The Neighborhood of Make-Believe

Is it me or is this bush not really burning, man? I can’t tell. It looks like it’s just on fire, but never burns.

You got any more of that manna? 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 same. And we’re going to be doing a little both today, aren’t we, Dan?

Yeah, a lot.

A lot. A lot of. A lot of both of it too. Yeah. Looking forward to today. These are, these are topics that come up all the time and, and a little topical when it comes to what’s in the news.

Oh, sure, sure. Some of it. I don’t know that our first, our first thing might not be too topical, but the second thing will be. It’s topical.

It’s not necessarily topical, but one. Yeah. At least at time of recording the second one is, is on the minds of an awful lot of people. Yeah. So. And we’ll talk about that.

Yeah, we, we’re. Our first, our first segment is going to be a, an artifacts and fiction segment. We’re. We’re going to be diving into the Red Sea and won’t it be nice?

It’ll be very shallow, very walkable.

Oh, easy.

It’ll be. Yeah.

So apparently you can just sort of wave your arms and like just walk straight through.

So that’s, it’s going to be a topical. A top-walkable day today. All right. So.

And then, and then later on in the show we’re going to do, we’re going to do a chapter and verse about, about a. A Good Samaritan. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens with that.

Yeah.

But. But to start us off, artifacts and fiction and today’s topic, I, I’ll, I’ll give a brief introduction. I know that you were prepped to talk about it more in depth, but I love that the main guy. You gotta love it when Google trolls a dude because when you Google Ron Wyatt, it. It says Google comes up and it says Ron Wyatt, American Nurse Anesthetist.

Yes. That, that was his, his day job.

So, so I, that is not at all what he is known for and not, not remotely.

I don’t know in the community of, of Nurse Anesthetists. And we’re not in, in any way shape or form whatsoever mocking or deriding that. No that community or that job. Those are very important people as I and my wife can both attest and that is very important work. However, yes, he’s, he’s more widely known for other stuff.

He kind of abandoned his field of expertise for a field in which he had no expertise.

Yeah.

And apparently it got started. You know, I was just reading about this guy and apparently it got started because he saw a picture in Life Magazine of a hill in Turkey and said that looks like a boat shape and decided it was where Noah’s Ark landed and that sent him on the amateur archaeology path forever.

That is, that is hilarious. I have not heard that story. However, obviously he’s talking about the Durupinar site.

Correct.

So this is a hillside in Turkey. So when you looked into this, had someone already said, we think this is Noah’s Ark or was this. He just saw a picture in a magazine that somebody was like, look at the lush green hillside. And he was like, there’s a boat.

I think it was like a maybe a little bit of both. I think people are already buzzing that there was a possibility that it was boat shaped and what if. And he just took it way too far.

He got the tingle and, and just decided this, this is how he was going to be remembered for all time and in all places as someone who was not an archaeologist but, but was

determined to be one anyway and do

a lot of harm to the field of archaeology.

Oh my gosh.

He has done.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I, you know, in his life he made over a hundred trips to the Middle East from 1977 until his death in 1999.

So. Wow.

He knows what he’s talking about 100

times a year at least.

Yeah. But today we’re going to be talking, look, he has claims about Noah’s Ark and timbers on Noah’s Ark and all. And like, all like, I think he claimed that he found a, a pillar from Noah that like had inscriptions on it and whatever.

Yeah, he was, he was hunting for seashells and, and was. What’s this? But to just, just for those who might be curious about the Durupinar site, this is the, this is a geologic formation on a hillside in Turkey. And you can tell it’s a geologic formation because it’s a little teardrop-shaped thing that is surrounded by. And it looks like kind of like rock outcroppings coming up that create this little teardrop. Teardrop shape. And there are other identical rocky outcroppings around it. Like there are a bunch of rocky outcroppings in the area.

You said teardrop shape. I think you mean ark-shaped. I think it was very ark-shaped. It looks kind of like a, almost like a football sort of thing.

Yeah, yeah. And, and there’s been. And so actual scientists have gone there to study it. And there’s a paper from a journal called Journal of Geoscience Education from. There’s a paper from 1996. This is volume 44, if you’re curious. Lawrence Collins and David Fassold wrote this paper called Bogus Noah’s Ark from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure. And so all the stuff, they’re like, we found the rooms, we found the beams, we found the, you know, the walls and everything. And they’re like, oh, what did they say they found? They said they found rivets, metal rivets. They said they found anchor stones and all this stuff nearby.

That’s right. I remember the anchor stones. I don’t know metal rivets. Did they even have metallurgy to do riveting in Noah’s time?

Like, would they had that when you date it? They had. Yeah, it depends on when you date it really. But what this paper goes through, it addresses all of the claims one by one and points out that, no, these are all entirely natural geologic formations. And, and also the, the, what they call drogue stones or the, the anchor stones, they’re large standing stones, stelae that have little holes near the top of them. And they’re like they tied them together and they hung from the side of the boat to help anchor them in the, in stormy weather and everything. And like, no, if you tried to hang them from a boat with a rope, it would have snapped the top because the holes are, are drilled or cut so close to the top edge of the stone like that there wasn’t enough to secure the.

Also quite famously, that particular boat was not made to anchor. It was made to just float sort of randomly until it set down gently.

The idea is the weight hangs from the boat and kind of steadies it. So even if the water is, is rough, the boat is, is a little more, is holding a little more still. But so totally nonsense, the claims about the Durupinar site.

Yeah, okay, but let’s move on to better claims. More fun things. Yes, because, because Ron Wyatt was very interested in proving the Bible through finding stuff in the Middle East, AKA making stuff up. Oh, did I bear? I, I, I gave away the ending. Spoiler alert. He made up stuff.

And just so you know, over a hundred years before Ron Wyatt, actual professional archaeologists already tried to do that. And that’s what resulted in critical scholarship and the field of biblical archaeology, because they went there and developed their techniques, their methodologies by trying to prove the Bible and failing over and over and over again. And so while there are certainly many parts of the Bible that are historical, they were there basically to prove the supernatural parts and they never could. And so actual archaeologists morphed into critical scholarship as they were like, well, let’s, let’s develop these methodologies. Let’s just try to do the best we can and we’ll see what we find. And, and that turned into biblical archaeology, which would become critical scholarship. But if you don’t have any training and you’re just there to try to make money because you’re not going to be a nurse anesthetist when you’re spending all your time in Turkey and Syria and, and Palestine, you have to kind of pay the bills.

And so you just make stuff up, which is, or he did.

Another way of putting it is all those trained guys were so mired in their own, you know, in, in their own secular thinking that they couldn’t see the truth that was right in front of them. So let’s talk about that.

Let’s talk about the truth that Wyatt uncovered. I want to talk about three main places. One is a valley that ends in a little beach on the side of what’s called the Gulf of Aqaba.

Can we just call them Mounts Sinai?

Mount Sinai, Yes. You got to make sure you get that, that glottal stop in there just to emphasize the S. And a lot of this is coming through representation of, of Wyatt’s findings from Kent Hovind. So I just went and found a Kent Hovind video, and he was like, here’s what we have. And, and then I just wrote down all the points to respond to them.

Kent Hovind once challenged me to a debate. I think he was just going down the list of famous atheists, or really of quasi prominent atheists. And he challenged me to a debate. He even offered to host me at his little very sad rural amusement park, like biblically themed theme park sort of thing. And I googled it and looked around and was like, oh, I’m not going there.

So this is like the Righteous Gemstones, but without all the money.

Yeah, it was very much that. It was the less righteous gemstones.

Yeah, the tolerable gemstones. So one of, one of the first things he talks about is that there is this valley with a dry riverbed that runs down to this beach, Nuweiba Beach. And sure. And I don’t know how, how much Wyatt emphasized this, but Hovind made a big deal out of the fact that the rocks are all moved to the side so that the… so that it is flat enough and there are no obstructions so that you could carry, you could wheel carts and things through there. Which is one of the most laughable things because it’s a dry riverbed. And one of the things about dry river beds is that sometimes they have water in them, particularly when there’s a flash flood or something like that. This is, this is what a wadi is in this part of the world. And so it is not people who have moved the rocks and the debris out of the way so that they can get carts on through 4,000 years ago.

And nothing has moved in the 4,000 years since then. It’s the fact that there are flash floods in the area that move water, move rocks and debris out of the way so the water can get through. But this leads to this beach. It’s a little bit of a, of a delta. You know, when you get the flash floods, you’re going to move a lot of silt and it’s going to get deposited once the water hits the Red Sea. And so the way the beach kind of sticks out a little bit, it’s a little bit of a dry river delta. But Wyatt claimed that he found two pillars. A pillar on the Nuweiba beach side and another pillar on the other side in Saudi Arabia. And these are like 8 foot tall cylindrical pillars that he says were erected by King Solomon around 1000 BCE to commemorate the crossing of the Red Sea. And he says the pillar that was found on the Saudi Arabia side had an inscription that was written in old Hebrew.

Wow.

That talked about it. And he has no photos or anything of the pillar that was on the Saudi Arabia side, as is his wont. He says that as soon as the Saudi government found out what was there, they came and absconded with it and are hiding it so that nobody can see it. But he does have pictures of the pillar that was on the Nuweiba beach side, which is a Roman era cylindrical architectural pillar that has a base and everything. And when you look in the passage that he says, talks about the, the, the standing stone that was erected. The standing stone is matzevah, which is not an architectural pillar, is not a cylindrical pillar. It’s a standing stone that is a little taller than it is wide, has a flat front and then a rounded back. And the idea is the flat front functions as a face and you write things on it.

So if there were an inscription, it would have been written on the flat side of the pillar. But if you’re just, if you just got a Roman era architectural pillar, there’s no inscription on there. So he has entirely misunderstood what this pillar is for when it’s dated. He doesn’t even know the difference between an architectural pillar and a standing stone. But that doesn’t stop him from making stuff up.

Well, and, and surely he lacked the, the ability to translate the ancient Hebrew that he claimed was on the, the other.

Well, it’s always, it’s always experts in Hebrew who told him what it said. Yeah, okay. And he never names them just because, just experts.

Why, why do you need to know? Shut up. You’re. You don’t have an expert. That’s you.

Yeah. And, and you know, plenty of people around the world like that right now who, who have press conferences and. Yeah. People say, well, how do you know this? And they say, because I have common sense, man. Don’t.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s just so obvious. And then something else that, that they noticed about this Nuweiba Beach was the sand appeared to them to be pretty, like glassy, like it had been melted and turned into glass. Oh, kinda, because it was still like, it was still very grainy sand and there were rocks embedded in it and everything. But the top, it looked like it was all concretized, like it had been melted. And then, you know, the claim is that it takes 3,000 degrees to melt sand. And, and so the idea is this is where the pillar of fire must have landed and melted Nuweiba Beach. And they have some photographs of that. And the people these days, you’ll see videos all the time that talk about this and they always have this audio of some dude saying you can almost see like footprints in the glass. Because. And, and then for whatever reason, people always show photographs of White Sands National Park in New Mexico in the United States, which has footprints from 20,000-plus years ago.

But they always say that. And it’s like, yes, because the Israelites were like, look, the glass is bubbling and turning to sand. Walk around in it in your bare feet.

Right? Yeah, it’s, it’s always a good idea, man.

But, but all this is, is, this is a perfectly natural occurrence. It’s called beachrock. And it happens when certain, certain things have to come together. You get a lot of calcite or another and other materials and the, the seawater evaporates quickly and, and you get something that basically concretizes all of this sand and dirt and rock and stuff. And so it looks like somehow this has all become a layer of concrete.

Right.

But beachrock occurs all over the world, is perfectly natural.

Now I’m going to challenge you on something. Fine. I’m going to accept, I’m going to accept that the beachrock wasn’t the sand melted. I’m gonna accept that a dry riverbed looks like you moved all the rocks out of the way. Blah, blah, blah. How do you explain, sir, how do you explain chariot wheels and human remains at the bottom? The man went into the water and he found it.

He did go into the water. And there are a bunch of claims associated with him going into the water, including, yes, two photographs that I know of that have been linked to Wyatt. One is of a coral that had that there’s like a, a pillar kind of formation and then a flat top. In the photographs you always see a chariot wheel superimposed upon it.

And so if Photoshop for that.

No, nobody ever pulled it out. Nobody ever found a chariot wheel. They just took a picture of a coral formation and said, doesn’t that remind you of a chariot wheel?

And then it’s kind of got an image that looks like a circle.

So that’s the thing superimposed on it. There’s another one that I’ve seen and I don’t know if this came from Wyatt, but it’s always included in the photos that, that are supposed to be Wyatt’s. In very shallow water, there’s some loose sand and then there’s a shiny four-spoke chariot wheel that’s supposed to be sticking out of the water. And it’s just a modern boat steering wheel that has just fell in the water and, and there’s a little chunk of coral that, that somehow drifted on top of it. And, and people like, yes, it’s a 4,000-year-old gold-plated chariot wheel. And you know, just because the middle of it has a big thread for, you know, screwing this thing onto a boat doesn’t doesn’t mean anything. So nobody ever pulled up any chariot wheels at all. They’re just some photographs. Um, and then human remains. There’s. There’s like a. A femur or something like that. And it’s never been dated. Nobody’s ever. In fact, the. The site where it was discovered wasn’t even documented.

There’s just a. A piece of bone on a table. And the, and the. It’s a photograph of a piece of bone covered in some. That’s been calcified.

Well, and famously, like this is. This is salt water that we’re talking about. Famously. When they went and, you know, did ex. Did. Did research into the Titanic and went and searched that, there was no sign of any human remains anywhere. Yeah, human remains don’t last 70 years, let alone thousands of years.

They would take it away and then you wouldn’t be able to put it on a table in. In your. Your righteous gemstones amusement park, right?

No, no, that was. That was Kent Hovind.

That was Kent Hovind.

Okay, so Ron Wyatt, just to be clear, has there. There is, or at least there was a little. A little museum, the Ron Wyatt or the Wyatt Archaeological Museum in Cornersville, Tennessee, which looks very much like, I don’t know, like a 1960s hi-fi shop or something. From the outside. It doesn’t. It. It doesn’t look inviting nor confidence inducing as a place where you would see actual artifacts. It doesn’t read. It doesn’t read well from the outside. Anyway, Anyway, sorry, move on. We. So we don’t have any, Any chariot wheels or remains of people.

There is, however, there. There’s also a. The SS Thistlegorm is a.

It’s my new favorite name of a boat ever.

It is a great name. It is. It’s from the 1940s. It was sunk in 1941 in the Red Sea by German bombers, and it had railway equipment on it which includes wheels.

Okay.

And so there are a bunch of people, and I don’t think this is Ron Wyatt who said this, but there are people who will show you photographs of what look like very large metal wheels covered in coral that actually is from the bottom of the Red Sea, nowhere near Nuweiba, but it’s actually from a 1940s shipwreck, the Thistlegorm. So just. Just be aware that that’s out there as well. And. And these days, there are a lot of AI generations.

To be clear, the. The place that we’re talking about on the Red Sea isn’t like the middle of the Red Sea. It’s one of the two little rabbit ears that come up from the top that are quite. Quite thin, quite narrow.

Yes, very narrow.

But that’s. That’s always where the crossing would have been on one of one or the other of those rabbit ears.

Yeah. Because otherwise. Otherwise you’ve got. Because of where they’re supposed to have left from. That’s up in the Delta region. And if they’re crossing the. The Red Sea proper, they would have had to have traveled very far south before deciding to veer to the east to cross the Red Sea.

Let’s turn left. What do you think?

There’s a giant lake there, but, yeah, right around Kuntilla. We’re gonna. We’re gonna kind of real easy, like, turn left. And so the one of the other claims that Wyatt made, he. He is. From my knowledge, he revised this claim, but he originally claimed that there was a natural land bridge at Nuweiba, that the water only got to a couple hundred feet deep right at the Nuweiba part. So. So that if it wouldn’t have taken much, according to Wyatt, for the water to get out of the way, so the Israelites could have scampered across and made it to the other side. And there is no such land bridge. It is a little shallower there than the deepest part of that particular gulf. It’s about 200ft shallower, but still, it still gets down to, like, 800ft.

Wow.

There. And it’s still quite steep. So a lot of. And. And Wyatt originally made that claim. Oh, it’s a land bridge. And then was like, okay, we looked, and it’s. It’s pretty deep there. But you still have people who will produce images of this area as if there was this natural land bridge.

Yeah, I think I’ve seen that. Where it’s like. The claim is that, look, it’s deep on this side and it’s deep on this side. And then, whoop. It just goes right up to just basically at the surface right here.

Yeah, yeah, you might.

It’s amazing anybody drowned at all. Like, it only comes up to your knees.

There’s an old episode of Quantum Leap every time somebody brings up drowning, where he’s. He’s a. Leaps into some kid’s body. They’re doing a hazing ritual. And. And his buddy has to tell him it only takes two teaspoons of water to drown a person. And for whatever reason, that’s always in my head whenever people mention that. And I thought now would be A good time to bring it up.

Yeah. For you young people, that was. Quantum Leap was a television program back in the middle, in the late 1900s. All right, let’s move on. So we’ve gotten. Let’s just say that we’ve crossed our land bridge.

We’ve crossed the land bridge, the non

existent land bridge in the chariots that aren’t actually down there. We’ve made it to the other side. And of course we know that the next step in the Israelites’ journey was to a mountain.

Yes.

Or as you pointed out earlier, two mountains.

Multiple mountains. Yes, we’ve got, we’ve got two mountains that are vying for the title of Mount Sinai. And there are features of each that a lot of apologists would really love to be just the features of one individual mountain because that would come together and just really ring that bell. And the two tops, two mountaintops. And in western Saudi Arabia, one of them is called Jabal Maqla and the other one is I think like 8 or 10 miles north of that and it’s called Jebel al-Lawz. And the thing that they like about Jabal Maqla is that if you’re looking at it from the east down in a little valley area and there’s stuff down in the valley area that we’ll talk about as well. But if you look up, it looks like the mountaintop is burnt, just like the sand of Nuweiba Beach. It seems like fire has burnt the mountaintop because the rock is all black and the bottom of the mountain is not black.

And that would be significant because somewhere in the text it says something about, about a fire on the mountain or what?

Yes, somewhere in the text it does say something about God descending upon the mountain in fire. You have the pillar of fire and then you have the, the pillar of, of the cloud that, that follows them by day and by night. Now the interesting thing about this idea that this pillar of fire is burning sand and burning the tops of mountains and is the only time you ever have any reference to what the fire that attends God’s presence does to things is in Exodus 3 when it’s burning the bush, but is not actually burning the bush, it’s not consuming it.

Right.

And so the only time the text ever tells us about this fire that attends God’s presence, it says it doesn’t burn stuff.

Well, and so the bush wasn’t made of rock or sand, Dan. Yeah, it just. It was. That was a good bush.

Yeah, that was. It was made of something else. And that’s why everybody really, really enjoyed being on the, on the manna on the mountaintop.

Is it me or is this bush not really burning, man? I can’t tell. It looks like it’s just on fire, but never burns.

You got any more of that manna, man? No, man, Moses isn’t here. No, it’s me, man. So, and just, and just a heads up, you know, we need to do a segment about this, but we know Cheech and Chong. No, about, about cannabis. We know for a fact that cannabis was used in rituals in ancient Israel. Yeah, man, we’ll, we’ll revisit that.

Yeah, let’s get Cheech and Chong on the show and we’ll talk about cannabis on, in the, in the rituals.

Yeah, I think they would love hearing about that.

All right, Cheech, the evidence. This is, this is. This one goes out to you. I know you’re. I know you listen, I know you’re a part of your fan.

So the, the problem with this observation, however, is that the top of the mountain is black precisely because it is covered in what is known as contact metamorphic rock, which is rock that has been exposed to a heat source and so has charred, burned, darkened the outside of it. And the problem is the heat source that does this is either underground magma or lava flows. And one of the ways that we know this is not because God just, you know, dipped a toe on the top of this mountain is that there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of square miles of western Saudi Arabia that are covered in contact metamorphic rock. So you can go look on Google Earth and find Jabal Maqla. And you will see that, that there’s kind of a little black thing that, that surrounds the top of it. And that black thing then extends for miles and miles and miles to the west and to the south. And as you zoom out, you can see it’s basically the majority of western Saudi Arabia that is covered in this stuff.

I mean, you don’t know that God didn’t visit all of those mountains.

He was just kind of like, oops, I let my, my robe kind of drag a.

He, he walked there, man. That’s how he got there.

And so that’s really the main thing that people like about Jabal Maqla. Now, Jebel al-Lawz is further north and near Jebel al-Lawz. Well, there’s one other thing. At the base of Jabal Maqla, there’s a pile of stones that’s like 20ft high.

So that’s definitely not that altar.

And also when you make a golden calf, you don’t—you—you’re focused on the golden calf. You’re not drawing pictures of it on the rocks. You already have the calf.

Yeah, we got the calf. We don’t need the picture. They’re—they’re schematics. You just have to be—you have to be creative about—

It was a study for the—for the actual physical thing. I like that.

And then there—there are a couple other things that are found near Jabal al-Lawz. For instance, the what they call the Split Rock of Horeb, which is a very large, like 60, 70-foot-tall stone that does kind of look like—kind of looks like an upside down—like somebody took a guitar pick and stuck it in a pile of rocks. Only the guitar pick is a giant rock. And then it’s got a split, just a perfectly vertical split right down the middle of it. And the argument is that this is where Moses struck the stone to bring forth the water. And they argue, look, the stones are all eroded. This is where the water came out.

It’s as if water has been pouring over these stones. Well, how could that possibly have happened?

There have—this pile of rocks is in the middle of a wadi. And so there are actually two sets of erosion marks. And they’re not perfectly, but they’re perpendicular to each other more or less. And none of them radiate out from the stone. They just go right on past the stone in the two different directions. And one of those sets of erosion marks is going perpendicular to the—the wadi. And this is actually what probably moved those stones into place. And that would have been glacial flows. Oh wow. And so you also—you have these scars going over these rocks that are glacial flows just moving on past. And these rocks were put into place, and—and so that’s—you’re looking contemplative.

Listen, I have seen images of Saudi Arabia. There are no glaciers in Saudi Arabia. Checkmate on you, sir.

Well, you know what? There are also whale skeletons in the middle of Libya, and that’s because the world was different millions and millions or billions and billions of years ago.

Yeah.

So, yeah, this happened a long, long, long, long time ago. And then you also have erosion marks going perpendicular to the glacial scars. And this is caused by the flash flooding in the wadi that this pile of rocks is in the middle of. And so you don’t have any—any indications of erosion radiating out from the stone, except for wind erosion that is right around the stone itself, on the stone itself, not the stones that are down underneath the—the Split Rock of Horeb.

So, I mean, I suppose Moses could have smacked the rock with a stick right when a flash flood started.

And then coming—the—that’s the dinner bell kind of whack, whack, whack. Everybody do the—no, I’m thinking of the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, “To the trees!”

I—I need to get you off of 90s. You—you’ve had your fill. You—you don’t get any more 90s references for this episode.

So the last thing to talk about, however, is that they claim to have found animal pens next to what they think is an altar and 12 pillars in the area, which they believe are the 12 pillars that were set up by Moses. And of course, once you look at the actual archaeological reports and they point out these are just animal pens, there is no altar, and the 12 pillars are again, Roman-era, cylindrical, archaeological or not archaeological, architectural pillars meant to hold things up and not meant as standing stones, matzevot, then you can—you can put the lie to those claims as well. So basically, absolutely nothing that Ron Wyatt found in this area in any way, shape or form whatsoever, even plausibly represents artifacts left by any historical Moses, any historical Joshua, anything.

What’s interesting is that none of this disproves the, the Exodus or anything like that. It just, it’s just. He’s bogus. Now. We, we don’t. There’s no, there is no archaeological evidence for the Exodus, but at least not as it’s presented in the Bible. But it’s just so funny that this, that, that people hold on to this guy and present him as being such a, a towering figure in archaeology. It’s, you know, if, if you’re, if, if your main arguments are that bad, you should probably pivot. You should probably figure out a different.

Or go back to. Yeah, go back to your. Your day job, which is a more honorable one than lying to the public in order to try to protect people’s faith.

Go, go, go put some people under anesthetic. It’s a better. It’s a better profession.

Hey, a good anesthetist is invaluable because. Yeah, my. My wife is. Is not an easy stick. She tells everybody that, and they’re always like, oh, I’m the best there is at this. And then they always have to go get the. The machine or the really good. Yeah. So a good anesthetist is. Is worth their weight in gold and does not find fake artifacts in the middle of Turkey or Saudi Arabia and then lie about it.

Okay, well, let’s move on at that. We’ll. We’ll leave Ron Wyatt to. To pass into the dust.

Yes.

Just as a. Or I hope he was buried at sea. In the Dead Sea. I hope that’s what they did. That it seems appropriate.

I have not looked into it.

I haven’t either. So we’re moving on to chapter and verse.

Alrighty.

And we’re gonna.

We’re in Luke 10 , Gospel of Luke . And. And I think it’s important to point out at the beginning that the Gospel of Luke is most concerned out of all the gospel authors for representing the marginalized and the oppressed. For instance, Jesus talks about and talks to women more frequently. And in Luke. And we see the foreigner represented. We see the poor represented more favorably in the Gospel of Luke . And so in. In chapter 10, he. He deputizes the 72 disciples. He goes, now you have the power to cast out demons. And they go off and they come back later and say, hey, we. We cast out demons in your name. It was really great. And they all rejoice. And. And there was much rejoicing.

Yes.

And then we have a. A lawyer, an expert of the law, a nomikos, who stood up to test Jesus, as the text says, and he calls him Teacher, didaskale, which could also be translated master. But he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus responded, what is written in the law? What do you read there? He answered, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself. And he said to him, you have given the right answer. Do this and you will live. And, and, and I want to point out real quick here that we’ve got two commandments that are given here that have nothing to do with the Ten Commandments.

It’s true.

And there’s no part of the Bible that actually says, oh, by the way, these are the two most important commandments. But this is the exact same answer that Jesus gives in the Gospel of Matthew when they ask him, what is the greatest commandment? And he does precisely the same thing. He quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 . And this is kind of part of the conventional wisdom of the day. Like people, when you had big complex things, you tried to distill them down to their essences. This is kind of a Greco-Roman/Greco-Roman Jewish thing that you did to show that, you know, you knew your stuff. And so the essence of the law is what Jesus says in Matthew is, on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. So Luke here is putting that statement into the mouth of this lawyer who’s testing Jesus. And then we have. So Jesus says, yeah, that’s all you got to do. You did it.

You came up with it. We’re.

You’re done. Yeah, Good. Good job. Get out of my face, kid. You bother me. But wanting to vindicate himself, he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor? Which is.

I mean, that is that, you know, that is a lawyerly question. Right? You gotta. You gotta love your neighbor as yourself. Okay, who’s my neighbor? Is it the guy next door? Because he’s a jerk. But I’ll. I’ll try.

Exactly.

Yeah. And. And this is something that we see. This is something that we see all the time these days, including from, oh, the vice president and others where they say, now wait, we’ve actually got a hierarchy of love

Yeah.

that we’ve got to pay attention to.

Or, or a hierarchy of neighbors that we’ve got.

Yeah, yeah.

Look, some neighbors, everybody’s your neighbor, but some are more neighbor than others. So.

Yes. Yeah, let’s. Let’s not get into this equality of neighbors kind of nonsense. We need. We gotta distinguish.

Don’t commit the sin of empathy and think that everybody’s your neighbor.

Yeah. And. But that’s exactly what the, the lawyer did here with Jesus. And Jesus replied with a story, because that’s just what you want when you ask a question. Yes. Is a story.

It’s a parable. It’s a, a. That’s better than a story.

It is a parable. It is probably the most famous parable in the world, and it’s also entirely fictional, which I always get pushback every time I say that. People are like, you don’t know that.

Well, you don’t.

Oh my gosh. Okay. Jesus replied, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. So this is Jerusalem’s in, in the hills. Jericho is in the river valley. It’s just north of the Dead Sea. Not a long trip, but you got about a 3,000 foot elevation drop. It’s pretty rocky, it’s pretty treacherous. In this time period, not a lot of people are around and fell into the hands.

I remember, even I remember that Martin Luther King Jr. actually mentioned that road. He, he had visited with his wife and, and he mentioned being on that road and how, how really rocky and, and you know how many twists and turns it took. And he just said, yeah, it makes sense that this would be where someone might fall into the, into the hands of robbers.

Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. I didn’t know he had been there and told that story. But yeah, that like if, if Jesus was like, look man, somebody fell into the hands of robbers, they were like, I bet it was on the way to Jericho.

That place sucks. Yeah, that road is terrible.

They need to put some guardrails up. Fell into the hands of robbers who stripped him, beat him and took off, leaving him half dead. Now by chance, a priest was going down that road. And, and a lot of scholars think that a lot of the priests who worked in the temple in Jerusalem lived in Jericho at the time. I don’t know how accurate that is.

But so, but we are talking, we’re talking about Jewish priests.

Yes, we’re talking.

Okay.

Yes. So these would, these would be the, the man’s brethren. Right. So members of his in group. Now by chance, a priest was going down that road and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And you can imagine him going and yeah, you know, a little pickup in his step.

So like blood all over you.

Yeah, so likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him passed by on the other side. So we got a priest and a Levite who are supposed to be, they’re, they’re the most privileged classes in, among these Jewish folks who live in and around Jerusalem in this time period. And they’re supposed to be the exemplars. They’re supposed to be showing people how to live. And they are both like, not gonna touch that with a ten foot pole. Don’t wanna. And, and I’ve heard people say, well, they were just ensuring that they were maintaining purity because if he was dead, they don’t want to touch a dead body, because then they’re ritually impure. Which is a nonsense excuse because there was a hierarchy of these kinds of concerns, right? If somebody was being murdered, you don’t go, ah, can’t do anything about this because if he dies and I touch him, then, you know, because one, ritual impurity was not sin. It was just ritual impurity.

It was just, you can repurify yourself, right?

Yeah, yeah, it was. You were just like, oh, I got ritually impure, oh. I’m not going to be able to make bowling tonight. But you know, it didn’t mean you did anything wrong, right? So that’s not a… which still would characterize these folks as being like, no, I don’t touch that. I got. I got better things to do. But a Samaritan while traveling came upon him. And when he saw him, he was moved with compassion.

So we’ve got an interesting twist here because the lawyer was like, well, who’s my neighbor?

Right?

And so we go from object to subject. Jesus is like, wrong question. It’s not who’s your neighbor, it’s are you worthy to be called a neighbor to someone else?

Right?

As far as you’re concerned, everybody’s your neighbor. It’s just up to you to be worthy of being a neighbor to everyone else. And, and there, there are a couple more things to note. The lawyer doesn’t say “the Samaritan,” he can’t even bring himself to acknowledge that. Because in this we should, we should,

we should quickly just mention what a Samaritan is. Who. Yes, Samaritan. I always thought growing up as I heard this, that it. That a Samaritan like that there was a group, the, an ethnic group or, or a, or a, you know, a country called Samaria or something.

But no, well, these, these are the folks who occupied Samaria, which is where the capital of the northern kingdom was in, in pre-exilic. Pre. Pre-exilic Israel. But according to the biblical narrative, when the Judahites are exiled to Babylon. These folks are left behind to their own devices. And then you also had priests who are sent from Babylon to go minister to these folks who were left behind. And, you know, there were lions involved and, and basically things just went sideways. And so they’re. They are characterized kind of as this group that was left behind and is no longer one of us. They are. And they.

But it was like a religious group, right? It was its own religion.

Well, they. Yeah, they. And they have the Pentateuch. They have their own version of the Pentateuch. It’s written in. In a type of Hebrew called Samaritan. And it is. And. And so they are kind of a branch of Judaism that is characterized in the, in the Gospels. They try to make a big deal out of this giant rift where the Samaritans were hated. They were a hated people. You wouldn’t even walk through Samaria. You would take an extra few days to walk around Samaria just so you didn’t have to dirty your. Your sandals on their filthy soil kind of thing. Now, yeah, the truth of that is debated. They probably were not quite so hated. The Gospel authors are just trying to juice up this, this rift in order to make it dramatic. And that’s what they do here by showing the lawyer just going, oh, the one of them that showed mercy, answering honestly, but not condescending to name the Samaritan.

Right.

And so in doing so, the story is basically saying, hey, these are the people who would be at the bottom of the list of people you want to call neighbor. And Jesus is representing the Samaritan as being more righteous than the priest and the Levite, and the only one of those three who deserved, who merited the title of neighbor. But then showing him mercy is what indicates that he’s being a neighbor. And Jesus’s command, “Go and do likewise,” I think fits in with Jesus’s statements elsewhere about showing mercy, about prioritizing mercy. In fact, he says in Matthew, in the Gospel of Matthew , on two different occasions, he quotes Hosea 6:6 , “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” Have we talked about the prophetic critique on our show?

I. I’ve heard you say that phrase before, but I’m not sure that I understand what it is.

Okay, well, that, that might be worth talking about at some point. Basically, this is when the prophets say, hey, or the prophets have God saying, I hate your temple sacrifices and your festivals and your Sabbaths and all this. It’s God saying, I hate that stuff. And it’s not because God’s. God’s a proto-Protestant and is like, it’s all about faith, baby, faith alone. It’s because this represents the law as intending to generate in the people who obey it a merciful and a just and a righteous heart. So the idea is the law is intended to create a merciful and a just and a righteous society. But the wealthy folks who are out there doing all the public displays of piety in private are, according to what Isaiah says, grinding the faces of the poor, neglecting and taking advantage of and exploiting the orphan and the widow and the oppressed and the needy and the poor.

And the idea is, because all of these outward performances of piety are intended to make you merciful. If you perform them, but you don’t end up being merciful, you’re just performing them in order to exploit their function as credibility enhancing displays in order to advance your own personal interests and standing, in which case the performance of those duties becomes sin. So that’s a prophetic critique. And that’s what Hosea is saying, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. If you do the sacrifice and it generates mercy, awesome. If you do the sacrifice and then exploit the poor and are not merciful, sinful. So mercy takes priority over sacrifice. And so that’s what Jesus says. And there’s even a. People are like, well, well, you can’t have mercy if you don’t have. If you don’t have justice or judgment or things like that. And there is a wonderful passage in the letter of James that I think speaks to this, Okay?

For he that said, do not commit adultery also said, do not kill. Now, if thou commit no adultery, no adultery. Yet if thou. Why am I reading from the King James Version? Oi. For the one who said, you shall not commit adultery also said, you shall not murder. Now if you do not commit adultery but you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. And here’s the important part. For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over justice. And so I think this is the important part. When you have the two of them, justice is supposed to result in mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. And so what the parable of the Good Samaritan is saying is, yes, everybody is your neighbor. Deal with it and be a good neighbor to everyone else. And Jesus takes no prisoners there. And unfortunately you have people like, well, that’s not what he meant by neighbor.

I mean, we really got to dig into who the neighbor is. That’s where we find basically the rationalization for our nativism and our jingoism and our bigotry is in trying to parse some kind of hierarchy of neighbors from Jesus saying, no, you idiot, everybody’s your neighbor.

It does seem so weird to me when I see Christians or professed Christians, forget that I’m not going to do a no true Scotsman. When I see Christians saying, you know, closing the ranks and saying, you know, we’re us and everybody else is them and everybody else can fend for themselves and that we don’t have to do anything for them and we only take, we take care of our own. And all this stuff. It does, it does seem like the central, like the thing that keeps happening over and over in the New Testament is we’re expanding out. All of, you know, the us is now everyone. The us goes out further and further and further and everyone counts as the us.

And also that rhetoric is all, is entirely insincere. They’re like, we got to take care of our people first. And then like it follows in time after then we’ll go and we’ll worry about the rest. It’s like, but you’re not taking care of your own people.

Right. That’s, that’s how they get you.

Yeah. When you say once we’re done taking care of our own people, we’ll take care of the other people. And then you never take care of your own people. You never have to worry about the other people. It’s right. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy and it’s insincere and it’s just a way to reduce the scope of your neighborly circle. Whereas in, in the Bible and, and what Christians throughout time, Christians who have not been all that great in a lot of other areas, but one, one thing that, that a lot of Christians have, have tried to do is say no. The duty is precisely to expand it. Because for a lot of folks, Christianity is not about validating your access to power and resources.

Right.

It’s about trying to expand it to other folks. And yeah. Unfortunately today an awful lot of people who have an awful lot of power to access to power and resources ignore that and try to leverage their, their Christianity precisely to validate, keeping it from the most vulnerable in our society as well as in the societies that are around us.

Yeah.

Which is, which is a pretty crappy thing to do.

Not great. Not great. All right, well, that’s it for today. Thank you all so much for tuning in. If you would like to be a part of helping make this show a thing and keeping it going for the foreseeable future. You can go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Join up if you know at at the right level you can be you can get.

Bye everybody.