Danny Jones Ancient Language Experts CLASH (2026-01-10)

Debate on Danny Jones, with Ammon Hillman & Luke Gorton.

• Runtime: 3:38:36
• Patreon ($5 a month): https://www.patreon.com/posts/ancient-language-147742181
• YouTube: [link]
• See also: the Bonus After Show With Ammon Hillman

Transcript

Welcome gentlemen. First of all, just to start this whole thing off, I want to have both of you guys introduce yourselves and your academic backgrounds. Um Luke, we'll start with you. Yeah, my name is Dr. Luke Gorton. Um I have been fascinated by the ancient world, by ancient languages for most of my life at this point. Um, I was very fortunate to take Latin in eth and nth grade. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I did. So, uh, everyone had already had always told me, you know, languages are hard, Latin is hard. Like, why are you taking that? And then I took it and it just clicked. I just loved this stuff. I had no idea that I was going to love it this much, but I did. Um, I ended up taking Spanish later in high school. And of course, as we know, Spanish is is descended from Latin. It's one of the Roman languages. And that got me hooked on connections between languages. How are languages related to each other? How do languages evolve from, you know, an older language to a younger language or or or whatever. Um, I went to college. I majored in Spanish. I also majored in religion. Uh, especially early Christianity, second temple Judaism, Mediterranean religions. Uh, that's when I first took Greek, uh, was in college. I took three years of Greek in college. Um, and I didn't think I could love anything more than Latin, but I did. I found that Greek was just the most amazing language that of course at this point I'd only taken three languages, Latin, Spanish, and then Greek, but it was the most amazing language that I had ever been fortunate enough to to take. Um, and I still feel that way today now that I've taken many, many other ancient languages, especially when I went on to grad school. Uh, I I decided to do my master's degree in linguistics, specifically historical linguistics, which is again the study of how languages are connected to each other. It's really the study of old dead languages. That's essentially what historical linguistics is. Um, so as part of that program, I learned the general principles of linguistics which I think are very important and I'm sure those will come up more in our discussion. Uh, but I also learned I I was also able to take many other old dead languages. I took three semesters of Sanskrit which is essentially the the Latin of India. You know, it's what all the it's what the Rigveda and the ancient Hindu texts are written in which super cool stuff. Um, I took Avestan, which is the ancient language of Iran. Um, and and you know, there's various ancient religious texts that are written in that as well. I was able to take old Irish. I was able to take Gothic, which is the oldest Germanic language. Uh, I also took Hebrew, um, which of course, you know, we'll get into that as well. Um, and, uh, I was able to take a little bit of old Egyptian, which is what the hieroglyphs are are are are writing essentially. They're writing this this old Egyptian language. Aadian, which is the old Babylonian or Assyrian language, Hittite, which is a language from what we today call Turkey, and and several other ancient languages as well. So, I was able to really fill out my my ancient language portfolio, if you want to call it that. Um but but my heart always remained with Greek and Latin. And between Greek and Latin, my heart is more on the Greek side. I love I love Latin. I tell all my students this and my students at the University of New Mexico, they're classicists for the most part, at least in the upper level Latin and Greek language classes that I get to teach. And and and within classics, as Ammon knows, there are different opinions about Latin versus Greek. There's people who like Latin better. There's people who like Greek better. And and sometimes it's just a vibe thing. You know, you you take these two languages, and if you're a classicist, you have to take both of them. It's kind of part of the job description. But some people vibe more with Latin, some people vibe more with Greek. I was always on the Greek side. I love Latin, but Greek is really where my heart is. It's a fascinating, wonderful language. And honestly, I I wish I wish everybody could learn it. All of you, you know, and I could probably help you. So, you have a PhD in classics. That's correct. And what about linguistics? My master's degree is in linguistics. Got it. And that So, yeah, let me finish the story. So, I I kind of interrupted myself because I'm so excited about ancient languages. Um, so I did my master's degree in linguistics and then I was deciding what to go on for my PhD in. I could have gone on and stayed with linguistics and some people said I should have, but I decided that I wanted to specifically focus on the ancient Mediterranean world which is essentially what classics is. And I know that you you and Ammon have had some discussions about what this word called classics is because a lot of people don't know like they they hear classics and they think Shakespeare like we're Shakespeare scholars which we're not. I had no idea what that word meant before Ammon before I met Ammon. Yeah, I think a lot of people are in that boat. So, that's a that's a PR issue that I think in classics we have to kind of deal with. I don't know how we're gonna deal with it. And then and then only Greek experts wear sunglasses. That's correct. Inside the cathedrals. Yeah, that's the rule that we just made. So, yeah. Are we taking these off? Are we keeping them on? I'm just No, I feel good. I'm so let's treat this as a brand new podcast and assume a lot of the viewers here have never been exposed to you, Ammon. Why don't you give a a brief summary of your background and what you know your experience with academia and what you're doing now. Okay. I'm also a PhD in classics. I went the whole way through bachelor's, masters and PhD in classics. Um my field of expertise was medicine. And I had the privilege of studying with John Scarboro who is you know the authority and during this time I was exposed to texts that are pharmacological stuff that we don't translate and oh god all of a sudden a world of of evidence came forward just out bubbling out of the surface. So, I spent a ton of time getting those degrees and a master's in bacteriology because I wanted to keep my both feet, you know, one foot on this side of the fence and the, you know, the humanities and science divide. And that's what turned on John Scarboro, right? And by the way, John Scarboro worked with a professor graz you're associated with and this is all ancient magic. So Fritz Gra was ancient he's a specialized in ancient magic. Yeah. So I worked with two professors during my PhD program at Ohio State who are are two of the preeminent scholars in the field of ancient magic. Fritz Grath and actually his wife Sarah Isles Johnson, both of whom are amazing professors and scholars who have been in the field for a long time who have published an incredible amount of stuff who have done a lot of translations of these ancient magical texts. Wow. And they've made some of the most authoritative translations that are available to the English speaking market. Um I was able to work with both of them. Uh Sarah Isles Johnston, she she's done a lot of work on ancient witches and witchcraft. Wow. She she used to tell us because I've I had classes with both of them, so I know them both personally. Um, she she I I remember she told us once in one class that she she gets she gets phone calls from random people online or just random people who are trying to become witches because she knows all the ancient texts. She's translated a lot of them. Um, so she she has some notoriety in that sense. That's amazing. So, um, they knew John John Scarboro and and him were close. They worked together. So, we found like a little cosmic connection between you two. That's fun. Plus, it's not a big field. translating the PGM and whatnot, the Greek magical papyrie and all of that information that's in there, that's all locked into the pharmacology. So, you were a professor at one point? Yes. At University of Madison. Yes. Wisconsin Madison. Yes. At the extended university. So, I I used to teach medical terms. I taught a class on that too. And that's a pretty common class we classist teach for the for I assume it was a class that had a lot of biology majors and Oh, it was all science people. Yeah. Because they want to learn the terms because they're all Greek and Latin, but mostly Greek. Yeah. And then for context for people that don't know, you were eventually ejected by the university. Then I went to there was some controversy with a play you were doing about media, right? Yeah. I then after that I went to the to St. Mary's University in Minnesota and was classics there and taught Greek to all the seminarians and after two years we got started getting calls back about how good the the priests were doing in their Greek. You know that it it was a big deal. So I I mean you know as well as I know that biblical studies is not the sharpest when it comes to Greek. I would I would love it if they focused on it more. Uh it would help them. Yeah. If they read something outside of the New Testament maybe and didn't just interlinear translate, right? Yeah. And from what I understand, a lot of seminaries are moving away from language instruction altogether, right? Um, and again, I'm not like in the seminary field. This is what I hear from people I know who are. Um, which which I think is is is is a crime. like you have to you have to be able to read any of these texts in the original language which of course if you're a New Testament scholar I think you absolutely absolutely need to be able to work with the Greek working with the New Testament is a good start but like you said the New Testament is part of a wider linguistic world it's it's not an island unto itself which I think you know a lot of times we have these false barriers within academia which are very frustrating for interdisciplinary scholars and I think we both are so you know people who work on the New Testament kind of have their little academic bubble and then people like us who are classicists who work on the wider Greek world but might be interested in stuff in the New Testament we have our own bubble and a lot of times it's it's difficult for us to talk to each other across those lines because we work in different buildings and we work in different departments and sometimes we don't even know each other and sometimes they don't want to talk to us and sometimes some of us not not us but some of us classicists might not want to talk to them which is unfortunate I want to be trying to build bridges and I mean that's one of the reasons I'm here is to try to build bridges and and talk to people and talk a wider audience. Um because I think that's our mission. I think a lot of academics are closeted in in their own little silos in their own little fields and they're like, "Well, we know stuff and it doesn't really matter if we tell other people or not or talk to other people who are different than us who might disagree with us." And I don't I don't see it that way. I think that we should be reaching out. I think we should be talking to people who are different than us who who maybe disagree with us and there can be productive disagreement. Yes. Yes. So to answer your question, it ties in. I was at St. Mary's at a seminary teaching, right? Um and we did a play, we we produced the media, Senica's media, notes. Sure. And I was decommissioned. I was let go for what? Opening portals or something, right? opening portals. Accused him of demon possession and opening portals, right? Demon possess. There was an inquiry. Bishop had to oversee it. This is a Catholic college. Is that okay? Right. Okay. He gets it though. Right. You see me as a classicist. Right. In the middle of this and in the beginning of the play, I marched down an 8-foot fallus. Right. Now, is that which was normal for Roman times. Yeah. Do you see do you see what happened? Offensive to a modern audience. normal for Roman times, which is one of the things, you know, as we're trying to explain the ancient world to people. If you're in a Catholic school, that might be frowned upon. Sure. Correct. But they contracted with me. Yeah. To do it as historically accurate as possible. So, everybody in the chorus had a dildo. Mhm. Right. Right. You can see how this would lead to problems. Cultural disconnect is what it is. Right. It is. Right. I cannot teach this even though it's the reality. And the disconnect is in many ways between the modern world and the ancient world. Ancient world was a very different place. They had very different morals, customs, standards. Back then, you know, fallaces were were not considered lewd. They they weren't considered problematic to just be out in public. Um and today, whether it's a Catholic college or not, I mean, if you go walking down the street out here, it's still going to be one of the things that blew my mind the first time I talked to Ammon, he showed me about the the god Prius. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Who walked around with this gigantic erection. That was that was his whole thing. He he wasn't famous for anything else. That wasn't a pun, by the way. Yeah. So that that's what he was known for. Yeah. So you should also lay out for folks who haven't heard what happened to you when you were doing your dissertation. Oh, right. So I'm writing this dissertation about it's Roman pharmacy and one of the meeting the long story short I defended and afterwards the meeting was just long the professors were taking forever. Oh god what's going on and the head professor pulled me aside the head of the department pulled me aside and said what makes you think that the Romans would use drugs? So they didn't bring this up with you before your defense. Correct. That's odd. Interesting, isn't it? Because it's normal for, you know, we we go through this whole process when we write a dissertation. It's a yearslong process. We're working with an adviser and at least two committee members and and they send us critiques and and and it's normal throughout the process for them to tell us to take stuff out during the process leading up to the defense. I got told to take stuff out multiple times and then I had to because that's just how it works. you know, you you bowed to the powers that be, so they, you know, knight you or whatever. Um, so we all had to do that, but but what you're describing is a little odd because it sounds like what happened with you is after you defended, they told you to take something out, right? That's that's less normal. Um, I had to make some changes to my dissertation after I defended and they voted thumbs up as long as I made the changes. So that's they were typical changes, not anything drastic. I was told you have to go delete any references to recreational drug use. So, take out the chapter on recreational and sacramental drug use. That take that out and don't mention any of these recreational drugs throughout the It was clearly just censorship. It was not. And we know that for a fact now because the press came in and invaded and the department said, "Oh, no. He never had a chapter on recreational drugs. Interesting. Yeah. So, they went and looked it up. It was already deposited, right? They went and looked it up in the library and it did, right? Oh, I'm sorry. It's backwards. It was removed. It was removed in the deposit. No, no, no. Which way did it go? Usually, it's not deposited till you have your final final version. It sounds like for your final final version, they made you take it out. Is that right? Right. It was taken out. And when they went to Oh, that's what it was. When they went to them, they said to Patricia Rosenmire, they said, "Um, uh, is there a problem here? And is it true what he's saying that you made him take out a chapter on recreational drugs?" You know what I mean? And she said, "No. Huh? We had no problem with that." So, they went and looked it up in the deposit, right? And they were like, "There is no chapter on recreational drugs and there's no reference." They can see that it was basically Epstein filed, right? Redacted. M wow right and the press blew that up and went back to the department and department after that point said we have no more comment right so it was it was obvious that my advisor did not communicate with the other members of the department about the existence of the recreational drugs right was it your adviser who asked you to take it out and they got tripped up no it was the head of the department and the head of the department was not on your the head of the department said you will not get your degree warrant signed until you have removed all references to recreational drugs. Right? Why do you think they had a problem with it? Because as she said, quote, "The Romans just wouldn't do such a thing." What were her sources? Nothing. And Right. Exactly. You see, where were you, Luke? If you'd have been there, this wouldn't have happened. Right. That's a shame. It is. It And that's sort of what led you in the path that you've been that you've taken. I took the information that was redacted and I put it into the form of a book and published it with St. Martins's Press and that was a fantastic experience because it allowed people to then see in a broader audience that oh god they use drugs in the ancient world and using them for all sorts of things. Mhm. Also, I think it's important to lay out the fact how you originally got interested in this stuff. You came from a religious background, right? Yeah. I had, you know, until about 21, I was uh Christian, evangelical. I taught in the as I was getting my undergraduate and classics, I taught in the mission, you know, uh preached in a mission, I should say. Yeah. So I had a particular interest in that in classics. Luke just liberated my expletive mind. And I was reading Aristotle and got it suddenly talking about nature, you know, and the metaphysics, the purpose and everything. And I went out that night and got laid, you know what I mean? And just for suck. So So Aristotle got you laid. Yeah. Exactly. See, it works. You were you were holding it off till marriage, right? And Okay. So I just laid aside Christianity. But then I came back later, Luke, and looked at this stuff. I started using the texts and looking at them and my god, there is so much drug use, especially all the Christ thing, you know. So the first time Ammon was on the podcast, uh, it just completely blew my mind. I've discovered that I'm absolutely fascinated with this stuff, but I simply lack the personal expertise to make an informed assessment on anything that he is saying. Uh, he's obviously taken a lot of arrows from people on the internet, poison arrows, if you will. Uh, and that's why you're here. So you are the first accredited highlevel Greek expert classicist and linguist that has ever and who actually specializes in some of this same stuff. You specialize in magic ancient ancient magic and ancient religions and then like sex and gender in ancient religions. Is that right? That's right. So at UN M I teach a class called magic and ancient religion which is exactly what it sounds like. We we read parts of the PGM as you would imagine. Amen. Um I teach a class called Sex and Gender in ancient Religion. Actually, both of those are going on in the spring, so everyone can come feel free to register and hang out or just come hang out. I don't know. Um so, I'm going Yeah. Yeah. No, they're both I mean, they're both fascinating topics. Uh I tell everyone I get to teach some of the coolest stuff in the world, honestly, at UNM. Um the the students regularly, you know, love these classes and and and feel like they get a lot out of them. So, um, first of all, I I would like to stay kind of high level on this podcast for for the the first half of it and then before we really dive into the weeds because I feel like that's going to lose a lot of folks. Um, but Luke, in your view, what is the difference between classic classists, um, linguists and like, uh, Bible scholars? Okay, this is a great question because, you know, I was just talking maybe 10 minutes ago that that oftentimes those of us in academia are kind of in our silos and you've just discussed three different silos, none of which talk to each other very often, which is really too bad. Um, I am a I am a trained classicist and I a trained linguist. I'm not a trained Bible theologian, but I've read a lot of the Bible in the original languages and can comment on it from what I hope is a neutral textual historical linguistic perspective. I'm not trying to grind any acts. You didn't come at this from a a religious background. I'm not trying to. Yeah, that's not that's not my goal. So, I'm I'm I'm as an academic, I I'm trying to read these texts and understand them again historically, linguistically, textually, all the scientifically. Scientifically, Sure. Yeah. Um I you know, I I don't have an agenda either way on that. So, like I'm not I'm not trying to say something specific about the Bible from a religious perspective. I'm also not trying to attack it from like an anti-religious perspective, right? So, I want to make that clear as well. Like I I I'm actually trying to read what's in there, read what the words say, right? And and what the words mean both within their own biblical context and within the wider cultural context. Okay. So, back to your question. Um, classics is the study of it's it's a huge huge insanely huge field. It's it's the study of everything that happened in the ancient world of the Mediterranean and near east which is basically what we would today call the Middle East. Uh so everything we would take all the Middle East is pretty much ancient near east. Okay. Um there there was no major cultural divide between Europe and and the Middle East back then like there has been for the past 1400 years when when it's been like a Christianity versus Islam thing, you know, Europe being mostly Christian, North Africa and the Middle East being mostly Islam. But that's new and and by new of course I mean from our ancient standards it's new. It's 1500 years old. That that that distinction postdates the era that we are talking about when when we're doing classics. So I think that's one thing we have to we have to remember didn't exist. There wasn't this giant cultural gap between say Greece and Syria like there might be today, right? Because of the the different religions that that historically in here in those two places today. So, so classics is the study of of everything from what's now Spain to what's now Iran. That entire area, that entire geographic area, and then all the way up to Germany all the way down to Sudan, up the Nile River. Wow. Um, you know, there there are there are peripheral locations like England and Arabia. Um, and and India, honestly, like there's connections with India, of course, because we know that people were going back and forth. Alexander the Great marched all the way from Greece to India, right? Drugs. Yeah, sure. And drugs, ideas, words, concepts, all these things are flowing back and forth in in that corridor. Um, so classics is the study of everything that happened in that whole area up until about the year 500 of our era. Okay. Can I say something? 500 AD. AD. Yeah. Okay. That's classic big picture. If you want to stated differently, if I may. Yep. Yep. Stated simply for people, right? like me, the evidence is the evidence that we have for that is going to be in Greek and Latin, most of it. So, a classical philologist, that's why you got to know Greek and Latin, is supposed to be a master of Greek and Latin because all of the evidence for anything you can determine from the civilization, it's going to all be in Greek and Latin. I mean, if you don't like that, go be an archaeologist. Mhm. And and they have important things to say, too, because they're digging up important evidence as well. And some of that evidence has Greek and Latin written on it, right? Yeah. So, they they're are allies. That's another silly wall that often Well, here's a really interesting anecdote I'll bring up is the guy who peer- reviewviewed your book in the Binmar classical review. I had him on the podcast. He's a forensic pathologist who did the only peer review on his book, The Chemical Muse. Uh I had him in here. He was a great guy. I I he he did all kinds of amazing work on like the remains of Picasso, Napoleon, Hitler, all these huge figures. And I asked him what his ancient Greek what his level was for translating these ancient languages and Greek and all this stuff. And he says like little to none. And I said, "Well, I'm like, you did this." I I asked him like you did a pretty extraordinary criticism of this book, The Chemical Muse, about which the premise of his book was that drugs were ubiquitous in antiquity because plague and famine and handtohand combat were were happening all the time. People were constantly trying to use remedies to cure these this pain. And his his review was basically saying, "No, this is wrong. This is like painting the world as being a world of drug addicts." And he's like I'm like, "Well, what Greek do you know and what have you read? Have you read the sources?" And he's like, "No, this is not my area of expertise." That was his answer. And I thought that blew my mind. I was like, "How do you do a peer review of something based on classical Greek when it's not your expertise?" Like wouldn't you instead of wanting to do peer review to just dismiss expletive wouldn't you want to like actually engage with the person who wrote it and try to collaborate on ideas that anyways that was something that really kind of like warped my like blew my perspective out of the water. It was a hack job. Yeah. Right. It was a hack job. It was meant to take down the book. That's all. Yes. But unfortunately, the guy hadn't been exposed to the sources, so he doesn't know what he's doing. He just Right. But you know, it does make me wonder though, how much do forensic pathologists or archaeologists actually do like communicate and and swap notes with classicists and linguists? Not much. Um like I said, there there are these walls. Um, and if if there's walls between classicists and linguists, which are which are closely allied fields, then you can imagine there's even higher walls between classicists and forensic pathologists. Um, and oftent times there's a sense of superiority that each group has within their own field. Like we know enough, we don't really need to talk to other people. Um, and that's even true with classists and linguists a lot of times. as someone who is a hybrid scholar because I am a classicist and a linguist and I have a graduate degree in both of those. I have a fairly unusual perspective on that because because obviously I I don't think linguistics is worthless and I don't think classics is worthless. I think they're both very valuable and have a lot to to communicate to each other. But but I'm a I'm unusual in the sense that I have I have degrees in both fields and expertise in both fields. And most of my classics friends, even, you know, when I was going through the PhD in classics, I would try to talk to them about Greek linguistics. Yeah. Because we're learning Greek, right? And Greek linguistics, may maybe this will help loop back around to your question a few minutes ago. What is linguistics, right? Linguistics is the scientific study of language. So, how do languages work? How are they structured? How do they evolve? Uh, all all of this kind of stuff. H how do humans communicate with each other via language? So linguistics is kind of a an over overview that applies to what we're doing right now. We're using language right now, the English language of the 21st century in the United States, that particular dialect to communicate with each other. So So if you get a degree in linguistics, like I did, just a two-year degree, just a masters, your mind will be blown, honestly, because you learn about stuff that you know, but you don't know you know, because you're speaking a language. So you you you suddenly find out that you're doing all these things with your with your teeth and your tongue and your mouth to make these sounds that you've never thought about before. But we're all doing it very competently right now, right? But but but until you learn linguistics, you don't you don't think about it. So linguistics is is is a subject that blows people's minds every time it's it's exposed to it. Anyways, so linguistics can apply to modern English. It can apply to any language, but but I'm particularly interested in it when it comes to ancient languages with, you know, Greek and Latin and the other ancient languages. So, as a as a linguist studying ancient Greek, I have a I have a richer perspective on it than someone who's not a linguist studying ancient Greek in the sense that I can appreciate the sounds that they're making. And of course, we don't they didn't have tape recorders, you know, that we have to try to reconstruct them based on the the writing system. So, then we have to understand the the the alphabet and the and the and the letters and the words they're using, right? Um so so that's what linguistics is. That's how it kind of does a ven diagram with classics. Most linguists are not classicists. Most classicists are not linguist. And so they can't they can't really you know appreciate what's at the center of that ven diagram when you kind of crosspollinate their fields. Every classist in a degree program gets forced to do a couple of semesters of linguistics just to be exposed. I wish that were true. That's not true in my experience. in at Ohio State at least none of nobody take a semester we had to take two I'm glad to hear that yeah we had to take two and that's where I first encountered Nam Chsky sure and he's a fascinating theory of course with his own theories you know I didn't know I didn't know he was a linguist yeah that's how he got his start I know he's kind of into other stuff now how old is he how is he super old there was a picture of him that just came out in the Epstein files on the jet with Epstein I didn't know that that's interesting find that comes back to Christing, I guess. Oh my god. That's the third thing. Yeah, just just to circle back around. Bible scholars. So, Bible scholars are exactly what they sound like. They're they're specifically focusing on and specializing in the biblical texts. Um, but the world of the Bible in general. But oftent times, and you know, there's all sorts of different Bible scholars and theologians. Some of them are secular, some of them are not. Look at that. There he is. Yeah, that linguist. If you told me that was AI, I wouldn't even know. Yeah. Well, that's Yeah. And that's already what 15 years ago about 100, right? So, right. Yeah. Uh yeah, there there's a this reminds me, you know, the quote from Heroditus. This is the great thing about classics. There's all these fascinating ancient quotes that are just full of all this wisdom. There's there there's this quote from Heratus and it's this apherism from the ancient Greek world that that you shouldn't judge the happiness and by that they mean the fortunateness of a person's life until they're dead because you don't know what's going to happen to them. It's like you think that oh like this person's the luckiest person in the world whatever but then something bad happens to them before they die. Sorry you're not fortunate after all that. That just brought that to mind. Epste Bible scholars Bible scholars. Now Bible scholars please be honest. The Greek not so good. Well they're all over the place right there. There's no consistent standard. Okay. So even today if you go to a seminary some of them will make you learn Greek which they all should and some of them are moving away from it. Um so so it depends on what denominations seminary you go to today. Um some of the more rigorous ones will make you learn Greek which again is good. Um and and some of them might not and and then some individuals are more personally dedicated to it than others. Right? So there there are individual Bible scholars whose Greek has become very good because maybe they went to a good seminary that that actually did force them to do it. Yeah. Like the one that I taught at. Yeah. That's great that they they wanted you to teach, you know, people Greek, which is awesome. Yeah. Um it's better than the alternative of not teaching people Greek, right? Um and and then and then some individuals have have taken this farther on their own and have have become quite good at it. But like we were talking about, they're probably going to be mostly focused on the biblical texts with with less of a of of a you know relationship to the outside Greek world that these Bible texts are occurring in. Just like any text that we have in English today, whether it's religious or whatever, I it's not existing in a vacuum, right? Those words exist outside of that religious text, right? Right? They have a context, which is literally context, which means the the weaving together, the text that's with it, right? They have a context outside of whatever it is. And and so I always tell people, if you want to understand the Bible better, you got to understand the context. The Bible was not written in a vacuum. You know, it it it was written in a culture. That culture had norms and rules and standards, like we were talking about earlier, that are not always remotely similar to ours. Um, so, so people who are understanding the Bible or trying to understand the Bible today do themselves a massive disservice if they don't learn about the culture that the Bible arose in. If you really wanted to understand the Bible, you would read all the Greek from 200 years before until 200 years after, you know, because that's the context, right? Because it's going to give you a rich understanding of what those words mean. And remember those words are our evidence. Sure. Yeah. As philologists. So this is another word that is worth worth studying and talking about. Philologist comes from two Greek words. Filo which means love and loge which means word. Anything logi logos logic whatever comes from this logos Greek word which is a very complicated word by the way. Um so as philologists what we are is we are lovers of the word. Yeah. And the words right. So like what do these words mean? And we're really trying to dig deep into these words and that's what a philologist does, right? Yeah. So it it does and one of the things I learned from Ammon is that the Bible scholars typically like to stay in that vacuum of the Bible and ignore all the peripheral stuff that was happening. You know, again, I'm not a Bible scholar. I can't speak for them. Uh I think some of them do. He doesn't want to fire any shots. That's okay. I'm honestly not here to You can fire all the shots you want. Let me do it. That's fine. So, and again, I think from what I from my knowledge of Bible scholars, and I've known a few here and there, even though it's not not my field per se, they're they are all over the place. Some of them are very meticulous and want do genuinely want to reach out and some of them really are just in their lane. So, that's been my experience. To you, what are the biggest misconceptions about the Bible? Oh, man. Um I I think I think a lot of it comes down to what we were just talking about. the these cultural gaps, right? So, so a random person who who might, you know, go to church every once in a while, considers themselves a Christian, probably has never read the Bible, like almost at all. Right? I think I think the vast majority of Christians have have have either never read the Bible or maybe cracked it to a few verses here and there. Um and and and when you when you do that, you are missing the context. And if you crack it to a few verses here and there, you're you're actually missing the inter the intrabiblical context. So you can't just pull a verse out of context and say this is what it means. I you can if you're trying to make some spiritual argument for your life, that's whatever. But if you're trying to make an academic argument about what a verse meant, you you have to get your methodology straight. I think one of the big things that I learned in grad school is is methodology matters. What is methodology? It's the way that we get from point A to point B. So how do we arrive at what we think we know? How are we gonna get there? Um so there are there are sloppy ways of doing methodology. There are more careful ways of doing methodology. Um the scientific method is a classic form of methodology in scientific fields, right? Where you can't if you're doing science, you can't just throw a bunch of data up in the air and see how it falls. Like you have to organize it in a specific way and then go through that data in a specific way. Um so that's really that's important methodology. Um, so pulling a verse out of context is is bad methodology because what when you do that, you're not being careful to take a look at what's around that verse in the same book in the Bible, right? Like, so that's the first piece of context is what does this book of the Bible say? Not just in this one verse that I like that speaks to me or whatever, but but what does the what does the whole chapter say? What does the whole book say? Why was this book written in the first place? Who was it written by? And then you kind of just go out from there because there's these concentric circles of context, the chapter, the book, the whole Hebrew Bible or New Testament or whatever it is. And then the culture that those works arose in. And then the other people who may have, you know, agreed or disagreed with what's being written, their their voices are sometimes found hidden in the Bible because sometimes a a lot of the Bible is is arguments between people, you know, like they're arguing about the nature of God or they're arguing about who Jesus really was or things like that, right? Um, so, so those arguments are oftentimes hidden in the Bible and and we do the Bible a disservice if we try to bury those arguments instead of bringing them to light and and trying to understand what the original authors were living through like what that cultural context was. Um, what is your view on I know there's different there's varying opinions, but when would the gospels were written? Yeah. So, you know, I I I tend to to take a pretty standard view on this, but I'm open to other ideas. because I don't think anybody knows for sure. But the standard opinion, and you know, I'm interested to hear what Ammon thinks, but the standard opinion is that Mark is the earliest gospel. Um, there are a couple of reasons for thinking this. It's the weirdest gospel. It's got it's got some Mark 14. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm sure we're going to get into that. It's got some some unexplained like only verse I've ever written in the Bible, by the way. There you go. So, you need some context. You need some context. It's the only one you need. So, so yeah, I'm sure we'll get to the context later since I just, you know, spent five minutes on a soap box about context. Um, so yeah, Mark is I probably the earliest gospel. Again, we we'll never know this for sure, but but we're trying to build theories based on the data, which is which is what we do. By the way, those of us who work with the ancient world, we we always live in a state of uncertainty because because we have a a fairly limited amount of data about everything that happened in the ancient world. And so when we're trying to seek understanding, which is literally our job and our training, we have to have a certain amount of humility and and you're going to hear me probably say this several times today that that I don't know. Ammon might say something and I might say, "Well, I'm not sure about that, but I can't disprove it either." Um, it might be right. I don't know. Like, let's just I'm going to be humble about it. Um, and I'm going to say that maybe we don't have enough evidence either way to decide this and let's just, you know, look at the evidence we have. So, so I think there's that.

Dr Hillman: I'm going to resort to John Scarboro's training, and I'm just going to, look at the primary sources. To me it's all that matters. If you ask me the same question of when Mark was dated or when the New Testament, I would answer from the perspective of reading it. And say, "What other texts have I read that are using similar vocabulary and style?" And from that you can put it straight: first to second, late first, second, centuries. And it's meshing perfectly with the apocryphal. These texts are using the same vocabulary. It's gorgeous. So I would put it, look: These are second century texts.

Danny: That's consensus or or what?

Luke Gorton: The consensus and again....

Danny: I hate it when people always fall back on consensus for everything cuz that's what most people in my experience have done when I ask for expletive you know.

Luke Gorton: Sure. Yeah. The consensus is it was probably written in the 60s like around 65. Which is last half of the first century of course. Um, the consensus, for whatever that's worth, is that it was written in the in the years leading up to the Jewish revolt against the Romans, which which took place between ' 66 and 70, which is a a watershed event in in Jewish and Roman relations, as you can imagine.

Danny: So, so that would have been Mark.

Luke Gorton: That would have been Mark. And then the and then again, the we're talking the consensus here is that Matthew and Luke were a little bit later. Um, again the consensus is that Matthew and Luke use Mark as a source because they have a lot of the same material. The three of them, Mark, Matthew, and Luke are called the synoptic gospels, right? Which comes from two Greek words that mean to see together, sinoptic. Um, so they seem they have a lot of the same material. The consensus is that Matthew and Luke already have Mark in front of them. So Mark had already been written by the time Matthew and Luke are writing their gospels, which can which can help explain why they have so much similar material. Luke right in his prologue says, "I wasn't there, but i've done my research and I'm using sources." So Luke tells us right up front that he is reading earlier material and talking to eyewitnesses because Luke wasn't there. He didn't see Jesus. So, so Luke tells us right up front he has earlier sources and it seems like Mark was probably one of them. Uh John is kind of off in his own world doing his own thing. Um he he's he he has a lot of different material from the other three gospels. Most people date John as the latest one, maybe in the 90s, but some people would put it later. Um, Matthew and Luke maybe being in the 70s or 80s, but again, I think I think these are all estimates.

Um, what what Ammon said about looking at the text is always good, but then of course, what's our methodology? How like how are we looking at the text? What kind of connections are we making? It's it's useful to do what you said. I I absolutely agree. It's useful to do what you said, but it doesn't necessarily it's not necessarily slam dunk either because because you can copy style, right? So like for instance I can read a bunch of Shakespeare which we know was written over 400 years ago and I could write a Shakespearean play in Shakespearean style right now if I if I you know bathe my mind in Shakespeare weirdo right well I am a I am a weirdo. I am a weirdo. Yeah you guys are two weirdos wearing sunglasses. No comment. No I haven't. No I haven't. But I could I could and that's the point right. So, so you're right that that that that we can look at similar styles and similar vocab, but that can be counterfeited. Sure. By me, I could write a lost Shakespeare play tomorrow and I could make it look pretty realistic. One of the best tools when you're looking at just the language is the use of quotes. So, you know that Paul, for example, quotes media ultimately throughout Paul has a lot of classical quotes. Yeah, he seems to be a classically trained individual. Those influences can be the Apostle Paul. Apostle Paul th those influences can be read in the language because for example just the dialect wise you can tell that somebody's been reading the Ionian physicians by the dialect that they're referring to if they're using technical terms. So ancient Greek is so gorgeous in so many ways. One of the ways is that you can trace the influences of the person who's writing that text through the language that they're using. And so that's how for example you could see people reading Nikander. I know we talked about Nikander a little just mentioned him righties. He is one of the most famous ancient writers. People are quoting him all over the place. Nicander. Nikander. Nicander. What we have, you probably never heard of Nik. Who the hell is Nikander, right? But he's a priest of Apollo who is writing poetry that is wholly medical. It is pharmacologically wholly medicinal, right? It's polyfarm pharmacy. So it's a whole bunch of, you know, if you get this problem, if you bitten by this animal, give this antidote, which is a combination of these eight different plants and in a form of a song that would be transmitted by a priest who is a priest of visionary experience. These are pri he's a priest of Apollo Claris, right? Mhm. So these sources are sitting there all surrounding the Bible. These sources and nobody reads it's hard enough to get a classicist to read Nikander. Have you ever read Phileuminous? He's he writes on antidotes and he writes about different Yeah. No, I haven't. I expletive is he? Right. But by the way people, there's something special about Greek. There is so much material. It's a big language. There is so much material. It How much in antiquity? How much Greek was there compared to Latin or Hebrew? It's hard to answer that question for sure because we've lost most of all of it. Like most of the Greek, most of the Latin, most of the Hebrew is gone. And almost all of the Persian is gone and and almost all the Egyptian is gone. like what we have of old Egyptian is what they inscribed you know in hieroglyphs that survived for thousands of years but there was other stuff written on papyrus that is just gone. So this is something that I always impress upon my classes that we are dealing with with a lack of data. We are dealing with a serious lack of data when we are trying to understand the ancient world. Yeah because they just wrote so much stuff. We know they wrote so much stuff in all of those languages and almost all of it's gone. Well, wait. And despite that, what we have remaining is still awesome from the libraries from from east to west. When they archaeologists open up a new library, Rome, we're in Rome, right? What would you think would would be written in these libraries dwelling Romans, right? Freaking Latin, right? Cuz they're Romans. No, it's majority Greek with some Latin. The amount that we have that survives is so much that I've been doing Greek for 35 plus years. You've been doing Greek for what? Yeah. Over 20. Over 20. And between the two of us, we should both know all the authors then if there's not, you know, but we never will cuz there's just We never will. There's so much. I mean, if we read Greek for the rest of our lives and all of our waking hours, you know, we might we might make a dent, right? Well, now that Herculanium is coming out, I don't know. Yeah. So, so what we have left from the ancient world, you know, cuz again, another thing I remind my classes is they didn't have the printing press up until, you know, 5 600 years ago. So, everything that has survived has survived because somebody cared enough to keep it and and to copy it, right? So like things that were all almost all this stuff was on was written on perishable material papyrus vellum you know a very humid climate too right often so so more stuff survives in a place like Egypt which is not humid at all it's a dry dry desert so even even near Alexandria so out in the desert so there there were a lot of our interesting finds like the PGM from Egypt have been found in ancient trash dumps that were out in the desert oxybrank Yeah. Yeah. So, they would dump their trash out in the desert and sometimes that trash included manuscripts that had writing on it such as this this this document that's really interesting, the the Papyrus Krikey Magakai, which is Latin for the the Greek magical papyrus, as you might guess. Whoa. And and there's one copy, one copy that was thrown out, and that's the only reason we even have that book today. It wasn't handed down. Uh the people the people who were in charge of handing these texts down didn't hand it down. It was probably supposed to be a semi-secret document in the first place really. But at some point this one copy got thrown out and it's such a dry climate that it it you know it didn't biodegrade. Some bugs ate holes in it so we have some gaps. Classicist translated it. Yeah. And it was they found purple in it. Right. And as Scar Scarboro was one of them. And Scarboro told me this is the crappiest translation in existence because it is so completely difficult to step from that base level of reading to the higher magical reading. And what are these words actually mean? Are they using code here? What the heck? They are. Well, they are. I think they come out right and say they're using code. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Back. So, wait. Hold on. for for for so the Greek magical papyrie is what you're discussing right now and it's written in Greek. Yes, it was we found it was written in Greek with magic magic words that have codes that don't look like Greek might be from something else things that they're doing directions for this is how you do the ceremony and this is what this is the god you invoke and this is the sub these are the drugs that you use. Okay. Yeah. And do we know or is there an idea of when those were written? Again, I think the consensus is maybe second to fourth century of our era, but it's probably based in older material. Right. Right. And it it from the hymns, the invocations, it's heavily heavily Orphic and it has elements. I I date the Orphic stuff earlier. I'm of that of of that group just because the orphic hymns are so packed with technical terminology that meshes with everything else contemporary in an early time. So I'm talking 6th fifth century BC is what I'd like to push the ideas that are in the PGM not necessarily the text coming out no but the language itself the language itself. So yeah, I I mean it's got root. It's second century is a nice place in an odome is a good place to put it right. But you've got to realize when you're looking at it, you're not dealing with just the second century. You're dealing with hundreds of years before it. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot of cross-cultural fusion that shows up in the PGM. So it's written in Greek, but there's a lot of cultural ideas from other cultures because the ancient Mediterranean world was a very diverse place. Um, as I was talking about earlier, today we kind of think of these two major cultural traditions in the area of the Mediterranean. Christianity to the north and Islam to the south, but back then neither of those religions existed yet, right? Um, and so there was just a fantastic diversity of local religions all over the Mediterranean basin, local languages, local cultures, local gods, local ways of worship, local ways of doing magic. And so what you get in the PGM is is a lot of that kind of that that material is kind of being brought together into one document. And you can see because they're writing in Greek. And the reason they're writing in Greek is because just like English today, it was the cosmopolitan global language of the day. So if you wanted your message to get out or just to be understood by as many people as possible, you'd write in Greek. Just like today, if you're on the internet, you're going to write in English to to get the widest audience possible. Like we're recording this podcast in English. And obviously, we're native English speakers, but we might be doing it in English anyways, even if we weren't. There's also a level of superiority to Greek, though. Well, the Greeks thought so. To the Greek. Yeah. And they called everyone else barbarians. You're right. The Romans agreed. The Romans agreed. Lucriccius is writing in Latin. He says, "I'm sorry I have to write in Latin. I because it restricts me with what I can explain to you. If I if I could, I'd be doing this in Greek." But, you know, hey, that that's that's true. So, the Romans looked up to the Greeks like a big brother. It was kind of a big brother, little brother relationship is kind of how I describe it, which is interesting because the Romans militarily conquered the Greeks. the re the the way that the Roman Empire expanded is they conquered Greece. They conquered Egypt which was Greek speaking by then as a well not the upper crust like not the regular people but the upper crust was Greekeaking as a result of Alexander the Great's conquest of the whole what we would today call Middle East and over to India right the Romans militarily conquered all that and they had the military power if they'd wanted to to impose Latin they never did that and the reason is that as I was just saying they Greek better they they looked up to the they looked up to the Greeks they looked up to Greek culture they knew that the Greeks had been working on science and medicine and all this stuff for long colonized for expletive sake by the Greeks. I mean there was sure and instead of coming up with their own mythology, they tied in all their own mythology to the existing Greek mythology, right? The anid is basically just a fanfic. The Aniad is basically just a fanfic on Greek mythology, right? Um so they're tying in their own Roman origin story to this pre-existing Greek mythological narrative in the Iliad and the Odyssey going all the way back to Homer. So, so yeah, the Romans 100% look up to the Greeks even though they own them, like they conquered them, right? They're still like, "Wow, this is a really cool language. This is a really cool culture." The Greeks are the first Grimarians grammar, right? It's a Greek word for freak's sake. This tech that they are exploiting this beautiful, beautiful mother Greek is driving all the science, everything. So, you know, it's it's no wonder that the drug using Marcus Aurelius is writing in Greek. Why would he choose Latin? It's inferior. Yeah. He's the Roman emperor, but he's writing and speaking Greek. Wow. Now, I do want to go another step further. You know, there's always a bigger fish, right? So, the Romans looked up to the Greeks because they understood accurately that the Greeks had been doing science and knowledge and and writing for longer than they had. But the Greeks weren't the end of that line. So the Greeks in turn looked up to cultures to the east and south of them because the Greeks understood that other cultures to the east and south of them had been doing things longer than they had. And those cultures are are are several different cultures. The Egyptians are one big group, right? So the Greeks always looked up to the Egyptians. They understood going all the way back to Homer. Um they understood that the the Egyptians were doing drug stuff long before they the Greeks had been doing it and were good at it. They knew they were good. Part of it climate, right? So even even in in in Homer, you know, the the characters talk about how Egypt is a magical drug land essentially. And the reason they think that, not inaccurately, is that Egypt has a warmer climate. Yeah. So you can grow more tropical plants. What's that word I asked you about the other day? Chem Kemet. Oh yeah. Isn't Egypt known as like land of Kemet? That's the older name for Egypt. Yeah. That's the older name. That's the Egyptian name for which means chemicals or or alchemy or something? I'm not sure. Yeah, it does mean dark soil. I think you're right. Which is where you can grow a lot of plants which create drugs. Sure. Yeah. Um the Greeks called Egypt Iuptose and that's where our name Egypt comes from. But that was never their native name. So the Greeks looked up to these cultures to their east and south. Uh Egypt was one of the big ones. Um and and the Greeks accurately understood that Egyptian culture and Egyptian knowledge, whether drug or otherwise, went back a lot further than the Greeks did. So, so the Greeks kind of looked up to the Egyptians as a big brother in the same way that the Romans looked up to the Greeks as a big brother. Um, other cultures of that area of course were the Babylonians, the Sumerianss go way back. Um, the Assyrians were a little bit later, but they're still very old compared to the Greeks. The Phoenetians, um, who who lived on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, basically what's now the country of Lebanon. Yeah. The Phoenicians were were were well known for building boats and sailing all over the Mediterranean. When they did so, they brought, you know, trade goods with them. That's the the reason they were sailing is to try to make a profit mostly. They were trading in dough. They were trading in all sorts of things. All sorts of things. Right. Opium. So, we have the vases. Did you see that? Which one? The little opium vases. I don't think so. Are you talking about the couple on a ship? Whole bunch of little shaped like the op the opium head capsule. Have you seen the University of Tampa a couple maybe a year or two ago? Steve, you can pull it up. They did an analysis of this Egyptian vase. Small little like cup or a mug of the god Bess. Yeah. And they did this analysis and they found all kinds of crazy expletive in it. Like like what was it? Vaginal fluid. Vaginal fluid. Like sick stuff. Blood. They identified vaginal proteins. Find find that article. That was pretty wild. Yeah. Ejaculate cuz we were talking about ejaculate being used and there it is. in this jug that's in Tampa. And that it seems like that had something to do with some sort of magical drug rituals or something like that, right? That's not my Bailey Wick. Here it is right here. Tampa Museum of Art once held psychotropic drugs, human blood, and bodily fluids. Research reveals the object was probably used in rituals by cult worshippers by of the deity Bess, one of the most popular figures in ancient Egyptian pantheon. There it is. Talks about expletive Yeah. Scroll down where it says the where it says the there you go. Look right here. Uh by analyzing proteins and metabolites using genetic techniques and syncroon syn whatever that word is radiation based furer transformed infrared microspectroscopy. A lot of words. The authors found that the mug contained residues of the psychotropic substances. These included peranum harala also known as Harl or Syrian rue nyia noali blue water lily and a plant of the cle genus. They also found evidence of human blood bodily fluid such as oral or vaginal mucus and breast milk. Yeah, fun stuff. Fantastic. The poly pharmacy of using this was University of Tampa right down the street. using the human body as a means of making drugs. Look, there's one right there. That's what they're doing. Well, they were very creative. Yeah. And they didn't have a lot of boundaries. Right. Right. They didn't have the cultural boundaries that we today. No, they didn't. In many cases, now they had boundaries. Every culture has boundaries. The question is what what were their boundaries and how did they differ from ours? Why do you think Jesus offers Mary his seaman in the greater questions of Mary? Uh, I don't know about that text. Can you bring it up? Oh god. Yes. Yeah. Find the slide. The greater questions of marriage. That's not a biblical text. That's not a text. That one was taken out. I don't think it was ever in there in the first place. That was probably written way after the Bible, I think. Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of later mythology about Jesus. And that's one of the method methodological questions. We know that people were were saying and writing things about Jesus that were very diverse, even early Christians. Like some of this stuff came from people who didn't like Jesus and and weren't Christian, but some of this stuff comes from people who were Christian, like who did worship Jesus. Um, but there's a lot of diversity, a ton of diversity. So the question is, you know, what what group do these texts come from and and what kind of historical accuracy would we assign? Find the context for Steve. one before that. This is Ammon's slide, but find like the definitions of the great greater questions of Mary so we can give the audience context of who wrote it, when it was written and all that kind of stuff. It is epipanius. Okay. Okay. Okay. And he is writing about the heresies in Christianity. Do we want the the English or the Greek? Yeah. So the her Google explanation of it. Okay. Good. It's good. Yeah. So, as I was just saying, there was a ton of diversity in early Christianity. Um, and you might think that something like this that sounds off the wall was coming from some someone outside of the faith, but it it might not have been might not have been. Right. From a bishop because there there was no orthodoxy yet. Right. Right. So, like it's being established. Early Christians are arguing with each other about who Jesus was, why he's important, and why we have to eat his semen. Well, that's what apparently some people thought these guys. Yeah. I don't think that was ever orthodox. You don't think that was orthodox, right? You don't think? It was one of the things. One of the many things that somebody said at some point the oites from the beginning were doing it. So was Simon crazy diversity in the book of Jude it says hey stop doing all that sexy sex questions of marriage. Okay early Christian writings Epipanius writes the following about the Gnostics and this is our only source for the contents. Uh they publish certain questions of Mary. So what year was this published Ammon? Uh it wasn't well or written rather. Let's see. Epiphanius is fourth, right? Okay. So fourth century. So 400, right? Confirm my freaking dates. I I think that's right. Yeah. He's right after Julian. Right after Julian died. The fourth century is really important to Christianity because that's exactly when orthodoxy is is being formed. Yeah. Right. Because Constantine converts to Christianity in 313. Yes. And for the first time, there's a there's a topdown power structure where somebody at the top can say, and Constantine did say this, guys, get your act together. What do we believe? Like, what is this religion anyways? Who was Jesus? What what's the official story on him? And so then you get a guy like this who's who's cataloging some of the diverse and maybe unusual stories about Jesus, right? That's the way we can refer to it. Exactly. That's perfect. And remember this is epipen is we're talking about after Julian tried to restore the pag 360s. Yeah. Yeah. This is the hard thing to me about trying to figure out I I I think and I also think that that's kind of like coming at it from the wrong perspective trying to figure out exactly what was going on because you're never going to do that. All you can really do is just sort of read it and then take it for for face value. You can't really because my question was like how many people in antiquity that were writing stuff like this had an axe to grind against someone else. Most of them like how do we know this wasn't the ancient national inquirer? You know what I mean? Something like that. And and yeah, this guy is reporting on this thing that he's calling a heresy. He doesn't agree with it. The guy who's writing this doesn't think that's true, right? No, he's saying he's reporting that there's another he's reporting another No, he's not saying it's not true. He's saying this is what they do. Uh-huh. The people who eat the semen. Uhhuh. Right. This is how they justify it. Jesus said, "Eat my blood and flesh." That blood is his hima. His excrement, his semen. Well, him and semen are two different words, right? Originally, hima No, originally him is what? An essence. It's a bodily essence, right? Well, blood, right? Yeah. Blood. Okay. Not just B. It's not just blood. Now, I mean, let me let me tell you this. This will help you. The ancient Greek physicians, and you know this, thought that semen was a highly concocted form of blood. Whoa. They did. That's what they thought. They thought that highly concocted form of blood. So, what they thought is that your blood go if if you produce your blood goes through your brain and it picks up thought and air bubbles and spiritual essence, which is why it's white, by the way. And that's where it comes from. It's an ess question of essence that you and I can sit and debate about the earliest references to him. Can this be so so but in what what he what the Christian author here is saying is this is what these people sure he's reporting he's he's he's reporting it and and he's orthodox so he doesn't agree with this section I think he is Christian okay he is a Christian yeah and in this section he's talking about ice which is fellatio fellatio and right up here. Watch. He says, "Right, let me just translate." And now Luke is of course here to just to make sure that I don't, you know, pull any wool over anybody's eyes, but not taking us into the back alley. Yeah, I'm not taking you guys into the back alley. Right. He says, "These people aren't ashamed to say that he himself, Jesus, revealed to her this ice cruia, this terrible, shameful act, right? And in the questions of Mary that are called the greater you know because he says there's also in the parentheses he says there's also these lesser questions of Mary right that have been created right he says they assert that he showed her this by taking her up into the hills praying and positioning her the level throwing her down to the level of his groin where you getting from began plea us. Where's that? That means that means side note, right? It right. But it's in the region of the side. Well, it's egg taste. So from the side, which means by his side telling you positionally. We're talking about position. By his side. Okay. So her head's by his side, which is vague. Not necessarily groin. Okay. She's on her expletive knees for some reason. Why? Why? Let's keep Okay, let's keep going and see if maybe as we translate it clears it up, right? And they said that he began to do what to her? To inci the fluids. Once again, often times it means sex and it's sexual, but mnami means to mix the fluids litally. Yeah. And what do we do with the what do we do with the compound form the ka in when you put kata it has a sense of consumption somebody consuming this thing is being consumed and it can also mean wasted positionally down can also be wasted like you used it up in the in positionally within this is prefer us referencing fellatio the act of sex that is that exchange of fluids that lifegiving fluid because what does Jesus say? What is the word that's highlighted there? Ice the shameful act. What does that mean? The shameful fellatio here. Do you agree that means felatio? It does not mean felatio. It literally means so ice gross means shameful as you said correctly. Org means act, work, deed, something like that. Um so ice means some kind of shameful act. Now the question is what kind of shameful act? Now Ammon you're taking a step further and and and putting your own interpretation that no why am I doing which is no no clear that you are doing it. No I'm not you're interpreting it but I'm doing that because of my experience with the Greek because I'm not necessarily what that means because I do you know what an iscro is? We talked about this. Yeah. What is it? Look it up Steve. Look up is ice. It's a person who performs fellatio. Not necessarily. Okay. Is it a person who performs fellatio or not? Not necessarily is not really a good answer. Can it be more than that? Can it be other things? Can it be can it can it be is it possible that is that also somebody who performs fatio as well as other things. Okay, let me let me talk about this a little bit because I think it would help to kind of make an analogy so that we're all sort of on the same page methodologically. All right. So let's say that there's a scholar in 2000 years because I like to do these thought experiments about let's say somebody studying classical English in 2000 years and I think we are living in the era that will someday be called classical English because we're a global language. We've spread to every corner of the world. Everyone's speaking English. There's so much English literature being created. It's diverse though, right? So the English that's spoken in the United States is not the same as the English spoken in Britain or Australia or some some place like India, right? It was colonized by the by the British. So, let's say that there's a scholar in the future who who who notices that that there's this particular word in 21st century American English. Uh, and I don't know if you're going to have to bleep this or not, but I'm just, you know, making making a scholarly point here. That is the word dick. Okay. All right. And and those of us who who live in and speak 21st century English, we understand that this word today primarily refers to male genitalia. Right. Or it could be someone being an expletive Exactly. Okay. So this one word it it it it refers to male genitalia, but then we can use it colloquially to say like stop being a dick, right? And and and when I say that, I'm not I'm not literally saying that you were male genitalia, right? I'm I'm making a a reference, right? And we understand that. Okay. Now, there's also another use of this word that's older. And so from my understanding, this use of the word dick as as male genitalia is pretty recent actually. Is this idioms? Is this kind of like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, every language has idioms and semantic references, right? So, this this use of the word that we kind of take for granted in English today is pretty recent. Up until fairly recently, Dick was used as as a as a as a name for Richard, right? As we all know. As we all know, right? So, we had a president named Dick Nixon. We just had a vice president who just died named Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney, right? And there's lots of other dicks in the world who are just guys named Richard, right? Okay. So, we understand because we speak English that there there are multiple meanings of the word dick and they don't all mean male genitalia. Right. Right. So, we understand that Dick Nixon was not calling himself that because he was making trying trying to say he's the the penis guy. Right. He's not. He's not. It's a totally different thing and it actually predates our meaning of the word dick. Now, let's say that there's a scholar of classical English at some university in 2000 years who who who correctly notices that this word dick in 21st century classical English as I'm calling it oftentimes occurs in in in in dirty contexts. Okay? It it refers to male genitalia. And then he has a hundred a thousand a million different examples of that, right? And so he hits you over the head and says, "Look, this this word clearly means male genitalia." And he's right that often times it does mean male genitalia. But then let's say he he takes a leap and he says, "Well, you know what this means about Dick Nixon, right? That means that Dick Nixon was calling himself that because he was a child molester. Like he just was obsessed with male genitalia." And I mean like why else would he use that as his first name? Like like how dirty would he have to be to use the dick as his first name, right? And so this this this person 2,000 years down the road has this theory that that Dick Nixon was was I don't know maybe he was gay. Maybe he who knows like come up with some theory like that. Now those of us who speak English today know that that makes no sense and isn't true at all. Right. Right. Because we know that there are different contexts in which this word can exist and it has different meanings in different context and that's methodologically sound is we have to pay attention to the text. So I want to I want to consistently come back to this. No, no. Because what I'm calling this is pulling a dick Nixon. So from now on when I say pulling a Dick Nixon, and I think I'm going to have to say it multiple times, what I'm referring to is pointing out a word that could be dirty or could mean a certain thing. Yes. But then but it might not. It might mean something else. It could mean facelio here, right? Is it possible it means felatio in that context? Okay. So since it means dirty deeds, euphemism for I see it. I see it. Oh, by the way, can we bring that up? So this is actually methodologically. Yeah. So this was from your short. You sent this to me a few weeks ago, but since you brought it up, let's bring up now, Steve. LSJ. Yeah. LSJS. Okay. Uh it was ice, right? Yeah. No, no, no. Um Ice Crotes. Why? Ice. Okay. Yeah. Okay. LSJ. Honestly, can we can we bring up Can we take Let's take I got to take a leak. So you look it up. I'm going to go pee. Steve, are you ready? Go to the definition. Let's go to the definition. All right. We are back and Steve just pulled up the definition of what's this word again? This is icecrotes and all of this is using the beautiful glorious Greek root alpha yoda sigma he right that row is hanging on there can come off or not but the ice is that which is just awful ugly deformed out look it's in his hand the ice so you see the mainia ice is the working of this shameful thing committing committing ice. Right. Exactly. It's filthy conduct deformity. You notice it's a euphemism for fellatio, right? But why is it So, I'm curious. Why is it fil so they're associating filthy conduct with fellatio? Yeah, cuz these are Victorians, right? Okay. So, this is something now. Now, for for the listeners, the three of us have had a had a text discussion or a text thread for the past few months. Um, yes, Ammon sent this to the thread a few weeks ago and I pointed out at the time that that semicolon is very important. Right after Ephesians 5:4, there is a semicolon. Ammon, what does that semicolon mean to you? You surprised. What does it mean to you? You surprised me as a Greek reader. It means nothing to me. Well, that's a problem. It means something very important. means it's an and as an English reader and it's a euphemism separating as you see from the scolast sorry Aristoph frogs frogs 1308 we agree with that and then they refer to you the general term is right which is which tites is going to talk about right in his com is Byzantine what to you what does that colon mean it's separating two different things that are that are pretty different here. Okay. So, specifically, it's separating two places in which that this word ice grotes has been used by two different authors at two different times and places. Before the semicolon, what we see is filthy conduct. Epistle to the Ephesians think this is particularly controversial. Uh the author of Ephesians is simply saying don't engage in ice grotes, right? He doesn't define it. I think on I think I I because I think he's being vague. Yeah. I don't think he's spec I I don't think he necessarily has one particular dirty thing in mind when he says that it could be sexual. Okay. So I think I think when he has dirty things in mind in Ephesians sexual stuff is part of it. All right. But he's not narrowing down the sexual stuff. Do you agree with that? He doesn't just mean one particular sexual thing. No, he does because I don't think he calls it a do latria. It is the act itself of engaging in these dirty dirty mysteries where they are eating come. Let me go back to the semicolon. All right. Okay. So then the next use of this is is centuries later. I'm actually not sure what century the the scolius to to to Aristophanes frogs is. I want to say like 11th or 12th century. It's over a thousand years after Aristophanes or sorry thousand years after the author of Ephesians. It's Byzantine, right? So, so hundreds maybe over a thousand years later, a scholast, and let me let me tell everyone a skull is and I both know a scolist is somebody who who is a commentator on a on an older work. Okay? It's like for instance, today you can buy a Shakespeare annotated volume because sometimes we don't know what Shakespeare means because it's been 400 years, right? And so somebody will say put notes in and say this is what Shakespeare meant when he said this or whatever. Okay, that's what Escolius is doing. He's a later writer who is a commentator on an earlier work. Usually grimarians. Grimarians. All sorts of nerdy people as you can imagine are scol right. Yeah. Linguists. Ancient linguist. Oh yeah. Yeah. Sure. So this is a a much a much later commentator on this classical Greek play. So Aristophanes you know fifth century late fifth century early fourth century BC. Okay. So there is the the use of this word is icecrotes in this play by Aristophanes. In the play by Aristophanes it the author doesn't explain what he means by ice. Um but this later commentator from from literally literally a millennium and a half after wrote this. He says I think it means fellatio. Okay. So that doesn't mean he's wrong but that doesn't mean he's right. That's his that's that's the opinion of someone from a millennium and a half later. That's important to know that that some some later rand literally random dude who never was part of that culture at all speaks and reads Greek but from a much later much later period. That's what he thinks. That's his opinion. I think you're under I think Luke you're under emphasizing. What do you disagree with about what is the Scolas are so separated from these traditions? They're grimarans. John Seeds, the guy on the end there. He's a Byzantine guy. And he is right up there in preserving. I mean, he preserves stuff that we don't even have. He talks about in the Odyssey what's going on when Cersei goes back to visit Homer and you're like, "What? We didn't know that tradition was there? How the hell? Huh? It's the first time we see it." He preserves that from things he's read himself. That's sometimes true. That could be true. like he has a commentary that guy who's there talking about the ice croune which is the older form that they would have been using he is saying oh this source is telling us x y and z and we don't have any other record of that he's he's he's the one who's saying look this is euphemistically right he's saying it's a euphemism for a fellatio. now I'm, I'm not, to be clear, I'm not saying he's definitely wrong because he's writing 1500 years later and I 100% agree that these scholasts are are in a tradition where they are very well read. They're not dummies. Just like if you if you hire someone to write a commentary on Shakespeare, hopefully they've read all of Shakespeare and everything else from the period to even know what they're talking about, right? Um so the I am not trying to discount that these scolas don't know anything. Otherwise, we wouldn't cite them in in a dictionary. However, we have to cite them with a with a pretty large grain of salt. So we can't just say that's definitely right because this is 1500 years later that somebody is coming along and saying I Mr. Scolas from the Byzantine period think that the use of this word in Aristophanes play the frogs means fellatio. Right? That's its opinion. It's a learned opinion. Okay? I'm not saying he's wrong. I'm just saying we do have to take it with a grain of salt. We can't say that's definitely Yeah. So, also I want to make this point. He's only talking about the use of the word in Aristophanes frogs. He's not talking about it anywhere else. Okay? He's not talking about the use of the word in Ephesians. He had no comment about the use of the word in Ephesians. He's not talking about the use of the word in what we were discussing before. The Victorians who were putting them next to each other and putting the semicolon. No, the semicolon is Bible. No, no, no, no, it's not. No, it's not. The reason that the semicolon is there, it's very simple. It's it's it's dividing two different times that this word was used. You agreed it was used in Ephesians. It was used in the frogs, right? Two different times. And that's all that's all I would say the same. I would say it's use the same semicolon is an and you can have that opinion but it's just your opinion right and I might have a different opinion you might have a different opinion we can both argue for it correct and it's good that's what university is for yes we argue for our particular you think could you think the leaders of the museum didn't fight with each other and all the fought all the time and they stormed off and they started new museums of course they did exactly now can we have the texts now I'm just trying to start a new religion here today that's all I'm here for to finish the text I want to go back to yeah we we were debating actually what led us to this is what the word ice means and so so what ammon has done is he's he's pointed out that hundreds and hundreds of years later one guy had an opinion that this meant felatio in a different text not even here he said not even in this text in this text this was in an Aristophan play Aristophanes play which is not what we're dealing with here so so this is where methodology comes into play on the no pun intended on the one hand ammon is doing linguistic work here which is important and valuable because he's saying look here's another time where somebody said that this word used in a different place but still the same language even if it's 1500 years apart or whatever means this particular thing. However, it doesn't remotely prove in any way that that's what it means here. Are we pulling a Dick Nixon by saying that this means fellatio? Okay. And it's up to you. You're the one who has to kind of build your case. Answer that by just translating. I don't want to have any ideas about I just want to translate it. Right. So what does it then say after he did entered into this act this sexual act with her? What really happened? Dayan is really emphasizing that he took the metal the oppoan. He took the offunnings. Right. Well, what is that? His own his own offunnings. His affluesence. His affluesence. Right. That Yeah, I'm sure it's vague though, right? It could be except we know also also contextually though he's been talking about semen eaters. So right context matters but then you got to build formataphages right he's been talking about it so it's a little bit of a cheat but he's been talking about it already who has the author of this epipanius who's writing it and he says he he showed her that we do this in order that we live right how are we how are we going to live if we don't do this and then it says look and it says Mary takes safe. She was taken a back and falls down deeply troubled. That's what Char faces. She's not happy about this. Yeah. No. Yeah. She's Yeah. She's like, "What?" It's like she's stunned from like what the hell? She falls all the way ki to the ground. And he picks her up and he he says to her, "Why? Why are you so freaking unfaithful, you faithless bitch?" Right. Algo peace. the Ammon translation, right? I added the expletive part, right? I added the expletive part. Now, tell me something. Where is the Where is the offunnings? Where what is he doing? He's making her eat something like the offites that Epiphanes has already talked about who are eating the semen. He It goes on, this passage goes on to explain what the people who were eating the semen believed about why he was doing this. Okay? and they use a half a dozen verses from the New Testament. So they're quoting when Jesus says X, he means this. When Jesus said, "Eat my flesh and blood," this is the offering. When he said, "I'm going somewhere and I'm going to return from the origin." The origin is his semen. Is that your interpretation somewhere? I'm ascending to the place. It was his semen. That's what they how they explain it. There's all sorts. There's a half a dozen justifications. This is how Epanius explains it. Yeah. Of why these people were doing what they did and it's through Epanius's. So, do you believe that this is Epanius's theory on what was happening in the Bible or what? He's quoting He's quoting somebody that he calls a heresy that believes this. Oh, I see. Epanius is talking about people who are doing this saying this is not good right this is one of the heresies and in this one they justify the eating this ice cia they justify it by saying Jesus specifically showed Mary how to do this and said look we have to do this to live and they go on to quote which is to me most important they're going on to quote Jesus when he is saying things like eat my flesh and right here. It's what he means. Yeah, it's following it. Following below where I Okay. What is your take on Okay. I I think context as we've been talking about and I'm going to both agree on this. Context is paramount. Right. So, this is from a late document but for for Christian historical standards, right? 400 400. So, this is 400 years after, you know, 300 plus years after Jesus, right? So, and it's from a guy who is who is trying to catalog all the weird things that people think about Jesus, but but this guy doesn't think they're true. Not that we would necessarily care what this guy thinks either way. But it's I don't think he thinks it's true. Even if he did think it's true, doesn't make it true, right? Lot lots of people are wrong about a lot of things. Except for that Dayan. Except for Dayan, which is it's like he's saying, "Hey, what is you literally you have to snap your mind out of it and realize now that really what I'm telling you is, okay, wait. So you think so you think this that Epipanius secretly thinks this is true and he's trying to like No, no, no. He's telling his reader, you know, don't be shocked here. This is really the way they're doing. Okay. So yeah, what I want to do is back up here and and and and ask ourselves why this matters. Okay. Uh to Jesus, right? So, so we're we're trying to get back to Jesus here as historical scholars like not not doing biblical theology of like what Jesus means from a theological perspective, but but we're trying to understand as historians because classists are historians, right? So, who was this guy Jesus who walked the earth, right? And and most of us really, you know, there's a minority mostly on the internet that thinks that Jesus is made up and and there never really was a guy named Jesus. But almost everybody in the academy that I've ever met would say that there really was a historical Jesus who did walk the Ammon. You think there there was a historical Jesus who walked the earth. Uh I read texts that talk about him all the time. That's my only I don't all of the all of the academic debate, all the myth, you know, is this person a myth? Does this per does it expletive matter? The Greek is what matters. That's what our of course it matters. Of course it matters because they wrote a lot of madeup stuff. Okay. About everything not just about Jesus, about Zeus, about I mean, you know, so just because something is written in a historical text and and we we do want to be responsible linguists and philologians and and try to dive down into the text, which is what we've been talking about here, right? And and try to get a good idea of what it means. The next question to ask is so what? So like, okay, maybe we we're trying to see what this text means. Does this word specifically mean this or something else? Those are wonderful debates to have, but then the next step is, you know, like did Jesus really exist? Okay. And it sounds like you're you're kind of not taking a position on that, which is fine. I mean, no, I don't take any positions. This text says Jesus was making Mary blow him and he tried to make the apostles do the same thing after this and they didn't. And it says they didn't follow him after that point. Okay. So, so do you believe that really happened? I don't have to believe anything. That's a text I'm talking about. No, no, no. Okay, we're we're having a disconnect here. This is science. It's not. This is science. No, it's a text. I don't have to believe science is a text. I don't have to believe in chlorine. I know chlorine text lie. I don't know if you know this is sometimes texts lie. Actually, usually text lie. Yeah. No, you can be that guy could be lying out his butt. Epic church bishop. He can be lying out his back. Plato's the biggest expletive liar on the planet. He's quoting people. So he's not a liar is the biggest liar on the planet. Oh, sure. Plato admits to it right up front. So no, that's a part of the text, but I'm still going to tell you what Plato Sure. I 100% agree with that, but then I don't agree that that it's not worthwhile or that we can just wave our hands and say, "Well, so what?" Like, "Did this really happen?" And and what you're saying right now is that that that you don't believe this happened. You don't necessarily believe this happened or it doesn't matter to you because you're more text based, which I I respect text based. It matters that somebody somebody wrote this down and that's our evidence. So let me let me tell you how I see this. Again, it's a 4th century text from a from a Christian guy who is trying to explain what some what he calls heretical Christians believe. Okay, this is not coming from outside the church. This is coming from inside the church. And and he's saying these are some Christians with what we would today kindly call diverse beliefs, but that that sounds too positive for what he's trying to do here, I think. Um he's saying these are weirdos. Yeah, these are heretics. These are people who who don't know who Jesus is, but they think they know who Jesus is. And they tell stories, okay? They tell stories about Jesus doing some weird stuff with Mary. All right? That that most other Christians, including this guy, are not going to believe. And and so so you know, we can kind of back away from that. Now, this is where biblical theologians would say, "Well, we know what Jesus did and he did this and he didn't do that." But as a historian, I'm actually still interested, not from a biblical theologian perspective, but I'm still interested in trying to get back to the historical Jesus. Like, and I do believe there was really a historical Jesus who really did walk the earth, and we could talk more about him. So, so that's the question that remains. So, you know, on on on on your YouTube channel, you bring up texts like this, but then I think you kind you you leave the question hanging as to like whether this is true or not. Yeah. Because I'm not I'm only there to present evidence. the court. Let the viewer figure out whether or not they think it's true. Okay. When I'm a pure pure classicist, I only want the philology. That's all I want. Classicists are also interested in what really happened. Yeah. Are we? We are. But the the actual surgery like a surgeon sure the surgeon has morals to them. What matters is that surgery, that technique. You know, it's an art and you have to do it right. And that's all I'm saying. When when you go to the Bible and you see terms that are related and you see episodes that are related and Paul's saying throughout your book, your magic books and in Jude he's saying don't do this stuff, this idolatry that involves the pharmarmacaya. Don't do it. That's sexual stuff. Don't Paul's like stop expletive your family members, right? And in stepmother. Yeah. Alexandria. In Alexandria, what are what are they persecuting Christians for? Incest, right? They go to their ceremonies, they put out the lights, everybody disroes, and they screw. Why? Because these fluids are life. They're life. This is the salvation, right? This is what Epipanius is trying to say, hey, this is uh, you know, within Christianity. It's this this is a movement. And just like Jude said, don't do this stuff. Okay. So, so yeah, in First Corinthians, which is a very early letter, everyone agrees. Paul wrote it in the 50s probably. It's one of our earliest Christian documents because it's earlier than the gospels. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Paul has to call out some of the the people in the Christian community at Corenth. One of them is sleeping with his stepmother, and he says, "Don't do that." Like, what what are you sleeping with your stepmom for, bro? Um that's that's my translation. Um, which the Romans hated. Incest to the Romans was like, "No, God." That's not technically incest. Don't don't be doing this. There were there were people in the Christian community that there was actually, and this actually goes to show the the the crazy diversity within the very early Christian community. Um, some Christians were were at were at opposite ends of the spectrum as far as their attitudes towards sex. So, some Christians heard Paul's message of a resurrection and that we're going to get new bodies. Okay, that's that's one of Paul's central messages it seems like that we can reconstruct from his letters. He's going around telling people Jesus is coming back soon and and we're going to have our bodies transformed. He says this in 1 Corinthians 15. And so some Christians, like apparently some of them at Corenth took this to mean that we can do whatever we want with our bodies because we're getting new ones anyway, so who cares? That seems to have been their attitude. And so some of those Christians, this is not people outside the church, but some of those Christians were sleeping with their stepmother. They were sleeping with prostitutes. They were doing whatever they wanted sexually, right? Because because they actually internalized Paul's message in a in a in a way that he didn't necessarily intend. And the we the way we know that he didn't intend it that way is because then he wrote the letter of first Corinthians to tell them not to do that. Oh. among other things like in in first Corinthians. It's a fascinating piece of literature from from the mid- 1st century BC that offers a pretty important window into into early Christian thinking at least from Paul. Now again, we always have to remember there's diversity. And that's one of the things I'm trying to hammer home with this text, right? Is that just because we have one Christian text that says some Christians were doing it this way doesn't mean that anyone else was necessarily, right? So we we can't we can't we have to be careful with methodological slippage. Yes. which means we can't just wave at a text and say, "Oh, yeah, that's that proves everything." It doesn't necessarily prove much at all. Okay, back to Paul. Back to Paul. So, he he's writing specifically to this one community, these Christians at Corinth that he had just recently converted from paganism, the recent converts from paganism to the Jesus movement and and paganism. Explain what paganism is. Yeah. So, I'm I'm using this loosely and of course that's a later term as probably knows, polytheism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so they were worshiping the Greco Roman god. So paganism comes from a from a Latin word that means rural. So so it comes from a later period when Christians had taken over the cities ideologically speaking, not militarily but ideologically speaking. But then there were still people out in the countryside doing things in the conservative way as as is the case today oftentimes in places like the United States. Um cities are what is deemed more quote unquote progressive and rural areas are more likely to be conservative. It's honestly kind of always been that way. It's derogatory. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like hillbilly. It was derogatory because it was used. It was used by Christians to refer to Yeah. hillbilly. Pagan means hillbilly, you know, rural rural bumpkin or something like that. Obviously, I'm not using it in a derogatory sense. Polytheism is fine though. So, he So, so Paul had just converted some a handful, we don't know how many, hundred, not that many people in the Greek bustling metropolis of Corinth to the Jesus movement. He rolled into town, told them the message of Jesus as he saw it, and then converted this handful of people, and then he left because he want he had to go to the next city and make more converts. That's that that was his whole career going from city to city trying to make converts and and he he felt the urgency that Jesus was coming back soon. Getting thrown in jail a lot. Getting thrown in jail a lot. He gets thrown in jail. What did he do to the Paththeia? Oh my god, that whole city was mad. Yeah. Well, the time that he cast the cast the the demon according to Acts cast a demon out of He kept saying you're a you're doing the Christos thing. So, yeah, we'll get there, I'm sure. I assume. Okay. So, uh, so, so Paul Paul writes to this community at Corenth and he says, "Yeah, so you you guys need to not be sleeping with your stepmother. Just because I said you're getting new bodies doesn't mean it doesn't matter what you do in this body." Now, there were there were Christians on the other end of the spectrum who apparently thought that you should never have sex with anyone ever, even your own spouse. And Paul never. And and there was a monastic movement. It wasn't called that yet, but there was there was a a that's what creates those sicko priests. There was a self there was a strain of self-control already within Greek philosophy that Aman probably knows about where where Greek philosophers were already saying maybe you should control yourself and like focus on higher spiritual realities, meditate, maybe sex isn't the best way to to use your your finite earthly existence. So So Christians didn't make this up. Uh Jews didn't make this up. This is Greek philosophers were always saying this. they weren't always living it, but they were saying they were saying it a lot of times. And so Paul also disagrees with them. So he also thinks sex has a time and place. You should never have sex. And that's basically that's the middle ground that that Paul is trying to drive in in in the letter of first Corinthians. Um and that's where this stuff comes up essentially. So again, why do you think he didn't suffer the ill effects of being bitten by a poisonous viper when he got shipwrecked and all the locals were like, "Oh god, that dude's going to die. Watch him." That's that's an interpretive question. So we have the story in Acts 27 or into Acts 28 where where he he has a shipwreck. He's being taken to Rome to stand trial before the emperor. And so they're they put him on a ship, load him from the Eastern Mediterranean, sail him all the way to Rome. They have a shipwreck on Malta, which is an island in the Mediterranean to the south of of Italy. You know, he's not supposed to be there, but the locals kind of take him and the other shipwreck victims in. Um, and then they're sitting around a a fire. It's winter apparently. And and this this snake comes out of the fire and latches onto his hand and and all the locals look at him like he's going to die because he just got bit by this viper. And apparently Paul, right, Paul? Yeah. It's apparently it's a poisonous one. and he like just looks and like shakes it off into the fire like nothing happened and keeps going on with his preaching and all the all the natives just look at him, stare at him, wait for him to die. He doesn't die. It's like nothing happened. And then they start worship him as a god and then he has to be like, "No guys, I'm not God. I'm just God's representative." And so the the the text, and again, this is an interpretive question, right? We, as we were just saying, we have the text. That's what the text says. The text doesn't give us an explicit explanation for why Paul doesn't die. except that I think I think that you know the author of the text which is probably Luke wants wants us to believe that God is protecting him right that doesn't mean that you can't come along like Ammon I think and say he's got some kind of concoction of of of of antivenenom in his body or something we have other contemporary texts like phuminus who were talking about hey this is the the act that is used you can counter the viper with this and that but you have to Christ it has to Christed. Um those texts are additional evidence that there's something going on there with Paul's viper bite. Um I don't have to believe in miracles because I have the reason of the word. And that word clearly is reflecting a real scientific anthropological reality that Paul is walking around with viper venom which is not typical which is not atypical. Excuse me. Is not atypical. So you think he's like the guy in the princess bride. So, he's using he's using his knowledge of of Galen's Theak, which allegedly Galen was using as like a performance-enhancing drug to keep himself safe from being poisoned by venoms, by snake venoms. And he's connecting that to this biblical writing of Paul getting bit by all of that is written in Galen in a work on the deiso. Okay? And he talks about the the Marcus Aurelius is on with its compound drugs. The concept of using antidotes through the viper for venom specifically traces in the bak text as well. It's the same all these priests like mander that's what they're talking about. They're talking about the use of these venoms and toxins in order to induce that openeyed spiritual experience. Vision, it is a process that is biochemical. And I as an investigator of the Greek, it looks to me like Paul is on that list. And that's why the Pythia calls him out for it. She knows that he's got to be Christing. She knows what Christing is. All right, we're going to get into the Christing stuff. I want to make sure we stay on track, though. Um, and not make this thing go all over the place. I want to keep it kind of like segmented. So, um, does that make sense to you how he's connecting this theak, the idea of these, uh, first of all, I'm sure you know about or are you familiar with Galen's Theak and and um, Nero's physician do talking about this Marcus Aurelius? Yeah. also Nero's physician talked about the the right um a concoction of like seven different viper venoms, viper flesh and all kinds of stuff that allegedly Marcus Areas was using and drinking daily. It had opium in it as well to keep himself safe from people who were trying to kill him with poisons. I have little doubt that there were people doing drugs. Yeah, regardless of what your adviser said. Well, this wasn't this wasn't necessarily like a like a drug to get you high. This was more this was more concoction. That's fine. That's fine. Um again, I think Ammon and I both agree we want to be faithful to the texts and be careful with the texts, right? So So Galen is writing quite a bit later. Nero is obviously closer to Paul's time, much closer to Paul's time. So weed under Nero, isn't he? Yeah. At least traditionally, right? Um it's actually our sources aren't great for that. Paul was executed under Nero. Yeah. traditionally like that our sources are not not great for that but that that was the early rumor very early rumor it's definitely not a later creation by any stretch it's not in the Bible so so my my perspective on this is that we can hypothesize I think it's interesting to hypothesize I don't see any evidence in the Bible for that I don't see any evidence in the biblical text of Acts where this this you know viper bites Paul that makes me think he's definitely on some kind of concoction sure I get I get that. Like it's not in there, right? But it doesn't say he's not. But do you think it's reasonable how he's making the connection from Galen's Theak to Paul not dying from being bit by a viper? I think he could write an article on it. Is that too much of a stretch? Talk about it. I I think I think he could write an article on it anymore. I'm done with it. It'd be fun. It'd be fun because I the the community can decide if it's too much of a stretch. Now, the community is wrong sometimes. Yes. Right. I think we can all agree on that. Yes. Um sometimes the community is too conservative. I don't mean that politically. I mean like they they just cling to older ideas, right? Um I don't know. I'm not a drug expert, honestly. Like like you know, I haven't read Galen, so I can't really comment. I mean, I've read parts of Galen. I haven't read my respect that he hasn't read Galen. He doesn't know. Yeah. As we were talking about earlier, I'm here to call balls and strikes and and most of what we talked about has been been within my area of expertise. I have no problem saying, "You've read more Gayen than me." Yeah. Okay. Now I'm interested. Maybe like you send me these sources and I'll take a look at them and then we can do this thing with them. You know a good connection is your wine too. You didn't know he wrote about wine and I know a lot more about wine than any other drugs. It's connected because Dascortis and others physicians write about the use of wine is a base for the drugs man. A lot of times they put drugs in the wine. All sorts of wines that are drug. This is like the Elucidian Mysteries, right? Was This is not anything to do with cult. This is just people enjoying drugged wines. Oh wow. Yeah. It's for health. Yes. It's for health purposes there. And they're all Oh, god. The descriptions of them are lengthy and the stuff, the amount of ingredients they're putting in. Oh, it's fantastic. And there's always a medical connection. It's always like, oh, this one cures your dropsy, right? you your inflammation will be reduced with this wine which has these three herbs that are addic herbs from so and so. Fantastic. But you did wine. You did you history of wine. And of course wine was the most common drug in antiquity. Yeah. Like everybody drank it even kids really. Although we do have to understand that that the Greeks specifically mixed wine quite heavily with water. Um so so they their their traditional concoction of wine was two parts water to one part wine. In other words, it was only one/3 wine and it was 2/3 water that they were drinking. What this did, and of course we know this now, they didn't know this, is that it killed the bacteria or at least a lot of the bacteria in the water. They had very dirty waterine. The wine did by mixing the water and the wine. Wow. And so they they just realized getting plagued and just being drunk all the time. They they Well, they didn't want to do that either, though. So they realized with trial and error that if you if you mixed one/3 part wine with 2/3 part water, you wouldn't get you were healthier. Oh, really? You were healthier because the it would kill a lot of the bacteria in the water where if you just drank straight water, you'd get sick all the time because their water sources were terrible. Wow. But when you drank this water mixed with wine, you wouldn't get sick near as much. But you also wouldn't get drunk unless you drank a lot because if you if it's two parts water to one part wine, it's going to take quite a bit for you to even get buzzed, right? Which is why they would give it to kids. So, it was a health drink for everybody of any age. and opium. They gave a expletive ton of opium to kids and ear raes, toothaches. The his recommendation is always opium diarrhea opium. I have nothing. Diarrhea, opium. Yeah, it's way way overprescribed. Way way overused. It's like common. Very common. Okay. Before we get into the Christing stuff, I want to talk about the idea that Ammon brings forward about the Septuagent. And Ammon believes the Septuagent was originally written in Greek and then translated into Hebrew. And he's the only person with a pulse on the in the cosmos that believes this to be truth. And other people I've had on here, experts I've asked the same thing. And they all say that that the Greek in the Septuagent was I one guy, Gad Bar, said it was Jewish Greek. Um some people say it's coin Greek. It is Jewish. Yeah, it's Jewish. It's Wait, wait. Are you going to say it's Jewish Greek? Why don't you make your case and then I'll make your case. Make your case. Lay it out for folks who aren't familiar with this. The people that may not even know what the Septuagent is. Sure. So, I'm not actually the first person to say this, nor am I the only person. Um, there was a Jewish scholar, Yehuda, Dr. Yehuda, who wrote a book called Hebrew is Greek. And in it he takes the or he takes the triliteral roots that you find in the Hebrew and then he shows you the Greek from which that term was derived. So and he shows you through the use of colloquialisms you euphemisms that the Hebrew is actually being constructed around the Greek. and he's he wrote his book Hebrew is Greek in the 80s I think it was 70s 80s something like that and of course you can imagine it did a dive because if if that's the case everything that we know about biblical scholarship is wrong completely wrong there is a rabbi who came forward do you have oh there it is do you have and there he's talking about the Spartans and the Greek that the Jews are actually from Sparta and and Cree. Anyway, can you Steve, did you get the video clip, the short clip that I sent you last night? Yeah. Yeah, I got it. Yeah. This is Rabbi Right. Tia, right? Let's see here what he says. I'll be quiet. Okay. The key is that Christians are appealing to a Septuagent, a Greek translation. A translation can never be superior to the original. This in any western court, the law of best evidence states that an original document in its original language is always superior to any translation. So this is a a specious argument. But he he is exactly right. A translation cannot be superior. To be clear, he is saying the Septuagent is a translation, right? He's saying the Septu translation, right? So it the the Septuagent should be a step down from the Hebrew original because in the translation process, you lose information. You never gain information. You never get a more technical document from a translation because because the translation is not adding. You can always add stuff anytime you translate anything. Well, you can, but you're you're not translating. You're you're then a lot of the Septuagent is an embellishment of the original Hebrew. You're embellishing. Yeah. So, what I'm saying is exactly what you're saying doesn't happen does happen with the subuition. Okay. Go on. So, his his premise is the superior form is the original. Who decides superior form? Who? I'll show you right now. Let's look at an actual text. Hit it, Steve, with the Greek text there. This is from Genesis 1:2. This is from Genesis 1:2. The one with the Yep, there you go. The whole verse is in the middle. And the earth was a ors and a sktos. The earth was King Jamesy without form and void. Kaisotos in the darkness was upon the deep they'll say the abyss and the spirit of God hovered there over the waters. Now look at the two words that the earth is in the beginning. The earth was aorotos in Greek and aatastos. If you look up those words just because you want to know what they are. Next slide, Steve. If you look them up, you're going to see right here we go. Look at the just tell me really quick. Akatusto not properly prepared and after that you they give a reference to a pharmarmacon right this word is used for synthetic drugs right these are unworked principles look at kastos below it that's without the alpha primitive on the front so the alpha primitive just negativizes the word so what is something that is kastos it's artificial ial. It's created or artificial. Okay. So, the earth is not prepared, not created, not yet synthesized. Look at the bottom. Aortos. What else is the earth? It's unseen or invisible. I want you to drop down to the second line and look at tooraton. What is it when you take the substantive of this adjective? It's an unseen world. And right after that, you get exuranu. Do you understand me? This is a part of Greek physics that you're looking at this word aoratos. Gia and uranos are part of it. Are you ready? Give me the next one. Wait, let me finish. Give me the next after that. Here's the verb because everything comes from the verb. What does the Hebrew version Okay, let's see. Is this superior or inferior? Look at the Hebrew version. An empty place. This is to for a does this does the Was the translator on dope? If this went from Hebrew and this means an emptiness it how did it get to aor? You couldn't have. Somebody's on dope or Hebrew is less sophisticated clearly. Look at the next word for a skastos. Boho. Are you kidding? They just took toe and made it into a bow. And what do they got here again? Emptiness. This Hebrew is not original. It is being constructed from the Greek. It is a terrible, terrible attempt to make a native translation out of a language that is so far sophisticated. Greek has 1.5 million word forms. Hebrew has 7,000 unique words. it can't compete. Okay, I'll stop there. You respond now. Okay, thank you. So again, let's let's examine our priors here. In other words, what are we sort of assuming? You're assuming as as you go through this. Number one, that you can make a judgment as to which language is more superior, which is very debatable. But let's let's just say for the sake of argument that you're right that somehow Greek is more superior than Hebrew, which no linguist would technically superior, that it's more advanced, that it's more descriptive, has a bigger vocabulary. Greek has the philosoph the philosophical tra tradition by this point, right? And so the the translator who who must be fluent in both Hebrew and Greek to do this translation is probably a Jewish person who knows Greek because nothing else really makes sense. And this is a person probably in Alexandria, which is a center of Greek philosophical learning, right? And this Jewish guy who knows Greek and maybe Greek is even his native language. Of course it is because because he's in a Jewish colonial context just like a Jew in the United States today would have English as their native language. Doesn't make them any less Jewish. Doesn't mean that they haven't been to synagogue and learn 100%. I get it. Um so this this guy is familiar with the Greek philosophical tradition. And so when he's translating these words he is embellishing them. He's absolutely embellishing them. He's taking the Hebrew and by the way to wabohu we don't even know to this day exactly what this means. Okay? Like there there have been so many books written on just these few words and it's it's unclear. Okay. Outside of the Septu outside of the Torah. Yeah. How much Hebrew literature from the 3rd century uses this word bohu or tou and bohu. How very rare. Yeah. Because there's no Hebrew literature outside of course there is the the Old Testament. Is there? Of course there is. Yeah. So okay. what Hebrew literature is there outside of let's say that your theory is right that that the Greeks or Jewish you know Greek speaking Jews or whatever in Alexandria which is probably where this is being written the the Septuagent are are inventing this language you think they're inventing it in Alexandria in the 3rd 2nd century BC definitely okay so if that were true there should be no Hebrew before that there should be no literature at all there should be nothing it you have a problem because there is Hebrew before What is the Hebrew? The archaeological evidence. We have a lot of archaeological evidence. Scribblings. No, it's not. It's okay. You have no work. You have no it's it. You go to and look at they talk about the amulets. You go and look at these things. It looks like it could be an olive. It it must be it must be Hebrew or no, it's protoheebrew. You have no works. Like Danny just said, you have no works in Hebrew. Let's see what here. Let's hear what he has to say about it. We have the priestly blessing which is in the book of Numbers. attested from an archaeological dig dated to the 7th century BC. Ammon, yeah, you have that's 500 years before the Septuition. You have that Hebrew textb that Hebrew radically predates. You have the text. You can go look it up. It was an archaeological numbers on a It was an archaeological date written on the entire book of numbers. No, I said I said three verses. The priestly blessing in Numbers. Look up Look up KF. That's fantastic. KF. K E T E F H I N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N N O O M. Two words. Yeah. Yeah. Uh space KF space. H I Yeah, it is. KF girls. Yeah. Yeah. Go to all. This is the silver. It's written on silver. Oh wow. And it's written in Paleo Hebrew. There it is. Priestly blessing from number six. I think it's in Paleo Hebrew. Paleo. Two tiny. Well, I mean it's a theory because it's true. No. No. What is Paleo Hebrew? Explain to the people what Paleo Hebrew is. What are your documents that are in Paleo? Right here. Here's one of them. Three lines from a silver oneous from a silver plate. One of thousands. Okay. So, there is PaleoHebrew. Everyone agrees that Paleo Hebrew is an alphabet that was used in in pre-exilic time. So, leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC, they used a different alphabet than they used later. And this is what it looks like. This is what it looks like. That's paleo Hebrew. That's silver. That's silver. And can you zoom in a little bit more, Steve? Yeah. So to wabohu is in there or of course not the verse blessing. So that scribbling is Hebrew. That's Hebrew. Yeah. And it's something that's in the Bible. It's something in the Hebrew Bible that already is found in an archaeological dig from from earlier than 600 BC. So it it predates the Septuagen by hundreds of years. They're already writing Hebrew. They're already writing stuff that's in the Bible. They're already inscribing it and and on scrolls maybe keeping it with them maybe as an amulet in pale. What is paleo Hebrew? Paleo Hebrew is this alphabet we're looking at here. This is an alphabet. That's an alphabet alphabet gimmel dal. That's the Yeah, it's an abjad technically. It's the exact alphabet of the It's an abjad. The what we call classical Hebrew different script, but it's the exact same alphabet. Yeah. Yeah. And they're sure it's completely been identified as Hebrew. It's very clear. I see a Hebrew rendition. I see a Hebrew, but they are certain. Wait. And they base that on what? It's just from this one. There's thousands of these. This is just the most famous one. But there's no Is there a translation of this from antiquity? I mean, how do we call it's an archaeological dig? They didn't put English translations in the arch is how do we know that that's the line from the text that we have because it's the exact same word in this put that somebody put you think it was planted but you no I'm talking they do the same thing with Phoenician right they exact same thing about guessing what the letters are and that's why when they find an inscription they guess that it's either Hebrew or protohebrew at the time that this is being written What's the date on the silver? Yeah. 700. Yeah. 7th century BC. It was found 600 BC. 600 BC. How many That's the consensus. Um how much how much literature is there being generated that is from this protoheebrew? What other cultures are referring to protoheebrew? It's none. Uh there's several cultures around them that refer to Israel and refer to specific kings of Israel that are in the Bible. They think they found the name Israel in an incription. multiple times. I don't think anybody debates that except you apparently. What is the Israel? Where does it come from? What's the You're a It's a Where does the word Israel come from? Yeah. Well, it's a Semitic word. It looks like a verb. Um but it's a name, of course. So, Semitic names are often compounds of a verb and a noun and the L at the end is God almost certainly, right? The yer part looks like a third singular masculine Semitic verb. There's debate about which verb it would come from, but it might mean God rules or he he struggles with God or God struggles with somebody. Okay. That's that that's the traditional etmology. Yeah. Okay. What literature do we have in it that you just gained that insight from? Where is the evidence? Yeah. So, here here's I think the methodological problem. You're saying that if a culture got destroyed and and and the the pre-exilic Israelite and Judeian kingdoms got got destroyed. Well, no. the people, the kingdoms got destroyed by the Assyrians in 721 BC and then the Babylonians in 586 BC. They had a they had a an apocalypse essentially. Those those nations, those ethnicities had an apocalypse where these foreign empires rolled in and destroyed them. They just leveled their cities to the ground. Jerusalem was leveled to the ground in 586 BC. They burned Jerusalem to the ground in 586 BC. And so what happened when Jerusalem specifically was burned to the ground in 586 BC? Guess where all the texts went? burned gone. They got burned. That's why you had the silver is what we have. The silver survived and this was I think yeah it was buried and it was outside of Jerusalem. So it would have been caught in the fire. It was in a library. They would have had libraries that got burned just like the library. They almost certainly did. Full of Hebrew libraries. Almost certainly almost certainly got burn certainly or they did burn. That's a big difference. Yeah. Okay. Ammon, let's back up and talk about methodology again because I I want to I want to make sure we I just want to know if they Hebrew li where this language was preserved. keep our eye on the ball. Yeah, we've already said two hours ago at this point that we don't know much about the ancient world. So, what we're what we're dealing with usually is probabilities. I like to think of this from like the perspective of a Vegas gambler. We don't know, you know, if you're gambling on something in Vegas, you don't know for sure what's going to happen or whatever, but you have probabilities. Okay? You can say, "Well, it's most likely or it's less likely, and so I'm going to put money on things that are more likely." And so, we have probabilities. So, you're asking me for a 100% probability of something that happened 3,000 years ago. Evidence and for evidence. This it's right up on the screen. Here's the evidence. This is somebody's interpretation of what that is. That is not the evidence. Wait. You don't hear. So, what I'm telling to you is if this is Hold on, hold on. Let me language is being used at the time. If this language is being used at the time, what other surrounding peoples and cultures record it? I just told you there's multiple ones. But the problem is that those same same empires that rolled in and destroyed Jerusalem destroyed those other cultures too. Why isn't that a lot of Are you saying the Greeks weren't doing anything over there? Hold on a second. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Are you saying that the Hebrew writing on the right, correct, is not accurate to what's on the silver? How do we know that it's accurate? I'm questioning the evidence of the people who made this translation or interpretation of what it is because what other documents are they using? Do they have that's why I asked do they have libraries? You can't do this with Greek. There's no guesswork about what it is. There's no guess Hebrew versus No, Greeks had different alphabets. No, at this time you say this thing is existing. There's Greek works all over the place. society is run. Yeah. Guess what? By that Greek war. You know what the Greeks avoided? Getting burned to the ground by the Persians, which almost happened in 480. Okay. So, if the Greeks had not managed to fight off those two Persian invasions, we'd probably be in the same position with Greek literature where it would have all got burned to the ground and then we'd be in this position where all we would all the Greek we would have is digging up stuff and archaeological. I hate to guess. We'd be in a difficult position. We always have to guess. But when the Christians, anything we do is guessing for the ancient world, we don't know anything for sure. I hate to guess, but when the when Greek lost its began to lose its glory, as the oracle shut down and as the 4th century lurched over its loss of its pagan origin, the language was affected and you see that. But the whole in the influence of the Byzantine Greek, the problem is throughout the use of the Greek, we've got Greek grimarians, we've got Greek scientists who are working on the language, right? What I am saying here is at the time that the Greeks are doing that and noting these other histories and these other societies around them and forming anthropologies and explanations of history of the cultures around them. Nobody ever encounters anything like this. The only reference that we have to anything Semitic is the Phoenician. And we know the connection to the Phoenician that that the Greeks even argued themselves that the Phoenician was not responsible for Greek. There's a Greeks to say it was and Greeks to say it wasn't for the alphabet. Right? So this is theoretical. There's no contemporary documentation of any of this. This could be somebody sitting in the desert copying out BS and then planting it in the ground for an archaeological dig to be dated to 600 BC. Do you realize how you're getting into like what I'm saying is planted? That's why I hate ideas. We if we stick with the text, what I'm saying is this thing that you've got here just showed up in a vacuum. Showed up out of the ground. We Where does this paleo Where does this Paleo Hebrew come from? Did they build buildings? Did they? If they got to this level of writing, they must have structures. They must have history and archaeology. Where is it for this? This is the archaeology. It's not this coming out of the ground. This is not the archaeology. It's coming from the archaeologists who found it in the ground when they were doing an arch. Everything has to start somewhere. Right. Right. But when you find, let me tell you what I'm talking about. When you find when you're doing a Greek site, for example, and you find Greek writing, the Greek writing builds for you exactly what's going on. You see those columns, you see this type of architecture, you see what they're using it, the mathematics, they're in these Greek texts. This is an isolation. It's got no relatives. That's how archaeology works. It's just sitting there by itself. Did there anything with this? Wait, they didn't find anything with this that was a building dedicated to some guy with using this in his name using this alphabet. There's so much stuff in this alphabet. It's widespread. It's widespread. This alphabet is very common, right? But it wasn't in a building with a dude's name on it that was using the same. There's a lot of stuff with dude's names on them in this alphabet that has been found in archaeological dig from the sixth to the 10th century BC. Cities that use this protohebrew. Yeah, it's widespread as they're like in Israel. In Israel and they have limit they had cities. Yeah, Jerusalem was li and there's libraries in Jerusalem. They were burned to the ground. There's library by the Babylonians. Okay. So was Hercuanium. We still have the we still have a expletive ton. And then and then they built a bunch of stuff on top of it. I don't know if you That's no evidence. You're not giving me any evidence. I just don't think you're willing to isolation. This is in complete isolation. You don't like the evidence to say you're discounting it. That's all that's happening here. It's not the the thing that really bothers me is that there is no Hebrew literature. When you talk outside the Torah, there is no Hebrew documentation. There are no Hebrew doctors. There's no Hebrew architecture. There's no He Hebrew geometry. There's no Hebrew anything because it got burned to the ground. Everything. So, you're saying they should have just done a better job of not getting burned to the ground? You're saying everything got lost of any Hebrew writing anytime. The only remnants were there was a small group of captives after the city got burned to the ground and lots of people got slaughtered and taken into slavery by the Babylonians. There was a small of course that's how life works. That's how allianc's there's a small group of people who were taken into captivity by the Babylonians to Babylon and they could only carry anything they could carry. They carried their most sacred text and that's all that survived that conflration, that civilizational conflration. That's all they kept. That doesn't mean they didn't have more. In fact, they almost certainly had more. It's gone. And they're the only culture culture that that happened to because of course they're not the only language. The language will survive. It did survive. You just don't want to see it. It survived in the Torah. It survived in the Hebrew Bible and it survived in the ground. That's all you've got. Okay. You just made a you just made a statement that is false and that is this is the only culture that's happened to. Of course, it's not the only culture that's happened to. Tell Let's talk about the Persians. Yeah. Let's talk about the Persians. The Persian Empire was far mightier, far more scientifically advanced than the Hebrews. Do we have classical Persian? We have inscriptions. We have the Behistune inscription. And then we have a few things from Herodotus where he's transliterating words from Persian. So we have contemporaries. We have contemporaries talking about the language. We have Herodus talking about that's exactly what I'm talking about. We have no Heroditus who can say there is PaleoHebrew. Yes, we've got the Persian. We've got the Phoenician. We've got 200 years after that. of these like well I'm saying and a a dude like Heroditus actually nobody for this you're wrong about that too you're wrong about that too the Nebuchadnezzar chronicle has been discovered in Babylon so Nebuchadnezzar was the most powerful king of Babylon he from 605 to 562 BC he was the guy who came over and burned Jerusalem to the ground with his armies this is historians generally accept this we have found his chronicle so most kings would would write a chronicle of the things that were ongoing during their reign that they thought was important enough to be kept for future generations. We found his chronicle from 605 to 594 BC. Unfortunately, it cuts off in 594 because we just haven't found the rest or maybe it got shattered or lost or something. In his chronicle, he talks about Jerusalem and the Jews. In his chronicle that has been found from that time period. So, when Ammon says there's no other records, he's wrong about that because King Nebuchadnezzar, the most powerful king in the world at that time, talks about them. Okay? It's in the chronicle. And he says, "I'm going over there to talk about them." There it is right there. confirming biblical accounts of his conquest of Jerusalem in 597 BC, the deposition of King Jehoin and the installation of Zedekiah. It's all there contemporary. That is a contemporary document justifies a text. So the people your so so so your belief is that the people who were writing the Septuagent were Jewish Greek speakers who were who were living in Alexandria in a Greek millu and they were taking the Hebrew translating it into Greek and embellishing and adding stuff to it. Yeah. So there there's a whole there there's not just one translator who does all of this work. It's it's it's different Jews translating different books at different times. And I can say this because I I've worked with this stuff. I've gotten my hands dirty with this with this stuff. It's it's incredible stuff. I've written articles on it. You can look them up. Um I did my master's thesis on on the Septuagent. Oh, fantastic. So So it's very linguistic. I mean, this is perfect. That's why I said you're perfect. It's wonderful. Hit me with the So they they are there's different translators who are translating different books at different times. What seems to have happened is And what year what year was it translated? We don't know for sure, but probably third to third to 1st century BC. probably the only way you can really date something is by people who quote it. What's the earliest we get people reading this text, right? That's really what you can quote. You can look at the letter of Aristas, which people in antiquity said was a forgery that talks about the translation. People said that was a forgery. That doesn't matter who's quoting it and when are they quoting it? Jesus is quoting it, right? The New Testament is quoting the Septuagent. So in Greek, in Greek, it never quotes it in Hebrew, which has always bothered me. If the Hebrew is the superior original and that's what the people, the rabbis are promoting, why the hell doesn't Jesus quote, why don't you think Jesus was quoting in Hebrew? Jesus was probably quoting in Aramaic. All right. Probably. No, that's linguistic. Let's Let's go back to methodology. Probably. Probably in Greek. No, it either isn't or it isn't. You're trying to pull a fast one here. All we have is probably. So, when I say probably, I'm being responsible. When Ammon doesn't say probably, he's being irresponsible with the data. I want to be clear about that. So, I'm a responsible scholar. I hope you are, too. Let's try to work toward that. So, obviously not. I, you know, hey, look, I'm I'm dealing with you and we're talking about stuff. I'm not calling you names. Jesus quotes Hebrew. Well, here's the thing. As you know, Jesus didn't write anything down, right? So all the stories we have about Jesus or somebody talking about him at a later date, right? But when they're writing about him, they're writing about him in Greek because that was the colonial cosmopolitan language and they want their message to get out. Okay. All right. So Jesus was not a Greek guy. He's a Jewish guy. You agree with that, right? Amen. I mean, I guess you already said you don't know who Jesus was. Greek is not an ethnicity. It's a language. Jesus was a deity. It's a colonial It's a colonial language. Greek fluently. and he was in Egypt. So he probably studied in Alexandria and he would have been studying Greek, not Hebrew. The question is why does Jesus or anybody in the New Testament never quote Hebrew quotes Aramaic? Several times in fact the only times in the New Testament in the Gospels of course when Jesus is directly quoted New Testament how many at least a handful right because they only quote at least a handful and a couple of those are ones that we think right that we think may be Aramaic. No, they are. It's pretty clear if you know Aramaic that he's it's Aramaic. It's pretty clear or it's it is. Um and we're we're going to keep going back to this every time. It's science. It's science. Look, it's science. It either is clearly Aramaic. Okay. You want me to say it this way? It is clearly Aramaic. It's clearly clear. That's when they say that. Can we put this up? Yeah. Mark 27. Mark, sorry. Mark 15, I believe, is when Jesus gets quoted saying eloaki, right? Can we can we put that up? Everybody says, "Oh, it's Arabic." I believe that's Mark 15. Aramaic. Aramaic, right? Yeah, cuz it is. So, let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. All right. I love it. I love this. Yeah. So, I have not studied Aramaic, but it's closely related to Hebrew. So, just because I've studied Hebrew, I can understand the Aramaic cuz they're they're like Spanish and Portuguese. They're not they're not that different. And so, if you if you study one, you can you can make heads and tails of the other. Okay. So, I can tell you what this Aramaic is and I will break it down for you linguistically. Okay. Uh, scroll down. Scroll down. Uh, we don't Yeah, we Okay, this is the Greek, but can we get in English? I think it's going to be more helpful if we get a translation. Actually, I Mark one chapter. If you look at the Sabok in the Greek, hold on. Let's let's focus on this. Uh, scroll down. Scroll down. Scroll down. It's toward the It's It's when he's on the cross and he cries out his final word. Yeah. A little more. A little more. There it is. There it is. They even put it in italics. Okay. Eloy. Eloyani. Okay. They put it in italics. So Jesus is being directly quoted as saying this and then they have to translate it because that's not Greek. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? So, so Mark is writing in Greek, but he's quoting Jesus saying. So he's writing in Greek and he's interrupting his Greek to to say something Aramaic to say something Aramaic. Jesus is saying his final words in Aramaic because that was his native language. So let's break down this Aramaic linguistically. L is God just like Hebrew. All right. El Eloy the E at the end in both Hebrew and Aramaic is a is a first person possessive pronoun that means my. Okay. So Eloy is my God, which you can see it's translated correctly there. My God, my God. That's the aloy aloy part in Hebrew, right? In Hebrew and Aramaic. He's speaking Aramaic and not Hebrew. Yeah, he's speaking Aramaic. Okay. So in Aramaic and Yeah. Yeah. Luma is actually two words that are usually written as one whether in Hebrew or Aramaic. Like llama in Hebrew, right? Why? Exactly. Yeah. There you go. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. L means for and ma means what. Yes. So when you say for what you're asking why does that make sense? So ma is why but it means literally for what it sakani. I think this is the most important word here. Clearly this is your verb. As you can see from the translation they're translating this have you forsaken me. Those are the words that we have left in the English there. And that's that's being translated from the Greek. I mean the Greek says my god my god why have you forsaken me in the in the in the translation which is in the parenthesis there. Right. Okay. So Aramaic has this verb. Now there's triliteral continental roots in in the Semitic languages, not just Hebrew, not just Aramaic. The the Babylonian languages, Phoenician, all the Semitic languages operate on what we call triliteral consonental roots, which means it's three consonants and you put vowels in the middle of the consonants to sort of inflect the term. Okay? Uh so there's three consonants here, S, B, and C. The ch is being is is a kai there in Greek. Um because in the original Semitic, this is actually a guttural sound C that we don't even have in in English and they didn't have in Greek either. So they're doing the best they can to transliterate this because Greek has this that that is a kai. It's it's the letter kai in Greek. Um so they're doing the best they can to write this in write this Aramaic sound in Greek. What's the Aramaic Aramaic letter for the the he? It's it's it's a it's a Okay. What does it look like? Yeah, it looks like a it kind of looks like Well, it looks like a P thing. Okay. But it's it's the source of our queue. It's the source of our our Latin Q actually. Yeah. Um because the alphabet wandered from Phoenicia to Greece to the Atruscans and ultimately to Rome and that's where we get it from. So you have this you have this C sound that the Greeks don't know what to do with but they write the next closest thing which is which is we we transliterate with ch there into English. But that's a kai. That's the letter the the letter kai in Greek, right? We can go look at it. Yeah. So yeah, however you want to pronounce it. Who cares? Modern Greeks. Yeah. Modern Greeks key. Whatever. It's it's in ancient Greek. That's that's what's going on there. The the Semitic languages have the sound sh and Greek as you know does not have the sound shu. So so Greeks did did not could not pronounce the sound sh. They did have the sound su like a regular s. And so anytime there is a word in any Semitic language that has a sh sound and there's lots of them and they want to try to pronounce that in Greek they write s instead of shu because it's the next closest thing. Okay. Okay. So this is shabbak in the original Aramaic which means it's this triliteral root. You put vowels in the middle shak that means to forsake. All right. You inflect it by putting a second singular masculine ending on it which is the ta the th ha there. Right? That's the second singular masculine ending because Jesus is talking to God and second singular is you. Okay? So he's talking to you God singular. Uh and then the knee. Semitic languages have this really cool thing where they they actually just attach object pronouns right to the word. So in English if you say have forsaken me, me is a separate word from forsaken. You don't say forsaken me all as one word. Right? Right. But in Semitic languages you you say that all as one word. Forsaken me and you write it all as one word. So that ni is the first person singular object pronoun. So when Jesus says sabakani that's why it takes four English words. which by the way shows that that Semitic languages are very elegant. They can actually express a lot of ideas that that take us multiple words in English which is another reason I I I push back against your idea that somehow Hebrew is is not as superior as Greek because it's pretty cool. It's a very elegant language and this is Aramaic which is similar to Hebrew, right? So he so so the author of Mark is is going out of his way. He doesn't have to do this. He's writing in Greek but he goes out of his way to say actually Jesus said this in Aramaic and then he quotes the exact Aramaic here. Well, he tells us he says it in Aramaic. That's Aramaic. Aramaic, but he doesn't say it's in Aramaic. Elsewhere, there's another quote where he says in Hebrew, Jesus said, "Okay, but here he's not saying that." Why does it matter? Why would it matter if he says it if it's written in if it's in Aramaic? Why does he have to say it's Aramaic? Because it's written in Aramaic is our concl is your conclusion. Okay, go ahead. Argue. It's not It's Go back to the Greek. Go back to the Greek. Go back to the Greek things. Let's see. Maybe it's not Aramaic. Is it possible? It's written in Greek letters. Is it possible it's not in Aramaic text, right? Scholars scholars entertain discussion. Right. It's a museum. Blow it up, Steve. On the I have no idea on the verse. What verse was that? A little further down. A little further down. What verse in the 30s? There it is. There it is. It's right above 35. Right in the upper middle. Right. Right side. Right margin. Right margin. No. No. Go right. Go right there. Stop. Blow that up. That last word. That last word before the semicolon. And remember, there's your semicolon. Wait, just that's not a semicolon. That's a question mark, right? In Greek, you write you write question marks as semicolons, right? And who put that in? So, Byzantine nerd. The Greeks didn't put that in. That's true. I mean, all the punctuation is later, right? All the capitalization is later, right? In the word spacing that they wrote like that. There's no There's no spaces in the original. There's no spaces. Okay, Steve. You just got to know. You just got to know. Just blown up. That's as blown up as I can get. Is that as blown up? Okay, just this one word cuz this is the verb. And to be honest, this is the most interesting of the words. Verb is always awesome. Oh, sure. So, if this is is Aramaic, as you say, this this should have really no Greek essence to it. Why? It should it What What do you mean by Greek essence? because there's no influence. There's no Aramaic influence on Greek. There are people bilingual with each other. We have no authors though who are saying, um, I'm going to use this Aramaism and I'm going to write and write it out. We don't have Mark is just doing this. Okay. Well, no, not if it's a quote. He's quoting him. Yeah. Right. It's just a direct quote. It's just a direct quote. You're saying Sabak thone. Is there anything in that that looks Greek? If I have read the Greek magic of Papyrus, I know my anus twitches because you can see both the roots for Sabah, that worship and the clonian divinity that is the Christing head, the ion who is the person inside the synagogues that is pictured on the walls of the synagogues. The god ion that is Sabah of the thorn. This is used in magic. Jesus is from the cross using magic Greek and he's talking about that God that induces that transfer from death to resurrection. And if you look up if I if you you know the Saba root, right, that I'm talking root, not the SA root. Are you talking about Sebomi to worship? Seom is the verb. So that's a different but here the saba no this is the same the god you're s he's going to say it's see I told you it's the same thing where is the literature that backs you up what do you mean the literature that back where is the literature outside the Bible that backs you up cuz I can give you literature outside of this that backs we've already been over this mythological territory we're just beating a dead horse it doesn't exist because it got burned to the ground no it doesn't exist you have evidence that it exists this. You don't have any Hebrew literature that's going to use the term Sabbath. What you have is Greek and you have Greek in the magical. You have you have Greek that is telling us even the pharmarmacology does this. His his his reasoning for that is because he thinks it all got well he says we know it all it all got burned down all the liar magic imperialism. If your evidence got magically disappeared it's easy to make whatever argument you want. Sure, you can say that. We have Greek evidence that where these roots are coming from the What are you talking about? The Okay. Sabakthone. Um, when you when you look in the PGM, we're just talking about the PGM. You've worked with professors who help translate it, right? Sure. And so did I. Yeah. Right. So, fantastic. In the PGM, do we refer to the God of the Sabbath? Saba oath appears in the PGM. Right. Right. Is that a Hebrew concept? Absolutely. Where's the Hebrew to back it up? It's behind the PGM. So, we talked about the PGM earlier. It doesn't exist. Behind. Explain what you mean. It's behind the PGM. What do you mean by that? So, we talked about the PGM earlier, actually, right near the start of this, and I mentioned that the PGM is is a collection of diverse cultures, cultural sources. Okay. They reference Egyptian gods like Thoth. Okay. So, according according to to Ammon's argument here, if we see the Greek letters T H O T, that proves it's Greek and not Egyptian, which is not true. Of course, we know that's because That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the cult because I'm not talking ethnicities. I'm talking language. And language conveys the practice of a cult. And the cult terminology is the sabakthon, the god of sabbath. Okay. So that is not Hebrew. That is Greek. We're dealing with three different things here that you're conflating and none of them have anything to do with each other. There's the Greek word sebomi which means to revere, to worship. Theo sebace means god worshiping. Theo base. Okay. Correct. That's an Indo-Uropean route that goes back to the Induropean root tieua which is found as far a field as India. Okay. So, you will put an asterisk. You will put an asterisk on that term because that is a back formation. You are guessing. Indo-European is guess for the thousandth time we're guessing about everything. Guessing about these are text and I don't want to guess. I have seen that expression in magical tags. That is not Hebrew or Aramaic. There is no guesswork here in Aramaic. This is pure philology. There is no text you have to back that up. There is no Hebrew doctor. There's no Hebrew epics. There's no Hebrew place. There's nothing outside of the Hebrew Bible. Nothing. I think we've already disproven that point several times, so I think we should move on. So here's the deal. Sebomi all right is a Greek word goes back to an induropean root that is found and you're right back formed because Ind the induropean language protoinduropean that was spoken by very early Greek tell people what back formation is yeah what it means and I did my my master's degree on this for two years okay so and honestly I think I think anyone who's interested in ancient text should probably become a historical linguist it's fascinating stuff so what we do is we look at the texts that exist the texts that exist in the real world whether Greek Sanskrit Latin, old English, whatever. And we notice similarities that that are highly unlikely to be accidental. Okay? And and the scholars, the European scholars who who first noticed this, they they already knew Greek and Latin. They went to India as part of the British colonial project that was there. And then they they learned Sanskrit. Some of them learned Sanskrit and they said Sanskrit is suspiciously similar to Greek and Latin. Okay. Now there were always theories like in in in antiquity people already noticed that Latin and Greek were suspiciously similar. Their theories usually ran in the direction of well like the Rome Latin is like a borrowing of Greek or or something like that. But what what what what scholars have you know recently realized in the past couple hundred years is that none of them are stealing from each other. The reason they look similar is the same reason that you look similar to your brothers and sisters and cousins. It's not because you stole genetic material from your brothers and sisters and cousins. because you have a common ancestor. There's an ev there's an evolutionary tree that's going on here. And so the Sanskrit word tudge means to to worship. It means to to revere. It means to do that kind of thing in and and and we're talking about science and data. So historical linguistics is all about science and data. That's really all we do in historical linguistics. I I think you'd like it, Ammon. Um so you so Grim brothers, they're in they were in there, too. Yeah. Grim's law is a famous sound law in in ancient ancient Germanic linguistics. So they so what we've seen in historical linguistics is anytime you have the sound t it powalizes that's kind of a technical term in lux it palizes to an s all right t becomes s which you got you can almost kind of see how t not that different right so anytime you have a t in in in in protoinduropean it's going to become a su in Greek and then anytime you have a gu it's going to become a b simplifies to a b so seb is the regular outcome of this this this hypothetical but I think pretty well substantiated based on the the linguistic evidence Indo-Uropean root that meant to worship in Sanskrit it doesn't change as much the globe becomes a J which we write J usually but it's in demonogy originally and so you get you get this form all right so sebomi is is is a is a well understood Indo-uropean root that's that's that that goes back thousands of years in the Greek language that means to worship a native so back formation is the creation of a word that you don't have a text to back it up that's because there were no texts 6,000 years ago. Yes. Wait, we've already said that. So, so so the back formation is a creation. It's not a reality in in language, in philology. It's not a reality. That's why they have to put an asterisk next to it in linguistics to show you this is not a real word. Do you think those are all made up? There is no evidence. They are all speculation. Just like you were saying, we are speculating. The question is when we go to Vegas, what odds are we going to get on that speculation? I don't want to speculate. Then you can't do this. All you can do is speculation everything speculation. When you talk about historical linguistics, the Greeks themselves, the grimarians, I don't know if you read many grimarans, but I do. And the grimarians will talk about the influence of languages like Palasian with the double sigma. And they'll talk about how that arrives. and the influence as far west as the Atruscans. That's the type of historical development. You don't have to put an asterisk next to the Grim Brothers with all of their stories. Oh god, it's just speculation. And I don't want speculation for this text. If I see other Greek texts that use this word and it's a magical text, that makes me think this is probably a magical term. Okay. So, you keep harking on this thing, just speculation, just speculation, just speculation. But then in your work, we've already noticed that a lot of what you do is speculation. No, give me an example. Yes, we've already talked about this. Okay. Give me an examp like like the earlier thing the fellatio. Pure speculation. It said it was a euphemism. They said it's a euphemism. I didn't say that. Okay. When you speculate that that's what that word means in that context. It's pure speculation. Now, we can go to Vegas and put odds on it, but you don't know that. We've already we've already covered that. when it says the comm is in his hand. You don't know that. You don't think? Okay. Another thing. Something's wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. So, it seems to It seems like you think that texts are divine. Like, you think that it's in the texts. That's all we got. Texts are divine. No, I'm a classical philologist. That's all I do is text. That's a problem because you have to have context for the text. There's more to just what we're doing than just what the text is. We have to analyze it. We have to say, is this text wrong? Is it right? Who wrote it? What's the what was everyone else saying in different in different professions surrounding that like doctors or lawyers or physic or whatever philosophers? Yeah. Can can we return to Sabakthani because there's several more speculations. I want to hear more. Let's wrap up. Let's wrap this. I want to move on after this. So, Ammon, what did you say about the cathon? You said it's connected to cathone. Cathon divinity is correct. Okay. All right. So, let me point out the methodological problem with the way that you're you're approaching this word. It seems that you're saying, "Hey, look, there's there's this word that doesn't appear to be in Greek because it's nonsense in Greek. Sabakani doesn't mean anything in Greek, but there's a part of it that looks like a word that is Greek." It's not nonsense. There's a part of it. No, it's not. No, you're wrong. That's not what I'm saying. It's not nonsense. Sabon is tested in the PGM. You can go and look at a goddamn ion wall. Are you mixing up? Do you know who the god ion is? Yeah, I'm familiar with it. What does ion give the Jew or the Christian? Ionic life. It's why he's setting in the ion. Yes. And ideos. Why is that also mean? What does this have to do with sub? What does I No. No. Let's focus. Listen. I'm telling you, read so much Greek. I can show So you can mystically see things that nobody else, even me, cannot see. No. I'm showing you what experience does. So 20 years not enough. Am I going to learn this in year 30? When am I going to get to this? I'm going to bring you when I bring you an apocryphal text that uses ionic right next to eternal and you will see the difference. But you haven't because you are trusting in Jesus. You are trusting in that text. You are the one who's making this. I have no idea what you're talking about right now. Do you have listen? Does it matter? Why does it matter? I'm asking why it matters. Not most of it. Why does it matter? So you have no idea what's in Phillin, correct? We're reading Markin right now. If I told you I am becoming more confusing, trying to bring in all this other stuff that I don't even I don't even know what you're talking about. So Okay. So I want to get back to what we're talking about with phone here because Ammon interrupted me when I was trying to talk about this. So Ammon's methodology seems to be hey there's a Greek word cathone which we both agree is a real Greek word that means earth okay and it's in various compounds like you know different ericonius mythical mythical early king of ads etc okay it's not the same word there is a there is a vowel different cathone versus cathon but at least it sounds like it it's not the same word but it sounds like it by the way vowels are very important in Greek you can't just substitute them in and out vowels vowels are very important so you can't you can't say that kathon and kthon are the same thing but but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say oh you They're mispronouncing it. Okay, whatever. Let me let me let me I'm not going to say that. Stop putting arguments in my mouth. That's disingenuous. You are mispronouncing. You don't do that at Cam, do you? Camas, do you talk about Do you talk about I know you want to talk about this cuz No, come on. That's not professional. No one's going to take you seriously. I was once a professor. Professional. Okay, so here's the deal. So, we got Kathone, which is a valid Greek word. We all agree with this. Okay. Ammon says he sees the word kafone in this Aramaic word or what what everyone else except Ammon thinks is an Aramaic word. Yes. Sabakthani. Okay. So here's the problem with this kind of this kind of methodology. And I actually talk about this in my book on wine which came out in my dissertation. I have a whole chapter on on linguistics and linguistic methodology in that book. Okay. And in that chapter literally the very first part of the chapter when you open it up is a quote from an ancient grammarian because we were talking about this. I love the grimarians. Okay. and and they talk they they try to make connections like this. So I in can hold on hold on hold. Well, let me explain. They try to make connections like this. Let me explain. Yeah. So I I deal with the wine word o sweenum. You know this word that's floating around the ancient Mediterranean, right? And what I'm doing when I do this is I'm I'm I'm first of all, I'm going all the way back to the original sources. What did the grimarians say about it? Like what did the Greek grimarians say about this word? What did Romans say about this word? And their speculation usually relies on what I call in the book the soundslike principle. Okay. So they'll say the word oenos or wenos in Greek means why dama. You put the damama. Of course. Of course. Classic, right? Nice. I love the digama. So you got oenos or wenos wenum in Latin. And they they're already trying to figure out like where this word comes from. Like what other words out there in the in the universe is it connected to? And they use what I call the sounds like principle. So what and there's multiple layers of speculation where they say, "Oh, maybe it's connected to this word that sounds like wos or wos. Maybe it's connected to this." what you know one of them says hey maybe it's connected to this word onios which means benefit because onios kind of sound alike they have most of the same consonants right and that's the that's that's the methodology that the ancient grammarians use all right modern historical linguistics has moved far past that methodology all right we have so arrogant that sounds so arrogant it's just called building do you think science do you think science has actually you think the Greek is musical do you think science has made progress in the past 2,000 years or not? Science is completely based on what? That great concept of how to create a hypothesis. Okay. So, has science progressed in the past 200 years? Not beyond its roots. No. Technologically, yes. But not beyond its basic methodological roots. Well, what I'm saying is the methodology has progressed. And I I told you we would come back to this time and time again. The methodology has progressed. All right. We are not doing the soundsike principle anymore because it didn't work. Let me let me explain. No, of course not. The Greeks were brilliant for their time period. Hey, you're talking to me. I love the Greeks. I love Greeks. So, so don't put words in my mouth. Just not great grimarians, right? We read them, but we don't believe everything they say. Like, this was in antiquity. They're they're arguing like this in antiquity, too. The etmology of words is important to the Greeks. And some people say, "You're full of shit." Absolutely. You don't know what you're talking about. Right here. Here's why the sounds like principle doesn't work. So is saying okay there's this there's this part that sounds like something else that he has read which is a legit thing phone whatever how do we know it's connected though all right so there's lots of things that sound like other things okay so for instance let's say that as a linguist I said that your name Danny contains the word knee the last syllable contains knee which proves that there's a connection to the the knee that's your body part okay and then I could make up a story I could say your ancestors would knee people I don't for the who knows or or Maybe a little more fanciful. I could say, you know what, your your your ancestors were the knights who said ni. Okay. Right. From from Python. Okay. Love that movie. Love that reference. And so your ancestors stood in a forest and and and demanded shrubberies from passing knights because of the knee in your name. Okay. That's where the soundsike principle leads us. I could do it with Sabakani. I could say the see the first uh syllable Saab that proves that it's connected to the Swedish car company that produces Saabs. All right, that's where the sounds like principle can lead us. It can lead us anywhere random. Anything sounds like anything. It's not good enough. Right. So, we need a more principled way of acting and that's where the modern discipline of historical linguistics comes in. Okay. So, the modern discipline to go back to your name, I assume Danny, short for Daniel. Okay. So, Daniel is a Hebrew word. I don't know if Ammon believes this or not, but everyone else does. Daniel's a Hebrew word and we can break it down into three morphemes. So I'm Jewish. Uh well your name is. Okay. Your name is Hebrew. Yeah. But lots of our names are Mine isn't but but lots of our names are are from some Hebrew source in the Hebrew Bible which was written in Hebrew. So so Daniel we can break it down to three morphes. Let me your your your ears pricricked up because I said morphine but I didn't. Morph morphe morphe which is a meaningbearing unit of language. Every language has morphes. Like if you say the word trees, there's two things that that have meaning in there. Tree and tree means a thing that grows out of the ground. And it means plural. Yes. More than one. Okay. That's all a morphe is. All right. So there are three morphes in the name Daniel. Don, which is the Hebrew word for judge. E the I in the middle of your name, which means my. It's the same I in Elo actually right there. And L which means God. Which means God. Hold on. Hold on. Let me This is interesting. Let me hear. So D means God is my judge. It literally means God, my judge. But you throw in the is to make it make sense. That's you learn that because that's what Hebrew ancient Hebrew grimarans wrote, right? Yeah, they got burned to the ground. We talked about that. Oh, but how do you know that then that that's what it means? We don't know anything. We talked about that, too. Oh my god. Am I stoned? You might be. Yes, you are. Oh my god. Wait a minute. All of that was based on not having any evidence, though. That's bad, bro. That's bad. I think we've gone through this already. I don't know if we need to go through. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've been What time is it? We're already three hours in. How long? We're almost three hours in. Yeah. We have a lot of ground to cover. We'll have to come back. We have so much to cover that. Yeah. Can we come back? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're not going to end it right now. We still want Oh, no. I know. Oh, you can absolutely do. I just think we have another 5 hours left here. I mean, we got way more. Wondering if we're keeping the audience. Yes. Yeah. We got We really got stuck here on on in the weeds here on this this stuff about the Septuagent and this this word. Um, but so basically the the case Luke is making is Jesus spoke Aramaic. He was Jewish and and you think he was Greek. You think he only spoke Greek? Um, textual evidence, right? Which Ammon loves, right? The audience can make up their mind. Um, we'll have to definitely do another one on this. So, now I want to move on to Ammon's biggest claim is that Christ is a pharmaceutical term. Correct. Now, uh, the case Ahmed makes, and correct me if I'm wrong, is the original, the first time the word Christ was ever used in Greek was from Homer and it's been used hundreds of times before Jesus Christ. Correct. And Ammon specializes in ancient pharmarmacology and ancient pharmacy. And he uses that context to corroborate all of this other historical writing we have from Homer and everything else. Talking about Christing arrows with poisons and all kinds of Christing, right? Applying something to the skin, to the eyes, to to an arrow, to something else. And he's taking that and connecting it to Jesus Christ, saying that he Jesus was someone who was known and was connected to drugs. Is that is that about right? Correct. Yes. Mhm. Yeah. I we have the reference. Bring up Odysius. It's a gorgeous picture. So, he has tons of references and he sent us in our group chat a whole list of read hundreds of references. Just to make a long story short, you can tell by having read all those references and you've read hundreds. I sent you over a hundred. If you search for all the compounds of Christing, you're going to find thousands and thousands. There's this is like not an unusual word. That's why when Bartman came along and said, "I doubt if Christing came before the Septuagent, why he looks so bad because it's a it's overwhelming the history of this word. Biblical scholars have no idea what Christing is. They don't know it's an actual drug. They don't know the action of Christing as somebody applying a drug. They don't know that is associated with oysters, the sting of the gadfly that the Greeks had established in mental mental changes, frustration, craziness, mania, right? That those are all associated with being Christing. We have it in Escalas himself with Io, right? And she says, "What about this? I'm being Christed by this powerful mindaltering thing." So, from from the arguments I've heard against Ammon, me using my my best judgment is that what most people believe is that Christing was applying something. It could have been drugs. It could have been a roof. It could have been a coating underneath a ship to make ships more buoyant. They would Christ them painting something. Um, yes, it was drugs. It was lots of other things, but they don't believe that Christ had anything to do with this word. Similar to your Dick Dick Cheney, uh, and pulling on Dick Nixon. Dick Nixon, right? Sure. Yeah. Okay. That seems to be the general push back to Yeah. Yeah. So, but thinks Christing was exclusively drugs. No, no, no. It definitely wasn't plastered. No, see, here's the thing. I don't come all sorts of things. I don't come up with ideas. I just read the text. Now in the overwhelming majority it's drugs. You can Christ plaster expletive Heraclitus Christed himself with with poop, right? Dung. Um there's all sorts of things. You can Christ a ship with a pitch so that or so that it's not waterproof. Right. Right. Um but the overwhelming majority are drugs. And the texts that I read are talking about the use over and over. And even texts like notice did notice this paraphrase of John. He talks about the antidote that's the Greek word right that was given to Jesus when he was on the cross. So this is not the association of Christing. You can Christ your penis. There's a very well-known saters right where you Christ the penis and you introduce that Christ penis to the vagina and that process is to kickstart the mystery. It's a bachic satanic chorus. You didn't know did you know in Greek that you have the expression the bak satanic chorus? I mean Satan is a Jewish idea not a Greek idea. So what are you talking about? Do you I'm asking you. Did you know that there is a Greek text that uses the Greek term bak satanic chorus? I'd have to see the text and I think you would agree with it. It's probably not the time. All right. Here's the point. Here here's the point. Here's my question. Are you just saying it's overwhelmingly associated with drugs because you specialize in drugs and read drug text or have you looked through everything? I'm saying performing a TLG search on everything that we've got on Christing. The overwhelming majority are drug associated. That should be pretty easy to prove or disprove, right? With the TLG. Okay. So, do you think inject is a drug term? Uh, the English term. Inject. Yeah, English inject. Um, I think it's pharmaceutically associated. I agree. I agree. Yeah. So, it's a term that is often used in drug contexts. It's also used in other contexts like let me inject myself into this conversation. Right. Right. Correct. And so the the verb creo in Greek is the same way. Okay. It can be used in various terms because it means to apply something apply something to the surface of something else. So if you're applying an ointment, which is a medicine, which could be called a drug, then sure, if you want to call that a drug term, go for it. I'm not going to argue with you on that. and and and and you have all these references where where there's some kind of ointment, some applied, you know, medicine drug, pharmarmacon, right? That's fine. There was he said, was it a what was it? Was it a potable or a Christ? What kind of drug is it? He says in in apolitus, is it a Christ or is it a Is it one that is anointed? In other words, smeared on like an unwintent, right? Or is it one that you drink? Those are two main different kinds of drugs, right? There's also a big catch. You probably didn't catch this or you did and you went past it because you accepted the common modern notion in Greek. The expression in right is coupled with yesu a genative form of Jesus in the Christ of Jesus. It every time it occurs in Paul it's in the Bible in general it's translated as but Paul uses it most. translated as in Jesus Christ. We have faith in Jesus Christ. We have this in Jesus Christ. The problem is that genative is just a genative and nowhere else in Greek are you going to translate that as part of that datative. So it literally should be translated in the Christ of Jesus. Jesus was performing the mystery openly. The fact that he is casting out demons is perfect perfect evidence of that. He knows these terms or he wouldn't be called the one who was Christed and there wouldn't be a naked kid with a medicated bandit. I think we're getting ahead of ourselves here wi with him there. So, do you think Christ knew spoke Greek or knew Greek at all? Probably not. No. Oh my god. Oh my god. Right. Who knew Hebrew? If there's that much Hebrew, he didn't speak Hebrew. spoke about and if there's that much Hebrew then there would have been documents left this magical disappearance of all the Hebrew we're not talking about Hebrew anymore we're talking about if you you agree you agree with Luke that Christing was similar to the English word inject Christ was similar to inject inject is commonly associated today as injecting something into your body but you can also use other word I would say it's overwhelmingly associated with a syringe right obviously but you can use that expression for other things like a conversation or whatever. If you could expand it to inject, would you agree with him on that? When you say inject though, you're not including things like injection. What is the substance that Christ becomes the substance as opposed to the act of Christing? So inject maybe injection injection. Okay, I see what you're saying. And then you have like fuel injection engines, right? Which doesn't have to do with drugs, but has to do with something else. We're being put into something else, right? Yeah. I think we agree on that mostly. So where do we disagree here? Yeah. So so this is an important thing that you just brought up which there's different parts of speech. There's inject, there's injection, there's past participles, there's present participles. Um you have this verb creo in Greek which is a well understood verb. There's you can make a present particip participle out of it. Uh in English our present participle ending is ing right? So you are anointing if we just use the sort of whatever term anointing anointing like I am anointing my body with some drug or olive oil what it doesn't matter. Um and then there's the past participle which means you have been anointed. Okay. Um I want to use the word to ju just to kind of to to to make this this point here. I want to use the word bite which is a different word but the the reason I'm using this word is is going to become clear specifically in English are past tense like I I anointed my body yesterday and the past participle my body has been anointed are often identical with most verbs but that's confusing the point because in Greek they're not identical as as Greek is sexy yeah because because thinks Greek is superior which I love Greek too so whatever so I'm using bite because because in English bite is one of the relatively small number of verbs where the past tense is different from the past participle. I bit into a a cake yesterday, but I have been bitten. So, so bitten is the past participle. If you were in a state of having been bitten, then you were already bit and you you have, you know, been resulted from that action. Like I've I was bitten by and I'm going to get in this. I was bitten by a vampire. I was not that's not a confession, but that's, you know, that's that's how we would use the term, right? So, bite bit bitten. Biting is the present participle. Bitten is the past participle. So the first point I want to make is that is and this you know this is I just want to make it clear because I'm here to call balls and strikes and I think people people know you know this this is the simplest grammatical thing in the world. Christing is not a word in Greek and the and let me explain because I'm not accusing you of anything super. I'm just explaining here. All right. Christos is is a past participial form of creo. So the cre and Christos is the verb part. The toast part at the end is a past participle. It means one. Yeah. Like bitten. Exactly. Like bitten is one who has been anointed. A Christose can be one who has been anointed or a drug like like in the in Jesus the Christ did. We're going to get there. We're going to get there. We're going to get there. It's somebody who has been had an action an action of anointing that has done to them. So I I just again I just want to make clear that that you that the ing ending is the present participle and you can't mix those two. Okay? So when when when Ammon says Christing, he's actually taking the T of the past participle and then putting a present participle onto it. And you will never find that form in Greek. No, I'm making an English word Christ. Correct. Yeah. You're making a neism and we deal with neologisms all the time. So I just want to make it clear just because I don't want to say anoint because because it sounds like something else is creo. The verb is creo. So just use the Christ. Just use the root. It's Christy. But the work that that that neologism is doing for you is that it's it's making people who don't know Greek think the connection to Christ is more obvious than it is because that's not a word that's not a word in Greek. Well, but you're doing the you're making the argument without doing the work by if they had read though if this audience that we're talking to that we're right now if they had read all these documents in Greek it's going to hit them like it's hitting. Yeah, you can say that all day long but they're never going to do that. So you have to make a case in in something we can understand. Yeah. Right. So this is me calling balls and strikes. Sure. I'm saying that's not a word in Greek. It's based on a true story. Yeah. But it there's no word Christing in Greek. All right. Because that's a past participle. Christing. Christing is not a word. Christing crying, which is not a word either. I just made it up with an I. How about the participle? Well, that's also a participle. That's a present passive part. It's Christing though. How would you translate that? Being anointed. That's what that means. Croinos. True. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I just wanted to establish that hopefully not controversial. I just wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page here so that people understand that that that that Ammon has created neologism which he's welcome to as long as we know that he's created neogism. Okay, let's move on. So wait, so does that mean that that the current word is different like that the current so it's anointed? So Christ comes from the Greek word Christos which is which is a past participial form which means the anointed one. The person who has been anointed. The person who has been bitten. Technically. Exactly. The person who has been bitten. Christos means you're bitten. A bitten one. You've been anointed. Anointed. Christed one. Yeah. Except Christ did the the anointed one. But again, it's anism as long as we're all clear. You can use theism as long That makes sense. That makes sense. Cool. Cool. Onward. So, I want to I want to take an analogy here using this word bite that that I think will help us understand. And Ammon's going to disagree with this. I'm going to say it anyways. It's what 99.99% of us would agree with except maybe Ammon. But let's let's hear what he says. Let's see. I'm excited. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, as as I've already said, Greek was the colonial language of the day. Yeah. And and in that sense, it's like modern English. All right. Modern English has spread all over the globe. Uh partially that's the legacy of of you know, British colonialism for the past 3 400 years or whatever. British people sailed everywhere. you know, Australia, New Zealand, obviously North America, South Africa, whatever. They've taken English and and lots of people who didn't used to speak English, their descendants now speak English, right? Like like the Mouri in New Zealand where the natives, they didn't speak English, but now because it's a colonial language, they they they now speak English, right? Greek was the same way. Greek was a language that was originally just spoken in a relatively small part of the world called Greece. and not even all of it that we would call Greece. Really just the southern part. And then Alexander the Great comes along and Alexander the Great conquers everything from Greece to India including Egypt, Palestine and everywhere in between. Right? So he he brings the Greek language all over all over that part of the world. He spreads it all over that part of the world. Uh and it becomes the colonial language of the day just like English has become the colonial language of our day. And so you have a lot of people speaking Greek post Alexander and Jesus is living 300 some odd years after Alexander the Great. So he's living in what we call the the the the Hellenistic period which means the Greek period. The Greeks call themselves the Helen. So you have a lot of local colonized ethnicities who are speaking Greek sometimes. Okay, but sometimes they're not. Okay, so oftentimes what there is is there's an upper crust. And this happens in Egypt. We all know this happens in Egypt. There's an upper crust of say e Egyptians who speak Greek because it is the cosmopolitan colonial language of the day. But the the everyday peasants in Egypt are not speaking Greek. They're speaking Coptic. All right? Which is the native Egyptian language. Like they didn't get it from anywhere. That's just what they've always been speaking there in Egypt. And we have Coptic records from a little bit later. Okay? So this is the this is the case in a lot of the Greek speakaking world of the eastern Mediterranean. Okay? And this is similar and I'm going to extend this analogy. This is similar to to English speakers. Let's say the British sailed to the South Pacific, which that we know they did. James Cook, whatever. And I'm just going to invent a a South Pacific community. It doesn't really matter who for the purpose of the analogy. And there is a local Polynesian group, Polynesianly ethnic, I just made up an advert, Polynesianly ethnic group in the South Pacific that has their own local customs, but then the British show up and they colonize them. And there might be some people who learn English, but then most of the like to deal with their English colonial overlords or whatever. And of course, at this point, English becomes the elite language. And if you're a Polynesian person from this South Pacific country, island chain or whatever, and you want to leave, you're going to need to know English to go to Australia, New Zealand, Britain, United States, whatever. Okay. So, so you have this colonial relationship that is going on. Okay. Let's say that there is a a a tradition in this this local Polynesian island chain. Again, it's hypothetical, but I'm making I'm making a point because this is actually the history of the era we're dealing with 2,000 years ago. And they have a tradition. I'm going back to this bite word now. They have a tradition and and I I made this up specially for you because I know you like this. They have a tradition where if you become the ruler or maybe in order to become the ruler of the of of this local island, you have to get bitten by a snake. You like this, right? I knew you would like this. You have to get bitten by a snake. They put a snake up to your arm. It's nonvenenomous. It doesn't kill you. Maybe Ammon would say it's going to inject you with some pharmic or whatever. That's boring. Yeah. Well, you can't die because you're going to be the ruler. He's the venomous snake. You're going to be the ruler. You're going to be the ruler. You can't die. Can't fall over. Okay. So, so in in this local Polynesian community, they refer to their kings as the bitten ones. And it's based on a very specific ceremony that they do in in their part of the world to to create rulers. They get bitten by a snake. That's cool. It is cool. I just made it up just for you. Okay. So, Oh, you're making this up. Yes. Hypothetic. Yes. Sorry. Hypothetic. Oh, god damn it. I thought there was some Mau. Well, there might be. I don't know. I'm not a Mauy expert. I was going to say they should have a theak and then when they got bitten they wouldn't. Yeah. Okay. So, let's keep going. So, they they've been colonized by the English. They are hoping for freedom from from from English colonial overlords. All right. and they are hoping that one of their bitten ones, which is their rulers, will rise up and throw the English out. And so they're they're looking forward to the day that a bitten one. And of course, they're using their own native Polynesian language, which again is hypothetical. It's like it's like Hawaiian. It's like Mallalerie. It's one of those languages. It doesn't matter what the word is. It's not the word bitten because that's an English word. And they're not speaking English because they're a local people, right? They're not speaking English. So they use this word bitten to refer to to their kings and then they are looking forward to a king a bitten one as they would call them in their local language who is going to to kick the English out so they can get their freedom back. Okay. Now let's say that there is a is is a is a wannabe ruler in this local Polynesian society and and and some people think he is the bitten one who is to come and some people don't and there's arguments about them. Um, and then he he dies and and then there are missionaries who go out from those Polynesian islands and they believe that he he came back from the dead or some religious thing happened. It doesn't really matter, but there some they think some religious thing happened with this guy and but they they decide they're going to leave their native islands and go preach the message of the bitten one to other places in the world. When they do that, they can't use their own language to spread that message anymore because no one except the people on their island chain understands their local language. They have to use English, right? Because English is the global colonial language. So they translate that native term that was referring to a native kind of, you know, unusual custom of getting bitten by a snake to be to be a ruler, right? They they translate that word as bitten into English and then they go out and preach the message of the bitten one in English. Now, in the English- speakaking world, they have to explain what they even mean by a bitten one, right? Because if someone rolled up to you and said, "Have you heard the good news of the bitten one?" You'd be like, "What? What does that even mean?" Right? Nobody knows what that means because we're not Polynesian. Okay? We're not from this this this local culture. We're not familiar with the whole snake biting. We're not familiar with the whole snake biting thing. And honestly, at some point, it gets attenuated to the point that maybe the people preaching it to you don't even remember that original cousin. They just call him the bitten one because that's that's that's that's what he's known for is being the bitten one, right? But now they're using English. They weren't originally using English, but now they're using English. Okay? And so they're preaching the message of the bitten one in the United States in England. And and some people are converting people who are not Polynesian, who never spoke that Polynesian language, but they hear about this this hypothetical potentially religious divine figure called the bitten one, and they decide to convert to bittenism. Okay. All right. Now, some people Bitianity. That's perfect. I love it. Bitianity. So in the English-speaking world that word bitten has been it's a native word that stretches back to old English. This is this this word is attested in Shakespeare. It's test in Chaucer. It's it's it's it's a good old English word. All right. So we have a thousand plus year literary textual history of this word bitten. But it but that doesn't that those uses of the word bitten from a thousand years ago don't have anything to do with this new use from Polynesia of the word bitten. It's actually a translation of a local Polynesian term and a translation of a local Polynesian term. Do we have texts about the bitten? Hold on. Let's finish this. I just made up Polynesian. I wish we do. I'm making No, no. I'm asking you in this hypothetical world. Oh, hypothetical. That's right. Because the Polynesian No, they probably didn't write it down. No, they didn't write anything down either. They probably didn't. Yeah. Strange in the hypothe It's not strange at all. Most cultures that have ever existed never had texts. I mean, you agree with that, right? Most cultures that have existed have never had text because most cultures that have ex existed have crap language. Okay. Well, that's your judgment. That's fine. You're welcome to. I don't think that's why. I'm totally biased. That's fine. You make your bias in your hypothetical example. If there was written, why do these cultures always not leave anything written? Most of them don't. If what you're saying on that do gets destroyed. Interesting. So, so why can I say one more thing about this? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So just one more thing in in English we have a rich tra tradition of vampire literature. Mhm. And in vampire literature there is a clear connection to the word bitten. Right. Like you're bitten by a vampire and then something happens. Right. So when these when these missionaries from Polynesia roll up into English-speaking places and they and they preach the message of the bitten one, some people think they're talking about vampires because we know that there is in fact in English a you know this tradition of vampire liturgy. Now if we understand the history there's this was not a vampire king okay from Polynesia. there's this this there's this uh local custom about being bitten by a snake, but it doesn't have to do with vampires. But a lot of people are going to think that it has to do with vampires. And then when this new religious tradition gets loose in the global English-speaking community, some people are going to start to worship the bitten one as a vampire lord because they misunderstand the original meaning of it. Or they're just like, "Hey, I mean, we got biting. We got bitten ones in English. They're vampires." Now, from a historical perspective, we would say, well, we know that that's not the original meaning of the word. But there there there may well be people, and there probably are going to be people in this hypothetical scenario who take who take this this religious figure, this new religious figure from an ethnicity that's that's not even English. Um, and from a language specifically that's not even English, and they are going to say, "Oh, there's a connection." Okay, let me bring this back. You can probably already see where this is going. Jews were a subject colonized population by Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great conquered that whole area including Palestine which is where Jews were living around Jerusalem in the 300s BC. Jews were not speaking Greek at the time that Alexander the Great colonized them. Yeah. Why would they? He was the one who brought the Greek. How about the Jews? Hold on. This is Asia Minor. One second. I don't I don't want to derail this yet. Let's let's so it's generally conceited that the Jews who were living in and around Jerusalem when Alexander showed up for the first time bringing Greek were speaking Aramaic. Okay. Hebrew was already a lurggical language by that point. But their living language was Aramaic which by the way is why Jesus gets quoted. What do you mean lurggical language? Lurgical is like Latin in the Catholic church today. It's used in in in religious circumstances. Okay. Um but it's not it's not a language that people speak every day with each other. You know, unless you're the pope and you learned Latin or something. Okay. So that that's what I mean by lurggical. So the Aramaic was like their regular language they used with each other on a daily basis. Did you say that they were assuming they're using it the Aramaic? Is that because we have Aramaic texts? We do. We have lots of Aramaic texts from the second temple period. Fantastic. Yeah. And some of the later books of the Hebrew Bible aka Old Testament are written in Aramaic. Like a whole chunk of Daniel is written in Aramaic. Yeah. Which is probably from that period, right? All right. So we have other So you have that's data. I love that. Data. So Alexander the Great comes. Alexander the great comes. He's the one bringing Greek for the first time to Palestine. There there's no evidence of of Greek speakers in Palestine until Alexander comes. But just like in my analogy or or my metaphor or whatever, he's the he's the colonial power who's coming and conquering this other area just like the British come and conquer Polynesia, right? And bring English. So Alexander's bringing Greek just like they're bringing English. There are local customs. They're obviously they're the the Jews are their own ethnicity. They're not Greek. Okay. Um, of course, over the centuries, there's there's over 300 years between Alexander and Jesus, right? You have the upper crust of Jews learning Greek. Um, because it's the cosmopolitan language. It's the elite language just like in what I was saying, you would have upper level Polynesians maybe learning English so they could travel, they could talk to their English overlords, their colonial overlords, whatever. Okay. But you still have most of the people, the the common people, the peasants who are not being educated, who are speaking the local traditional language of Aramaic and and and not Greek. Now, Jesus is very likely one of them. This is where we're going to disagree, but Jesus was very likely one of those peasants. He doesn't seem to have come from a wealthy family. Um he he he he seems to have lived a poor peasant existence. Um and he's he's gathering his followers from the from the peasantry and not the upper level groups. He never goes to the elite cities where Greek is being spoken. So, nobody who reads the Bible. How do we know that? Well, let's read the Bible. Let's go back to the text because you like I mean, how do you know he didn't? Like, I'm genuinely asking this as a Bible scar. How How do you know that he didn't? How can you make the statement Jesus never went to Alexandria? Well, we can't for sure because here we go. For sure. Right. What's going on? Sounds like a battery backup. Oh god. Huh? We broke the system. Yeah. So, should I pick up with like sort of I already fleshed out the analogy, but like bringing it into what we're really talking about here. Um, so, so you have Alexander, he's he's bringing Greek as this colonial language with all the conquests. The upper crust in these in these among these local subject populations speak Greek, but most of the peasants never learn it. They're still speaking their their native language. In Egypt, they're speaking Coptic, which is a native Egyptian language. In Palestine, they're speaking Aramaic because that's by this point the native Jewish language. All right? And everywhere else, they're speaking anything. Okay? All over the place, there's different subject languages. Barbarian, those that's what the Greeks called them, right? The Greeks called them barbarians cuz the Greeks were chauvinist. Speak Greek. But most cultures are chauvinist. They don't speak Greek. Cuz they don't speak Greek. Yeah. All ethnicities. The Syrians spoke Greek. Well, at some point at some point they learned it, right? At some point. At some point, another Greek went down and seduced them. They all abandoned what they were speaking and they embraced it just like the Judeans in Alexandria. Yeah. Ju just just to make the point I'll say in and if you go to linguist school they're never going to say that some languages are crap. I'm just that's your personal opinion. Fine. Yeah. All right. We disagree on that but that's that's neither here nor there. That's fine. It's just me. I'm free to say that. So you are free to say whatever you want. I would never have said that as a professor. I mean I don't believe it honestly. Like I'm I'm telling you what I believe. I don't think that's true. Okay. Um, so, so to to to bring my analogy to to because that was all hypothetical with the Polynesian and everything else. Yeah. You have Jesus and Oh, I you know, we were talking and and you brought up the good point. How do we know Jesus didn't speak Greek, we don't. Okay. We're we're bit we're doing exactly what you want us to do, which is look at the text. Okay. So, when every time Jesus is directly quoted, it's in Aramaic, like what we looked at. I know we disagree. I think I made my point. So, it's in Aramaic. There's a couple other texts. Maybe when we come back, we can look at the other text. Whatever. Neither here or there. So when he's quoted, it's in Aramaic. Um, and and again, his earlier earliest followers are are are these peasant Jews who seem to be speaking Aramaic and not Greek. You have you have John writing the book of Revelation in Greek, and he's a he's a Jewish guy, but his Greek looks like a guy who learned Greek as a second language as an adult, and he's making some basic grammatical mistakes, like a second language learner. Okay? like somebody who moved from who who who who learned a a local native language but then moved to London and had to learn English. Yeah. As an adult and he never gets quite comfortable with it, but then he has to That's what revelation looks like in Greek. I I know you're familiar with the Greek Revelation. It's it's it's pretty trippy, right? It's pretty Anyways, I wouldn't say uneducated. So, I didn't say educated language or language way. I say educated. People criticize Peter, too. They say, "Ah, he's Greek, isn't it?" expletive you, man. Peter's awesome. His Greek is great. I I worked with an MD on on Peter and I can't I can't fault his style, baby. People say he's not as good as Paul. Thank you. You know what I mean? In first Peter, he says that he wrote this letter Dia Solanu, which means through the agency of Sylvanas, who's a Greek guy, which means that Peter, as a native Aramaic speaker, is probably telling this content to his friend who's bilingual and Aramaic and Greek. And so Sylvanas is writing it in Greek form. So fantasies is expletive Sure. And he does exactly what he should do. Describes Mark, man. Mark ends up as expletive too. And he's How are you defining expletive here again? And he's What's your what's your specific technical define expletive Somebody who is subservient to another. No, not technically a slave. Right. Doesn't have to be that. Right. Okay. Author, I'm a your attendant. Exact. That's fine. Okay. All right. Um, so so Jesus, just like our our local Polynesian uh bitten one. Yeah. There's these lo There's a local Jewish custom Mhm. of anointing kings. And usually it's with olive oil. All right. Maybe Ymon would have some theory about the It was a Jewish custom of anointing kings with olive oil. Yeah. And it goes all the way back throughout the Bible. Every Jewish king gets an and and sometimes priests and prophets as well. Um they get olive oil poured on their heads which is a local custom. The Greeks, the Romans don't do this, but but Jews do it and that's their traditional way of showing that you've you've been inaugurated. Okay. The the the example I always use because everyone's going to get it is it's like putting your hand on the Bible and saying the oath when you become president. If you think about that's kind of a weird custom. Yeah. That's how we Americans do it. Yeah. And and that's how we show Okay, you have now become this new thing that's important, right? Yeah. And different cultures have different things. In this madeup culture from Polynesia, they you get bitten with a snake. In in Judaism, in Jewish culture, you get olive oil pour on your head. You get anointed. All right. Right. So when you have been anointed, you are the anointed one. Just like once you have been bitten, you're the bitten one. Right? In Hebrew, that that native word is mashiach, which means anointed one. It's person who has that oil poured on their head. Literally, that's all that word means. Okay. Okay. You get oil poured on your head, now you're the king. And so people can refer to the king as as the anointed one, the one who has been anointed in the past and therefore is in the state of being anointed. That's what a past participle does. Okay? And they're trying to translate this into Greek. They are translating into Greek with Christos. With Christo because Christos is a past participle in Greek that means anointed one. That's all they're doing. So just like you translate the local Polynesian word, you can correct him in a minute. Okay. Yeah. Try to correct me. Yeah. So Oh, somebody's got baby. You got to restrain that. You know what I mean? Your people and your faculty will be like, "Oh, that's all right. You can't bring it on. Yeah, bring it on. Bring it on." So, we've been bringing it on with each other this whole time. Yeah. Let's keep doing it. Let's keep doing it, Luke. So, you have you have the anointed one. It's Messiah in in in the in the in the Hebrew, right? And then just like the the word bitten in this local Polynesian language is not the English word bitten. It's some other word. I didn't even bother making one up. Sure. That's the that's the equivalent of a Messiah in this case. Got it. It's a local It's a local word. It's a local custom. And then after the death and as his followers believe the resurrection of Jesus whom they declared to be the anointed one they were waiting for. They called him the anointed one, right? Which is which is Messiah. Okay. Which is by the way as you as you probably know we transliterate that even the Greeks transliterate that as Messiah. Remember I said that the Greeks don't have the sh sound. Exact point. Remember they don't. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let's start let's start that so we can come back. We have a Greek word messas, right? Which is a transliteration of the Hebrew word. Christ is not messas. Christ is Christing. Mhm. Okay. Anyway, all right. So, you have you have the local Hebrew word. Sometimes the Greeks do transliterate that Hebrew word as messas, which we just talked about. Sometimes they they do what's called a calc cue, which is a loan translation, which means that you translate a word as you're borrowing it into your language. Okay? So they they borrow this local Jewish custom of anointing rulers and and when somebody has been anointed, that person is the Messiah, the anointed one, the person who has had oil pour on their heads to show that they're king. No, no, no. Christos is a native Greek word. But then when they take that language into the cosmopolitan Greek speaking world that was created by Alexander, Yep. the colonial world, they can't speak Aramaic anymore because no one will understand them. Just like the local Polynesians can't speak their local Polynesian language if they come to London, right, or New York City. They have to they have to translate everything into English and they translate is they translate that term as the bitten one because that's the English word, right? In the same way when those local Aramaic peasants who are following Jesus and believe that he was resurrected and is the king that was to come and they call him the anointed one, the Messiah as as a result. They translate that term as Christos. Yes. because that's the Greek equivalent of Messiah. Now, when it gets when when that term gets loose out there in the Greekeaking cosmopolitan colonial world, just like in my just like what I was saying that some people are going to make a connection with vampires because because there's this vampire literature in English and it involves biting and being bitten and all these other things. So also once you get the message of the Messiah, aka the Christos, Jesus Christ as we would call him, which is a past participle, someone who has had oil poured on his head, anointed, right? Or as you would call it, Christed. Um, you're going to have Greeks hearing this message who are who are radically divorced from the original Jewish context. They don't know Aramaic. Why would they? It's a local language within within the Greek speaking world. And those people might think that Christos has something to do with drugs. that that Jesus is a drug lord because Christose can like inject can be a drug term, right? Just like bitten, we use the word bitten all the time in English. Doesn't have to be a vampire. We would think it's a vampire. Yeah, you might think it's a vampire. You don't have to. And sex, don't leave out the sex element because even Jeb the class great classicist. You know Jeb? Yeah, Jeb Bush, of course. Fantastic. No, we're talking about a great classicist who's already pointed out that Christ thing is used with drugs to induce sexuality and I think this is a little far field of what we just discussed field. This is Yeah. Yeah. Well, no. You were talking about meas, weren't you? Yeah. I want you to respond to what I just said. Like where where's where's I'm done. So, so, so, so what Luke just said seems to make sense to a dumb dumb like me. Like that that that seems to make logical sense that what he was saying about the the Jews speaking Aramaic and Alexander the Great bringing in the Greek. The people who were divorced from who didn't know understand the Aramaic, they're used to the word creo Christos that is being associated with injection or applying something to the skin. They might confuse that Mashiach word with a drug term. Right. Right. You are meant to be confused by all. Does that remember this is a thought experiment. Correct. You're not talking about action. I created an analogy based on the sources that we have from the ancient world. They talk about the history of what happened. I have no clue. I have no clue if there is any element of reality in what was just spoken. So, Jews didn't speak Aramaic. I know I know that we have texts and that those texts tell us about who is speaking what and we don't read Josephus, right? Josephus talks about this. We don't. Josephus is writing in Greek. Perfect, beautiful Greek. Perfect. Beautiful Greek. It's a pleasure to read Joseph. He probably had a scribe helping him with that. It's a pleasure. Who is Josephus? He's a Jewish guy. The farting pho, right? He's a different kind of Yes. Right. So, just like today, Jews were scattered all over the well the Mediterranean at that point. And so they spoke different languages just like Jews today. Jews in America are going to speak English. Jews in Sweden are going to speak Swedish, whatever. And so you had Jews living in in Palestine who were speaking Aramaic. That was the Jewish homeland. That's their native that's their native homeland, right? They're speaking their traditional language, which at that point was Aramaic after after they came back from the Babylonian exile. Jews, as they went out into different parts of the world, just like Jews today, often times spoke whatever the local language was as their original language. So Jews in Egypt were 100% speaking Greek as their first language in Egypt. He's educated. Oh yeah, Pho is an Egypian quoting. He's not a Palestinian quoting fantastic Greek sources. Okay. For somebody to say that that's not Greek. Of course it's Greek. Who said that? He's doing a professor from Hifus said he is writing in Jewish Greek. Okay. So Josephus. Okay. Josephus the Septuagent. Um Pho. It's a dialect of Greek. Yes. No, it's not. It doesn't exist. Okay. Do you believe there is no Jewish Greek? It's just Greek. I'm telling you, I read it all the time. It's just the same expletive language. This is something we need to come back to in the next interview because we didn't actually get into this. Do you think there's a difference between coin A and when I say classical Greek? Do you think there's a difference? It's a later version, right? Classical evolves into coin. Is co is coin a Greek? It's a different is a classicist. is a classicist like yourself qualified to read coin a Greek just tell me that yes okay what's your point so what we're being flooded with is people saying no no no this guy is an expert in classical Greek not coin a it's stupid mis people are saying that about you yeah it's stupid misconceptions like this that comes from the biblical side. Um people saying, let me state it very simply. Ammon has a PhD in classical Greek. He's not qualified to read the coin a Greek because it's a different language. Okay. I disagree with that. It's expletive is it? Of course it is. Yeah, exactly. They are different dialects, but not that different. Not that different. Okay. You can go between. What is the coin a from? Which dialect is it coin a of? It mostly comes from Adakionic Greek. Yes. Very nice. Gorgeous. See, he knows what he's talking about, right? Fantastic. So, this is the thing that is replacing the little languages of the backwaters like Judea. You have to admit Judea is a expletive hole. Nobody wants to go to Judea. The governors that are getting assigned there, it's punishment, right? So, um, we have no system of education. When Jesus comes back from Egypt because he was given a expletive ton of money from the magi and you're well familiar with what a mus is, correct? Oh, of course. Because you teach ancient course magic. Yeah. They're Maui, not wise men. Yeah, sure. When he goes with all the What are the magi? Oh, that's a whole another thing. But they they just for people just for people that listen that are listening. Yeah. I actually think this is a whole another hour we could do just on this topic. It's where the word magic comes from, but it doesn't mean magic necessarily. Um they they were it comes from a Persian word speaking of Persian and Persian that we have left. Um the the per the priests of the Persian religion which was arranism were called magouch and that was their that was the regular word in old Persian for for the priesthood. Okay. Yeah. The Greeks heard about them and they borrowed that word into Greek and they called them magoy which is the the closest they got to that. It was pretty similar. Obviously, they know the drugs. They're known for practicing the pharmarmacaya, all the drug works, right? They're the ones bringing us and they give Jesus all the gold and the frankincense and the myrr. The frankincense and the myrr are bases for drugs. When he comes back from just valuable spices when he comes back from Egypt plus venoms when he comes back from Egypt. Which gift of the wise men was that? He's It's the guy who put it in his buttocks when I don't remember that. That's how they administer it. H No, I'm not kidding you. The doctors are talking about this, right? Even Dascortis talks about the Magoy and what they do with the drugs. So, so you're making the case that Jesus, there's texts that connect Jesus to drug use. Yes. Quite literally. Yes. when he came back from Egypt, he goes to the temple and he's, you know, he's just a kid, but he's outsmarting the people that are there because it's backwater expletive hole. He went to an educated Egypt to Alexandria. It's only unified in its Greek that you were talking about. You think he didn't speak Greek? Of course he did. Yeah. Other than Christo. That's a Greek concept. So there is a great concept, right? I I only know of one early halfway anything reliable reference to Jesus going to Egypt is when he's a baby and he comes back while he's still a baby. Yeah. I don't know of anything early that ever says he goes to Egypt. Now we've seen because remember that very first thing we looked at we saw that there's all these crazy stories about Egypt from sorry about Jesus Egypt too from hundreds of years later. Okay. They may or may not be reliable. Often they're not. So, you're saying, "Let's look at the text." I'm saying, "Are these text reliable?" Okay, this is perfect. I'm glad you said that. This is something I don't do. I I used to, but I don't do it anymore. I don't discriminate between the Bible, the New Testament, and any of the other Christian literature, any of it that's contemporary. I read it all, the apocryphal stuff, everything. I read it, too, but I do discriminate. And there's a very good historical methodological reason I discriminate and any historian would and that is that we go by the principle the earlier the better the ear so this is true for any historical event not just about Jesus I mean we use this for everything if you call witnesses into a courtroom actually you know let's we can do this with anything if you have a source that that was written let's say it's the assassination of John F. Lots of lots of theories. Let's say you have a source from 1964 about it, right? And we know it was written in 1964 and then you have a source from from today. I don't know. They made something up yesterday or maybe not made something up, but they wrote something yesterday and it's not necessarily based on earlier sources. You're going to be more likely to just just a priori judge that the 1964 source is more likely to be reliable, right, than the 2025 source. Now, that's not a guarantee. That's not a guarantee. Contemporary. No, I totally agree. temporary sources. So we need to discriminate evidence. We need to discriminate based on age correct of the text if we can date the text. Right? So I think we should discriminate. Now if I quote unquote discriminate in favor of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it's not for a religious reason. It's for a historical reason. Those are the four earliest stories we have about Jesus or sources we have about Jesus. Okay? All of this stuff is coming from 200, 300s, 400s. We know there's all this mythology that grows up about Jesus in those intervening centuries, right? That doesn't mean it's all made up. Okay? So, when when we put something up on the screen from 350 or something, he's 370. I'm not saying all it's all fake. We should throw it out. That I'm not saying that that's the same. I'm saying methodologically it's a lot less likely to be true than something written 30 years after he walked the earth. Correct. That's the principle. I that's why I think dascortities is so important because you need contemporary data to back up and Christing if you want to see more about Christing than any other source go look in dascorities dude right it's you've got more Christing there than anywhere and it's exacting in the Greek tradition exactly contemporary with Jesus it's perfect nobody pays attention to that so is phuminous right so antidotes antid antidotes, right? It's all there. So, what is the best connection in your view, Ammon, that Jesus had anything to do with actual drug use? His title, right? But he just explained that. He just explained what we the history of his title is most important. By the time Jesus Christ is called the Christed one, there is a thousand years of popular history to Christing. It is something that is featured on the democratic stage of expletive Athens, right? Yeah. It's a Greek word. As well as 300 years. No, no, no. Christing. The actual verb Christing is what I'm talking about. Look, we're all about the language, but they were they were using it way before Jesus. And they were also using it way after during Jesus's time and after Jesus's time, right? You take a look and figure out the best evidence that you're talking about comes from his contemporaries. What are the contemporaries saying? And when you jump into that pond, you're going to find sex drugs and mystery ritual that involves the consumption of semen by a bunch of child traffickers. And that's why Jesus is screaming out on the c when he's arrested, I am not a lace. You could have arrested me at any time. Why'd you come out here with all the weapons? I am not a lace. That's something that we should definitely talk about next time. Yeah, that's a whole another thing. I think we need hours at least in our delay states. Yeah. Can we save that? Can we come back for that? Yeah, I'm familiar with it. Let's come back for that. Let's come back for that. Yeah, if we can. Yeah. No, that that's that's something that I'm definitely fascinated by and Yeah, we don't want to we don't want to short shrift that, right? Yeah. Okay, we'll do a part two to that then. Yeah. Well, thank you guys. I think this has been fantastic. I think there's definitely a lot more for us to discuss. Uh we should definitely set up a part two and yeah, I I have tons I have tons more questions. I feel like we're only halfway through this, but that's how I feel, too. I think that's why we need a part two. Yeah. I just wish we could have talked about some of the Christings like I was looking forward to the expletive Christing and Christing virgin breasts and little boys testicles. Did you see that one in there? I sent that one. I try to avoid little boys testicles personally. I know. But did you see that? And all the Christ things that I sent both. Let the world hear it. Yeah. I sent both of these champions. I sent them. Yes. All the Christings with the sex stuff and Christing your Balinos, right? There's no doubt that Christose was a term that could be a drug term that was used going back a thousand years. I don't I don't think there's any sex. Did you get this all the sex stuff I said? There there's sex stuff in there, too. Sure. A lot of graphic sex stuff, right? With saviors. Yeah. So, was a Greek word that was very complicated that later got applied to Jesus. And it has a pharmaceutical history. You would love that. It's the history. You I love words. I'm a philologist. We should talk about that. Well, we're definitely going to talk about this one quick thing. completely unrelated to any of this. I want to ask before we wrap it up. The Isaiah scroll found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Maseretic texts from a th000 AD. There are people who say that it's like a miracle that the Maseretic texts of Isaiah match the Isaiah scroll word for word. Um, first of all, is that real? Second of all, what do you what do you make of that claim? Yeah, I I would want to actually and maybe we can maybe I can answer this question in part two just because I want to be as responsible as pos possible. I haven't compared them word for word personally. Okay. Um I will say in general because I do know this that that of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of them match the MT, the Maseretic text that whose earliest copies we still have are from a thousand years later. Um and and some don't. Mhm. So those are all over the place. I I I want to double check the Isaiah scroll before I say anything. Okay. Yeah. Can I just say no expletive way. Do you have that much time and the transmission of the text is exact? No way. A thousand years. It's a miracle. I will say it's possible. It is that would make me believe in God if that was real. Here's here's here's why I know it's here's why I know it's possible. We talked about India. I took three semesters of Sanskrit. The Rigveda, the earliest texts of the Sanskrit, of the Hindu religion that are written in very early, very early early Sanskrit, they were handed down orally for for I think around 2,000 years before they were written down. And they are pristine. I mean, they look exactly like we would think from the earliest level of Sanskrit. I mean, linguists think that they almost didn't change a single word in 2,000 years. Yeah. In Hinduism. But also, wouldn't it be possible for for people to be copying that scroll like when they when they hid those scrolls in those in those pots or whatever? Isn't it also possible that there was many other copies existing? There were there were and that were being copied up until that time. There there were multiple copies. The Dead Sea community had their copies. Other people in Jerusalem and elsewhere would have had their copies as well. When does the first copy of the Hebrew Bible emerge? Like like like complete copy. Yes. Yeah. I think it's 11th century. the oldest one that still exists. Now, the reason, and I know you know this, is not because there weren't earlier copies. They You don't think they invented it in the 11th century, do you? I'm wondering if it's a process of not just at one time, but a process. Why don't we have like consistent copies? That's what I don't understand. It's a maseretic invention, right? The vowels are a maseretic invention. The vow points, they were the ones who started writing the vowels. So the continental text is is older. The vowel points probably go back to the seventh century. Isn't it possible? And why does every all the translators why do they use just that maseretic text? I I wouldn't want to just use the maseretic text. I wouldn't want to look at the septuision. I would want to look at cuz you know why didn't good Bible translations look at all those. They don't just look at the empty. Are there good Bible transl What would you recommend? Yeah, I would recommend learning Hebrew and reading it. Okay. for the Okay, you just like learning Greek. Learning Greek. It's a shame though, isn't it? Well, it's a shame. Learning the original language. The Greek. No, if this is my thought experiment, I get one, too. What if the Greek is the original, then you're doing yourself a huge disservice. I read the Greek, too. Yeah. I I study the the translation because we both agree there's a translation going on here. 99.9% of the world, including me, thinks it's Hebrew to Greek. You think it's Greek Hebrew, but we both agree it's a translation. And what did you think about the toou wabohu? Can you just like sum it up? Going from these really sophisticated concepts in Greek to these really basic and it means the same thing, empty and empty. Yeah. I'm still not sure of your logic as to why you think it has to go in one direction. I I I don't understand that. Okay. So if you do have this Hebrew original and you're translating it into Greek, you're going to see tu wabu, which both mean empty, and somehow you're going to get two concepts and that are totally different. Well, that's how translation works. You have to choose the best word you have in the in the target language, whatever. Why didn't they just choose empty? Because they didn't want to. Why does any translator choose any word? Do you understand why it sounds sus to me? I don't think I do. I mean, I want to understand. I do genuinely want to understand. The Greeks had a had a rich philosophical tradition. So, they had complicated words like atos. Yeah. And right. That's fine. So, they had those those linguist that linguistic technology. You want to call it that linguistic technology. All right. That they could just Okay, let's plug this into this word. All right. Um, Hebrew had to waboo. We don't know what kind of Hebrew philosophical tradition preceded the the cataclysmic destruction. Yeah. Because nothing survives. Well, the Torah survives and the rest of it besides the none of this rich and the archaeology and those goddamn silver tablets. By the way, I do think we should bring this up again in part two. First of all, I think it's one of our it's it's a good discussion we had. I think there's more that both of us could bring to bear. I have other points. I made a list of about 10. I got through three of them. What are some of mine? We'll we'll do the replay. Perfect. And I'm sure you can bring more. I have I have many more points that I could make as as to why arguments for why the Septuagent, the Greek is a translation of the Hebrew, and not the other way around, right? And I'd like to hear what he has to say about those. Fantastic. Everybody, this has been super fascinating. I think I think this has been a a great discussion between both you guys. Um you guys obviously respect each other's expertise. you guys share the same passion for these languages and this has been super informative for me and at the very least I think we what this discussion is going to do is going to bring more inquiry into this stuff and bring more interest into this classics the study of classics and the ancient language and all this stuff and thank you guys so much for your time. Can I say one thing before you finish? Yes. This is the first time that you've seen somebody trained in the dojo. Do you understand why I say now that without the classicist, you've got the Bible scholars and they're not up to snuff. They really don't work with these texts, right? They just kind of do a little peripheral and pull in and BS and people are supposed to follow them. Yeah. But this is a classicist today, Luke, who has stepped forward. And do you see how the the training is different and that's why I say I can spot it. I can spot it 100%. I can't I want to thank you for bringing that force. And and Luke, thank you for engaging. It's been a long battle for me to get somebody with training to be able to sit here and talk to. And I know you don't think that Jesus was arrested in a public park. We'll get to that. That'll be part two. We'll get to that. It'll come. Let's see it. Thank you guys both. Luke, uh, where can people find more about you online or read your work or anything like that? Yeah, I have a I have a side project that's a YouTube channel called Word Safari that's that's pretty small. It doesn't deal with any of this stuff except etmology. Um, so I deal with a lot of Greek and Latin roots on that channel and it's all about English to be clear like that. That is about English words that come from Greek and Latin. And I think you agree with that, right? There's nothing controversial here, right? Yeah, I've watched it. Your audience are must be totally brainy nerds. They have some very smart comments. I always appreciate the comments. Um, you know, there's episodes on the origin of the alphabet, you know, from Greek, Phoenician, all the way back. Yeah. Um, so, so yeah, and I think I I think you said you watched a few episodes. You we probably don't have any argument about this stuff, right? Origins of English and Greek and Latin. Every once in a while, some kind of origin. I'll be like, "Yeah, that's possible." But they don't know for sure. That's, you know what I mean? It's kind of like that. As I've been saying, there's a lot we don't know for sure. And I think you have I am comfortable with that. As a classicist, I'm comfortable with not knowing things for sure cuz we're just never going to know. For sure. 100%. For sure. Right. We can take the odds in Vegas and we go from there. You're optimistic. I'm going to be negative and say no. And we're a good We're a good foil. We're a good foil for each other. We're providing both. Let's go. Christ. Amen. Lady Babylon on YouTube. That's the main place people can find you. Yeah. We'll link we'll link both of those YouTube channels below for everyone who wants to learn more. And I'm very much looking forward to part two. Thank you, Danny, for the opportunity. My pleasure. Good night, everybody.

Bonus

See also: the Bonus After Show With Ammon Hillman