Getting to Gnow the Gnostics

Screw dust covers.

Says the man whose book is about to come out guaranteed with dust covers on it.

That was not my choice.

When you get Dan’s book, the first thing you are required to do by Dan’s own edict is burn the dust cover.

Hey Everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re 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 Bible. How are things, Dan?

Things are good. Things are good. We’re here. We. We got some fun heresy coming up. We got some.

We got some good stuff going on. It’s the new year. It’s. It’s hot Boys winter. I don’t, I don’t know.

New Year, new us, all of those things.

And uh, I think, I think we’re gonna have some fun with, with today’s show. Our first, our first segment is going to be a, a History’s heresies because we likes to get heretical up in here. That’s going to be fun. We’re going to talk about Gnosticism and I’m excited about that. And then in the second half of the show, we are going to talk. We’re going to do a. What is that about? A thing that you have mentioned many times on this show and in your various other social media. Codex Sinaiticus, which sounds like.

Probably.

It sounds like a disease.

Question mark.

I don’t know.

Yeah, something like that or something you see a commercial on that says may result in anal bleeding or something like that.

Do not take Codex Sinaiticus if you’ve experienced any. Yeah, exactly. All right, well, let’s, let’s just launch in with History’s heresies. All right, so I said it. We’re talking about Gnosticism. I personally am a Gnostic. I am ag.

Agnostic. Yes, yes. Easy to get those two confused.

But I, I would like to learn more about. Here’s the thing. For all of the things on this show, usually when you, when we decide on what we’re going to talk about, I dive in and do a little bit of research to sort of figure out what the heck we’re, you know, so that I have anything at all of value to offer to the conversation. But this time I actually opted out of doing too much. I wanted to do some, you know, surface stuff, but I figure I’m just going to be the guy learning with the rest of the audience on this one because it just seemed like that would be a useful thing. And I’ll ask questions because I don’t know anything about Gnosticism.

Yeah. All right, dive in.

What do we got?

Yeah, first off, the, the word begins with a G. Gnosticism is, is what we’re talking about, which comes from the Greek gnosis, which means knowledge. And so gnosticism would seem on the surface to have something to do with knowledge. And really it’s a kind of a blanket term that is used by scholars. And there’s a debate regarding how accurate a term it is for a handful of different movements that we primarily see within early Christianity, but are theorized to come from perhaps a pre Christian Jewish movement. We’re actually not totally sure about that, but it is related to a philosophical movement known as Middle Platonism, which is kind of where one way that Platonism was what’s getting its kicks in the first and early second century. So Platonism?

Is that a relate. Is that related to Plato? Is that what we’re talking about?

Yes, it would be related to Plato. So, so Plato was, was all about the, the fleshly material world versus the spiritual divine. And, and never the twain shall meet. These are two diametrically opposed categories. And this influenced the cosmology of perhaps some, some early Jewish folks who saw the material world as corrupt and evil and saw salvation and the goal of, of our, of what we’re all doing here being related to overcoming the flesh and escaping the fleshly prisons of our bodies. And that was not done through, you know, what, nor, you know, animal sacrifices. It’s not done through penance, it’s not done through payment, it’s not done through all these things. It’s done through accessing knowledge and specifically kind of secret knowledge about the, the hidden main God.

And so, yeah, you go back to like Plato’s Cave. You’re familiar with this. The Allegory of Plato’s Cave, where we’re all just you. I mean, I’m not recalling this.

Yes, I’m definitely 100 familiar with it, but for the other listeners.

Yes, yes.

Maybe it’d be a good idea to talk about it.

So there was this, this idea that it’s called the Allegory of Plato’s Cave, where what we experience of reality can be compared to a, a shadow puppet show somebody is behind. We’re all kind of chained up, forced to watch this screen or this wall of a cave where somebody behind us has a light source and they’re kind of putting on a puppet show and all we’re seeing is the shadows dancing on the walls. We’re not experiencing reality directly. We’re seeing this kind of projection of reality. And what philosophy does is help you escape from the cave and actually directly engage with reality and experience it as it is rather than as these, these puppet masters behind us are wanting us to experience it. And so the, but this is, this is related to the idea that the world is an illusion and we’re trapped in these bodies and we want to try to get, escape them so that we can return to the pleroma, the fullness—our, our spirits can anyway.

Because the reality is that ourselves are these divine sparks, these spirits that are within us, that want out. And then all of the trappings of the flesh are literally that—trappings of the flesh that keep us here. And so the idea is to, through Jesus—Jesus is supposed to be one of the offspring of one of the. Barbelo is, is the name of, of the first emanation of the main God. And Jesus is the, the son of Barbelo according to one of these traditions. And Barbelo is kind of androgynous. We’re not sure if it’s male or female, but in one of the traditions that’s kind of the root of all of this. And then we get Jesus as the son who is, has come to try to help the people who are interested in gaining this secret knowledge do so so they can ultimately—they realize their own divinity within them, realize that the fleshly world is a prison and then try to gain the knowledge, the secret knowledge, to finally unlock the, the door and escape back to the world of the divine, to the pleroma.

And that’s like a 900,000-foot view of what we have been able to reconstruct because we don’t have much directly from Gnostics. Overwhelmingly. Yeah. Our information about Gnosticism primarily comes from the writings of Christian leaders who hated Gnostics.

And so they, they quoted things and they, they talked about leaders and things like that and they talked about their texts. And, but we didn’t know much at all about them until we discovered the Nag Hammadi codices, which are a bunch of texts that, it appears somewhere around 400 CE, somebody out in the desert seems to have stuffed all these texts in some, some leather folio things and buried them. And we didn’t find them until about 75 or 80 years ago. And, and we, we found a bunch of texts that generally are categorized as Gnostic, including some that we, we have known about like the, the lost Gospel of Thomas for instance. And there was also a Gospel of Judas that was recently—not recently, gosh, probably what, 20 years ago, almost—the Gospel of Judas was, was discovered. That’s another example of something that’s generally identified as Gnostic.

But we, there are a bunch of branches of Gnosticism. You have Valentinianism, you have the followers of Basilides, you have the Sethian Gnosticism. And there, there are a couple of later branches. Manichaeism. Have you ever heard of, of Manichaeism?

I’ve heard you say that word before.

So that’s—it’s generally considered a, a branch of Gnostic Christianity. It was started by a prophet named Manny or Mani, who was.

I like Manny. I want to feel like he’s the guy that, like he’s a prophet, but he also runs the corner store down the street, the little bodega. Hey Manny.

And he was born in the early third century CE in—he’s Iranian. So he is kind of taking a little bit from here, a little bit from there. A little Zoroastrianism, a little Christianity, a little Gnosticism. But was, was kind of a—his was kind of a, a conflation of a bunch of different movements and, and was propped up by some followers as the fulfillment and the, the, you know, overcoming of all the different traditions.

I feel like that’s that one of the key, one of the points that we, in looking at any of these things is that the second you try to nail something down is like, here’s the central philosophy of this. It forgets the fact that all of these things, Christianity, Judaism, all of these things modify wildly over time. It doesn’t take long for something to go from one thing to another to another to another.

Yeah, it, it has to be able to adjust to, to circumstances and, and things like that. And so yeah, it, and it didn’t last much. Most Gnostic movements died out by the, around the end of the fourth beginning of the fifth century CE because this is. We have the Edict of Thessalonica, I think in 380 CE this is when not only did Christianity become the official religion of the Roman Empire, but they specified specifically Nicene Christianity. And so all of the, all of the other traditions became religio non grata in the Roman Empire. And that’s why somewhere around 400 CE some people went out in the desert and went bury that crap. And, and there’s an argument to make that monasteries got their start in association with Gnosticism, that they were out in the deserts with their sacred texts, you know, doing whatever it is they, they wanted to do on their own, leaving everybody else alone, similar to, you know, like the Essenes at Qumran and things like that.

And, and they may have been the ones who preserve some of the Gnostic texts because the, the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered near some monasteries in the desert in Egypt, which is precisely where you had all these people out there try and you know, just basically saying, don’t hassle me, man. And, and getting hassled and ultimately being brought under the arm of the Catholic Church because of, mainly because of Athanasius of Alexandria. And, but we do have a branch that survives down to today and we’ve talked about them before on our channel and they are the Mandaeans. Okay, so you’ll recall we talked with James McGrath about his book on John the Baptist and Mandaeans who, who may have been there may or may not be a genetic link between the following of John the Baptist and the Mandaean movement. They, I think traditionally they, they claim that they go all the way back to John the Baptist.

Whether they do or they do not, Mandaeanism postures itself or is describable as a, a Gnostic movement. And so maybe not as, as bizarre and out there as some of the Gnosticism that people who study the patristic authors and the early church fathers would think of Gnosticism, but it is a Gnostic movement that has survived down to this day.

I’m still not 100% clear is the thing, are we still holding that, that the thing that makes something Gnostic in nature is that duality between material and immaterial world. Is that the main identifier or what?

I think that’s, that’s one of the main identifiers. This is one of the reasons people debate things like the, the, the Gospel of Mary. Is that Gnostic or, or is it not? Because it seems to be talking about all this. You know, you got to have the right knowledge and there’s, there’s mockery going on of, of people who don’t have the right knowledge. But completely absent is any reference to a traditional Gnostic cosmology. Yaldabaoth is the, is the JV squad deity that creates the natural world to try to imprison all these spirits. And, and that’s who Jesus is coming to save everybody from. And, and this is where Gnosticism runs into some can run into some anti-Semitism. There are certainly movements that have emphasized this more than others. But when you look at the, the Hebrew Bible you see Adonai, the God of Israel is creating the material world and that makes Adonai the bad guy in some Gnostic perspectives.

And so the, and the name they use is Yaldabaoth and so Jesus is coming to save his followers from Adonai, the God of Israel who’s, who’s out to make sure they stay imprisoned. So, so getting back to the Gospel of Mary, some people say well we can’t really say it’s Gnostic because there’s nothing about that cosmology or no references to Yaldabaoth or anything like that. So for some people that is diagnostic of Gnosticism. A lot of other scholars would say we can’t really identify a necessary and sufficient feature of Gnosticism. And some scholars would argue that anciently there’s nobody who would have said oh yeah, I’m a Gnostic. Right. That wasn’t an identity that was, that had any currency back then. It’s the, perhaps the closest analog that we could talk about is like paganism because paganism just becomes kind of a catch-all term for everything that’s not us is right is paganism.

And it becomes a, a byword and, and this kind of thing. And then now we have neopaganism where, where folks are trying to restore to the degree that they can what was going on with some of the non-Christian European traditions that were, that were around before. So.

Right.

So it is pretty squishy. It is kind of nailing Jello to the wall problematic. Yeah. The, the categorization. Another interesting movement that I think some people have called like pseudo-Gnostic is, is the Cathars, Catharism.

And this is, this is not just somebody who can’t pronounce Catholicism. This is a specific movement that starts up probably around the 12th century. It’s a little fuzzy where it’s coming from. Some people think that there is a movement called Paulicianism that might come from the Byzantine Empire, come through Armenia into Bulgaria and then further west into Europe and become Catharism. But they had a, they seem to have incorporated some Docetism into their, into their ideas about Jesus. In other words, he wasn’t a. Docetism is, is the idea that Jesus wasn’t a flesh and blood human. Oh. And that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, but was kind of like “peace out, suckers” and, and, and left. Either replaced him with someone else or it was just an illusion or something like that. And this is, and this is something that Marcion is accused of, of promoting with his version of, of the Scriptures, the, the Pauline writings in his version of Luke.

And, and so that may be why the first two chapters of Luke were added at some point later as a way to confront and counteract Marcion’s Docetism. But we see that in, in Catharism where they, they’re treating Jesus as, as not a flesh and blood human. And they had this. Yeah, they had a, a rite. It was kind of like baptism, only it was called consolamentum. And this was. It’s kind of an interesting thing. It was very similar to baptism in, in that you shook some holy water over someone’s head, but you, you had to do a lot more of it. It was like a very thorough rinsing so that not just a sprinkling, but you had to get thoroughly wet. And, and this is the idea.

This is a full soap, super soaker. Yeah. Treatment.

Yeah, yeah. This is the, this is the supersize me version of, of this where you’re definitely, you know, you have been consolamentum-ed, but the idea is that temporal pleasure is sinful because it is the trappings of the flesh. And once you have reached the point where you’re like, I’m ready. I’m gonna be. I’m gonna, you know, do my best to completely overcome all the trappings of the flesh. You would go through this process and then afterwards you were supposed to be a pescatarian. So no, no meat, just the, the fishies. You’re supposed to be celibate and you dedicate the rest of your life to itinerant missionary work, traveling around, teaching Cathar doctrines. And evidently from what we’ve. We’ve been able to reconstruct of. Of this. Right. The overwhelming majority of the people who, who went through it, and after you went through it, you were called a Parfait, not a parfait, but a Parfait, which was related to the idea of being perfect. And evidently the overwhelming majority of the Cathars who went through this process did so right before they, they died. So this was like a deathbed thing.

That is the best. Like anything that requires of you that you give up all of your earthly pleasures and also, like, sex and all that sort of stuff. You kind of want to do that right before you die. Yeah, that is the best time by far.

The guy who’s like, well, I’m allergic to fish. So. So it’s like, well, then let’s do this on the way out the door. And so that. That seems to be what happened. And. And I don’t know if that accelerated the process of. Of getting out the door, but is

the word Catharism, is that related to cathartic or to. Do we know.

It has to do with. With purity. Oh, okay. So from Greek. And I imagine that cathartic probably has to do with cleansing because of some sort. Yeah, that’s got to come from the Greek. Let me just pull up yon etymological dictionary. Gotta love it. Cathartic.

I highly recommend yourself a. An expert in things so that you can just. When you get curious about a thing, you can just ask them and then they can.

Yeah, yeah, that. That comes from the Greek catharsis, purging or cleansing from the stem kathairein, to purify. Pure from katharos, pure, clean of dirt, clean, spotless, open, free.

Clear.

Shame or guilt purified. So. So yes, it is. It is related to that. But then when.

When did the Cathars, the cat. When did Catharism. Like, what was the time frame of that?

12th to 14th century. So 1100s is when we first start seeing people thumping their chest and goes, I’m a Cathar. And then we have very quickly the Albigensian Crusade. They were actually like, let’s spin up a crusade against these dorks and, and pretty heavily brutalized them.

And then I do love the idea of. Of the Crusades as a hazing ritual. That was, hey, nerds, get over here.

But they, they were. I think they were viewed as. As trying to restore like, one of the great ancient heresies. And so they were like, you know, we’re gonna leave the Turks to the Holy Land for a little bit because we got some. Got some nerds over here that need some. Some noogies. And then they were part of the medieval Inquisition, and they were pretty much gone by, by 1400. And. And people were, they were, you know, towns would be run through. They would hang people, they would burn them at the stake. Men, women, children. Like, wow. They were really upset about the Cathars.

Yeah, I guess.

But they, they were. They were also non-trinitarian. They’re. It’s it’s a little fuzzy and probably because these movements tend to, there tends to be diachronic as well as synchronic variability. And, and those are some two dollar words. Diachronic means through time. Synchronic means with time. So think of variation as we move through time and then variation at one time, but as we move through space. Yes. And so some of them were adoptionists so that Jesus was adopted by God at his baptism to as son of God. And the others took a more modalist route where it was that there were, that Jesus was one of the modes of God. And then you could, you know, you press a button and they spin and then bam, there’s another one that’s in front and then you press a button, they spin and then bam, there’s the third one that’s in front. And so the, but that was a, a heresy that was, that was condemned by Nicaea as well.

So these were, these were not the Nicenes were not friendly to these.

No, I mean it, the whole purpose of Nicaea was basically to, to narrow things down so that we know who, who, who were okay with who’s in and who’s out.

Yeah, well, and, and there’s a, I’ve, I get a lot of pushback from folks who are like, no, this was about salvation. These people thought that you had to believe the right thing to be saved. Which is, you know, I, I see where they’re coming from, but overwhelmingly this is about power. And, and that’s what Nicaea was. Because if, if there had been no Constantine, they would have continued to bicker about this because nobody would have had the authority to say, well, I got an army or I got a whole nation or empire and I’m going to exile you. No, it would have just been a bunch of cities just kind of slap fighting each other for centuries. But once Constantine came in and said, all right, we’re playing with the big boys, we need to get some unity here. So I’m giving you. Figure it out. I’m giving you the authority to figure out how to do this. And yes, I will, you know, exile the people. And, and Constantine was actually pretty sympathetic toward the Arians for a while.

In fact, there was an Arian con, not an Arian Constantine, an Arian emperor in the 5th century or late 4th, early 5th, I think late 4th century CE. So the, you know, it wasn’t, it wasn’t a smooth transition, but ultimately the ones who, who had the crown were able to enforce their, their will. And, and you know, the, the Cathars started up in Southern France and, and the crown enforced their will with prejudice upon them to ensure that they didn’t make it past 1400. Certainly weren’t going to see Columbus sail the ocean blue. So yeah, they, they never got to know that, that the earth was round.

Yes, because that’s what Columbus figured out.

That’s what. Yeah, nobody knew it before then.

Nobody figured that out before him. Interesting. Okay, well the, so this thread of Gnosticism, it feels, it feels like it’s in conflict with everything that I know about sort of Christianity. Did they, do you, do we think that the Gnostics, I mean it doesn’t, I don’t, it doesn’t even seem related to what I know of Christianity. It just seems, it seems so outside of it. But, but they did, they did honor or, or they, they liked the Christian ideals.

character of Jesus at least how they represented him right in, in their literature. Because not all of the, the New Testament writings jived with, with the Gnostics, which is why they came up with, with a lot of their own. And that’s, that’s the main. When people talk about non-canonical Christian literature, like the Gnostics in the second century, they’re the main purveyors of, of other texts.

And so, so these, these gospels of, of who did you say? Judas and what were the.

Yeah, and Thomas and Gospel of Mary and, and there are a bunch of, of others, the Apocryphon of John and, and you have a bunch of these.

And so they’re coming in the, in the second century. And. Yeah, it is, it does what we understand of Christianity today, it seems like they stand diametrically opposed, but they’re coming in at a time when not all of that is nailed down.

Right.

And so it’s a bunch of different Christians who are like. And, and you know, I always go back to Talladega Nights, I picture Jesus like with the, with big old wings like an eagle. And you know, they got a bunch of different people running around with a bunch of different ideas and, and one of those streams of tradition would ultimately take over and would be the one to, to characterize what Christianity was going to be ever after.

But in the time period when, when Gnosticism was popular, it was just one of the other variations, one of one

of the competing philosophical ideas surrounding Jesus and, and his, his legacy.

Yeah. And, and you know, a lot of scholars reconstruct the earliest periods even before Gnosticism, as, as pretty full of, of pluriformity and even conflict. Yeah. Where maybe James has got one thing going over here and Peter’s got one thing going over here and Mary Magdalene has something going on over here and Paul’s got something going. Going on over here and, and maybe they didn’t really like each other very much, which a lot of people theorize. This is why Mary Magdalene gets, gets the shaft in a lot of ways regarding her own authority and perhaps at the hand of Peter or followers of Peter. And this is why Paul and James didn’t seem to get along. And so I, I think as time goes on, you go from greater pluriformity to more consistency. And, and so we’re looking back through the, a stack of historical interpretive lenses that compels us to view Christianity a certain way when if we could get rid of all of them and go back to the first century, I don’t think Christianity would be recognizable to anyone who is experiencing it today.

I think that makes a lot of sense. Even just, you know, the only analog that I have in my mind for that time frame is sort of, you know, I was raised in the, in the Latter Day Saint tradition, which, you know, well and just heard of.

Yeah, aware of it. Yes, yeah, I know of the tradition.

You’re familiar. But it’s, but like there were so. And as I grew up in the Latter Day Saint, I didn’t hear any of this, but there were so many moments where it fractured off and there were so many like diasporic uprisings and schisms and things where, you know, this guy had just had a different take, James Strang. And so he took a bunch of followers and they all went and lived on an island—that literally happened. And you know, like there were, there were literally hundreds of people who considered themselves the rightful sort of lineage of Joseph Smith’s work. Lot so many different. And several of these offshoot variant versions of the Latter Day Saint movement which, you know, so many people think of Mormonism as being a single thing, but there’s been literally hundreds of Mormon religions and that’s just in the past 150, 100 and you know, 80 years or whatever.

So it like, and, and you know, certainly nothing so, so I just think that it’s interesting to think of the, that first century, first and maybe second century CE as being that for Christianity of being a time of, of like wild disagreement and, and, and, and it wasn’t certain and it wasn’t easy and it wasn’t, things weren’t obvious in any way.

Yeah. And, and I imagine it was doubly hard because they were all having to do this while. While trying to scurry away from Roman powers who were. Yeah. Persecuting and prosecuting them along the way. So, yeah. Yeah. It must have been a trip.

Indeed. Indeed. All right, well, that. I think we’re gonna have to revisit Gnosticism at some point. We may have to bring up. We may have to, like, tuck into an actual Gnostic book and just. And just see what it’s all about at some point.

And I’ve got a couple of friends who are chomping at the bit to come on the show. One of them, one of the leading authorities on Gnosticism, April DeConick, that I had dinner with at SBL, who’s a wonderful scholar of early Christianity and Gnosticism.

So love it.

She’s eager to come on and correct any and all misinformation that I’ve spread that we’ve just.

That we’ve just poured out into.

All right, excellent. Looking forward to that. Well, let’s move on to. What is that?

Did you ever watch the very first episode of Saturday Night Live?

I don’t think so. No.

There’s. There’s a skit where they’re just showing the stage, and Bill Murray walks out in the middle of the stage and looks off in the distance and goes, what is that? What is that? Oh, wait, no. What is that? And then, like, by the end of this skit, half the cast is out there gone. Look. What is that? Yeah, and what is that? And then, like, they’re all like, oh, oh, okay. And like, that’s the end of his. It. It was weird, but every time you say, what is that? I. I think of the very first episode of Saturday Night.

We’ll have. We’ll have Bill come on and do it for us.

That would be excellent.

All right, so today’s. What is that? The thing that we’re looking off into the middle distance at is the Codex Sinaiticus. As you. Exactly. As you came on. As you and I sort of started talking before we launched into recording, I mentioned that I was just. I was busy looking up the. The definition of the word codex, even. So maybe we should just start with that.

Oh, yeah.

And then move on from there. I know you love definitions, so that’s what we’re very excited about.

Yeah. It comes. It’s related to the Latin word for book. So. Yeah. Manuscript, volume, and anciently. This is interesting. Anciently, you didn’t keep your important books on codices. You, you only kept like one page or just a few page documents that you didn’t really need on codices, the important stuff you kept on scrolls. And there is a theory that Christianity innovated this shift towards thinking of the codex as the transmitter of sacred literature. And so they were like those Jewish folks have their scrolls, we have our codices. And, and because nobody prior to the late first century CE was, was doing anything important with codices.

But when we say that, we’re just talking about the form of multiple leaves of paper stacked together and bound on one side. So.

Right. So that, so that you can. And, and one of the things this does is it makes it easier to go from one part of the text to another because with a scroll you got to sit there and go, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll.

Right.

Ro. Roll, Roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, roll back. And you know, you got to find what you’re looking for with like the days of micro. But with a codex you can just flip over and it’s also, it also takes up less space.

Yeah. So the, and you can number the pages even so number the pages.

Makes it that much easier.

And in a lot of ways, Christian scriptures, the technology for the, the utility of Christian scriptures has been aimed at facilitating the public consumption of the text. Because if you look at all the, all the technological innovations, every step seems to make it easier for someone who has the text to be able to find a specific part in the text quicker. Yeah.

It’s funny to think of the idea. Think of a book as a new technology, as like high tech.

Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, it kind of was. That makes sense that that would be, that that would be a really useful, handy dandy new tool.

100%. And if only they had thought of versification anciently, that was something that was, that was. So the versification of the Hebrew Bible happened in the 1300s. There was a rabbi who was responsible for being like, I’m dividing them up. And then in 1551, we had Robertus Stephanus who took the Textus Receptus and published an edition of the Textus Receptus with versification of the New Testament and then published his own edition of the Latin Vulgate with everything versified.

And you’re just talking about like numbering out, dividing the chapter and verses.

Well, yeah, there, there had been chapter divisions for a while, but, but to divide sentences and, and sense units and things like that into individual verses. Yeah, that’s when that happens.

Is that the guy that I can complain to when I, when I’m conf. When it looks dumb, where the verse break is? Because there’s so many moments where I’m like, why is that the verse and not like, shifted over four words and it makes so much more sense.

Yeah, yeah. That there are obviously some. Some shortcomings to the way it was done, but it has become so ingrained in the tradition that we cannot violate it, which is why we now have. And. And this is actually directly relevant to revelant and relevant at the same time to Codex Sinaiticus. But we have over a dozen passages from the New Testament that we know are later additions to the manuscripts and not original to the text. And so we’ve taken them out, but guess what we haven’t done? Change the versification.

Right.

We just skip over the verse. We just go 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, and we just leave 21 out of it. Because it’s. It’s so deeply ingrained in the tradition. So.

Well, and it makes sense. Like, you know, so many writings about the Bible up until now have direct references to chapter and verse. And then it’s just like, if we change the versification for any reason, even if it’s like, oh, this would be a much smarter division into a much better verse, you just mess up. Yeah. You’re messing up hundreds of years of writings and etc.

That go back to the 4th century CE. That’s. That takes us back to the production of Codex Sinaiticus. We don’t know exactly when to date it, but it’s probably somewhere close to the middle of the 4th century CE to the end of the 4th century CE. So I’m going to say Q2 through Q4 of the 4th century CE. Somewhere in there, somebody.

I’m just gonna plop it at 350.

We’re just gonna call it 350, all right? If we need something, if we need a line, if we’re going to draw a line in the sand here, it’s going to be at 350 CE. And it is. It is a manuscript across hundreds of. Of pages that has the text written in four columns. It is a Majuscule. It is one of the great uncials, as they’re known.

And I have no idea what that means.

I have always hated the word uncial. It’s literally U N C I A L. The Sinaiticus is uncial one.

And. And this is a reference to the fact that it is a. It is written in Majuscule. Majuscule means all capital letters.

Oh, okay.

And it is written in a form they call a continuous form, meaning there are no breaks between words.

No spaces.

Oh, my gosh. That is infuriating.

And additionally. Additionally, line breaks occur in the middle of words.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, yeah, you just.

You write until you run out of space, and then you just take the

next letter and just keep going down. And they. They developed some. Some shorthand for. To like, squeeze stuff in. Like, if a. If a word ended in an N and you got to the end of the line, but you couldn’t put the. The nu on the end there, what you did was you just wrote a little bar, a little horizontal line that started around the middle of the letter before and just jutted out a little bit into the margin, and that indicated this word has an N on the end of it.

I. I just pulled up a. A copy of the. Or an image of the text. Oh, my gosh. It’s impossible. It’s in four columns.

Four columns.

It’s columnar. And then it’s. And then it’s like just letters. Just so many letters.

So many letters. And there’s. And there have been a bunch of. There are a bunch of correctors later, hands that have come through to revise things. I think they. They’ve identified somewhere between five and seven, I think, different corrective hands. And you got stuff written in the margins. Yeah, you got symbols occurring here and there. They use a lot of what is called nomina sacra. This was a practice within early Christianity where certain words, and mainly the names and titles of deity, they’re abbreviated, where you take anywhere from two to maybe sometimes five or six letters from a longer word.

So, so this is phenomenally important. But if you take your, your, your handy Bible, whichever one you have today, or probably whichever one you have today, and you start comparing it to Codex Sinaiticus, you’re going to find a lot of differences. For instance, you’re not going to find the last 12 verses of Mark. Your version of Mark is going to end at 16, verse 8, which is where everybody is terrified. And verses 9 through 20 are, they go tell everybody and you know, Jesus appears to some of them and they, they go to Galilee and blah, blah, blah. And you have your post-resurrection appearance and stuff like that. That’s not in Sinaiticus. Oh those, those dozen plus usually about 16 passages that most modern translations of the New Testament omit. Those are not in Sinaiticus.

The story of the woman taken in adultery from the end of John chapter 7 and the beginning of John chapter 8, just not in Sinaiticus. One of the, one of the passages that is that many modern translations of the New Testament omit is the first one canonically. If you start Matthew and you go through the first time where you actually skip a verse or you go what the heck went from 20 to 22, that’s Matthew 17:21 is omitted. It’s not in Sinaiticus. The text just blazes on through perfectly happy without noticing. But you have somebody who wrote a little like divider mark, you know, the line with the dot above and below. Somebody wrote something in there and then put a little another one in the margins. And then up at the top of the manuscript you have in a later hand. So in the centuries after the original transcription of this manuscript, somebody went in there and wrote what is now verse 21 up in the margins.

Oh, weird.

And it seems to have been taken probably from a passage in Mark. The idea being they’re like, hey, it’s the same story. But they lost, they didn’t repeat this one detail that I really like. So is it a useful detail?

What is the what, what is that?

It talks about fasting and this is, this kind doesn’t come out except by much fasting and prayer. So the, this is when the disciples have been sent out and they’ve been deputized with Jesus’s agency and they come back and they go, we, we couldn’t cast the demons out of this one guy. And he goes, ah, yeah, I know this guy. We’re, you know, and, and in Mark chapter 8, he says, this kind doesn’t come out except with fasting. And what is written in the margin is this kind doesn’t come out except by much fasting and prayer. And that’s what you now have at Matthew 17:21 . But every time somebody stumbles upon this, they’re immediately like, fasting is the most important thing in the world and the devil doesn’t want you to know about it. So they took it out of the Bible and, you know, like, it’s still in Mark 8 in all of the Bible. So, you know, it’s not. The devil didn’t do that good a job if that’s what, what yon devil was trying to do. But yeah, it’s, it’s not because the devil is trying to stop people from fasting.

It’s just because that wasn’t originally in the Gospel of Matthew and somebody later on added it. Right? So then. And there are a bunch of examples like that where Sinaiticus just doesn’t have those things.

And we’re assuming that that’s because those things were later additions. Is that why we assume that Sinaiticus doesn’t have those?

Most of them? Now, there, there are places where Sinaiticus omits things that most scholars today would say that was probably an accident. And there are a number of reasons for this. With instances like Matthew 17:21 , we don’t have it in, in a few manuscripts, the earliest manuscripts, and there’s not a good reason why it would fall out. There’s not a good reason why, like, usually when scribes accidentally omit stuff, we can see why. Usually it’s because they stopped at a word and they were like, okay, I stopped at that word. And they, they move over to the text and they write what they’re going to write. And then they come back and they’re like, all right, where’s that word? Okay, there it is. And sometimes there’s another occurrence of that word nearby, and you accidentally go to that one, and that either means you repeat stuff or you skip stuff, right? And so repeating stuff is called dittography. Skipping stuff is called haplography. And so there are a bunch of—not a bunch, but there are some instances where scholars are like, ah, that’s what happened.

That’s why it’s been omitted from this manuscript. And in cases like this, that doesn’t account for how it could have fallen out. Sometimes things are taken out because of ideological problems. Somebody doesn’t like something. That’s an explanation for why something might come out. There’s not really a good explanation for why this would come out. We do have a good explanation for why it would be added in. And so scholars are like, okay, everybody agrees it’s more likely that this was added in than it was taken out. And so every time you have one of those text critical questions, you basically go through that process of figuring out what’s most likely here. Is there some reason this could have fallen out? Is there some reason this would have been added in? What do all the other manuscripts say? And you come together and you agree on something. And so most.

If there’s one thing that we know Bible scholars do is that they come together and they agree.

True, we’re very good at it. We’ve had a lot of practice. But there are, and that’s. And, and so there are these normally 16 or so passages that the overwhelming majority of Bible scholars are in agreement: these are probably not original to the text. And we’re so sure that we’re just going to leave it out. Yeah. And, and you know, it gets left in. Most translations will. Will relegate it to a footnote where it’ll say some ancient authorities include this and then they’ll quote it. Or they’ll say some later manuscripts include this and then they’ll quote it. Or if they—if it’s too important, like the ending of Mark or like the story of the woman taken in adultery, they’ll leave it in the main body of text, but they’ll put some double brackets around it. Yeah.

I don’t know, though. I saw a tiktoker in a cowboy hat who was pretty convinced that it was the devil that took it out. And, and that’s why you can’t trust modern translations.

He’s the one who, who thinks that CERN is, is trying to open a portal to hell.

And. And cannot be. What’s, what’s funny about all these people is I want to see if they’re still doing this in 50 years when not a single prediction of theirs ever came true. Yeah, it has. It will not be the end of the world in 50 years. But, but they’re like, guess what? CERN is going to start the end of the world. It happened in April 8th. And. Yeah, it didn’t happen. Yeah, well, like the world.

The world might end anyway. And then what? Then, then we’ll be like, yeah, but not because of your thing

I. It is like, of all the, of all the grifts to. To make money off of batting zero is like, good night.

Well, the. The nice thing about making predictions on the Internet is that you don’t have to revisit them. You just make more of them and then move on to the next ones. You don’t. You don’t. If they don’t come true, you don’t have to cop to that. You can just. You can just move on.

Yeah. Yeah. We have short memories in. In. In that industry. Industry.

Yeah. So I want to get back to Sinaiticus in part because we have not discussed why it’s called—like, we discussed what a codex is, not why it’s called Sinaiticus.

It’s called Sinaiticus because the first time the. The wider world of scholarship became aware of it was when a bunch of the leaves. And, you know, it. It would be nice if it always was kept as a single volume within two, you know, bound very neatly and cleanly and with a nice little drawing on the cover. And yeah, that does sound. Dust covers. Screw dust covers, but says the man

whose book is about to come out guaranteed with dust covers on it.

Oh, yeah, that was not my choice. I was like, what about when you get.

When you get Dan’s book? The first thing you are required to do by Dan’s own edict is burn the dust cover, not burn it.

That could probably release some harmful gases of some kind or another. Or maybe not. I don’t know what kind of chemicals are going in there, but. But no, I’ve. I’ve never liked dust covers. But. And yeah, they were like, we don’t care. So in case you’re wondering how publishers respond to. To certain idiosyncrasies of authors, they don’t care. They don’t care. Well, at least with your first book anyway.

Right?

So there’s a. There’s long been a monastery at the top of the traditional site of Mount Sinai called St. Catherine’s Monastery.

And you say traditional because. We don’t actually know.

Oh, yeah, there. Yeah, yeah, no, we don’t. We have no idea.

Meaning the Sinai referred to in the book of Exodus is the place that we don’t really know where it was.

Horeb, Sinai, whatever you want to call it, it’s the. The traditional location in the Sinai Peninsula. Like, there’s. There’s no reason to think that’s the actual location, but there’s a. There’s a monastery up there. And my old doctoral supervisor. I don’t know if she still does it, but for a time she would lead a, a tour that would start in Cairo and you would ride camels across the Sinai Peninsula and then hike up to St. Catherine’s Monastery at the top of Mount “Quote Sinai,” unquote. And, and then she would talk about artwork and artifacts and architecture and stuff of St. Catherine’s Monastery, which I think would just be so much fun. But I digress. 1844-ish. You have a guy named Tischendorf who is there in St. Catherine’s Monastery and notices some among the, the piles of stuff and is like, “Hey, what’s that over there?”

And notices some Greek and reads through it and is like, “This, this looks like the Septuagint.” And he was like, “Can I, can I have this?” And then they were like, “Why do you want it?” “No reason.” And they were like, “We kind of feel like this is important now. So you can take 43 pages.” And he goes off with 43 pages which contained 1st Chronicles, Jeremiah, Nehemiah and Esther. And he ends up coming back to be like, “So you got any more of them?” The manuscript pages he’s got

rubbing his

hands, twirling his, his mustache. And over time they gather the majority of, of this codex from St. Catherine’s Monastery. And some of it has made its way to, to other places, but they gather most of it together and are like, holy crap, this is big time. And realize this is a very, very early text. And here, here’s the interesting thing they found. They find this codex and based on paleography, which means the, the letters, how the letters are written. Yeah, that, that’s kind of like pottery where it is so precise but also changes so much that you can frequently date it with a relatively high degree of accuracy by comparing it to other known texts. So they’re like, this is like 4th century.

And somebody was like, “Hey, y’all remember when Eusebius got a request from the emperor Constantine to create 50 copies of the Bible for use in Constantinople?” And it said they should be of three or four columns each and they should be on vellum and all this stuff. And if you look through the description that Eusebius repeats of the request that he got from the emperor Constantine to create these copies of, of the Scriptures. It sounds an awful lot like Sinaiticus as well as another very important 4th-century manuscript known as Vaticanus. Vaticanus is three columns. Sinaiticus is four columns. And so I, I think if I recall, Tischendorf was like, “We found one of Constantine’s 50 Bibles.” And I think probably the majority of scholars these days are like, “Sit down. No, we didn’t.” But there, there are some scholars who, who still argue that, which would mean they would date to somewhere in the 330s CE.

Which is possible. That is Q2 of, of the 4th century. So it’s certainly possible a little ways

before the actual date of 350.

Yes. Which I already gave January 1st of 350. They did it real quick because, yeah, they’re like, “We don’t want this to, to cross over into another day.”

They’re like, oh, a new codex just dropped. It’s January 1st.

Hey, it’s your boy Eusebius. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. And so Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important Bible manuscripts on earth. And I stumbled across it in the British Museum. No, no, British Library.

British Library. Yeah, no, it’s in the British Library.

Yeah, it was the British Library. I was there. Oh, gosh, I don’t even remember how long ago it was. Was it two years? It was in October of a recent year. I don’t know. But anyway, I was there with my family, and we’re like, we’re going to go to the British Library. And they’re like, oh, my gosh. But they went. And as you walk in, you come up these stairs and, you know, you got stairs going in all different directions and everything. And on the left, it was like the book. And it was an exhibition on the book as a technology and—oh, it’s a very cool exhibition. It’s one point one-ish big room with a couple of little rooms that split off from it. But it starts with, like, the earliest books from societies all around the world. They’ve got, you know, the first edition of Shakespeare’s complete works. And they’ve got, you know, the piece of paper that Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” on.

And, and they’ve got—they got the Magna Carta off in one of these other rooms and—

Sure, why not?

I was like, yawn, let me see some Bibles. And as one might expect. And so I, I was just kind of trolling through, looking at all these Bibles, admiring them as is my wont. And then I was like, hey, that looks familiar. Holy crap, it’s Codex Sinaiticus. And then I looked right next to it, and it was Codex Alexandrinus. And I was like—and went to tell my family, who could not have cared any less if I had.

No, they’re like, can we now walk two blocks and see Platform 9 and 3/4 at King’s Cross station, please?

Well, they, they weren’t excited about nine and three-quarters because they were like, it’s always so crowded. I don’t know when the last time you were there was—there was a time when it was just that little, that little cart thing embedded in the, in the brick. Now there’s like—yeah, you were saying?

I’ve never, I’ve never been to—

Oh, you’ve never been. Okay.

Well, I just know.

Anyway, you used to be able to just walk up to it and be like, hey, take my picture. And now it’s roped off and you have to wait in line. It’s like an hour line sometimes that you have to wait in. However, they have built an entire Harry Potter store into the platform next to it. And so my kids were all about that, which it’s a very cool store. So. But again, I digress. The—and it was incredible to be able to see it up close. And it was incredible how, like, faded it is because I was like, I can barely make out some of these, some of these letters. Parts of the manuscript are very, very faded. But it was, it was an experience, it was a spiritual experience for me to suddenly be like, I am a foot away from one of the single most important manuscripts of the Bible that has ever existed. So. So yeah, if you find yourself near Platform 9 and 3/4, that means you have found yourself near the British Library and a lot of very cool stuff including—well, again, I don’t know how long ago this was on.

The exhibition might not be there anymore, but Sinaiticus is in the British Library.

Check it out. Yes.

All right, well, that’s it for today’s show, folks. Thank you so much. If you would like to become a part of making the show possible, as well as gain access to an early and ad-free version of every episode and potentially also gain access to the afterparty where Dan and I spill our guts and spill the beans all over each other all the time, you can go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and just kick a couple coins our way. It really helps us out. You get some cool stuff, and everybody’s happy in that. If you would like to reach out to us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye everybody.

Getting to Gnow the Gnostics

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology