Easter and the Undead

You know, you have different takes on. On Pilate, where Pilate’s like, this man is innocent, but I will do whatever you tell me to. Which is very clearly fiction because the actual Pilate murdered Jewish citizens in Jerusalem by the handful whenever they annoyed him.

Right.

So the notion that they would get together and be like, we’re gonna tell on you, and he was like, okay, I’ll do what you want is just not historical. Hey, Everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same.

And we do it with enthusiasm and with style. I don’t know why I needed to be. Why did I want to just be enthusiastic in that moment?

I don’t know.

I was. I’m excited.

We’re trying to cast a wider net for. For our audience.

That’s right. That’s right.

Yeah. We tried the sound effects a couple of times. It didn’t go so well, but I.

Thought the slide whistle worked. I don’t know why you were against it, but fine, fine.

I really like the sound effect, but, you know, there’s. There’s stuff. There’s baggage there. So how are things today, man?

It’s good. We are fast approaching, or depending on when you hear this recently passed Holy Week. We’re.

We’re.

We’re trying to record this in a time, in a timely manner to make sure that it appears sometime around Easter.

Yes.

And that is. So that’s a fun time for a lot of folks.

The most beloved of holidays for many Christians around the world, although most of them don’t call it Easter. But maybe we’ll talk. Maybe we’ll talk about that.

Well, we talked about it a year ago, if you’ll recall. We talked about. About Pesach. And there you go. And the. You know, the. The fact that it’s Passover. Anyway, here’s the thing about Easter. I find it very confusing. As a child, I always found it very confusing because there was joy and. And candy and fun and bunnies and a murder. A really important, horrific, painful, awful murder.

State violence. Yeah.

State sanctioned violence, which felt incongruous to me. I don’t know about the rest of you all, but.

Well, I didn’t know the word incongruous when I was a kid celebrating Easter.

No, no, I’m. I’m imposing that one on.

Okay, Okay.

I don’t think that I. I knew that one either. But we’re gonna. So at the beginning of this episode, we’re gonna talk about Holy Week, sort of what happened, the timeline. Do the Gospels, maybe. Do they not quite agree on a few things? And how, how does that work? And then you’re gonna talk about resurrection and not just, not just Jesus’s resurrection, but just the concept as a whole.

Yeah. Where. Where did this thing come being worked into the Gospels? And. Yeah, we’re going to get into it. Probably the most controversial episode that we’ll ever have regarding the. I’m, I’m being sarcastic. Just. Yeah, the, the notion that the Gospels conflict on their timeline for the, for the final week of Jesus’s life probably shouldn’t surprise anyone who has ever heard our voices before, but.

Yeah, well, let’s get into it. I’m going to call. I. We’ll just call this a chapter and verse as we dive into this. So here’s the thing. I. When I started to do some research about Holy Week and wanted a timeline, I just wanted to sort of understand the basic timeline and try to keep straight what each of the Gospels was doing.

Right.

All of the timelines that I found were on apologetic websites that didn’t seem to think that there were ever any conflicts. And it was all very easy to track. And. Yeah, and then those same websites would be like, of course, you know, the skeptics will say that blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, blah conflict. But that’s not true because of all of our, you know, all X, Y and Z apologetics. So what I decided to do was actually go to the website that they were most often citing as what the skeptics would say, which is the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible.

Okay.

And even I caught them out on a couple things that seemed like a bit of a stretch in terms of their, their contradictions, but some of them seem like important contradictions. So, so my, my thinking is we’ll go through the timeline and, and I’ll bring a couple things up as we go that, that might be contradictions or you can. And we start basically, don’t we, with. With a story we’ve already told, which is Jesus riding two donkeys into Jerusalem.

Right. Whether this was one on top of the other, whether Jesus.

Has quickly become my favorite.

Yeah, that’s. It’s going to be canon pretty soon. I mean, once, once Zack Snyder gets a hold of it, that’s gonna be canon. So we’ll have some lens flares, we’ll have Jesus on two donkeys. So I like it. And that is the, the triumphal entry.

Which by the way, it sounded like you were. But you weren’t just swearing under your breath because it sounds. Because if you mutter Jesus on two donkeys, that doesn’t necessarily sound. That is what you were just talking about. That you weren’t.

Yeah, so yeah, in Disney movies it will be cheese on two donkeys.

Yeah, exactly.

Or whatever. Well, I don’t know if you ever watch the Princess and the Frog, but there’s one part where one of the characters is like getting upset and storms out of a church and she goes, cheese and crackers. I was like, that’s like one of the most like transparent substitutions for, for what’s considered profanity I’ve ever heard in a Disney movie.

That’s somebody writing, working on the script for that went to BYU. That’s awesome.

Okay, we, I want to go just before the triumphal entry though, because we already have, we already have something that is a bit incongruous.

Oh, okay.

Incongruous. If you’re nasty. At the beginning of John 12 we have Jesus arriving in Bethany. Now one thing to note about the difference between John and the Synoptics is Jesus’s ministry is one year in the Synoptics; he’s up in Galilee, he’s. You’ve got the, the evangelical triangle, these three main cities that he’s operating within. And then it’s kind of the, on the way to Jerusalem, you know, road trip and then he’s in Jerusalem and that’s the last week and then that’s it. John actually has a, what seems to be a three year ministry. And John has Jesus arriving in Jerusalem and cleansing the temple in chapter two. Like right after the wedding in Cana, he goes down to Jerusalem to cleanse the temple.

Remind us quickly what the order that we think the gospels were written in. John was the last one, right?

Well, it depends on, on where you put Luke because Mark is, is almost universally agreed to be the earliest gospel.

Right.

It’s the shortest. It’s the one that doesn’t include some of the things that seems to be, seem to be expansions and innovations on the story that we find in Matthew and Luke. Like the birth narrative. It’s the one that doesn’t even seem to have a post-resurrection story at all. We have one that’s tacked on later and then it’s probably Matthew. Luke was probably written after Matthew and is reliance I, some scholars think is reliant to some degree on Matthew as well as, as on Mark. We talked a little bit with Helen Bond about the possibility that Luke might be early 2nd century, that it might have been written after John. But most people put John somewhere in the mid-90s CE, so almost at the very end of the first century CE.

And why is John considered separate from the. The Synoptic Gospels?

Because the narrative is so different. Synoptic. See, together you can line up the. The. The three Synoptic Gospels, and there’s a lot of the narrative and a lot of the sayings are parallel. Or if they’re not parallel, the same things are found in other parts of the narrative. So it seems clear that Matthew and Luke are reliant on Mark.

Right.

They also share things that are not in Mark. And so this is where the idea of Q comes from. That Q, which is the. The a reference to the German word Quelle, which means source, is this other source that was not used by Mark that Matthew and Luke are sharing. And then Matthew and Luke also have their own stories that are not in Mark and are not shared between each other. And scholars will refer to Matthew’s independent source as M, and they’ll refer to Luke’s independent source as L. So there’s a complex relationship of all these things to each other, but probably Mark, Matthew, and then either Luke and John or John, then Luke. So it depends.

Okay, got it. All right, so we are. So. So John has Jesus in Jerusalem way before the other guys.

Yeah, he’s. He gets baptized. It’s like, I gotta hit this wedding. And. And then moseys on down to Jerusalem and cleanses the temple. And this is first year of his ministry. And he’s going to be going back and forth between Jerusalem and Galilee a couple of times. But in. In John chapter 12, he shows up in Bethany for his. His third trip to Jerusalem. And then he is anointed before the triumphal entry.

Oh, okay.

All the other anointings take place after the triumphal entry.

This is the, this is the, The. The. The anointing is a woman putting oil on his feet. Is that the thing, or am I thinking of something else?

Yeah, we actually have a couple of different things where. Yeah, here what we have is somebody named Mary. Jesus is in Bethany. He’s in Lazarus’s house, which is different from the Synoptics as well, because in those, he’s in the house of some dude named Simon. And Mary shows up and she’s got a pound of this expensive ointment. Spikenard. I think is what. How it’s translated in the.

That is my favorite, favorite thing in the universe.

Yeah. And the. We. We usually translate anoint, but the Greek verb is not the normal verb for anoint there. So it’s. It’s more like just cleaning or perfuming his feet and wipes his feet with her hair. And this is. And there are a few different things that are going on. Here is one, his feet have not been washed. She’s just dumping this oil on his feet and then wiping the oil off. So it’s almost like. Let me get that for you. Let me just wipe that off. Okay. You should be good to go. And there’s. There’s a parallel here between Mary kind of washing Jesus’s feet with this expensive nard.

Gotta get some good spikenard in there.

Yeah. So I, I keep thinking of Monster Squad, Wolfman’s Got Nards, and. And then later in the next chapter, Jesus is going to wash the feet of his disciples. Right. And so you’ve got Jesus’s feet don’t need to be washed because he’s already pure. He’s not sinful. But this is taking the place of the anointing that. That happens later on in, in the other gospels.

If I remember correctly, when we spoke to Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, many moons ago, she said that. That her theory is that that the Mary that does all of this is Mary Magdalene. Is that right?

She is. I don’t remember if we talked about John 12 .

I think we did.

We. Did we. Okay. In.

In Lazarus’s house, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She. She was claiming. She was saying that her research says that it could be that that was Mary Magdalene.

Yeah, I. I think I remember that. There is. Now in Luke, you have this. Let me pull up the chapter. This happens in Luke 7 , I believe it is. He’s eating—a woman in the city, which was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair, kissing his feet and anointing them with ointment. And again, that’s a different word for anoint. And what’s interesting here is that sinful woman is not identified. It’s not Mary. But the beginning of chapter eight, it’s going to talk about Mary as a woman out of whom Jesus cast seven devils. But this is actually where we get the idea that Mary Magdalene was a sex worker.

Right.

Because we have Ephrem the Syrian in the 4th century, who conflates the two. And then Gregory. Pope Gregory the Great in 591 CE, gives this homily and says that, in fact, I think I have exactly what he said. Yeah. She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary. So Gregory is conflating Luke 7 with John 12 , we believe to be Mary, from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. So now we’re taking the. The unnamed woman in Luke 7 , the Mary who anoints Jesus’s feet in John 12 , and then the Mary from whom Jesus cast seven devils is Mary Magdalene from Mark, and I think is also mentioned in Luke 8 . And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts.

Oh, wow.

What? She therefore displayed more scandalously. Scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner.

So you look when you have one vial of ointment or unction or whatever.

You got a pound of it. You got. You got.

You got. Look, you got to use it for all the purposes you got. If it’s your lube, it’s also the thing that you wash your Savior’s feet with. It’s fine.

Yeah.

Okay. We. Let’s. Let’s. Let’s keep going with the. With the story here.

With the story.

Yeah, we got a whole week to get through.

Oh, gosh, that’s good.

We. Look, we’re not gonna get through all of it, but there will be other Easters, guys. We’ll get back to it.

So. So that brings us to the. The triumphal entry, and we’ve already gone through some of the. The differences with the triumphal entry, but this. And this is Palm Sunday.

Right?

So why do we call it Palm Sunday? Well, because they were waving palm fronds, palm branches, in celebration of the triumphal entry of their king, who was just sitting on his ass.

Honey, honey, he’s coming. Go get some leaves.

That’s a Brian Regan bit. Get some leaves.

I. I don’t know that. All right. Okay, so he makes it in. And now we have another timeline issue. You said that John cleansed the temple. John had him cleansing the temple way back in chapter two. Right now we’ve got Luke saying that basically not having any time between the triumphal entry and the cleansing of the temple.

Yeah, it seems like Luke comes into the city, and then he’s like. And, you know, he made his way over to the temple, and then he starts beating people, flipping tables, and yeah, flipping tables and, and gently letting the birds go. But. Yeah, exactly. I’m here to set some birds free and to kick some ass, and I’m all out of birds. That’s right. He’s. And according to Luke, that seems to happen on Sunday. He’s not being very clear. In fact, right after the cleansing of the temple, it said. It just says like. And he was in the temple a bunch and not being clear about what day these things are.

Are happening, but definitely makes it sound like it’s that day.

Yeah, yeah. There’s. There’s no narrative break. It’s just. He’s a triumphal entry. He makes his way to the temple and then he drives out the, the money changers. The other two synoptic authors, however, explicitly put this on the next day.

Right. So he. So he cleanses the temple. That. That’s. That’s a good day.

And the, the cursing of the fig tree also is something that is not in Luke, it’s in Matthew and Mark. And I don’t know if that has something to do with why they put it on the next day, but that’s something.

That’s. Yeah, that’s right. That’s another thing that we talked about on an earlier episode. Yeah, so great.

Oh, and also, he seems home base here seems to be Bethany.

Okay, so that’s just outside of Jerusalem.

So. Yeah, and so it’s outside of. Of the city. So on the east side of Jerusalem you got this valley, the Kidron Valley, and then you have the Mount of Olives. And the Mount of Olives is, is. Is pretty big. And if you go up kind of the middle to the south end of the Mount of Olives and keep going east, kind of on the, the. The back slope of the Mount of Olives, you’ve got Bethany. And so he’s just outside the city. Or as. What did the, what did the comedian say who talked about the fig tree? Like, when you fly into a place, you just stay at the Ramada by the airport. You don’t. You don’t go downtown to, to stay. So. So Bethany is where he returns to.

Right.

In the evenings. And that is, I believe, across all four Gospels, John has him arriving in Bethany staying with. With Lazarus, and the others have him in Bethany spending the night with Simon, I think. So on Tuesday, we also have what most folks refer to as temple controversies, but we also have what’s called the Olivet discourse on the return to Bethany. So they’re heading back to the hotel and. And Jesus is talking about the Second Coming, basically. And this is in the three synoptic gospels. And this is where we get the, the Son of Man will be like this. There’s one standing in the field. One will be taken, one will be left. Son of Man coming in the clouds of glory and, and all that imagery. And, but this is, this is not in John. John has another spot where he sprinkles some discourse in which I think is funny actually after the Last Supper.

But Jesus is, you know, they, they finish the Last Supper and he goes, well, let’s get out of here. And then there are three chapters of Jesus lecturing them. And then so that’s like the, I think it’s the end of, of chapter 14. It, he says, arise, let us go. And then it’s not until chapter 18 that it’s like, so they arose and they left.

Well, listen, if, if I was facing down what Jesus was facing down at that time, I’d probably like, you know, dawdle a little bit myself.

Yeah, so a lot of scholars think that, that the discourse in there, which includes the intercessory prayer, was added or moved from another part of John or something like that.

Okay, so we do have, you know, the, the four Gospels don’t always agree on when things happen, but it sounds like even John couldn’t agree on when things were happening.

Things were getting moved around. On Wednesday, Jesus continues to teach in the temple. The temple is, is kind of, you know, he spends the night in Bethany, but during the day he’s, he’s in the temple dropping knowledge. And there we also get reports that now the Sanhedrin, the bad guys are like, Jesus is in town, we need to exploit this opportunity.

Well, and every time he goes to the temple, he’s just raising a ruckus, he’s causing trouble.

So, and, and here’s something that, that I brought up on, on some social media site recently that annoyed a lot of people. And it’s something I’ve said before on, on TikTok, the reconstruction of the historical Jesus doesn’t really have a role for the Sanhedrin in Jesus’s death. It was probably the Romans who were like somebody came in and drove a bunch of people out of the temple and started a small riot. Well, kill that guy. That’s probably not all that went into it.

That’s called disturbing the peace.

Right?

Not legal.

And this is, this is the biggest festival celebration of the year in this giant city, capital city where the Romans are always struggling to keep the peace. And so if anything put Jesus on the Roman radar, it was making a whip and driving a bunch of people out of the Jewish temple and starting a small riot. And so from a, from a critical historical Jesus point of view, that was probably what got him killed.

Right.

Now when the Gospel authors get a hold of it, you get this kind of trajectory from Mark, where, you know, the, the Jewish leaders are involved all the way to John, where it was like Satan entered into them and they were all trying to plot, how are we going to get this Jesus killed. And, and, you know, you have different takes on, on Pilate, where Pilate’s like, this man is innocent, but I will do whatever you tell me to. Which is very clearly fiction because the actual Pilate murdered Jewish citizens in Jerusalem by the handful whenever they annoyed him.

Right.

So the notion that they would get together and be like, we’re gonna tell on you, and he was like, okay, I’ll do what you want, is just not historical.

Right.

And so it seems like the, the role of the Jewish leaders in this and up to. And including the. The notion that they all cried out with one voice saying, his blood will be on us. Right. That’s all fiction.

Right.

That is something that they made up to shift the blame to the Jewish people and off of the people who were probably actually responsible for his death. The Romans, those called Romans.

When you say they did this to shift the blame, you’re talking about the authors of the Gospels.

Yeah. And. Well, probably this probably originated before they were actually committed to text. But the people who are curating the. The tradition, either as it was circulating orally, or who were committing it to writing and the sources that may have been used by Mark and the other Gospel authors was this.

Do you. Do scholars believe that the reason to shift that blame from the Romans to the Jews was just as a means of separating Christianity, this new cult, from its Jewish roots. Was it? Or why would they do that?

Not so much. I think probably part of it had to do with growing hostility between Jesus followers within Judaism and the rest of the movement. Probably some of it had to do with the fact that they were trying to get by in a Roman world. And so we’re, we’re trying to.

So it’s a bad look to be like, look, the Romans killed your. Your. Your God or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. And. And I think there were. There were other rhetorical points to make about the Jewish folks who rejected their savior. Right. That have kind of an anti-Semitic tinge to them. Yeah. And. And I. A wonderful book, I think, that discusses this to some degree is Bart Ehrman’s book Jesus Before the Gospels, which uses social memory to talk about how the, the presentation of Jesus’s life and death in the Gospels could be serving certain interests within kind of the, the social memory of, of what happened, what is likely a gist memory versus what has been altered in order to serve the rhetorical goals of the authors and, and the communities. Okay, so, so yeah, that’s, that’s something that is probably a literary creation is the, you know, the Sanhedrin sitting there plotting how are we going to get Jesus murdered?

But okay, but that starts on Wednesday. According to. Yeah, that was their hump. Wednesday, Wednesday into Thursday. We’re making preparations for the Passover. And then we have the Last Supper, which is in ye olde upper room. And if you go to Jerusalem today, there’s even a, a medieval style upper room that they will take you through and, and a lot of space in there. It would have been a pretty happening Last Supper if that’s where it had actually happened. We have.

And the Last Supper itself was a Passover, right, Seder.

Well, yeah, it would have been a Passover meal, but the way they would have done it in the first century CE is not perfectly clear to us. Right. But the way it’s done today is, is quite different. So it, you know, they didn’t have a little matzah that they were passing around under the table to the, to the kids to hide and this kind of thing. Those are much later developed traditions. But yeah, it would have been a traditional Passover meal. And then we have, within the Synoptic Gospels, they, so they’re in Jerusalem. They go out, probably skirt around the south side of Jerusalem to go down the hill into the Kidron Valley and come up the other side to the western slope of the Mount of Olives to what is known as the Garden of Gethsemane, which refers to an oil press. And so these are olive trees that make up this garden. And we have Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. We don’t have this, this prayer in John.

Some people think that the, the intercessory prayer is kind of the Johannine substitute for the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. Okay. At which point Jesus is arrested in the garden, which is something that is precipitated by the betrayal by Judas. And another interesting trajectory is with Judas, there’s a theory that in Mark, there’s not a presentation of Judas as, as a conniving backstabber. It says that he turned Jesus over, but the, the handed over verb is kind of morally neutral. Like, it’s not a negative. It’s not inherently negative. And there’s a theory that, that Judas had done this in the hopes that he would be setting up the confrontation that would catalyze Jesus’s, you know, hulking out and, and, and destroying the Romans.

And then after he saw. Oh, no, that didn’t work, he is distraught because he could have been trying to arrange the meeting to. To kick off the Second Coming. And it’s in Matthew, Luke, and then John where Judas is increasingly possessed by the devil.

Right.

To do this. So it’s an interesting trajectory to see as. As Judas.

So Mark doesn’t have paid for it. Mark doesn’t have any of that stuff.

Is that right?

I.

There’s definitely not. They don’t mention Judas going and picking up money like we have in. In Matthew and in Luke-Acts. Okay. So yeah, it is. It is something that he just. It. It’s just kind of like. And then Judas did this and they’re.

Like, hey, who’s Jesus? And he’s like, he’s that guy. Oh, it’s that one. Not. Not necessarily. A sort of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And there have been some interesting stories of. Oh, that brings up. Oh, that brings up. There’s one of the things that Jesus says on this last night in, in Luke, we have him say, you know, I sent you out without purse or scrip. And. And you guys did all right. Right? And they’re like, yeah, we did fine. And then he says, well, now sell what you have and buy swords. Do you recall something in that area? And I’ve seen people recently appeal to that scripture as an indication that Christians need to be warriors. We gotta go strapped.

It’s the Jordan Peterson school of Christianity, school of meekness.

Yeah.

Yes.

But what happens is they.

He.

And it says because he. He’s to be numbered among the criminals, or words to that effect. And then his. His followers say, hey, we got two swords right here. And he goes, that’ll do. And it’s. It’s kind of a weird head scratcher there. But then when he gets caught in the Garden of Gethsemane, they’re there with the swords, right? And so one dude loses an ear.

One poor guy loses an ear.

Yeah, Malchus. And the idea seems to be that if he’s going to be counted among the criminals, let’s have him have these guys with their unauthorized weapons on them when the Roman authorities show up to. To pinch him. And so it’s not saying why.

Why to what? To what end? I’m not sure I understand what the purpose of that was.

So there’s that, that prophecy counted among the, the transgressors or the criminals or something.

Oh, okay, okay.

And so the idea is, oh, that fulfills that prophecy. That when the Romans show up and it’s kind of, it seems like an afterthought because, you know, it never really says. It’s not like they try to fight off the Romans, apart from just the ear thing. One guy, he’s like, hey, you guys.

Remember that, that prophecy, you better get swords. We don’t want people to be confused.

And, and so the, that’s the one passage people will appeal to. Like, see, Jesus is cool with, with us having AKs, but. Yeah, exactly. It’s actually just Jesus saying, hey, we gotta fulfill a prophecy. Make sure you got a sword laying around.

Wow.

So, yeah, and, and there are, there are scholars who will say, oh, well, the, the disciples misunderstood. They didn’t know what he was talking about with the swords. And Jesus was just like, you what, let’s just drop it. But I, I think that’s historicizing the, the text a little bit too much. But that brings us to the trial.

Ah, yes.

Did you have any questions leading up to this?

No, I. Should I. Now I feel like I, I’m supposed to. Let’s, let’s, let’s talk about the trial. I mean, so we’ve got. Yeah, start us in with what happens across.

We have a few different people that Jesus goes before, and these are different according to the different gospels because we have Annas, who I believe is the father-in-law of Caiaphas. He used to be the high priest. So in John, he comes before Annas, then he goes before Caiaphas and part of the Sanhedrin and then later comes back before the Sanhedrin and then goes to Pilate. According to, I think it’s Luke, Pilate sends him to Herod, who then sends him back to Pilate. So yeah, there it’s kind of, it.

Kind of happens in one day.

Yeah, well, and it starts in like the middle of the night. So you can, you can imagine somebody was like getting, getting woken up and be like, yeah, put on my robe and go out and to see this guy. And yeah, we have Pilate interrogating him. And, and this, this is something that Bart Ehrman also points out in his book. There’s in, in some of the accounts, Pilate like brings Jesus out to the crowd and he’s like, this guy, you want me to kill this guy? And then he like takes him back in and then sentences him and then he goes off and is crucified. And, and where did we get the account of everything that Pilate and Jesus said in their little private meeting right in his office before he went off to get crucified. Because none of the disciples were anywhere near any of that. And there was no opportunity for Jesus to tell any of this story.

You haven’t read Pilate’s authorized biography.

They’re, they’re actually there in the, in the late 19th century. And I’ve got to remember the name of this book. There were some people who published what they called the Acts of Pilate, which they claimed were firsthand accounts of Pilate. But they were, you know, they were very clearly 19th century compositions.

Right.

And, and they’re also strangely white supremacist. Like, because one of them is like.

He said, shocking no one.

Yeah. One of them describes Jesus’s appearance and it’s like he, he saw them and, and you know, he had flowing golden hair and, and blue eyes and lighter colored skin. And then all the Jewish people around him were swarthy with dark hair.

Right.

You know, he’s, he’s this, he’s this Aryan Adonis.

Right.

And, and it’s just, just straight up white supremacist. But you have some of those in circulation and every now and then on social media you will have people trot out those accounts and be like, see, we have accounts of what Jesus looked like.

All right, let’s, let’s push through. We are, we’re already threatening our final. We might not be able to make it to our.

We can talk a bit about resurrection as we get to the resurrection in the.

Sure, sure. So, so, so he’s, he’s pronounced guilty. We figured that out.

Yeah.

And, and sent away to, to the thing. And meanwhile we’ve got Peter denying him along the way and there’s some question as to the number of cock crowings and.

Yeah. Whether it’s just once or three times.

Right, Fine, fine, let’s keep going.

There’s a, there’s a big discrepancy, however, in regarding when Jesus is crucified.

Okay.

Because the Synoptic Gospels describe him being crucified at nine. And then it says around noon the sun went dark. And then around 3pm that is when Jesus says Eli Eli lama sabachthani and all that kind of stuff. So we have a several hour crucifixion. And in John it actually says that they lead him out and crucify him at noon, so.

Oh, okay.

They are off by a handful of hours.

And that’s. Yeah. And that’s. That’s a significant difference. It’s not, it’s. It does. It’s not, you know, it’s not a game changer, but it does. I mean, if, if the sun, you know, if we’ve got moments like the sun going dark at noon, it does seem like it’s important to sort of get. Keep some of these together.

Yeah. And then I’ve seen apologetic attempts to try to identify accounts from later Roman authors who were like, there was a… There was an eclipse this year. And they’re like, “Ah, that’s the year that Jesus was crucified.” And it’s like, well, there cannot be an eclipse at the Passover because the Passover is when the moon is on the other side of the earth from…

Right.

So you can’t really have an eclipse at that time. So.

Interesting.

And… And also, eclipses don’t last for three hours, max seven minutes. Did you say yours don’t?

Yours don’t. According to you, they had better eclipses back…

I’ve been practicing.

There. Let’s… can we just briefly take a brief moment to talk about what the soldiers gave Jesus to drink?

Yeah, let’s talk about that. We have the… the… the accounts are different.

Yes.

Mark is the earliest. And I would say, since this account is found in all the Gospels, they’re probably drawing from Mark or from whatever source Mark was drawing from. But Mark is our earliest. And it just says somebody ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Let’s see if Elijah will come to take him down.”

And then I… I’ve got wine mingled with myrrh. Is that just a…

What translation are we looking at? Hang on just a moment. Let me pull up the… the Greek. Okay, so… So we got a sponge and we got sour wine slash vinegar.

Huh.

Let me look up this… this word here. Sour wine or wine vinegar is what it has in Mark.

In Mark. Okay.

Yes. Now let’s… Matthew 27:48 .

So, okay.

And… and that one has… I believe it has the same thing, vinegar to drink.

So this says now… Okay, so I don’t know what translation these guys are looking at. I’m gonna guess that we’re in the… in the KJV.

Oh, let me, let me take a look. Filled it with vinegar. That’s what it has for Matthew 27:48 in the KJV.

I’ve got… Oh, I’m looking at Matthew 27:34 , gave him vinegar.

Oh, they gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall. Yeah.

Which doesn’t sound very nice.

No. And that… but that just says that has oinon or oinos, which is just wine. That’s just the generic word for wine.

So that’s weird.

Wine mixed with gall. But that’s not the… the stick one.

Right.

Which… which gets interesting. And then we’ve got John 19:29 . And this is the… of all the… the Gospels, John is the least likely to be historical. It’s writing the… the furthest away. Maybe it is also the one that’s… that’s toying with things the most and seems to be based on entirely different sources…

sources, but also seems like the one that’s best written, like it’s most interestingly written.

It’s like…

It’s like telling a much better story. But yeah, probably it’s storytelling like more. More than the other thing.

And there we’ve got. Put a sponge full of. Of oxos. So that sour wine again on. Put it on hyssop and hyssop.

I don’t know what hyssop is.

It’s a. It’s a type of branch. Okay. Type of. It’s like a bush branch. And. And gave it to him to drink. And. And I’ve heard people say that this sounds like the xylospongium or the tersorium. And for folks who have visited ancient Roman cities, not anciently, but have visited them today, they have. You have the, the latrines, the. The public shared bathrooms.

Oh, yeah.

And there’s a little trough that kind of runs right in front of you. So if you’re down. It’s down by your toes. And the xylospongium would be a sponge that was on the end of a stick. And you would take that stick and you’d splash it around in the water and then you would clean yourself with it. And so there is. There have been people who are arguing that this is what’s going on, that.

They gave him a poo stick.

That they gave him a poo stick. And not the kind you throw under the bridge and then run the other side of the bridge. You heard that right? When the words came out, you were like, that sounds like Winnie the. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there’s. There’s an argument for that, but that, that doesn’t make much sense to me, particularly because of how the, the story changes. And, and. And some people say, well, they put vinegar on it to, to aid in, you know, antiseptic, whatever, but.

Right.

It’s wine. It’s sour wine.

Or no matter what, they were just trying to give him something gross as a last. As a. As a sort of rude last thing. An insult.

Yeah, yeah. And it doesn’t.

It almost doesn’t matter if it was poo or if it was like nasty vinegar wine or whatever. It’s like. Like you don’t want to drink it. That’s the.

Yeah, yeah. They’re just making his. His final moments unpleasant. Yeah, yeah. And. And then he. He gives up the ghost. We have the, the Aramaic, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani. That’s.

That’s. Oh, my God. My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Yeah.

Which he doesn’t say in all of the Gospels. Right.

I think it’s in most of them, but probably not all of them. Yeah. Because I think in. Because the John, I don’t think, wants to have Jesus asking God why he has been forsaken. Because for John, Jesus is the Word. They’re united, right? In. In will and agency and all this kind of stuff. So, so you can’t have that high Christological Jesus going, like, what’s happening? So, so why didn’t you save me, dad? So after he’s received the vinegar, Jesus says it is finished, which in the Greek is tetelestai. Okay.

Yeah, I, you said something in the middle of that that I think we need to touch on, which is how many days and nights was Jesus? Yeah, because it, you hear the number three tossed around a lot and yet it wasn’t three.

No. Well, I mean, or was it? So according to at least the Synoptics, he gives up the ghost around 3 pm. John doesn’t really say exactly when he gives up the ghost, I don’t think. But that is before nightfall. So that is 3 pm on Friday.

Friday, right.

So he dies on Friday before nightfall. The day starts at nightfall within the Jewish tradition. Okay, so Friday night would have been part of Saturday.

Okay, so.

So we have a full day. There is a full 24-hour period where he’s gone. But he’s only gone for a part of Friday, all of Saturday, and then a part of Sunday because they come to the tomb early Sunday morning and he’s already gone.

That’s a day and a half if.

We’re going by 24-hour periods. Yeah, it’s a day and a half now, you know, if I, if I fly to. Like I was on Monday, I flew to Kansas, and then I was all, I was in Kansas all day on Tuesday and I flew home Wednesday evening. And so I would say, you know, if I said I spent three days in Kansas now, would it be like, hey, you spent 56 hours in Kansas. That’s not three days. But you know, I might be like, I was there for a day like either of those.

It took up three of my days, essentially.

Now there is a problem with this though, and that is that Jesus says, this adulterous generation will get no sign from me. No sign, except for the Sign of Jonah. And it says, just as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.

Okay, so that is a problem.

Yeah, so that’s where, you know, that’s.

How did you almost get the days right?

I have approximate knowledge of many things. Some people will recognize that quote. But yeah, it’s just a, it’s a, you know, good enough prophecy because it absolutely was not three nights.

Right?

Yeah, that’s okay.

Well, and now we’re at the point of talking about resurrection, so let’s dive in quickly to resurrection as a concept. Where did, where did this idea come from?

We, we don’t really have anything. Well, we don’t have much in the Hebrew Bible that could plausibly be connected with resurrection. We don’t have anything that explicitly talks about a physical resurrection. In the earlier periods, once you die, your, you know, your body was put in, in a tomb, and then once everything had gone except for the bones, your bones would be collected up and in earlier periods, they would just be thrown in a, in a deeper part of the tomb and you would just become one of the ancestors. This mountain of bones where you were indistinguishable and disarticulated, or you were put in an ossuary, a bone box, and had a name written on it or not, and that was stuck in a smaller part of the tomb. There was no expectation of resurrection until we. Probably because of the Greco-Roman period, we have ideas about reward and punishment in the afterlife developing.

We probably have in that period, ideas about resurrection. We have some, some hints in Daniel, we have Ezekiel, the Valley of the Dry Bones. You know, the, the flesh comes back to them. And this is really about the restoration of the nation of Israel. But this is probably fodder for the development of a concept of resurrection. We have it mentioned in Second Maccabees 7, which is probably a mid-to-late second century BCE text where it mentions the mother and the seven sons and that they were, because they were righteous, they were looking forward to a better resurrection. But because Antiochus IV Epiphanes was wicked, he’s going to be destroyed. So in an earlier period, it seems like resurrection was the reward. No, non resurrection was the punishment.

Right. Annihilation.

Like, yeah, annihilationism. Once we get to the New Testament, there seem to be three different concepts of postmortem punishment. Annihilationism, temporary conscious torment followed by annihilationism or eternal conscious torment. And we see those kind of sprinkled around the New Testament. Although Paul never refers to any of them explicitly, never refers to hell at all. Although does once, once and a half refer to people being destroyed? So might be annihilationism. But we have this, this concept of resurrection that is developing within Greco Roman period Judaism. And it seems to be represented a couple different ways in the New Testament. And you also have people being brought back to life in the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere. But there’s not a sense of you’re immortal now, it’s you were dead. Oop. Okay, we’re gonna do. Hit the reset button.

You get a few more weeks, buddy.

Yeah, you’re still mortal. You’re still gonna get old and die. There are some folks who argue that, that the idea of the dying and rising God, the kind of cyclical go down to the underworld, come back thing, might have influenced the idea of resurrection, but it’s something that’s developing in the century or two prior to the New Testament. And then we have Jesus is the one who, who kind of kicks off the resurrection, except in Matthew, because when Jesus dies, tombs open and people rise up, right? And there’s like, there’s like a little.

It’s a dead man’s party. Who could ask for more?

A little mini zombie apocalypse where.

Yeah.

And it says that people were seen in the city and.

Yeah, they’re just wandering around the streets. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

It’s cool. And nothing. We. We don’t hear anything about whether they were now immortal. If this was because Jesus is supposed to be the first fruits of the resurrection, the first person to be resurrected. So. Right. Maybe it was just like, hey, you know, a. What was the, what was the. The Pixar movie, Onward? Maybe it was just A you got 24 hours kind of deal. And. But yeah, so the resurrection is. Is kind of unclear, but it’s. It’s crystallizing by the time of the New Testament. And it’s in the periods following that that we get along with the systematization of heaven, of hell, and of these other things. And I think it’s important to note that the Gospel authors, the other New Testament authors, they’re mostly writing from their own point of view and they have different ideas about all of this stuff. But what makes it necessary to consolidate it all, reconcile it all, harmonize it all, is when the New Testament comes together and now we have one corpus and we’re considering it a single corpus, which is something that starts in the second century and is really formalized in the fourth and fifth century.

And now that we’re looking at it all as inspired scripture, suddenly it’s like, well, let’s make sense of it all. And we have the apologists in the second century who are trying to make the Gospel intellectually palatable for the Greco Roman elite, the intelligentsia. who are trying to make the Gospel intellectually palatable for the Greco-Roman elite, the intelligentsia. And so they, they’re looking at this corpus like, this is a mess. We gotta. We gotta get this organized. And that catalyzes this work of systematizing everything and taking all these disparate kind of incongruous pieces and trying to fit them together to make a single kind of systematic framework that can work. And that’s what’s going on between the second and, like, fourth and fifth centuries within Christianity. And that’s why we have the ideas that we have now. It’s. It’s not because, you know, Matthew and Luke and Paul and John and James were all like, we agree on everything, right?

Because they didn’t.

They.

They disagreed on a ton of stuff. But then you have Clement and Athanasius and Tertullian and all these other guys who are looking back and saying, well, if we think these people were all inspired, then we got to make them agree. Yeah. So it’s kind of a necessity that drove the development of the, of the concepts as we have them now. But in the New Testament, they all have different ideas about the resurrection, about postmortem divine punishment, about all of these things.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, that’ll do it for the, for the show. I think for our afterparty for our patrons, we should go through a few more of the contradictions in the story and we’ll, we’ll chat a bit about that. So if you want to become a patron who can actually hear that afterparty and hear bonus recordings of every week, you can join us over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma, which we would really appreciate. The $10 a month and up category is what will get you the afterparty. But also you can just join us there for an ad-free version of every show and early access to every show. If you’d like to reach out to us, you can always do that. contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the way to do that. And we’ll see you next week.

Bye, everybody.