclusio that kind of bookends the two statements. And then the last two things, the last two verses here change from third person plural, “Blessed are those,” to second person plural. Now we’re shifting. We’ve got our Beatitudes and we’re kind of closing, we’re tying the ends off. So Matthew 5:11 and 12 say, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you,” which kind of just recapitulates everything and says this is the ultimate kind of recompense for what we’re doing, for seeking after the kingdom of heaven.

And so just know that you are blessed. If you experience all these things, you can do all these things and you can be Beatituded, you can be blessed, but you’re also going to be persecuted because of it. But, well, remain faithful.

You know, I think.Dan Beecher: I think that’s great. You know, we mentioned the possibility that this could be misinterpreted. No, I think it’s time.

I think it’s time that we. Let’s take a brief break and then we’re going to get to one of the most impressive misinterpretations I think I’ve ever seen in my life.

Stick around. All right, let’s see it.

Well, here we are. We’ve gotten through all of these wonderful Beatitudes. We’ve talked about how being poor in spirit, how being kind and gentle and a peacemaker. These are all the things that the Beatitudes are telling us we should be. We mentioned that that meek one was going to be highlighted. This is Jordan Peterson, who, if you don’t know who he is, congratulations.

You have.

If you do know who he is, you may not be aware of the fact that his expertise is— He is a psychologist. To my knowledge, He has no particular expertise in biblical studies or ancient languages of any kind. But boy, that doesn’t stop him.

So this is him on the Joe Rogan Show. Another non-expert. Decidedly so. A man who is a comedian and also very into mixed martial arts fighting. So let’s see what those two have to say about a Beatitude, shall we?

I read this New Testament line, well, decades ago and I could never understand it. It’s—the line is, “the meek shall inherit the earth.” And I thought, there’s something wrong with that, that line. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Meek just doesn’t seem to me to be a moral virtue. And so I did a series of biblical lectures this year, like 15 of them. That was also a weird little experience that we can talk about. But I was looking through these sayings, these maxims, and that was one of them. “The meek shall inherit the earth.” But I’ve been using this site called Bible Hub and it’s very interesting, it’s organized very interestingly. So you have a biblical line and then they have like three pages of commentary on each line. And so because people have commented on every verse in the Bible, like to a degree that’s almost unimaginable. So you can look and see all the interpretations and all, all the translations and get some sense of what the genuine meaning might be. And the line, “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Meek is not a good translation, or the word has moved in the 300 years or so, 300 years or so since it was translated.

What it means is this: those who have swords and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed will inherit the world. And that’s another thing I’ve been telling—

Yeah, no kidding.

That’s a lot different, man.

That’s a big difference.

It’s so great. And so like one of the things I tell young men—well, and young women as well, but the young men really need to hear this more, I think—is that you should be a monster. You know, because everyone says, well, you should be harmless, virtuous, you shouldn’t do anyone any harm. You should sheath your competitive instinct. You shouldn’t try to win. You know, you—you don’t want to be too aggressive, you don’t want to be too assertive, you want to take a back seat and all of that. It’s like, no, wrong. You should be a monster, an absolute monster. And then you should learn how to control it.

Do you know the expression, “It’s better to be a warrior in a garden”?en.

Than a gardener in a war?

Right, right. Exactly. That’s exactly it.

Well, that’s fun. Wow, JP, that’s. That’s a hell of a take. And feels to me very different than what we were just discussing.

It does feel quite a bit different. And I think the. The part of this that kind of gives things away is what Jordan says at the beginning, where he says that. That just doesn’t feel right to me.

It doesn’t seem to me that this is a moral virtue. Which shows that the impetus for this is not an interrogation of the data. It’s not awareness of the literary and the historical and the rhetorical context. It’s just. I don’t like that.

Right.

And. Which shows that the point is not trying to understand the text on its own terms. The point is trying to align the text with one’s own ideologies and one’s own set of moral virtues, which may not always be that great.

Yeah. I feel like he actually does us a favor in that moment because so often people do decide to impose their worldview, their sense of what. How things ought to be, onto these texts, but they don’t give you that very clear. Like this. Like he. He said the quiet part out loud.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My motivation is that I don’t like it.

Yeah. This really bugged me.

And so I’m not gonna go with whatever I think Jesus meant. I’m going to change it until it makes sense to my own worldview.

Right. Which is. Which is something that I’ve said many times on my channel, is that people are going to read the text in ways that make it more meaningful or. And. Or more useful to them. And here Peterson is rereading this in a way that is both meaningful and useful to him. Meaningful not only because it is something that aligns with his concept of moral virtue. Useful because he now gets to give permission to the people who follow his ideologies to be monsters.

There. He’s suggesting, hey, Jesus wants you to be a monster. Yeah. And based on this far cry from.

The sunbeam that I was told to be growing up.

Yeah. And. And so this is rhetorically useful for a guy who makes his living off of slaking the anger of white men who are not incredibly successful at life and. And think that the answer is this dude. And he says that the. The. The word has shifted and 400 years or whatever this. Better translation. What were you gonna say?

Well, I just wanted to know, like, yeah, he says he has his definition, you know, that is, that involves, you know, knowing how to use your sword, but then sheathing it. Is there anything that you can find in the various, various versions of this that you’ve seen that that would support that translation?

Absolutely not.

That’s nothing.

Well, here’s what’s going on here. This word in Greek is praeis. And you have two different kind of styles of Greek. You have classical Greek, which was earlier, kind of the third quarter of the first millennium BCE, 400 BCE is kind of the, the what many people think the pinnacle of Greek, of classical Greek.ek, of classical Greek. By the time you get to the New Testament, you have what people conventionally call Koine Greek, common Greek. This is when Greek had become the lingua franca of Southwest Asia. And this is a different style of Greek. Now it’s not the case that in classical Greek that’s what the word meant. However, in classical Greek, the word just refers to. Here’s one lexicon’s entry pertaining to not being overly impressed by a sense of one’s self-importance. Like if you have to describe in general what this term is used to refer to, it’s that gentle, humble, considerate, meek.

Now this can be used in contexts that are related to that. You might describe someone who does know how to use a sword but keeps it sheathed as meek. But the term does not include within it a reference to that. Like if I, if you know, you might describe, like Dave Bautista is very gentle, particularly when it comes to dogs. But the word gentle does not mean a professional wrestler who loves dogs.

Right.

Like there’s a context for the usage and then there’s the word’s sense. So you get the sense from the context. And absolutely nothing in the context of the Beatitudes or the Sermon on the Mount indicates we should be understanding this as a reference to the people who are meek, despite being monsters. So that’s reading other contexts into the usage here without any grounds or basis whatsoever.

Yeah, I mean, I suppose that the concept of meekness as it’s described in the Beatitudes could apply to a monster who has learned to sheathe his sword.

Certainly.

But that’s not, that’s not the category we’re talking about.

Right. The word itself does not include that sense in its usage.

Whatever. Meek, like, like a very. A small, withering, meek person. A very, you know, someone who’s never felt a violent impulse in their lives. The kind of person that I imagine Jordan Peterson would not consider a real man. That’s also in the category. That’s. That is also every bit as much contained in that category.

Right. And I’ve heard people say, well, it has to refer to the people who have a capacity for violence or monsterhood, who sheathe that because otherwise it’s just talking about the way you are, and that’s not a virtue. And that’s kind of an asinine argument as well, because a lot of the other things in the Beatitudes are not talking about things you choose to be. They’re talking about things you are. Whether you are that way on purpose or not, whether you like it or not.

Being in poverty is not a virtue.

It’s not like, oh, I’m gonna. I’m gonna. You know, it’s not a virtue that Jordan Peterson has lived up to, that’s for sure. And so the argument that, and that’s just a rationalization that is just, I like, that’s people saying, I like what Peterson is saying because it gives me permission to be a dick. Yeah. And so I’m going to try to figure out a way to rationalize why what I like is legitimate. But just looking at the data, looking at the usage of the word praus, meek, in all the different ways that it can be used, looking at what the psalm that we’re translating, which uses anav: oppressed, poor, humble. This is not someone who is a monster but knows better. monster but knows better. And so this is just a ridiculous argument.

Yeah. All you have to do is look at the rest of the words of that chapter to know that that is not who we’re talking about. We are not like the— Yeah. That. The whole concept. When that video came out, when it first hit, I was shocked, genuinely. Like, I’ve seen that man make some bizarre statements before. Usually they’re just incomprehensible word salad. But in this case, he was so direct about it. I was just like, I—I think you just reinvented a whole thing. I think you just made up a bunch of stuff. So I’m glad that you— That, that you can confirm that for me.

Yeah, yeah. This. This is a case of someone trying to leverage the authority— authority of the Bible to give permission to their specific group of followers to be monsters, because he knows they want to be monsters. And, and they want Jesus’s blessing. And you don’t have Jesus’s blessing to be a monster.

Don’t. Don’t, ladies and gentlemen, don’t go be monsters. Yeah. We. We don’t need more monsters. I don’t—whatever your belief system, we just don’t need monsters in the world.

So learn to be praus. Learn to not be overly impressed by a sense of your own self-importance. Learn to be gentle, humble, considerate, meek so that you will inherit the earth.

I love it. I love it. All right, well thanks so much friends for tuning in to us. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can always write into us. contact@dataoverdogma.com. Also this conversation will continue in the patrons-only section. If you would like to become a patron and help to make the show go as well as get access to the patrons-only content, you can always go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Dan, thanks so much for enlightening us. I sure do appreciate it. Thank you, Dan, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

A Beatitude Adjustment for Jordan Peterson

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology