Can Jesus Forgive Sin?

His first impulse isn’t just like, hey, I’ll heal you. His first impulse is like, we’ll do this other thing, and then I’ll use the healing as the proof that I. That I have the authority to do that.

Yes. It’s almost as if the story was carefully crafted to tag these rhetorical bases. Yeah, you didn’t hear it from me. 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. How are things today, Dan?

Going well, man, I’m. I don’t have a headache like you do, so that’s good. I’m. I’m. I’m one up on you anyway, so that’s great. Yeah. And I’m looking forward to today’s show. We got some fun stuff. We’re. We’re going to do a Bible versus Bible and, and, and. And find some. Some interesting contradictions. And then we’re gonna look at the concept of sin, forgiveness via a big hole in the ceiling. So that’s gonna be fun. Everyone should stay tuned for that. But first, let’s do Bible versus Bible.

All right, so what are we talking about today?

Well, since it was your idea, I think you already know, but Ahaziah is. Is the name of a guy that I had never heard of, but he pops up in both second Kings and second Chronicles or just first and second Chronicles. So, yeah, he’s in. He’s in both of these places. I’m. It’s. It’s always a bad idea for the Bible to retread the same ground, because every time it does that, it’s tricky.

It’s tricky.

It’s a different retelling, and they have some different things. So why don’t you walk us through the story? Do you want. Who is Ahaziah? Or.

Right. So we got a. We actually have a couple Ahaziahs in. In. In this history, but Ahaziah is a king of Judah. So in this period, traditionally, we think of the United Kingdom, the. That was founded by Saul and David and Solomon, and then we had the divided kingdom. The reality is that there was probably never a united kingdom, that these are two kingdoms that developed separately and were never.

Judah and Israel.

Correct. So Judah in the south, with Jerusalem as home base, and then Israel in the north with Samaria as home base. And this. And the northern kingdom of Israel was the larger kingdom, the more successful kingdom. And in the 8th century, this was. There was a lot more economic growth going on. There was a lot more cities popping up. There was a lot more money flowing in. And Jerusalem, to the degree that it was able to engage in, like, international trade and things like that, it was probably through the Northern Kingdom of Israel. And Jerusalem doesn’t become prominent until the fall of, of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, because they kind of take over the identity of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. And we get the creation of this history where there’s a. A united kingdom, but Ahaziah is a, a king in Judah. And we have, we have Joram as a king in Israel.

So that’s in the, in the Northern Kingdom. And then Jehu is giving Joram a.

Hard time, and Jehu is a, is a. Some sort of antagonist. But, but, but, but a powerful dude has a lot.

Yes. And, and Jehu is actually going to Jehu is one of the earliest figures from the Hebrew Bible, for which we actually have direct archaeological evidence. Oh, cool. In fact, even a pictorial representation of Jehu.

Bowing down before an Assyrian emperor, Shalmaneser III. But still one of the first ones that we have represented anywhere in the, in the late 9th century. But we have the story of Ahaziah’s death because Ahaziah is considered a wicked king. And so Jehu is on the warpath. Well, Jehu is coming after Ahaziah. And let me see where we got the Jehu. He’s going after Joram first. Jehu drew his bow with all his strength. This is 2nd Kings 9, verse 24. And shot Joram between the shoulders so that the arrow pierced his heart and he sank in his chariot.

Yeah. This is fun. It’s like chariot. All a bunch of chariot stuff. Yeah. Meet each other on, on the field in chariots.

Yeah. And. And we’re in the. The Jezreel Valley, which is. You got Megiddo over there, the Jezreel Valley. You go further north and you get Megiddo.

I’m sorry to interrupt, but what’s that pronounced? Megiddo?

And further north, Nazareth is, is kind of in a little bowl place where if you go up on the hill, you can look south over the Jezreel Valley. And on a clear day, maybe you. You can at least pick out where Megiddo would be way off in the south. And Jehu said to his aide, Bidkar, lift him out and throw him on the plot of ground belonging to Naboth the Jezreelite, for remember, and I rode side by side behind his father Ahab. How The Lord uttered this oracle against him that. That basically he was going to. He was going to die. When King Ahaziah of Judah saw this, he fled in the direction of Beth Haggan, house of the garden. And this is southeast of. Of Megiddo. This is basically just over the hill from the southern tip of the Jezreel Valley. Jehu pursued him, saying, shoot him also. And they shot him in the chariot at the ascent to Gur, which is by Ibleam.

And then he fled to Megiddo and died there. His officers carried him in a chariot to Jerusalem and buried him in his tomb with his ancestors in the city of David.

So all very specific, like, yes, he was riding in his chariot.

He was shot. He slumped, but he didn’t die yet.

It was another guy who. Who slumped to the ground. It was Joram who was killed. And then. And then Jehu is like, get him too.

And so he’s going to get away. And so they. They shoot Ahaziah in his chariot.

And it says then he fled to Megiddo and died there.

And then.

And Megiddo isn’t even as. Oh, yeah. So like, he. They shot him at the ascent to Gur. Meaning he was climbing a hill or something.

In the chariot. And then he made it to a little town and then died.

Yeah, It’s. It’s a little. It’s out of the way. Like, his chariot, he turned and went another direction. Probably like, “I’m not gonna make it there. I’m gonna. I’m gonna head to this place thinking.”

They can’t shoot me if I serpentine.

Right, serpentine. And then Ahaziah’s own officers carried him in a chariot to Jerusalem and buried him in his tomb with his ancestors in the city of David. So we’ve got a clear picture of how this happened. And then we’re going to go to 2 Chronicles. And it’s funny how many of these contradictions are between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles, because Chronicles—Samuel-Kings are basically taking a bunch of records and putting together a single history of what went on with the kings. And then Chronicles is basically doing the same thing, but a couple of centuries later. And they’re like, “We don’t like what that’s doing. We’re going to take this over here. We’re going to carry the two, and we’re going to slice that out right there.”

So that’s not what I heard. What I heard happened.

Yeah. We think whoever put together Chronicles certainly had access to some version of Samuel-Kings. It certainly wasn’t the version exactly as we have it, because even in the Dead Sea Scrolls, like, there’s a lot going on that’s different. And so. And this was centuries before that, so some version was there, but among other things.

And also they were. They were trying to. The reason they decided to compose this history is because they had certain rhetorical goals, so to speak, of their own. And then, so we go to 2 Chronicles 22 , verse 7. “But it was ordained by God that the downfall of Ahaziah should come about through his going to visit Joram.” So we’re on the same page, at least that Ahaziah and Joram are having a. A game night or something. And it says, “For when he came there, he went out with Jehoram to meet Jehu son of Nimshi, whom the Lord had anointed to destroy the house of Ahab.” So Jehu had been anointed by Adonai, the God of Israel, because this. These are members of the. The dynasty of Ahab. And so they’ve got a—Jehu’s going to shut them down. When Jehu was executing judgment on the house of Ahab, he met the officials of Judah and the sons of Ahaziah’s brothers who attended Ahaziah, and he killed them.

He searched for Ahaziah, who was captured while hiding in Samaria and was brought up to Jehu and put to death. They buried him, for they said, “He is the grandson of Jehoshaphat, who sought the Lord with all his heart.” And the house of Ahaziah had no one able to rule the kingdom. So end of the dynasty here. But we got a very different telling of the story. Yeah, we’ve got Jehu executing judgment on the house of Ahab, the officials of Judah. So remember, this is the king from—from Judah, the sons of Ahaziah’s brothers, all the—they get killed. Ahaziah is not there. And so they—they had to go and pound the pavement and look for Ahaziah and captured him hiding in Samaria. Now, this is a reference to Shomron. This is a reference to a city, not the region of Samaria. And they. And. And this is the people who are searching for Ahaziah brought him to Jehu.

And the Hebrew is plural, which means they put him to death. That being the people who sought him out and found him in Samaria. They. The people who sought him out, found him, killed him, buried him. And it gives a reason why they would bury their enemy, right? Because they said, hey, this guy’s daddy was important. Granddaddy was important. So we’re going to do him the honor of giving him a proper burial. So right off the bat, we’ve got a number of significant differences between these two.

A very specific set of circumstances or. Or set of plot points, but just none of them line up other than the cast of characters.

And even there, like, we don’t have Joram being shot between the shoulder blades and slumping down in his chariot. A very, A very graphic telling of. Of that story. But we do have Ahaziah, who is hiding out and brought to Jehu, which is not Jehu, commanding his men to fire upon Ahaziah in his chariot while he is fleeing.

And then fleeing to Megiddo and dying there. According to Second Chronicles, he was killed before Jehu by Jehu’s men, and then Jehu’s men buried him. And I think this is one of the most explicit contradictions. In Second Chronicles, it is Jehu’s men who bury Ahaziah. In Second Kings, it is Ahaziah’s men who bury Ahaziah with his ancestors. With his ancestors, yeah. It’s. That is an explicit contradiction. Jehu’s men are not Ahaziah’s men. And so that can’t be reconciled. But we do have interesting attempts to try to gin up these scenarios that are not in evidence to make these things gel where he. What was. I heard an interesting one. They searched for him, found him in Samaria, brought him to the Jezreel Valley and were like, run.

And then he was like, okay. And runs off in his chariot and then they shoot him and he goes to Megiddo and they find. And then they have to go find him again and they find him in Megiddo and then they put him to death in Megiddo. So it’s.

You gotta add a lot. And also, like, the hiding thing, like, Kings doesn’t have any of that. Kings has him. And who’s the other Jay guy? Jehoram? Is that the other Joram Joram?

Both riding out specifically to meet Jehu in that place. Like, yeah. There’s a whole thing that leads up to it. So, yeah, there’s. He couldn’t have been hiding in Samaria. That’s not possible. Unless you really, really. You gotta squint and turn sideways and kind of like, definitely. You can’t. You. You can’t. You have to be working real, real hard.

Right? You’re. You’re not letting the text set its own terms. You’re setting the terms for the text and, and here’s something that I find so baffling about the attempt to salvage the inerrancy and the univocality of these two texts is you basically have to turn both authors into liars. You have to say that each account is just wildly misrepresenting the events.

Right.

So that you can say there are these connecting events that get us from point A to point B that are being entirely omitted. And so you have one story where everything’s going on in the Jezreel Valley and it’s, it, it is coherent, it makes sense. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end. And it all happens in this one little corner of the valley. And then it’s like, no, the reality is that this thing was spanning over dozens of miles and we have people coming back and forth and we have people who are giving them a chance to get away or something and you know, playing sport with them. And you basically make each story entirely false in order to protect the inerrancy of the two stories, which is something that frequently happens when we’re talking about contradictions. Like the, the death of, of Judas is like that. People are like, oh, well, that’s simple.

He went and he hanged himself. And then over time the rope broke and he fell and then, you know, everything just, he burst and, and all that. It’s like, that’s not the story. Yeah, that is a very, very different story from the two stories that were told. You’re, you’re, you have to insist on sovereignty over what the text is actually saying and you turn the text into a falsehood for the sake of protecting the inerrancy of the text.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I wanted this discussion to be about was the idea of why we point out these contradictions on this show. Because I think, I think you think it’s a very important thing to do. And it’s not about poking holes. You know, I know plenty of people who point out contradictions because they want to poke holes in the Bible and haha, it’s a big gotcha. But that’s not what this is about. So why is it important to you?

It’s important to me because I think it is necessary to take the Bible more seriously. If we believe that the, what the Bible is saying is important, then I think you have to let the Bible operate on its own terms. But so many people don’t want to let the Bible operate on its own terms because these presuppositions of inerrancy, of inspiration, of univocality have more authority than the text of the Bible. And that’s not taking the Bible seriously, that’s taking those dogmas seriously. But if I, I’m trying to let what these authors were trying to say come through. When you mask, when you obscure what the authors are trying to say and alter it in order to salvage your dogmas, you’re just shoving the Bible down. You’re not taking the Bible seriously. And this is why I insist there’s no such thing as a biblical literalist because one, the Bible is not univocal, it’s multivocal.

There are lots of different people saying lots of different things. So you can’t even extract a single coherent, consistent worldview from the Bible as a whole. You have to pick and choose. You have to say we’re going to, we’re going to take this one for this situation and we’re going to leave that one on the side for this situation. You have no choice but to do that. And if you try to impose a unifying framework upon the whole thing to say no, it all works, then what you’re doing is saying the Bible cannot operate on its own terms, it has to operate on my terms.

Well, it doesn’t leave room in a book that was written over the course of what, a thousand years or something like that?

About a thousand years. Yeah.

There’s no room in your worldview for innovation within that period of time for, for change, for, you know, change in thought, change in philosophy, theology. Over a thousand years is impossible.

Yeah. And, and it’s, it’s an example I’ve brought up many times in the past, but just within my own lifetime I have seen people on one side of the political aisle go from you can never have an adulterer as president to it’s okay to have an adulterer as president. Like within a single generation you can have people entirely flip flop on what they claim are absolutely essential central ideologies for their identities.

Right.

And so over the course of a thousand years that’s going to happen thousands and thousands of times. So yeah, it doesn’t treat the Bible as an authority on its own. Right. It treats the Bible as the proof text for the real authority, which is the dogmas that are prioritized for a given set of social identities. Whatever one’s identity politics demands the Bible be, that’s what they’re gonna make the Bible into.

It doesn’t even allow the Bible to be the authority on the Bible. Yeah, like if there’s one thing that the Bible can definitively be the authority on, it’s damn self.

Yeah, but we assert authority over that as well. When you have New Testament authors quoting from the book of First Enoch or referring to Second Maccabees or the Ascension of Isaiah or something like that, we’ve got to say that wasn’t really Scripture.

Yeah, yeah, that’s a problem.

Yeah. The folks 300, 400 years later who sat down and hammered out what the boundaries of the Bible were going to be, they knew better. Or at least we’re giving them more authority than we are to the actual authors of the biblical texts. So it’s such a disingenuous concern, this trying to protect univocality because it has absolutely no choice but to assert the authority to dictate to the Bible what it is and is not allowed to mean. Like, this is one of the reasons I’m not a huge fan of the New International Version of the Bible because it says in the preface or the introduction that all the translators are committed to the inspiration and infallibility of the text. It’s like if you’re committed to that, then you’re not letting the authors speak, you are speaking for them and on their behalf.

And you have to make changes in order to make things fit. And they do. You can find places where they are fiddling with the translation in ways that are not academically defensible just to make things fit this ideology.

Yeah, it makes sense to me that the, yeah, this whole thing, I will say this on a slightly different topic because I think we’ve made that point. I think that that’s, I think we’re clear on that. Anyone who would disagree with us at this point about that is just defending that ideology or they’re defending those dogmas. I do think that one of the things when I was reading Second Kings chapter 9 about Jehu son of Nimshi, I think we should have in our merch. We don’t have merch yet, but we will. But in our merch, I think we should have a bumper sticker that says Second Kings chapter 9, verse 20, because that has the part that says it looks like the driving of Jehu son of Nimshi, for he drives like a maniac. And I just think that would be funny.

You drive like Jehu son of Nimshi would be a bumper sticker or something like that.

Is that what it says in the King James Version?

Oh, that’s what it says in the NRSV.

Oh, NRSV. Drives like a maniac.

Drives like a maniac.

Maniac. Oh, I probably can’t sing that.

Nobody heard that, right?

Yeah. The King James Version says, for he driveth furiously.

Yeah. Either way, both are good.

Fast and Furious. And then the New English Translation says, he drives recklessly.

Oh, I like like a maniac, but furiously also. Yeah. The Fast and the Furious. I love it. Jehu, son of Nimshi. All right, well, there’s that. However Ahaziah died, we will never know the truth of it, unfortunately.

Probably not. Probably not. Yeah, so I would just say that Second Kings is probably closer to the truth than Chronicles, since it’s coming so much later and. And. And is trying to fiddle with things more.

Okay, fair enough. All right, I’m. We’re gonna. We’re gonna say he drove wounded his chariot back to wherever the place was. All right, well, I think it’s time for a bit of chapter and verse.

All right, let’s hit it.

All right, so we’re. We’re going now to Mark and. Walk us through. This is. We’re in Mark, chapter two.

Mark, chapter two.

And there is a fun story of Jesus, and it starts at his house.

Yeah. So this is Mark, chapter one. The Gospel of Mark begins with, we’ve got the forerunner coming. Here’s Jesus. He’s getting baptized. He’s been baptized. And then we have Jesus staying within what some people call the Evangelical triangle, which is a triangle of three cities on the northwestern corner of the Sea of Galilee. Bethsaida, Capernaum. And I. Shoot, I forget what the other one is, but it’s a little up the hills, up the hills away. And it has black stone, like the city was constructed of black stone. And there are hyraxes there. And so you got to be careful, because these rodents will yell at you. And they’re bizarre, bizarre creatures. However. So everything’s going on up in Galilee in Mark 1 . And he has a. He casts out an unclean spirit.

He heals many at Simon’s house. And Simon lives in Capernaum, or Capernaum, or Capernaum, however you like to pronounce that name. And when. If you go visit, if you ever have the privilege of visiting, there is a statue right outside the front entrance. As you’re going in the front entrance, you look to the left, and there will be a bench and there is a, what looks like a homeless man covered in a sheet or something laying on the bench. But you look at the feet and you see there are scars on the feet. And so this is Jesus. It’s trying to remind you he’s. Jesus is one of us. He’s a, He’s a beggar. I thought that was a. That’s a lovely touch. But you go into Capernaum and you can actually go visit what some people think is Simon’s actual home. Like they’ve, they’ve drilled down to a dwelling place that likely dates to the first century and seems to have very quickly become a pilgrimage site.

And so a lot of folks think this might be Peter’s home, but Simon’s home.

But you do.

Simon. Peter. Oh, okay. Sorry.

These guys and these names, man, I never, I will never get the New Testament prophets straight or New Testament apostles. Apostles, yeah.

We did a show on this.

I know.

And so Mark 2 begins. When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. And the Greek here suggests that Jesus was at his own home. So Jesus probably lived in Capernaum.

Okay, there you go. If you need to send him letters.

Yeah, to care of Mary. And so many gathered around that there was no longer room for them. So the, the word got out. It’s like, it’s like the tours going around where The Rock lives and people are like, “I saw him go in,” and they all run over. Not even in front of the, the door.

Open, without the top. So that they. Yeah, yeah, go and see.

Yeah, the double decker. Yeah, gotta have that. I. One of the funny. Just a sidebar here. One of the things I remember the most about riding double decker buses in, in England was I was always surprised by how much moss and mold and stuff grew on the tops of the bus stops.

Because normally you see a bus stop and you see there’s a covering there, but you’re not looking down on the top of it. And. But when you’re on the top deck of the bus, you’re like, “Oh, I’m looking down on this roof here and there’s moss everywhere.” Okay.

So I just liked being on the. Sorry, now I’m on double. I just loved being at the very front on the top layer of a.

Double decker because just flying, you think.

You’re going to hit literally every—first of all, those bus drivers, especially in London, are maniacs.

Yeah. But they, they drive it furiously, huh?

Yeah, they do. They do. They are like, what’s his name? Son of what’s his name? But they also, like, they get really close, and you feel like you’re just, like, going to hit every single. Yeah. In front of it.

I. That. I. I don’t know what would be more un— I don’t think that’s as uncomfortable as back in the day riding in the back of the station wagon, the seats that pointed backwards.

I used to. That was my favorite.

I hated. Because when, you know you’re on a road trip and somebody’s behind you on the interstate and you’re like, “Where do I look?” I don’t want to just stare down the person who’s going to be behind us for an hour.

Oh, I was there like an idiot waving.

Okay. So many gathered around that. So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them. Not even in front of the door. And he was speaking the word to them. Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And in the King James Version, it says, “one sick of the palsy,” but this just means someone who was paralyzed.

And there were four people carrying him. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him. And after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay, so that they climbed up on the roof, which would have been a flat roof, and it would have been there. There would have been a couple layers of things there. There would have been some mud, branches, and then probably a bunch of straw and stuff like that.

They literally dismantled Jesus’s house.

And then what? Craned the guy down? How did they. Like, it seems. It seems like they could have just sort of maybe asked the crowd to part a little bit, but. “Okay, we’re going in the hard way.” That’s fine.

Yeah, yeah. The. The very hard way. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic child, your sins are forgiven. So he’s obviously not upset about the property damage.

No, he’s.

Because he can. Yeah, because I’m. I’m sure he can just wave his hands and, you know, rebuild. Bibbidi bobbidi boo. Yeah. The way. He has repaired. Maybe it’s not Bibbidi bobbidi boo. Maybe it’s. What is. What does Merlin do in. In Sword in the Stone?

It’s. It’s whatever the Aramaic is for. Bibbidi bobbidi.

Yeah, yeah. Now, some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts, so they’re not saying this out loud. They’re thinking this and this. And this raises an interesting thing here. Mark is a little closer to kind of the. Let’s say, Semitic culture than to the Greco-Roman culture. And in the more Semitic side of things, your heart was the seat of not just emotion, but also cognition.

Right.

So you thought with your heart, you didn’t think with your brain because they didn’t care about your brain. That’s why the Egyptians, when they mummified people, they just scooped the brain out.

Throw that away.

Threw it away.

Yeah, one of those.

Yeah, it’s. It’s. You know, it’s like. Like a gigantic oyster. Just this goo that we’re gonna get rid of. So the. The heart was the seat of. Of cognition. And so in the. The statement, the first great commandment, love God with all your heart, might, mind, and strength. That is a Greek translation of the. The actual commandment from Deuteronomy, which only says heart, might, and soul. So if. If they’re talking about the mind, it’s not Hebrew Bible stuff.

Interesting.

And that. Yeah, that would not have been how Jesus would have talked about this stuff.

But I’m also interested in the fact that the author of Mark is writing in the third person. Omniscient. Just talking about how. What. What’s going on in everybody’s heart.

Yeah, well, and this. This is something that some folks bring up when it comes to some of the stories of Jesus’s trial. Because when Jesus is before Pilate, Pilate takes him out, like, puts him on display. Hey, everybody, what’s going on? And they say, crucify him. Pilate brings him back in, interrogates him. He’s alone. And then Jesus immediately goes to his death. So whoever is telling that story, obviously is just. We have to imagine what would have. What Pilate would have said to Jesus. But. But yeah, the. The narrator is omniscient. So. So they’re questioning in their hearts, why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy. Who can forgive sins but God alone. At once, Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves. And he said to them, why do you raise such questions in your hearts? to them, why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven, or to say, stand up and take your mat and walk.

But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he said to the paralytic, I say to you, stand up, take your mat, and go to your home. And he stood up and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them. So that they were all amazed and glorified God saying, we have never seen anything like this.

Well, there you go.

Quite the powerful parlor trick here of healing the paralyzed man.

Right. And there’s something interesting of being able to. As a demonstration of the authority to forgive sins, which is.

Interesting. Reason. Not. It’s. He does like, it’s. His first impulse isn’t just like, hey, I’ll heal you. His first impulse is like, we’ll do this other thing. And then I’ll use the healing as the proof that I. That I have the authority to do that.

Yes. It’s almost as if the story was carefully crafted.

Wait. To.

To tag these rhetorical bases.

Yeah, here’s. Here’s what.

You didn’t hear it from me.

Right? Here’s what. Here’s what I think this story does. At least one of the things the story does. We’ll get to the forgiven, because that’s where we’re really angled for. But if anyone ever claims that they are a messiah, if you ever run into a David Koresh figure or whatever, dig into his roof, break into his house, and if he’s mad at you, that’s not him.

Not the Messiah, not the one. So we’ve got this question about divine forgiveness. Who can forgive sins but God alone? One of the things that baffles me about this and. And this text is. Is appealed to frequently by folks who are trying to make the case that Jesus is God.

And basically, you have to agree that the scribes. Is it scribes or who does it say in here?

Sorry, Yeah, I think it’s scribes. You said the word.

Yeah. Some of the scribes. Some of the scribes are sitting there questioning in their hearts. So basically, you have to suppose that the scribes are right that no one can forgive sins except for God alone. And this is. I mean, this is not an incorrect inference to draw from the way the Hebrew Bible talks about the forgiveness of sins. However, I think Jesus’s response precludes that understanding of what’s going on here. Because Jesus doesn’t say, then turn around and give him one of these. What do you think that makes me. Jesus says wrong so that you may know you lack information. You don’t know something. I am going to drop some knowledge on you. What is that knowledge? That the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. In other words, the scribes were wrong. Who can forgive sins but God alone? Jesus says Son of Man can forgive sins.

And Son of Man. Here is a reference specifically to him himself. Right.

So there’s a, there’s a debate about this. I, I think Mark is presenting Jesus as the Son of Man. However, those who, Bart Ehrman and others who try to reconstruct how Jesus himself might have thought about this, they, some of them will argue that Jesus did not actually think he was the Son of Man. And this requires kind of taking some of these Son of Man statements as actual words of Jesus, but reinterpreting them as, as third person references rather than first person references.

Okay. But I mean, the way this story presents itself, it is very clear that he is saying, I have this authority. He’s not. And he’s not saying anyone else does. So it’s basically according to him, at least in this moment. Me and dad.

Yeah. Yeah. The guys are saying only God can, can do this. And Jesus says, I am God’s plus one because the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. I, I just don’t see how you can interpret this as anything other than a correction of an error. Now it’s. And, and so right off the bat, I don’t think it serves as a proof text for the notion that, that Jesus is God. But there’s more to this when it comes to the forgiveness of sins, because this is a, this is a question that we see rising up in some other Jewish literature, even some Greco-Roman period Jewish literature. There’s an idea that there might be a Dead Sea Scroll fragment that is talking about a priest having authority to forgive sins. But there’s this, this is a debate that people have been having for a while. Does the Bible say that only God forgives sins?

And is there anything else, anywhere else that says anyone else has the authority to forgive sins? Because this is something that is repeatedly attributed to. This is a divine prerogative throughout the Hebrew Bible and most of the New Testament, except for here. So we have in Numbers 14 , Moses asked God to forgive the people, and God says, I have pardoned according to your word. We have a bunch of references to God having authority to forgive sins. In fact, in Joshua 24:19 , you have Joshua telling the people, you can’t serve God because he’s a jealous God and he will not forgive your sins. The word there is a word that’s more commonly translated transgressions. But there’s a lot of semantic overlap between the two. But Joshua says he will not forgive your transgressions. And, and most scholars agree this is, this is not saying that, you know, you’re hopeless.

God’s. God’s never going to forgive your sins, but that God is the one who has the authority to do so. And God is jealous about that authority. And God is also pretty sparing with that authority, which does.

I mean, that feels in conflict with what I was taught, which is that, like, anyone who asks for forgiveness earnestly and repents and doesn’t sin anymore gets forgiveness.

It certainly sounds like that in the way the New Testament represents it, where we forgive those who have sinned against us seven times, 70 times, and things like that. It sounds an awful lot like we have the ability to, to forgive other people’s sins.

Well, no, I, I’m saying, like, I thought that God forgave our sins. Like, it, like he’s not stingy about it. All you have to do is go ahead and ask for forgiveness. Ask for forgiveness. Then you get it. Like, it’s, it’s. So, it’s interesting that, that the earlier idea was maybe, I don’t know, we’re gonna see. I doubt it. He doesn’t like you very much.

So, yeah, it’s a mixed bag because the Bible is not univocal. So you’ve got a lot of different representations of God’s perspective on sin because you have other things where Micah, for instance, is praising God, who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance. So God is praised as, as being pretty liberal with the forgiveness of sins. And elsewhere God is stingy with the forgiveness of sins, but God is, is mainly the one who is able to forgive sins, at least forgive the sins of, well, forgive other people’s sins. Now, I was about to say, like, in human circumstances, we’re supposed to forgive others who sin against us. And so. But we can’t really forgive the sins of someone against somebody else.

Right.

And so the. That’s outside of our purview. That’s above our pay grade.

Right.

And, and here we get into the question of how God’s authority relates to that. And, and scholars would say that the sins as they are laid out, as they are described in the Bible and within, like, early Jewish literature and things like that, overwhelmingly are represented as violations of God’s commands.

Right.

So if it’s not against God’s command, then it’s not a sin. And so God is the offended party, is the injured party when it comes to any sin whatsoever. And so it’s up to God to do that.

Yeah, because it’s often bothered me the idea that, you know, Someone, even if it’s God, that someone other than the, like, you know, I do something horrible to someone else, and then like, forgiveness is something that, that God can grant me. But I don’t think to my mind, that’s not how that transaction works. Like, the person, the only person who can grant me forgiveness is the person that I have hurt in some way. And, you know, they’re under no obligation to do so. But. So I think that there’s an, you know, I think that forgiveness also means different things. You know, there’s forgive, forgiveness. I think oftentimes in this, in these kinds of contexts, in biblical contexts, it’s more a sense of forgiveness as in we forgive a debt, not as in like an emotional forgiveness. Like, I have gotten myself to a place emotionally where I, you know, can now let go of the fact that you’ve done harm to me.

But it’s rather like, okay, you owe me X amount because you did this, and I forgive that debt sort of thing.

Yeah. And. And I think that is a, that is a metaphor that governs the representation of the, the moral transgressions. So the, the word that is used for forgive is, is like release, loosen, let go. And so I think it’s, it’s probably related to the idea of, of that debt. And, and as you pointed out as we were outlining what we were going to talk about today, in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew, it says, forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors. And then if you go to the, the Lukan version, the Sermon on the Plain, it says forgive our sins. And so one could interpret Matthew to be talking about fiscal principles, or it could be. I, I think it’s probably more likely that it’s being used figuratively to refer to moral debts and things like that.

All I know is that the first time I looked up the, the Lord’s Prayer, because I didn’t. I wasn’t raised saying it. LDS people don’t say the Lord’s Prayer. But I, you know, I’d heard it in like, you know, media on movies or whatever, and I kind of knew, you know, I kind of know it. It’s enough in the Zeitgeist that I kind of know it. So I look it up in Matthew and I’m like, and forgive us, our debts are what? Huh? That’s. That doesn’t say trespasses. What’s going on? It was very. I. And then I was in a frantic, like, like, I’m looking at all of the different translations and whatever, and it all says debts. And I was. I was blown away by that.

Yeah, that. There’s the. There’s what the text says, and then there’s the. The discourse about it. And, and frequently what we internalize and what we remember and what the. The level at which the discourse operates is not what’s. What’s in the text. Like, people. And that now, people. There are a lot of conspiracy theorists who claim that that’s because, you know, CERN has been screwing with the fabric of reality and has been changing things. So it is the lion and the lamb. Because in reality, the Bible never talks about the lion and the lamb. It talks about the wolf and the lamb, but it has become the lion and the lamb in the discourse. And a lot of people are like, no, NASA and CERN have changed reality and Mandela effect. Exactly. So they’re like, I know what I remember. And, you know, I. There was a. There was a scholar at one point. I can’t remember where this was. I don’t remember the context, but somebody at some point was talking about when.

When. When the Pharaoh gave Moses his ring. And I was like, you’re thinking of The Prince of Egypt. That was an animated movie. That’s not in the text. So, yeah, I. I totally lost track of where we were going.

Forgiveness for a minute there.

Forgiveness for sins. Yeah. But I want to return to this idea of God being this jealous God who will not forgive your transgressions because there actually is another divine agent who. Of whom the exact same thing is said word for word. And that happens in Exodus 23 , when we have the angel. God says, look, I’m sending an angel before you to guide you along the way. Don’t disobey him, don’t tick him off, says, because he will not forgive your sins. And it’s the exact same Hebrew that we find in Joshua 24:19 . The purview, the prerogative of the jealous God. And then it says, because my name is in him. And so I. I argue in my book that this seems to be. They’re accounting for why the angel’s identity gets mixed up with God’s identity, which we see with. With the angel who appears to Moses in the burning bush.

And. And it happens with Hagar, it happens with Abraham, it happens with Gideon, it happens with Manoah and his wife, where stories that were originally about God visiting humanity have the angel written in to kind of muddy the waters. And this, I argue, is. Is a way to account for how the angel can do what only God is supposed to be able to do. And in this, and in the case of Exodus 23 , it’s that prerogative not to forgive sins that the angel has as a result of God’s name being in him. And so I would take this back to Mark 2 and say it’s possible, I think it’s likely that the author has in. In mind an allusion to this notion that, hey, there was a divine agent that was able to have authority over the forgiveness of sins. In the Hebrew Bible, the Son of man is held up as an example of someone who is able to exercise divine prerogatives, and in some instances, because they were endowed with God’s name or have God’s name indwelling within them.

And so I, I think that’s probably what is underlying the story here, rather than the notion that Jesus is winking at them about being God through this narrative without actually coming out and saying, yeah, don’t you get it yet?

I’m the same guy.

Yeah, it, it’s-a me, the Messiah.

Messiah-rio. Yeah, that, that’s fascinating. I, it, it’s weird that it happened. Like, the whole setup with the, the paralyzed guy coming in through the roof seems real strange to me since we’re setting up something that could have happened in any number of other ways. But, but I mean, who knows? Maybe it’s because it actually happened. You know, people digging through your roof. That’s. That’s a fun story. You’re going to be dining out on that for a long time.

And I, I think it’s interesting that also that it says Jesus saw. Let me make sure that’s. That’s plural. Yeah. Jesus saw their faith. So it’s not the, it’s not the, the man lying on the bed whose faith Jesus is rewarding.

Right.

It’s. It’s the faith of his buddies. And he’s like, oh, well, I’m gonna forgive this guy’s sins. The four, the four buddies are probably like, and what about our sins? Yeah, it was our faith you were talking about there.

We hoisted the guy all the way up here. We should get something. Yeah.

Unless it was the, the man who was, who’s laying on the, the cot or whatever they were carrying him, who, who was like, dig through the roof. I gotta get in there. And he made them do it.

It literally cannot be that. It, like some structural or civil engineer has to tell me how it is possible that they dug through the roof and it, the whole thing didn’t cave in. I just want to know anyway.

Yeah, because it’s fine. Because it could have been, you know, like a basketball hoop sized hole and they just kind of lowered him down by his feet. Because if they had to hold him flat, that is a very large hole that they’ve got to dig into.

And did they like, they keep referencing this guy and his mat. Did they lower him down on the mat? Like, it feels like they must have used the mat to lower him. I don’t know. This is weird.

They had a dolly and a bunch of straps that they were.

Stop being weird. And lowering him down, inching him down.

Click by click.

Or, or they just strapped him to the mat.

Just roll him in.

They were like, cross your fingers. But it’s, it is, it is fun to imagine potential historical realities underlying these, these literary stories.

Because I, I think some of the ways that these stories are told, they’re not told so that you imagine these realities, they’re just told so you focus on the points that they’re making. And then trying to imagine those realities raises peculiarities.

Well, this is what I’m saying. I, if I could go back in time and talk to biblical authors, I would be like, I understand good storytelling involves details, but like, let’s not make the details so weird that it totally distracts from the actual like point you’re trying to make here. Because that, that’s a weird detail.

Yeah. I don’t know where, where they grew up, how they, how they learn their, their storytelling craft. But the one thing is for sure is the gospel authors were definitely well trained. So there, there were, they were sticking with the, the conventional, the conventions and the, the norms of, of their time. Even if it strikes us as, as peculiar and all.

They did. The paralytic man did crowd surf to the place. All right, well, I guess that’s it for this week’s show. If you guys would like to become a part of making this show happen, as well as receive an ad free early version of every episode and get access to the after party, which is bonus content every week. You can head over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and sign up there. Or if you just need to reach us for anything, please feel free to write into us; contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the email address and we’ll see you next week.

Bye everybody.

Can Jesus Forgive Sin?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology