Cultish: Did Constantine Decide What Was in the Bible? Pt. 1

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Cultish: Nicaea & the Lost Gospels, Pt. 2

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What's up, everybody? It's the Super Sleuth here coming at you with some exciting news. Get this, Cultish has our very own

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YouTube channel. It's been in the works for a while, but now it is here and we want you to be a part of it.

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You can go to cultistv .com where you'll be redirected to our YouTube channel page. You can subscribe and hit the bell to get notifications.

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Not only are we going to be releasing shorts and special clips from previous episodes, but we have special content that we are going to be creating specifically for this channel.

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So be there, don't be square. We don't want you to miss out. Go to cultistv .com, get redirected to our

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YouTube channel today, subscribe and hit the bell. See you there, guys. Ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish entering the kingdom of the cults, my name is

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Jeremiah Roberts. I'm one of the co -hosts here. I am always joined by my trusted co -host,

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Super Sleuth and all around jack of all trades. I feel like I should add something else to the resume.

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Is there anything else I should add? Did I give you all the tiles, Andrew? No, those are good, man. I'm happy that you gave me even those.

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Okay. Well, glad you could join alongside of me. It should be a fun topic to tackle.

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I almost tongue twisted that. But yeah, what you just heard was a compilation from Joe Rogan and a couple other cults, online cults of personality per se, talking about what always sort of seems to come up,

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Constantine. I mean, it's interesting, we are shows cultish.

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We're a podcast on cults. We deal with it definitively from a Christian perspective. But people who try and discredit us saying we shouldn't go from that perspective, we'll say, well,

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Christianity is a cult because all we're doing is this Roman emperor. He cherry picked all this for us.

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And that's a good question. Honestly, it's like, well, if that's really what's going on, well, I should figure it out.

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And maybe I should take a look at it, go back to the drawing board. But yeah, listen, we're excited to tackle this head on.

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So we are here with a good friend of ours, Wes Huff. How you doing, man? I'm doing great.

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It's a good day up here in Toronto, Canada. So can't complain. Awesome. Awesome. It's always good.

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It's always good to be connected with another Canadian homie. We've had we've had some previous guests from Canada on the show, Stephen Van Kars.

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And we had a couple other guys, some former UPC ministers back in the day. So it's good. Good. Always reconnect up there.

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But yeah, just so we're going to jump in talking about Constantine. You know, it always goes around that he is the one he is the notorious person who decided what books would be in the

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Bible. And so I want to just tell everyone just a Cliff Notes, LinkedIn bio about who you are.

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And you kind of know a thing or two about this stuff. So we're excited to hear from you. Yeah, I appreciate that.

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I think it's always funny that if we were to go back in time and tell Constantine how much he is credited for,

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I think he would be a little bit surprised. Yeah, he gets a lot of he gets a lot of credit for a lot of things that I don't think he ever intended to be responsible for.

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But yeah, my name is Wes. I live up here in Toronto, Canada. I'm an elder at a Baptist church up here.

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So I'm very involved in my local church community. In fact, my office here is in our church here at West Toronto Baptist Church.

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And I'm also the director of Central Canada for an apologetics ministry called apologetics

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Canada aptly named. So we're situated actually on the west coast, but I'm responsible here in Ontario for Ontario and Quebec.

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We do a lot of teaching, reaching and equipping to the church community here in Canada. I'm also a

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PhD candidate at the University of Toronto where I study New Testament and early

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Christian origins. So in terms of this topic, why would you want to listen to this random guy from Canada?

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Well, my area of expertise kind of falls into this. It falls into I study early

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Christian manuscripts. But a big component of that has to do with topics related to the canon of scripture, early church history.

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And so like you said, Jeremiah, over and over and again, people keep telling me despite my own field of study that Constantine has something to do with that whole process.

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So I'm always interested to learn those things, because it certainly isn't being communicated through the historical documents.

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But Constantine gets a lot of credit from a lot of different groups, whether they're, you know,

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New Age or Muslim, or I've even heard of from Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons.

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There's a lot of people who want to give these sort of arguments about where the canon of scripture came from and why the books of the

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Bible were chosen, and they want to ascribe that to an easy point in time.

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And thanks to things like the Da Vinci Code, that's kind of fallen on Constantine. Yes, yes,

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I was doing a little preliminary research for this episode, and I was going through, man, some of the old clips thing about that came out 20 years ago.

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And man, it was so interesting seeing the like Tom Hanks with like the long hair playing Robert Langdon.

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I remember that book came out, and I remember like reading the book, and of course, you know, the claim it's fiction, but at the very beginning it was

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Dan Brown who said like, this is based off stuff that's historically accurate. Like what

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I'm depicting the book, it's fiction, but I'm using elements that are true to depict this narrative.

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Now before we kind of jump into it, you recently went to Egypt, right? And you were kind of studying some in relation to this.

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Tell us about that. Yeah, I had the unique opportunity with a co -worker and a filmmaker to head out to Egypt.

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We did a ridiculous couple week journey where we covered more than 2000 kilometers.

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I'd have to do the calculation as to how many miles that is, but it's a lot either way, where we covered the basis of where the earliest manuscripts of both

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Christian documents and apocryphal documents come from. So we're coming out with a three -part series.

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We're calling, Why Can I Trust the Bible? That's the title,

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Can I Trust the Bible? And we're covering the stories of where the earliest biblical manuscripts come from.

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So we got a lot of questions when we were heading out to Egypt as to why we would go to Egypt to talk about the

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Bible as opposed to somewhere like Israel, but I think a lot of people are surprised to know that the earliest copies and really the vast majority of our earliest copies come from Egypt.

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And that has to do with the production of papyrus, which grew along the

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Nile River, but it also has to do with the fact that the climate of Egypt is just so arid that it preserves these things.

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The same reason museums around the world and in Egypt itself are chock full of ancient mummies is the same reason why we have ancient manuscripts preserved coming out the sands of Egypt.

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And so what we did is we went to some key sites, villages like the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus, where the majority of our biblical manuscripts from the second and third centuries come.

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But we also headed out into the Nag Hammadi desert and told the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library.

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We went to the village where it was brought back to and told the story of the Gospel of Thomas. But it's really interesting when you go down the list of the

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Gospels, the books that weren't included in the Bible, if you want to put it that way, the

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Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Peter. They're all coming from Egypt, at least the copies that we have that are surviving today.

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They're coming from places like Elminia and Cairo and Oxyrhynchus and Jabal al -Tarif and Nag Hammadi.

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And so we went to those places and to on the ground communicate, here's where these things come from.

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And here's where our earliest biblical manuscripts come from. And let's tell those stories. Let's really get into that 113 degree heat and communicate in a very sweaty way to the audience why we can have confidence that we can trust the books that we have in our

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Bible, that they're what should be in our Bible, that they haven't been changed over time, and that they're in fact true as opposed to some of these other

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Gospels. Wow. 113 degrees, that sounds like Arizona. But Andrew, what excites you about this conversation?

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What Wes is saying so far? Yeah, what excites me is that people, though some of the assertions that are made like the

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Bible was constructed at the Council of Nicaea, that's when the books were determined to be in there, or that people are the ones who have the authority to determine what canon is.

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I mean, underlying all of that is the principle that supposedly God has spoken. Therefore, if these things are coming indeed from God, then they're true and it's important.

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So underlying all of the conspiracy in a sense, there's a good question is how did we get our

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Bible, the one that we have today, and what is the canon and who has the authority to determine what canon is,

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Wes? Yeah, that's a great question. I usually highlight that answer by talking about the theological question of canon, which is why would the early

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Christians put together a Bible to begin with? And then there's the historical question of canon. Because I think if you were to hop in your time machine,

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Andrew, and go back in time to the second century and ask those early Christians why they chose

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Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, I think they would look at you and they would say, what are you talking about with using the word choose?

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Because it's been pointed out by a number of scholars even recently that the equivalent of asking an early

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Christian why they chose Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is like asking you, why did you choose your parents? You know, you didn't choose your parents.

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You recognize that your parents are the ones that you ended up with, right? And the early church,

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I think, would to a degree look at you and say, hey, these were the books that were handed down to us by the apostles. You know, these are the ones that have the direct communication and direct line from Jesus himself.

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And so the question of canon theologically is one that has to do with its connection to the individual who established the new covenant.

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You know, God made flesh and dwelling among us. And so because the early Christians were

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Jews and the Jews had this fundamental understanding of covenant being followed up by written documents,

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I think it would have been very organic for the early Christians to say, okay, we have the new covenant from Jeremiah 31, 31.

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Now, where are the written books? You know, where are those? You know, Moses made a covenant and we got the

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Torah. You know, the prophets were given the words of God and we have these statements, you know, write it on a scroll and scribe it up on a tablet.

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They understood and were fundamentally a written scriptural religion that God communicates to his people.

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And so the early Christians, that would have been very natural for them. And then there's the historical question as to, well, for the early

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Christians, what are the closest books that get us to the time frame of Jesus by either someone who knew an apostle or someone who knew someone who knew an apostle.

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And unanimously, as someone who studies this, I would say the only books that get you into that timeframe are the 27 books of the

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New Testament, specifically those four gospel biographical accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

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Jeremiah and myself, as we go live and interact with all of our members, you'll also get early release of episodes one to two weeks early.

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12:24

Yeah, no, that's good. I appreciate that. And so what I want to do here, and I think we've sent some good foundations here, is that so there's a,

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I was trying to find just an outline that would really compartmentalize the general consensus or the general arena of ideas or pulls of thought when it comes to people who sort of have their, the general narrative that is told about Constantine, which you mentioned before,

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I guess if we went back in time and got to talk with him, he'd be saying like, what? What are you saying about me? I didn't know

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I did that. But anyways, so you mentioned that you went to Egypt, so this is very interesting. I want to maybe have you unpack and commentate this.

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So this is an article called the Lost Gospels by Dr. Roy Murphy. This article, it's on medium .com.

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This article came out in like 2018 of October and says this, in the winter of 1866, archaeologists were searching for ancient artifacts in a newly discovered area of an old

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Christian cemetery, which was underway in the upper regions of Egypt. At this newly uncovered site, an amazing discovery was unearthed during a

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French sanctioned archaeological dig. What was discovered would forever shake the history of Christianity to its very core.

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What they uncover is a long forgotten grave of a monk buried there in the eighth century.

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This is a great historical find in and of itself, yet the real find of historical importance is what the monk was taking over with him to the next world.

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Carefully under the crossed armed embrace of eternal slumber laid a book that had carefully been placed inside the monk's casket in order that the monk could take the treasure book with him into the afterlife.

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Amazingly, this early Christian book of text contained not only the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but the gospel of Peter.

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And then he goes and mentions several other gospels, but they're saying that the discoveries of these gospels in the 18th century, this led to all of a panic.

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The scholarship, all of Christendom was shaken to its core because they found these gospels in the 18th century.

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So just kind of given your field of expertise and what you heard from this article so far, what comes to mind so far?

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Is he on to something, things that are accurate, or is he kind of taking his own prejudice in here? What are your thoughts on those claims being made about Egypt, the lost gospels being found,

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Christianity being shaken to its core? What are your thoughts? Yeah, I always find it interesting that there's such a kind of flowery language being used, right?

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Shaken to his core sounds very, it sounds almost like conspiratorial, right?

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That Christians were totally caught off guard by these things. Realistically, the gospel of Peter, which was found in Aqmeem, Egypt, which once again,

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I passed through Aqmeem, Egypt in order to tell the stories of these things. Was that really, you know, sometimes, let me back up.

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Sometimes you'll hear these things being referred to as lost gospels. And as someone who studies this,

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I find that it's sensationalized because they never really were lost.

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You know, we've known about the gospel of Peter since the second century. And we've known about the gospel of Peter since the second century because Eusebius, the early church historian, preserves for us a letter from Serapion, the bishop of Antioch in the late second century, who had written a conversation with the church in Rosus in Silica, where the gospel of Peter comes up.

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And after Serapion reads the gospel, so basically, this church community writes a letter to the bishop, the overseer of this area named

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Serapion. And they say, we found this letter. It's called the gospel of Peter. We know

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Peter is, should we read it? And so he just, he says, well, continue reading it. I'm going to find a copy and look into it.

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He finds a copy and he looks into it and he immediately identifies it as containing the non -Christian heretical teaching of Docetism.

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And then writes to them and says, hey, don't read that. It's heretical. And so when we discovered the gospel of Peter manuscript, it wasn't like we didn't know about it.

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All we found when we found, and this is true really for the vast majority, the gospel of Thomas, gospel of Peter, gospel of Judas, we've known about these because the early church was very aware of the literature being produced by these groups like the

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Marcionites, like the Docetics, like the Gnostics, and they condemn them.

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All we do by discovering the gospel of Peter is confirm that the text actually is heretical, that it contains the things that individuals like Serapion, when they read it in the second century, knew that was problematic.

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And then we read those and we say, yes, those are not historical Christian teachings. And you said, is it

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Docetism? Yeah. So Docetism or Doceticism, depending on which way you pronounce it.

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So docane in Greek means to seem or to appear. And so the docetic or docetic heresy is the idea that really played off of a common theme that was prevalent in the ancient world.

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So it's drawing from Greek philosophy, which teaches that the physical is bad and the spiritual is good.

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So nowadays, sometimes we have a hard time convincing people Jesus is God. In the ancient world, they had no problem believing

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Jesus is God. They had a problem believing he was a man. So if you say he's God, because of this idea of what's sometimes called substance dualism, although there's a bigger conversation in that as well, it essentially chalks down to the idea that the physical world is being held down and is evil.

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And so you as a person are a spirit, but you're stuck in this meat prison of a body.

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We see this even in the book of Acts, when Paul is preaching at Mars Hill, his

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Jewish audience is actually tracking with him up until the point where he uses the word anastasis, resurrection.

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And then they're like, this guy's crazy. And one of the reasons why they completely leave him at that point is because they hold this idea of substance dualism.

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And so this idea of resurrection to come back into a body that the believed at the time, and then the

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Christians also believed inheriting that thinking from Judaism, that didn't make any sense.

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You want to get rid of your body. You're desiring to get rid of your body. And the docetics in their heresy, and what really set them apart is they have stories of Jesus, where Jesus does not have a physical body.

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And the gospel of Peter is an example of this because the gospel of Peter exemplifies a Jesus who only appears to have a physical presence, who is not really being crucified, who has no problem resurrecting because he never died truly to begin with.

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And so when these sorts of ideas that fundamentally deny the incarnation and that essential teaching of Christianity, when they appear in this documentation, you can almost always exclude them from being historical

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Christianity, because they deny an essential truth that goes right back to the earliest writings and teachings of Christianity.

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That as the gospels of Luke and Matthew teach within sort of the

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Christmas story, but also John chapter one, right? John 1, 14, and the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

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That's essential to Christianity. Docetism denies it, as does the gospel of Peter. Serapion recognized that in the second century, condemned it as heresy.

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When we found the gospel of Peter, we found that that's exactly what it taught. And so we likewise, along with, you know, the bishop in the second century can say has nothing to do with historical

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Christianity. Trevor Burrus So in other words, they were really, and you know, let's jump in here a second. But so in other words, there was commentary that was readily available and accessible, where people were talking about the gospel of Peter, that they had adamantly rejected it.

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So that there wasn't a super conspiratorial thing. It's already a matter of public record, not to have like, there was there.

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So in other words, if I was using another example to, like I said, a little bit of a movie buff. So if there was a bunch of public records of where Quentin Tarantino had said in interviews where he did it, let's say he's

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I did a spinoff, I did a sequel to Pulp Fiction, like a Pulp Fiction short film that I never released to the public.

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But I've never I just made it just because I wanted to. But all of a sudden, all these years later, say 50 years later, somebody finds like a film, a 70 millimeter film reel with, with all of a sudden, this

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Pulp Fiction spinoff, it's not all of a sudden, we should be shocked about it, because there's a whole bunch of transcripts of Tarantino saying,

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Yeah, I made this, I'm giving a hypothetical. So it's basically the same thing with the Gospel of Peter, where the somewhere that there's commentary out there saying, oh, and have these heretical views, people were have probably had their presuppositions about who

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Jesus was just given the time of the day they rejected it. Is that is that similar? Is that is that is that my make putting two and two together there?

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Yeah, and there are even books that are condemned by the early church that we haven't discovered yet. But we know that if and when we discover them, we're not going to be shocked by them.

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We're going to find exactly the the confirmation within the text of why the early

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Christians condemned it. Gotcha. Here's my question. Trying to think like, like a skeptic here.

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How do we know that the Gospel of Peter wasn't written by Peter? And if we can doubt that Peter wrote the

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Gospel of Peter, then why shouldn't we doubt that Matthew, Mark, Luke and john didn't write Matthew, Mark, Luke and john?

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Yeah, I think that's a great question. Because it has that name association with it, right. And this is the way

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I sometimes put it. Andrew, I know you're a smart guy. You're the super sleuth. So I know that you're smart.

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So plagiarism nowadays, is I take your stuff and I put my name on it, because I also want to be called the super sleuth.

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So I put it take your content, I put my name on it. And then that way, I am viewed as intelligent.

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However, in the ancient world, sometimes that looked a little different. Sometimes plagiarism was

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I take someone else's name, and I put my content on it, because let's be honest, nobody's going to read the

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Gospel of Wes. Because Wes is a Canadian, he is just a generic white guy, nobody's going to read what he says.

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So I, I then I take someone else's name who has credibility, and then

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I tie my writing and document to it. And so when you have this, these groups like the

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Gnostics, which by the way, when we refer to Gnosticism, Christian Gnosticism is a second century development.

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So anytime, anytime we see aspects of Christian Gnosticism popping up, it's automatically a red flag that it cannot be first century.

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So that's just an aside. But the Gnostics, what they did is they appropriated Jesus, they included him in their philosophical and mystical system.

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And then they wrote their documents, which cast Jesus as a pagan mystic.

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And then they included the names of individuals who are already established and recognized within the

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Christian community, like Peter, like Philip, like Judas, like Thomas. And they would write those.

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And then they would, they would propagate those as being from those individuals.

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But the reality of it is, is that even so we can, we can negate them from a content aspect, because if they have any of this

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Gnostic kind of flavor to them, they're already a second century development. But even just from the compositional nature of the manuscripts themselves, these were not very popular documents.

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In fact, I think there, when you talk to people who really love them, they'll never talk about the fact that we really have very few, if any manuscripts to begin with, of these documents.

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In fact, we're dealing with only really a handful. Whereas with the biblical documents, especially for the

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Gospel of John and the Gospel of Matthew, those were quite prolific within the ancient world, spread all over the place.

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The most manuscripts we have of any ancient Christian document by far are the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John.

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Those were a favorite of the ancient world in the Christian communities. But we only have a few of these copies of these other documents.

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The most we have is the Gospel of Thomas. We have three fragments in Greek from the second century, and then one from the fourth century.

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But that's like, that's the rock star of the apocryphal Gospel world, four fragments.

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Compare that with about 12 of Matthew and you see really the stark difference.

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But none of these other Gospels, whether we're talking about Peter, Thomas, Philip, Mary, they are coming from times.

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So you mentioned the Gospel of Peter, so I'll pick on that one. The Gospel of Peter can be dated no earlier than 150 and probably no later than 250.

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So Peter was long dead when that Gospel was written. In fact, we know he was long dead because we have pretty well established evidence as to when his martyrdom was in Rome.

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And so if he's dead before 70 AD, then if we're pushing even the most earliest date of the

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Gospel of Peter to 150, well, it's still way, way too late to be connected to Peter historically.

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So we have a number of both internal and external evidences that disqualify the

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Gospel of Peter on the outset, both in content and in terms of composition when it was actually written to being anywhere near the timeframe of Jesus.

26:32

No, that's so interesting because usually when this sort of thing is happening, to be honest, most of the time a

26:42

Christian probably is the very first time of hearing this as they go to college. And usually for me, I grew up in a homeschooled world for the most part, and I kind of grew up in the homeschool co -ops and really only people that agree with me, kind of like my yes men of sorts.

26:56

So the majority of times, I think for a lot of people, they start, all of a sudden they have a friend who's a skeptic or maybe someone challenges them.

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And now it's just everywhere on TikTok. I mean, there's so many stories that get told and retold about all these different Gospels.

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So a lot of times it's like, wait, what is this? So it's good to have these claims cross -examined. So one of the things

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I want to maybe bring up, because I think it's good to know, where did this actually come from? How does this differentiate?

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Because usually when we think of a cult, we think of some weird leader out in the middle of nowhere having a private revelation and God talked to me or their authority is because I said so.

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So a lot of people would take that and say the same thing with the origins of Christianity, how this is just a spinoff of one of the many early

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Roman religions. And let me just go ahead and just read, continue from this article I mentioned before. And this is from the article on Medium.

27:49

He says to the Gospel of Peter, that wasn't the only Gospel. And then he claims that, yeah, he says, in the early days of the

27:59

Christian faith, there were literally no Gospels and no Christian Bible. The followings and preachings of the earliest

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Christian begins around the year 30 AD by a small group of Jews who followed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in the same way that at least 300 other religions were being promoted and taught in the same region.

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I believe that's true, given there's a Roman emperor and there's a lot of syncretism there. And at the same time, these were spread by the telling of stories, which were certainly the case with the early followers of Jesus.

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Any followers of Jesus would almost certainly have not been able to read or write. So they relied on elaborate myths of storytelling passed on from one generation to the next.

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Very similar stories akin to other solar messiahs that arose in the region for thousands of years prior to the advent of Christianity.

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Stories of Jesus were not written down for many decades after his apparent death. Scholars believe the earliest

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Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written around 70 AD, some 40 years after the purported death of Jesus.

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However, the earliest complete papyrus in existence is a Greek transliteration some 220 years later, and only small fragments of the earliest text existing.

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So from all that, that's a lot, but you kind of get his fundamental assertions. Given your area of expertise, is he accurate in off some areas?

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What's your critique if he was your student and he delivered that paper to you, what would you grade him? Oh boy, what would

29:34

I grade him? I'm not sure. He's got a lot of, he kind of scattered guns some facts there, some of which

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I have no problem with. And sometimes it's not what he's saying, but what he's not saying.

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I mean, I would date the Gospel of Mark much earlier than he just professed in that.

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However, I think what's interesting is that the vast majority of New Testament scholarship, whether it's believing or non -believing, goes with what's referred to as Mark in priority, which, you know, there's this conversation as to which

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Gospel is earlier. I don't claim to know. There are lots of theories. In fact, my dissertation supervisor is one of the foremost world experts on what's referred to as the synoptic problem.

30:26

And he focuses on that question. But if we just go by the academic consensus that Mark is the earliest, we still argue that Mark is the earliest, despite it actually being the latest attested

30:42

Gospel from the manuscript evidence. So nobody argues that because we have very few manuscripts of Mark, and because they're late, that that's a problem for the dating of Mark.

30:53

In fact, everybody argues that Mark is the earliest written, even if it's the latest that's attested in the manuscript tradition.

31:00

And in fact, the latest written that's argued by the majority of scholars, the Gospel of John, excuse me, the

31:08

Gospel of John is the earliest attested in the manuscript tradition. So even if we're dating

31:14

Mark at 70 AD, which I think is a little bit silly, it's a kind of late in my estimation.

31:22

And we're dating the Gospel of John at its latest, which is probably around 90 to 95

31:28

AD, that our first fragments of the Gospel of John are coming in the second century and our first fragments of the

31:34

Gospel of Mark are coming in the third century. But that doesn't seem to be that big of an issue.

31:41

And I always think it's interesting when individuals throw out, you know, well, there were these other

31:46

Gospels. Well, of course, there were these those other Gospels. That's kind of the wrong question.

31:52

The question shouldn't be, were there other Gospels that talked about Jesus and look different than the biblical

31:57

Gospels? The question should be, what's the earliest source material that gets us closest to Jesus?

32:04

Well, it's not those other Gospels. So in that sense, you can throw them out. Historically, they have no early independent eyewitness content.

32:14

The only sources that get us to an early eyewitness content perspective are

32:20

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And I think that that's pretty well documented within undesigned coincidences, within unnecessary details, within name correlation and geographical information that's found within the

32:36

Gospels. The Gospels, especially Luke and John, go to really extraneous lengths to justify themselves historically, whereas the other

32:45

Gospels don't really try that hard. In fact, they really do a terrible job.

32:52

Some of them, in fact, show a lot of evidence of having familiarity with 3rd century

33:03

Egypt and use names that are popular in 3rd century Egypt, not in 1st century

33:08

Roman occupied Judea and Galilee, whereas the Gospels and Acts show a direct causation correlation with being familiar with 1st century

33:20

Judea and Galilee. So why would the Gospel of Philip seem to be more familiar with 3rd century

33:26

Egypt? Well, it's because it's being written in 3rd century Egypt. So those types of things are almost smoke screens.

33:34

When you throw out all that information and say, you know, there are these other Gospels and the

33:39

Gospels that are in your Bible, they weren't even written until decades after. Well, okay, but the

33:46

Gospels that you're mentioning as competitors aren't being written for centuries later.

33:52

So why even mention them to begin with if your argument is that the

33:58

Biblical Gospels are too late because there is no Christian Bible, which I think is a silly thing to say.

34:04

There is a Christian Bible. It's called the Old Testament. And we even have evidence. I guess this is an aside, but it's one thing that really frustrates me when people say, when even

34:14

Christians say sometimes, well, you know, there was no Bible within the early church. Well, of course there was a Bible within the early church.

34:20

They had the Old Testament and then they had the

34:25

Gospels. I mean, the Gospels are being argued for by early

34:32

Christians within the 2nd century as scripture. And then you have even

34:39

Peter mentioning that Paul is hard to understand like the other scriptures.

34:47

And so Peter seems to think that Paul's letters are scripture. So why would we argue that the

34:52

Christians didn't have an early Bible? Well, of course they had an early Bible. It's just not what we think of a

34:58

Bible today because we picture a single tome leather bound document with nice thumb indexing on the pages and everything is comfy.

35:09

And we don't like the fact that these books floated around as independent books for so long, because that's not how we understand scripture.

35:17

But the early Jews were fine with having the Tanakh, the Torah, the

35:22

Nevim and the Ketzebim, what we call the Old Testament existing in separate scrolls.

35:28

And it was still scripture. So I know I missed something in there of what you read out, but I think there's a lot of smoke screening going on.

35:38

There's a lot of kind of, well, I'm going to throw this thing out there and you're going to feel preoccupied with that.

35:44

And so, uh, by the time I really start talking about the Bible and the gospels, uh, you're already thinking, well,

35:51

I don't know about the gospel of Peter. So maybe that has some validity when in reality, um, it's, it's, it's really not, uh, related to the subject of, hey,

36:05

I want to know about Jesus. So how do I find the earliest source material that gets me to Jesus? Yeah. What's up everybody.

36:10

It's the super sleuth here, letting you know that you can go to shop cultish .com and get all of our exclusive cultish merch.

36:17

There's the bad theology hurts people shirt. Jerry wears it all the time. I wear it all the time. Sometimes we wear it at the same time without even trying to have that happen on the show.

36:25

And we're just like, Whoa, you're wearing the shirt. I'm wearing the shirt. You can wear the shirt to go to shop cultish .com today and get your exclusive cultish merch.

36:34

Talk to you later guys. Andrew, if you're going to play skeptic so far, if you're, if you're going to play the skeptic with everything that Wes has said so far, what would be your best reply or just question you have with everything we've unpacked so far?

36:46

Yeah. Not to play the skeptic, but just to see if I'm tracking correctly. So we may not have the original copies, let's say of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, uh, help me think here,

36:55

Wes, uh, what you're kind of saying is that even if we have copies of Mark from what century is it? You said the third century, the third century.

37:03

And John was from which century second century. Uh, it's the texts themselves that show through the locations that are being used, the specific names, uh, their familiarity with Judeo, uh, situations that are going on at the timeframe.

37:18

We can see through the actual documents that they were written much earlier than the copies there are.

37:26

Cause I could see a skeptic going, well, you don't have the original copies. How do you not know that someone just wrote this within the second century?

37:32

And of course they're going to have familiarity within the first century, uh, Judaism because it's right. Uh, am

37:39

I tracking kind of correctly? Yeah. I mean, um, the, the fact is that we don't have any original copies written by authors from anyone within ancient antiquity.

37:49

So it's not like the Bible is alone in this text test case.

37:56

Uh, Joe Rogan is a big fan of Marcus Aurelius. Um, we don't have any originals of Marcus Aurelius.

38:05

In fact, I think the earliest, and I could be wrong about this, but I think the earliest copy of Marcus Aurelius comes from the 16th century.

38:11

Like we're, we're waiting a really long time for a lot of these documents. And so, uh, but that, that doesn't pose a problem for the original text of Marcus Aurelius, because this is just the issue of antiquity.

38:24

And we're able because of the careful scholarship, whether that's with the classical works of Marcus Aurelius, um, or someone like, uh, you know, there were four biographers of, um, of, uh,

38:39

Socrates. Uh, one of them was, uh, Aristophanes. One of them is Plato.

38:44

And another guy was Xenophon. Xenophon, we don't have any copies of Xenophon until 1800 years after we know he wrote.

38:54

And yet I have had colleagues who have done text critical work that is working with the text and tracing it back to the original of Xenophon.

39:03

And they'll say, you know, there are issues with a word or two here or there, but we can have confidence that we know what

39:09

Xenophon wrote. And so it's, it's, this is an issue that all of works of antiquity have to deal with.

39:16

But with the Bible, we have an incredible amount of confidence that what we have is what the original author wrote.

39:23

And this is one of the things we really wanted to communicate when we went out to Egypt and we devote a whole episode of the three episodes that we were producing on that subject is because despite the fact that we are 2000 years out from the text of the new

39:37

Testament, we're not actually getting farther from the text. We're getting closer because we're continuing to find manuscripts.

39:43

We're continuing to dig them out of the sands of places like Egypt. We're the, the reason why you can have assurance in the text of your

39:56

Bible is often because scribes did things like made mistakes.

40:02

And we're able to see that, compare it with other copies that we have and look at both the internal and external evidences.

40:10

And we're able to trace the original text back so that even the most skeptical scholars out there, individuals like the audience might know the name

40:19

Bart Ehrman. He's pretty prolific in being a, a skeptic of the biblical new

40:26

Testament. He'll say, we have the original text. He'll say, what we have is what the original authors wrote.

40:32

We're just, there are some questions about some words here and there, but that what we have is what the original authors wrote 2000 years ago.

40:40

We can have confidence in that despite the timeframe. And I would actually argue that like I said, before Andrew, we're not getting farther from the text as time goes on, we're actually getting closer.

40:52

So another question as we're, we're, man, time goes by fast. There's so much information to learn from and think, and this is, this has been great.

40:59

So you, one of the areas of expertise aside from the textual criticism, criticism is also just understanding really like first century or very early church

41:08

Christian history. So a lot of people talk about Constantine, we're going to get there. We're going to talk about Constantine, but I would like to maybe give our audience, maybe just a kind of a pre cliff notes of like, what happened before 325

41:21

AD, which is sort of the pinpoint of when they say Constantine decided what, what books would be and not be in the

41:29

Bible. But cause when I think of Roman history and the relationship of the church, like I know that you've got a lot of emperors, like a lot of emperors rising, emperors falling.

41:40

There's also, it seems to be like a lot of bloodshed, you know, there's emperors who get murdered, but you also have

41:45

Christians who are being persecuted. You think about the story like Nero and how he would make Roman candles out of Christians and kill them and Christians being thrown to the lions.

41:54

But all of a sudden now you've got a Roman emperor who now seems to be this very powerful political person.

42:01

We'll get there. But what would you give, like prior to like the first 300 years, what would be the relationship between Christians, but also

42:09

Gnostics, because that's sort of brought up in the argumentation too. And the

42:15

Roman empire, like what's the relationship between all three of them, like leading up for the first couple of hundred years up until Constantine, just so we can kind of give our audience context when we get there.

42:25

Yeah. So it's a good question because Christians were always at odds with the Roman empire. A lot of the earliest

42:32

Christian apologists were writing to Roman officials, or at least perceiving

42:38

Roman officials as part of their audience and saying, here's why we have validity and here's why you shouldn't kill us.

42:48

Because they're giving evidences for the faith, for what they're doing. You know, the early church didn't say as much.

42:57

I think sometimes we have this perspective of, you know, what has the world come to? I think the early church kind of said, well, look at what has come into the world.

43:05

And so on that basis, the early Christians had a strong fervor to go out into the

43:11

Roman empire because Christ was sitting and ruling and reigning at the right hand of the father. And so their relationship with the empire was not one of power and persuasion as much as it was one of the fact that they already thought they had won.

43:28

And so we see the prolific view of the early Christians, despite intense persecution, like you said, literally being set on fire.

43:40

The story is as torches in Nero's garden. And then that really comes to a head immediately before Constantine because persecution was kind of dispersed and it wasn't unanimous under the different Roman emperors and officials.

43:57

However, under Diocletian right before Constantine, it was really, really bad.

44:03

And it was a nationwide Roman empire wide persecution and many

44:09

Christians lost their lives. We have records of Christian documents being destroyed.

44:16

And so there's a very tense relationship with the state at that point.

44:22

And yet Christianity grew and it grew because of the fact that Christians understood that the gospel message would go out to all nations and it would profoundly overturn the world's perspective of what power looked like.

44:41

Because you had the God who ruled the universe, stepping out of eternity and into humanity, into a baby, and then ruling through serving and dying on a cross.

44:59

Yeah. Let me ask you. No, that's good, man. I would definitely agree with that. So when you think of like in contrast, the

45:06

Roman empire, it's an American empire, which technically that's true. But you think about all the different presidents, you think of Bill Clinton, George W.

45:14

Bush, Ronald Reagan. And you think of like Richard Nixon, all of those presidents were the president of the

45:22

United States, but they also had different parties. Their relationship, for example, like whether the

45:27

Republican or the Democrat party would have been very different in the 1980s versus the 1970s versus like the 1990s.

45:35

You have different things that are going on in the culture. You said it was Emperor Diocletian that was before Constantine. Diocletian.

45:41

Yeah. Diocletian. So I mean, you have other emperors, like you have Nero and you have other emperors who are kind of lenient.

45:47

Is there something about Diocletian specifically that sort of motivated him or kind of set him off like,

45:53

I'm really going to go after the Christians? Because it seems like before Diocletian, maybe there was not as much.

45:59

Because the only thing I really kind of know, my history is a bit rusty. There's just that emphasis of them not giving the pinch of incense on the altar to Caesar because Christians couldn't do that on their conscience because they said that Christ is

46:11

Lord. Was there anything on top of that or what was the nature of Diocletian's motivation of anything you'd be aware of like why he decided to really go after the

46:20

Christians, even though other emperors had done it on some level? Yeah, that's a very good question.

46:26

I think there are a few theories. I think in the ancient world, Christians were viewed as very strange because they were, and the literal accusation against the

46:34

Christians was that they were atheists, that they denied the gods. They were referred to as atheists and anti -social.

46:42

And the reason that those two words were used is because A, they denied that the gods existed, which is a very strange thing to do in the ancient world because the ancient world wasn't polytheistic as much as it was referred to as henotheistic.

46:57

So they believe that almost all gods exist simultaneously. And that's why it's part of the reason why the

47:05

Greek religion and the Roman religion have the same gods with different names. But it's why when

47:12

I was in Luxor in Egypt a couple of months ago, you go into the temple at Luxor and you actually find a shrine that Alexander the

47:21

Great put up for himself where he depicts himself as an Egyptian pharaoh being being officialized by the

47:32

Egyptian gods. And part of the reason for that was that they didn't think that their gods existed and the

47:38

Egyptian gods didn't. They believed that the Egyptian gods existed and actually the Egyptian gods could be their gods under a different name.

47:46

And so this henotheistic perspective was so widespread and religion, unlike today, was directly tied to your ethnicity.

47:55

So the Jews got away to some degree, although the Romans clearly thought they were a strange bunch.

48:00

They got away with being monotheists because it was their ethnicity. But then Christianity comes along and it's not any one ethnicity, right?

48:12

You have Jews that believe in Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, but very quickly you have Romans and you have

48:18

Nabataeans and you have Greeks and you have Gauls and they're all being converted.

48:23

And so the ancient Romans did not understand or know what to do with this because at least those

48:28

Jews were strange because they were Israelites. But these Christians are denying that the gods exist and it has nothing to do with their ethnicity.

48:37

And so that is very confusing to them. And so part of the reason why they would get angry and why they would blame the

48:45

Christians for things is because say you were in Athens and there was a famine or a flood or some type of natural disaster.

48:55

Well, it's very easy when you're trying to find a reason for that natural disaster to say, well, these

49:02

Christians are running around. They're saying Athena doesn't even exist. Well, that must be the problem, right?

49:07

So there was a saying I think comes from Eusebius that if the Tiber is too high or the Nile is too low, that was the river in Rome and the river in Egypt, the cry would ring out the

49:17

Christians, the lions. And the idea behind that was that the Christians are easy targets because they're confusing.

49:24

Because they're atheists, they deny the gods and they're anti -social. They won't participate in the public life that is inherently related to the religious practice.

49:34

And so when Diocletian comes along, you mentioned that pinch of incense, he basically says, how do we weed out the

49:41

Christians? Well, they will not say, they will not adhere to the Roman religious cultic practices.

49:48

So the emperor wants you to take a pinch of incense and put it on the altar of Caesar and say,

49:56

Caesar is Lord. Well, one of the earliest confessions of the faith is

50:02

Jesus is Lord. And so the Christians are not going to do that. And they would make this a requirement to buy or to sell within the markets.

50:14

So if you took a pinch of incense and you put it on the altar of Caesar, they would give you a piece of paper that was called a libelous.

50:21

And if you did not have a libelous, you were not allowed to be a legal business within a large portion of the

50:28

Roman empire. Now you can make connections, illustrations to the Mark of the Beast, right? They did within the early church.

50:35

I just did in my head. Yeah, exactly. And so the Christians became very early and easy targets because they were just seen as strange within the ancient world.

50:46

And so by the time you get to Diocletian, he's really doubling down on the

50:52

Christians being the odd ones out and they're preventing temple worship with their conversions.

50:59

They're threatening society and the social order. And so Diocletian really cracks down on Christians prior to Constantine's conversion to Christianity, where Christianity is actually an illicit religion.

51:16

It's an illegal religion. And then Constantine comes along and he decriminalizes

51:23

Christianity. And that makes a big difference in the history of Christianity. And how did you have emperors?

51:29

Some of the emperors were murdered, obviously, but in the case of Diocletian versus Constantine, was there sort of a system in place for how emperors replaced one another?

51:43

Was it something that was like, you think about a king having his specific descendants when you think of like more like in Europe and like when

51:51

France, somebody has their descendant and they become a king? Or how did that work when it came to Rome?

51:58

Like how would they replace one with the other? They have a system in place of that or how that work? Yeah. So there's actually a division between the

52:06

East and the West. By the time Constantine comes around, there's Constantine and then there's Licinius and they end up actually battling it out and Constantine wins.

52:16

And it's in this time period where Constantine meets with Licinius, who's running things in the East and they meet in Milan and they issue what's now known as the

52:24

Edict of Milan. And the Edict of Milan, which was initiated in 313, was not just aimed at Christians, but was more broadly a policy of religious tolerance.

52:33

So they decriminalize a whole bunch of religions, but you have Constantine in the West, you have

52:38

Licinius in the East, and eventually Constantine supersedes Licinius. The empire is not divided, it's brought together and then

52:46

Constantine succeeds the throne as emperor.

52:51

But the history of Roman emperors and who succeeds who is kind of a messy and bloody one because politics is always so simple, isn't it?

53:04

Man, so what's the benefit for Constantine to decriminalize

53:10

Christianity? Did he see that it could be used to position himself in such a way to gain power?

53:16

Was he actually somebody who was converted? I know there's stories about him seeing like a cross on the battlefield.

53:22

Because I know a lot of people, especially one of the articles that we've been citing, they're kind of saying that Constantine just saw that this new religion was becoming powerful, so he was just decriminalizing it in a sense to get a foothold in the nation.

53:39

Yeah, I think there's a lot of debate surrounding Constantine's conversion, but ultimately

53:46

I think it's overplayed when we talk about the Edict of Milan and saying that it was specifically aimed at Christianity.

53:53

It certainly benefited Christianity, but it decriminalized a lot of other religions that were also illegal at the time.

54:01

So I think to just say that this was some sort of political ploy really doesn't make sense in the grand scheme of things.

54:10

It also benefited other religious perspectives, and Constantine really didn't have anything to gain from adopting

54:18

Christianity personally. Christianity was, with all due respect to some historians who argue that Christianity was actually quite prevalent at this time, it was still a minor player in terms of the religious practice and sphere of Roman antiquity.

54:33

And so I think Constantine actually takes a gamble when he converts to Christianity because I don't think it actually would have benefited him more to continue worshiping the sun and continue worshiping and establishing religions that put him in a place of kind of military rulership.

54:57

Because the Gospels and the Bible and Biblical Christianity is one of servant leadership.

55:06

And there are far more advantageous narratives to take hold of and ascribe to yourself if you're looking for power.

55:15

A lot of the people who, and I hear this from podcasts like the Joe Rogan podcast of saying that Constantine, this was a power grab.

55:24

I don't think he gained any power from doing this. There's this ragtag group of bishops who have been persecuted for the last over a century.

55:34

What would it benefit him from aligning himself with them?

55:41

Even the calling of the Council of Nicaea is something that he does because I think he just wants the early

55:48

Christians to not fight amongst themselves. He wants more of a sense of peace across the

55:54

Roman empire. And he recognizes that they're Christians, very spread out through the Roman empire. But I don't think his conversion, and it's argued whether his conversion was legitimate or not.

56:04

I think if you read Eusebius when he talks about Constantine, I think Eusebius communicates that at least

56:10

Eusebius thinks his conversion was legitimate. I think to say that was a power grab is really to misunderstand what is going on religiously and politically at the time, because there are literal war gods who he could have aligned himself with who would give him a lot more of a strategic position to be able to take unanimous control of the

56:38

Roman empire. Yeah. Well, let's do this because people are really curious to find out. I feel like we're just kind of getting to Constantine, but we're going to leave everyone on a cliffhanger.

56:46

Sorry, everyone. But we're going to go ahead and kind of jump into that, because this is where everyone likes to start.

56:53

But we sort of laid a precursor and foundation, things about the biblical texts, things about the history of the

56:58

Roman empire, and just really a lot of Cliff Notes stuff. And Wes, you have other content as well, too, where you go a lot more deeper.

57:04

Some of these are your bullet points that you have the whole videos on. So just real quickly, in case of people hearing you for the first time, where can people go to find you at?

57:12

Yeah, well, the easiest place, the one -stop shop is WesleyHuff .com or ApologeticsCanada .com,

57:19

the organization I work for. So if you go to WesleyHuff .com, you can find my social media handles there.

57:27

You can find the infographics that I put. In fact, I have an infographic on the infographics tab.

57:32

That's the history of gospels from canonical to apocryphal, where I put the timeline of, OK, when does the gospel of Philip come up?

57:40

When does the gospel of Peter? When was it written compared to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? I have that categorized there.

57:47

So WesleyHuff .com. Otherwise, you can go to my

57:53

Instagram, I believe, is Wesley underscore Huff. Yeah, that's right,

58:01

Wesley underscore Huff. But you can find that social media handle on WesleyHuff .com. So if you're interested in any more of my content, that's where to go.

58:08

Awesome. Sounds good. So on that note, we're going to leave it at a cliffhanger. We'll have links to your socials and all that, too, when we drop this episode.

58:16

Thank you all for listening in, and we will talk to you next week in part two, where we talk about Constantine and the

58:22

Lost Gospels on Cultish, where we enter into the game of the cults. Talk to you all next week. or follow the link in the description and start listening to the full series while supporting this mission.