#62 Polytheism, Paganism, and the Tower of Babel + Dr. James Sedlacek

When Jesus showed up, the world was already full of other gods, like Zeus and Artemis and Mithras and Isis.

Where did polytheism even begin in the Bible? The clearest place for me to land is

Genesis 11, with the story of the Tower of Babel. It seems, at least as far as from the heavenly perspective goes, that that wasn't just humans.

So there's a concept of the divine counsel, they are no longer serving the Lord, they're serving themselves. That's began a creation of grotesque images that humans were worshiping, something anti -creation.

What happened to them? Where'd they go? Hello, hello.

Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Belluno, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the

Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding

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Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get to the show. Hello, hello. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host today for Biblically Speaking.

Today we're going to talk about something that has always interested me, the origin of polytheistic gods.

And this is going to be very different from the other conversations that we had regarding other gods and their creation story compared to Genesis, or how were they viewed by other gods amidst a

Israelite people worshiping a monotheistic god. Because this is important because when

Jesus showed up and he preached in Galilee, the world was already full of other gods like Zeus and Artemis and Mithras and Isis.

We see this all over the Old Testament. And then he walks into throne rooms dedicated to Zeus. So in this episode,

I've brought on the renowned, the beloved Dr. James Sedlicek. You are a repeat guest who

I always love to have you back on. You are one of the smartest people I know. And you're going to walk us through the ancient spiritual background of scripture from Genesis to Revelation, and how polytheistic gods emerged and why divine beings are even being acknowledged in the

Bible and what we as Christians need to do to live faithfully despite these false gods.

So just for anybody who has not listened, this might be your first episode. You are in for a treat because Dr.

James Sedlicek is highly, highly qualified to speak on this. You have a PhD in biblical studies with a focus on Greek language and linguistics on the

New Testament. You have an MDiv of biblical studies focusing on Hebrew and Greek exegesis. And right now you do teach biblical languages and interpretations at the

Israel Institute of Biblical Studies. And then you also serve as a professor for Greek exegesis and the textual criticism for God's Bible School and College.

If we were going to talk to anybody, we'd be talking to you. So welcome back to the show, Dr. Sedlicek. How do you feel about today's topic?

I'm excited about it. First of all, I want to thank you so much for having me on the show. It's always a pleasure.

We've had several good episodes in the past, and I would like to continue this, and it's always a pleasure to speak.

And even with different ones that have asked questions or posted comments, it's been fun to follow up with some of those items that we've had a chance to follow up with.

So I want to thank everyone for logging on and being part of this. Amazing. What are some of the comments that you've seen and followed up on?

I think the majority of them were related to the grabbing of the robe.

That was amazing. Did you see all of that recently? Oh my gosh, people love that. I'm happy that it was worth reposting.

So when you have people reach out, do they share the same sentiment? Because all I see when I repost that kind of content is this opened up so much more about the

Bible than I've previously known. I've had some people contact me on the side too and want to know what classes they can take and learn more.

So that's also helpful. Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, I know we only have an hour and we'll probably have to do two of these because this conversation is going to be so good.

I already have a feeling about it, but let's jump right in. So when we think about all of polytheistic religions, it's really difficult for me as a

Christian to understand where those came from. There must have been something that came before Genesis.

Had they showed up and there was already a Greek pantheon, a Roman pantheon, some of the books that I've read, there's this thing called a divine feminine.

Where did polytheism even begin in the Bible? Because the Bible begins at the beginning of time. Where do we get these polytheistic gods?

Yes. One of the first places that's caught my attention is Romans 1 because Paul begins to explain the origin of idols and demonic activity and how the

Gentiles or the nations pursued this to their own detriment. And while there's been some misinterpretation of Romans 1 in terms of what's really being said, one of the clearest pictures that you can get out of Romans 1 is this first century idea that there was an original setup that went bad.

And then the thing that goes bad also affects those who followed it. So the Gentiles were all affected by it by the time of Paul.

So he's like referencing a past event. Yes. Got it. And it's not clear when you're reading the chapter what event this was or how it relates to the rest of the stories.

The clearest place for me to land is Genesis 11 with the story of the

Tower of Babel. So I think you have, that was one of the key verses that you highlighted was to talk about the

Tower of Babel. We get a very thin sketch there that there were a bunch of human beings all speaking one language, and they built a city, they built a tower, and then gods came down, confounded their languages, and then they all scattered.

The story doesn't get into a lot of details about the whys of things, but in Jewish tradition alongside of the stories there was an understanding that there were some beings that were sort of between human beings and God in some kind of way, in some kind of governance, and they went bad.

And when exactly do they go bad is a big question because the story isn't given to us in Genesis 11.

Are you talking about like at the time of Tower of Babel, it wasn't just humans on earth? It seems at least as far as from the heavenly perspective goes that that wasn't just humans.

Now from an earthly perspective, humans may have thought they were alone. Oh, okay. So that's possible.

Now for me, it's been instructive to also see the book of Enoch as it unfolds.

And Enoch kind of goes in and explains some of the whys and puts details behind some of the missing data that we read when we read

Genesis or other books that it seems that Paul is informed by, and it seems that John is informed by when they write their books,

Revelation in particular. And so if Enoch is such a source of information, it's probably worth our time to at least see what it has to say.

Enoch was not accepted as a canonical book by many groups, both Jewish and Christian, but it was accepted by a few groups at different times and places.

And it shows echoes throughout a lot of the books that we call New Testament books. So it's an interesting book.

One of the things that Enoch kind of clarifies for us, because Enoch goes back to the reason for Noah's flood, and in there, there was beings who interacted with humans in a way that produced harm and destruction, and then

God needed to bring the judgment on the people. And then the beings were bound in a place far, far away.

It isn't clear, even from Enoch, where that location is. And it's also not clear how these beings still exert force onto the earth from their prison, wherever that is.

But it seems as though when you get to the Tower of Babel story, these beings are still active somehow.

Even though they aren't roaming loose, they're still active. And so I wanted to kind of throw that out as a foundation, because the question is about idols.

Where do they come from? And you almost have to go back to Genesis 1 and 2, when

God is creating mankind, to see that God builds the universe where there's a firmament between two levels of water.

That word for firmament is sort of a key piece for us, because that's the same word used for the ceiling of the temple and the tabernacle later.

That's the only place we find it used. And prophets, when they're looking in the heavenly throne room, they see this same word, separating the beings supporting the throne from the throne and the divine being on top.

So this word is kind of a, if you know other places where the word shows up, it makes you wonder what's really going on in the creation story.

And the other piece that's critical for us is that God makes man in his own image, and then breathes the breath of life into him.

Well, this sounds just like, oh, this is a life -making moment.

If you know nothing else about ancient religion, that seems to be all it's saying.

But in ancient religions, in their temples, in their idolatry -focused temples, the idol in the temple was always called an image, and it needed life breathed into it from this being who wasn't there in order to activate the religion of the place.

In other words, it wasn't just the stone or wood idol that sits there. There was some kind of understood being that was spirit -like, stronger, greater than humans, but yet invisible to humans who would animate the image and breathe life into it and interact with its people through that image.

So for the creation story, the animals are the creation God wishes to interact with.

So he breathes into man, and man becomes his image, and therefore the one who interacts with the animals.

And this key point is bounced upon many times through scripture that the idols around in the nations do not live, do not breathe, do not move, because a different image does, and it's the human image who actually lives and breathes and moves.

Yes, sure. What were you saying about the animals not breathing? No, the idols, the images, they don't move, they don't breathe, they're made of wood and stone, they have no activity, they can't perform anything in their realm.

That's hit upon a number of times. Well, the reason that that's important is because the image of the true

God, in other words, is in a breathing, living human being who can act and move. Right.

I mean, I get that because I'm on the Christian side. So what's the argument for the other side that thought that this wooden deity was worth worshipping, or were even the breath of God, that God's, lowercase g's, life got into it?

The next piece I want to move us into is something called a divine counsel. We love this, we love this term.

Talked about this before. Let's go. Someone I'm thinking of who's done a lot with this is

Michael Heiser. Maybe some of you have read books by him. But this idea that when

God is in the creative moment, he begins to speak to a plural group, saying, let us make man in our own image.

And it's like, wait a minute, who's the we and who's the our here? And it leaves it mysterious. It's not answered there.

In fact, it leaves a lot of question marks in the history of Jewish interpretation of Genesis. And there's no other explanation in other

Jewish texts on that one? Not right there. Throughout the development of rabbinical thought, there were a lot of posed explanations.

And one of them is these divine beings, not divine in the sense that they're truly

God, but that they are somewhat elevated above humans and they're spirit -like, invisible. And they can zap into a room, zap out of a room at will.

And they have these abilities. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so basically Tower of Babel.

So there's a concept of the divine council where it's not yet like messenger angels, but it's not

God's. It's something in the middle that is advising and counseling God within this divine council. And we get that allusion to it in Genesis.

So when Tower of Babel happens, God says, okay, my council, go rule over these new nations.

Instead of directing people to worship the Almighty, they direct the worship towards themselves, arguably becoming a fallen now opponent of God because they are no longer serving the

Lord. They're serving themselves. People are interacting with deities that have supernatural power.

So they think they are talking to capital G God, and it's just little case G God. And as they talk to their neighbors across the mountains, they say, oh, there's a sun

God. Like now, how does it now attribute to, well, you have a sun God. I've got a fertility

God. You know, mine is Artemis and it helps with war. And then you get these sacrifices.

Where's the next step to this? These entities needed life in them. Oh, they needed images for humans to notice.

So that's began the creation of grotesque images that humans were worshiping. And the interesting thing is these images could be made of things that were creation elements of creation, or they could be something that never was created, something anti -creation.

And so what's that mean? Mixed bird beaks and camels, legs and horses, body, you know, all these different.

So it's not like a tree. It's like, oh, it's like a concoction of dead bodies. Yeah, a concoction of different body parts.

If you look at especially the Near East depictions of some of the deities, some of them have human faces, but animal bodies.

Some of them have opposite. They have human form, but animal heads.

Egypt is like that. Well, many of them. So the anti -creation essentially was just dead body parts that they were putting together and again, just using creation to create these like images of like,

I think of Shiva. Isn't Shiva for the Hindu religion? Like I'm modernizing this entirely, but it's like a human face with like an elephant trunk or like an elephant body with a human elephant face with a human body.

Ganesh. Ganesh is like that. It's more of an elephant. And Shiva has multiple arms.

So you get a lot of this kind of thing. If you look at the Assyrian or the Babylonian or the

Persian deities, and they have some that they consider bad and some that they consider good.

The bad ones are always more grotesque with more random assortment of body parts, while the good ones are usually mixed between human and animal features.

It's just so wild to me how it's jumped. You know how you start with, okay, I'm interacting with a

God. I'm going to, you know, because I'm getting the best results when I pray about the rain,

I'm going to call it my like weather God, because then, you know, when I pray to it, I'll get rain, my crops will grow.

And I depend on that for livelihood. This probably has these concoctions of items and you create that anti -God or that anti -creation as you stated.

And then it balloons into this like God like image. It's hard for me to see that evolution of it because I'm seeing the whole thing, but it would be hard for me to see this something that's like giving me some responses made out of legs and arms and tree trunks and whatever

I'm using to create it into now this like God like figure that then you like pass on the mythology of it to the generations and your children.

How does that work? And I'm entering this as humble and like ignorant about this, but I'm truly trying to understand how you can go from the starter to the end that we see today.

Yes, and the images are wildly different and the beings behind them are the beings that are connected to this divine council.

We can think of them as watchers. Enoch always calls them watchers instead of angels. What should we call them?

That's always an open question, but that's what Enoch calls them. Some texts don't call them that.

They call them sons of God, plural, which we find that reference in the

Hebrew Bible on occasion, which is interesting. And we see that in some pagan literature, too, with the sons of God doing their thing.

And if you look at even Greek and Roman pantheons, there's always a head God, and then there's the sons and daughters of that God.

And then I would love to get into that next discussion. Destruction. Yeah. Each version of these culturally are different from each other.

So Babylon had their version. Canaan had its version. Persia had its version. Greek and Rome each had their versions.

But most of these versions that reach the first century are amalgamated. For example, the

Greeks had some core ones that were close to home, like Athena or Helen. And then from there, they acquired more as they conquered more people.

And they claimed Artemis, for example, into their own pantheon of gods and goddesses.

But that one wasn't originally Greek. It was the Amazonian women, the big invaders that had the bow and arrows, you know, that gave the

Greeks havoc back in the day. And so the Amazon tribe of women warriors was the one that brought

Artemis into the Mediterranean. What? So they were defeating different people and then just inheriting their god.

Yes. And here's the way it would work. If you go and conquer that other people group and you sack its main temple, you grab all of the stuff from its temple and go put it in a storehouse that belongs to your own temple.

And then you have allowed your god to conquer other gods. Because now you've captured a god.

Mm hmm. This is why the Israelite temple stuff ends up in Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

And Nebuchadnezzar wouldn't touch it. He left it in the storehouse, but his grandson decided, I'm going to use that stuff.

And that's when his kingdom ends, because he messed with the god stuff that was in captivity. OK, but oh my gosh, this is insane.

OK. OK, so I can totally see the thinking behind this. This makes sense that you have a deity, works for you.

My neighbors, they have a deity for water. I'll take that one. Now I took over. What is it?

That's the key point. That's the key point right there, because you got a deity for fertility, but you don't have one for water.

And the other country has one for water. You need both. So you go get their deity, and now you've got both fertility and water.

Which begs the question, when they were creating these anti -creations, why was the thinking, this is only a god for X, not this is a god for all of me?

Don't know the answer to that, but that raises some interesting questions. One of the purposes of these beings seems to be to destroy what

God's trying to do with creation. So what better way to -

The purpose? So - Because these are fallen deities that are leading them. They're in rebellion, open rebellion.

Got it, got it, got it. So if they can get human beings to fight each other, declare war on each other, kill each other, then they've succeeded.

Oh my gosh, okay, okay. And so that's one way they succeed. The other way they succeed is establishing human sacrifice, and people are killing their kids, and other people that they captured in battle.

So nearly all of your Old Testament and New Testament pagan religions had sacrifice.

So like in Rome, it was different than it was in Babylon or Persia. But in Rome, if you conquered somebody, you always dragged the captives to the feet of Zeus and sacrificed them there.

That was the way that you did that. Or Jupiter, I should say, rather than Zeus. But some of the

Canaanite religions, you sacrificed a person that you cared for in order to get the gods to send rain.

So it was about appeasing the deities to get what you needed. That's so interesting because I'm reading a lot of 1

Samuel, and there's so much war and bloodbath and being delivered of the Philistines into the

Israelites' hands. And so you think like once this monotheistic god isolates the

Israelites, and he's still declaring war over other peoples, they're not doing the same thing that they were doing before.

It's like same, same, but slightly different of like, we're not sacrificing these people for God. We are taking out an enemy that is a bad influence, essentially.

Would you say that that's the correct distinction there with the Israelites? There's several things going on with the

Israelite situation. I know I just like jumped so far in the future, but... It's okay.

But there are people groups that have allied themselves to a particular demon, to use a blunt word.

And they are worshiping this demon and sacrificing humans to this demon. And God said there's enough.

So he's going to have his people come in and remove those people. And it's one of the explanations that makes theological sense when you look at, well, what were the

Israelites really doing to the Canaanites and why? You know, that becomes a big modern day question.

Was it genocide? Was it God declaring war on those who rebelled against God?

And it's, if we see those different strands of statements, why God tells the

Israelites to go do this. And there was a time when God said not to. And then he said that their iniquity was not yet full.

And so it's like, well, what does that mean? When does the iniquity become full?

We don't know that answer. It's never spelled out where it says, okay, their iniquity is full.

Now it's the time. All we know is that it wasn't the time because the iniquity wasn't full.

And then, oh, now it's the time. And we don't get an explanation for what they did. What was different?

What was the thing that was so bad that God said, hey, go in there. But something was bad.

And we just don't have the detail of it. Nothing recorded. Was it human sacrifice? What really was it?

It's hard to say. You're saying the Israelites were doing something that's not really expanded upon that Jesus, that God in heaven was like,

I'm not going to help you guys out just yet because you're doing something bad. I don't think I understand fully.

No. So at some point, God doesn't say to the followers of God that it was okay to go in and remove the

Canaanites from the land. It wasn't their time yet. As if there's coming a time, as if there's something that needs to be done before the time is right.

And we don't get the detail. We don't know what it was or what time it was that made all of that right.

But then when God inaugurates with Joshua to go in and start clearing the land,

Joshua does it, and it's the right time. And the iniquity must be full.

But what was it? We don't know. Yeah. Oh, okay. Got it. I understand now. Thank you for explaining that. Yeah, because we get into this discussion a lot with genocide and what is right, what is wrong when in this case, it's very different from a typical situation.

But coming back to the idols and to the development of idolatry, you see various things in various cultural groups because some of them accumulate deities from conquering other city -states.

And some of them are happy with a set core and just never really add more.

So a lot of them associated some of their deities with certain constellations in the sky.

And this is what gave us the sense that you had one for each month. And eventually, because there's 12 months in a year, they just kind of felt that stopping at 12 made sense.

So they had a 12 deity pantheon, one for each month. So some of the month's names that we have today are named after Roman deities.

January is one, it's named after Janus, the two -faced god.

And March is named after Mars, the god of war. And there might be one more, but it slipped in my mind.

But originally, well, saying originally is tough because there's always time before that.

But you go back far enough, a lot more of these months were named after deities. But eventually, some of the months just became named after a number.

So like September, October, November, December are seventh month, eighth month, ninth month, tenth month.

But that's all they mean. But December's not the 10th month. Not anymore. But in the

Roman calendar, they started their year with March, one. And they finished with February.

So December was the 10th month back then. Okay, got it. They start with the signs of life in the spring.

That was the start of the new year. Oh, okay. Yeah. That makes more sense. So the names of some of our months are stuck on those months from something that happened 2 ,500 years ago when they named them this way based on the system that they use.

We've never updated the names of our months. That's wild. Oh my gosh. The days of our week in English are also named after deities, but not

Roman ones. They're named after German ones. Monday is the day of the moon. Tuesday is the day of Tus.

Wednesday is the day of Woden or Odin. Thursday is the day of Thor, Thor's day.

Friday is Frigga's day, Frigga the goddess. Saturday is the day of the

Satyrs. Only Sunday has a kind of nice name to it, but it's just like the moon.

It's the sun god. So it's Sunday. So that's interesting to bring up German culture because I'm so stuck in like, we're in Israel.

So how did, like when you're saying like, is that coming from a place of when people after the Tower of Babel, people were sent out, they were truly sent out all over the land.

Of course, I'm being so centralized and like the arid of like the Middle East, like this was everywhere that this was happening.

Yeah. So you get human expansion over the globe, each taking one of the 70 guides with them.

Eventually these guides are banished and judged. We actually get a passage in Psalm 82 about the judgment of these entities.

The counsel of God being under judgment. God judges them over their inability to do the right thing and sentences them to serious judgment and then extols humanity to serve only

God and not serve them. So this is kind of like the origin of, okay, wow.

So this is kind of like the origin story of like every different religion other than the original

God. Like this is where all the global religions came from, you could say. And that's what the order presents itself to us in Romans 1.

It begins with the worship of one God and then it degenerates to the worship of things not

God and then it multiplies and it increases. Just a kind of sort of a touchstone on this is when you look at the development of Hinduism.

If you go back to the original Vedas, think about the development of Hinduism.

Yes. If you look at the oldest Vedic scriptures, there's one God. When you look at scriptures, the

Vedic scriptures around the year 800, think about Isaiah's timeframe, there's three gods. BC, AD?

BC, yeah. Okay. Isaiah's time. Okay, 800 BC. Because of the taking over other civilizations, needing other gods?

It's less clear. And in Hindu, a lot of things that are more concrete in Greek and Roman history are less clear for Hindu history.

So it's not exactly as clear how one becomes three and how three become more.

But if you go back to around the time Israel goes to captivity, there's 30. And if you go to about the first century, there's over 100.

And today modern estimates think there's as many as 300 ,000 gods and goddesses in India or in Hindu religion.

And they have that many. Why? What was the need to keep adding? It's difficult to understand fully, but not...

Okay. Imagine you're in an ordinary situation in life. You went to the store to buy a hamburger or whatever.

And while you were waiting in line, something you could not explain happened. And you tried to explain it with the best of your rationality, and you could not.

And so you believe that something happened, manifested itself right near you, and it was divine in origin or otherworldly in origin.

It would be very easy to say, well, that's another god who spoke to me or who did this.

Now, what happens is maybe one village says, well, that's another god. But somebody in the city a little further away would say, no, that's the same god we already have here, just manifested itself in a new way.

So there's all this debate whether there's really 300 ,000 or if there's some forms of Hinduism that believe there's only one ultimate god, but it manifests itself differently in all these 300 ,000 manifestations.

So you do get variety of understanding about them. But if something manifests itself to you as a mushroom that's talking, and three months later something manifests itself to you as a cow that's doing something else strange, it'd be easy to think, well, those are not the same deity.

Those are two different deities. Right. That makes sense. But then someone else philosophically could say, well, that's the same deity just talking to you two different ways.

Okay. So those would be like three different civilizations with three different approaches to that event. Three different philosophical understandings of a particular divine manifestation.

Yeah. So in the Hindu religion, you get various answers to how many deities are there.

And really, is there only one? Is there many, many, many? Or is there just a handful and who knows what the rest is?

You get a lot of different answers. But India shows us, or the Hindu religion shows us a modern way that worshiping or don't.

That's a good question of like, what happened to the Mayan gods? Did they become a different religion that we honor today?

Or why are they gone? Why do we not have, or are they still here? Maybe I'm just completely ignorant.

That begs the question, essentially, that what happened to these polytheistic religions that no longer exist?

I think of the Mayan religion, and I could be totally ignorant here that there are currently people in South America that still worship those

Mayan gods, but they're not mainstream. So for the ones that let's just assume they're completely gone, what happened to them?

Where'd they go? And what determined the end of them? Do you think that there's like the Easter bunny that may be more pagan in its origin?

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Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things. Now, back to the show. Okay, we're back with a part two.

We left off with a riveting conversation, basically picking up on what are the current manifestations of polytheism today?

You know, what happened to Mayan cultures and those many gods that they served? They still exist. Maybe they're just called different names.

And what modern equivalents of polytheism, like an Easter or witchcraft or many gods?

I want to continue this conversation of now that we understand where these many gods came from, now that we understand how they worked back then, let's make this currently relevant because I don't think that these enemies just disappeared once we had a monotheistic god.

Could you bridge that for us, Dr. Sedlacek, with comparison to how it's evolved towards today?

Sure, yes. And one of the things that I think has happened in human civilization, the early needs of early human civilizations after the

Tower of Babel was mainly to preserve a culture and to be very agricultural and move, roam, and finally settle down somewhere.

So the vision that we see of their pantheons and stuff relate to the way that they survive in the agricultural cycles.

Later, when the Roman Empire comes along, things are more empire -like, big metropolitan city -like.

It's not like that roaming agrarian society kind of thing. So the deities tend to be more sophisticated, they tend to be more involved with hierarchical structure of human civilization.

Whoa! And so you see the natures of these pantheons change when you go from ancient

Semitic world to Greco world to Roman world. And of course, as Christianity expanded from the ancient

Middle East all the way through the Roman Empire, it minimized a lot of the gods and goddesses and the influence that they had.

Because it was just an evolving world where they're less agrarian and more sophisticated. So I don't need gods for planting if I'm focusing more on politics.

Yeah, and so the roles of the deities tended to change. But you do see in most agrarian cultures, you see a sense of a goddess or god of fertility.

You see another one of war. Humanity's not been without war no matter how it's been structured.

But you don't see hierarchy of deities until you get to the late antique period with cities and metropolitan cities.

And suddenly these deities have hierarchies within the pantheons. And in Roman system particularly, the

Caesar was over all of them. He viewed himself as all of them. This would have been the version that Jesus interacted with.

Yes. That particular version began maybe 40 years before Christ with the

Roman emperor declaring himself as god of all gods. Like it was a major thing.

And a lot of times - That would have been a major thing for a human to say, I'm god. Got it. Especially over all of the traditional gods and goddesses.

That was new news. It's kind of like it warmed up. It was like they walked so Jesus could run because then

Jesus like, well, I'm god of everything. It was an interesting time for sure for him to show up. Yeah. There is some timing that's involved.

And when God says at the appointed time, there's some things that make sense there that that was a great time.

Okay. Okay. So for the polytheistic religion, he's like other gods exist. I'm just head of them.

And then later on Jesus like, I'm head of everything. You cannot serve the other ones.

Whereas the Roman god is more saying like, I'm just above the other ones. But yeah, keep sacrificing to Artemis. Well, the typical pagan in Roman society would have been very focused on one deity in their village.

But in their recent past, they would have been told and emphasized to kind of worship a plethora of them from different that they may have originated in different cities.

But they're sort of like as empires began to form, they started worshiping the deity over here on this day of the year and that deity over there on this day of the year.

Because it's supposed to give them benefits all year long. Okay. Well, then when the Roman Caesar comes out and says, well,

I am going to be over all of them because of this ancient myth. That's places where the pagan culture started to fight back and resist

Caesar. And this kind of upheaval was very big in the New Testament world in some of the pagan areas.

Some pagan areas were fine with this. They built temples to Caesar and they spent more of their energy worshiping

Caesar than their traditional gods and goddesses. But other areas resisted. And Ephesus was one of the resistance areas.

They had a goddess Artemis, or in the Roman culture, they had a semi -equivalent one called

Diana that they often said was the same thing. But that region really wanted to focus on her, did not really want to focus on Caesar traditionally.

And it was a hard sell area for Caesar worship. And a lot of times when we read our New Testaments, we don't realize that when

Paul visits Ephesus, he's got a very different problem on his hands than when he visits Philippi or Corinth or Athens.

Why? This is a people that not only resist

Caesar worship, but they have a single goddess that they serve and worship. Whereas many of these other areas are worshiping a pantheon of gods and goddesses.

And that makes it more difficult because they're less likely to worship Jesus. I want to take a minute and say thank you to the recording service that has made this podcast possible,

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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. They're very loyal to their goddess.

They just see Christianity as another usurper religion who's trying to surplant their goddess.

Is this where you kind of get the rise of the divine feminine? Well, that's been around. The idea of a divine feminine has been around.

I think the origin of Artemis is actually not Greek. Many Greeks would not like to hear that, but it's not

Greek. It comes from the Amazon women that settled that side of Turkey. The Greeks adopted it.

They fell in step with the worship of that deity when they colonized that area.

That would be the origin. Like that Amazonian god is the divine feminine? That's a version of it.

Yeah. There's another one in Turkey further inland called Sibyl, where we get the

Sibylline oracles from. That was another divine feminine, and that's the one Paul is interacting with when he goes to the

Galatians. Just to kind of tie that back in, the origin of Sibyl or this

Amazonian god came from the Tower of Babel principality ruling over that region.

That's hard to be certain about because things evolve over time, but presumably some being from the

Tower of Babel that followed the humans in their dispersion over the planet is responsible for what comes after.

I don't know. This tradition, has it been changed five ways, 10 different cultures since then?

All this can happen, and it's very hard to point to origins. I think when you look at Enoch particularly,

I think he states the same number of beings that separate out from Babylon as there are people in Jacob's family when the

Israelites moved down to Egypt. He makes a symmetry out of that saying, well, this is a number to offset the other number.

That kind of number is wild, but I don't know if I would suggest that they really connect that well, but there's been arguments made in that favor.

I know with Michael Heizer's material with the divine council, he focuses on that number as well.

There's this many, and they have this role. They rebel, and then in Psalm, I think we have this in our notes, but Psalm 82,

I think it is, God announces the judgment on these beings, and then they are no longer allowed to be in charge.

It takes a long time for many centuries from David's day till the day of the

Messiah movement in the first century to actually counter these different worship systems.

It doesn't happen overnight. Okay, so they are in Philippi interacting with this devoted group of people that are paganistic and non -accepting of Caesar.

Ephesus, yeah. Ephesus, sorry. Okay, and where do we go from there?

Does that still exist today? What happens to that? No, but it's interesting what's happened through time with the material from Ephesus.

What do you mean? The, as Paul starts to build a Christian movement in Ephesus, there's still a strong leaning of the people to want to kind of mix stuff from their

Ephesus religion with the new Messiah -focused Christian religion, and some of the things

Paul warns the Ephesians against in the letters is to not get these things mixed up, and some of the rules he sets in that local area are very different from the rules he sets in other letters to other cities, and sometimes as church world, we have taken all of Paul's letters and said to ourselves that everything in them is normative stuff for all of us everywhere to be concerned about and do.

That's definitely how I perceived it. Right, and that's, unless we have a sense of knowing why he's doing something to this group and to that group and to the other group, then it's very hard to pull out and say, these were situational things to counter this problem in this area.

How are we supposed to know that today? This is where historical background research is really helpful.

This is also where knowing something about the Greco -Roman pagan world is helpful because syncretism or the mixing of Christianity with pagan things is the biggest thing in the, after the

Gospels in the New Testament that is focused on, but every single one of them have to say different things because the cultures they're dealing with are different cultures.

So it's good to know what cultures are being told what and why. Yeah, so basically you have the

Jewish culture, which is primarily anti -idolatry. You may have some factions, splinter groups that are, but they're no longer welcomed by the typical

Pharisees and whatnot. You have the Greco world, which is distinct from the

Roman world. They have their own characteristics and their own logic about how they go about their religions.

Even though the Romans would say all of their stuff is a copy of the Greek stuff and it's the same thing, you have to be careful that sometimes we've understood

Romanized things about the Greek stuff because that's how we received it. We received the

Romanized version. And this is where studying the Greek pagan world in the original text is helpful to knowing what

Paul's doing in different churches because he isn't primarily writing in Latin and he's not primarily writing to Roman citizens that are

Roman culture, except in Corinth and Rome. The rest of them are Greek culture and they may have

Greek names because they have a Greek background. And so when he's dealing with Ephesus, that is not a

Roman area. Never was. And even though it was the capital of Asia, the province in Turkey, the

Roman province that was on that western bank, Asia had a different capital when the

Romans first established their capital there. And they built a Caesar statue there and a

Caesar temple. It was called Pergamum. But the Romans moved the capital to Ephesus for trade efficiency.

That's where it was the closest port city to getting to Italy and such. So they moved everything there, but Ephesus never wanted a

Caesar temple there. And this is the thing that was the friction between the Roman empire and the Greek cultures that they owned basically.

Isn't there, and like, this is me talking to multiple people, so I'm not going to quote the exact verse, but there's a verse where Jesus shows up to Pergamon and sees the altar of Zeus and he refers to it as like the altar of Satan.

Oh, in the book of Revelation, when he's giving John the letters to the seven churches. Yeah, he talks about the throne of Satan at Pergamum.

And many people take that as a metaphor for Caesar's own temple. Why, wait, why is it a metaphor for Caesar?

Wouldn't it, like, I guess I'm confused. Because Caesar doesn't call himself Satan. That's why. Okay, so Jesus is saying like, this is the altar of Satan and anybody else is like, well, no, that's where Caesar resides.

So everyone's like, oh, Jesus is calling Caesar Satan. Pretty much. Yeah, a version of it. There is a contender, though, in Pergamum for the throne of Satan and it's the old

Asclepion, which was a Greek healer culture that had a serpent, a twisted serpent as their motto.

And so a lot of people have thought that was the one. It's hard to sort out exactly which one is the throne of Satan in Revelation, but I think the

Caesar temple is a good contender for it. And I'm not saying, like, that's hell on earth when

I was asking that question. I think it's more like he's recognizing that this is a fallen form that does not worship the king of kings.

Therefore, it is of the enemy. Not that this is like the place where Satan resides, but it is like that deity is satanic in these eyes of the

Christian. It is not a God that is worthy of praise, but it is a God that people are worshiping.

And another way of thinking about it, too, and many of the Caesars were agents of Satan to do harmful things to Christians and to Jews.

Do you think they were like, of course, like, okay, the Illuminati, like they are people in power sacrificing to get power from the enemy, like their gods, their lowercase g, that they're like how, it makes me think of like a silly example would be, what is it?

The road to Eldorado. Do you remember that movie? Where there was like, you know, the two explorers and it's a

Mayan culture, but then there is the antagonist who is making these sacrifices to a very evil deity.

And when you imagine like these Caesars in power, who are agents of Satan, do you see, and this is like, correct me if I'm wrong, because this is how

I'm just imagining it, letting my imagination go wild, is like these agents of Satan are like making sacrifices to be in goodwill and to keep a contract up with Satan in order to retain power.

Or am I just like running with this? Am I totally wrong? There's a connection there. And often the way that would work out in the

Caesars days was that if they executed people that were not pagan, people who did not worship the

Roman pantheon or interact with it, then their gods would be pleased with them. So anytime something is wrong in the

Roman empire, it's time to round up the Christians and the Jews and execute them. Maybe their gods will be appeased and start giving them the blessings again.

This was pretty common. That makes sense. I shouldn't be shocked, but that makes sense when you tie it together like that. Okay, so they're at the throne of Satan.

What is the Ephesus message that is specific to that group of people? One of the things that stands out to me in 1

Timothy 2, and this is where I like to talk about how it's easy to misinterpret passages because we take them as broad spectrum passages aimed at all of the

Christians. But he says some things in this letter to Timothy, who's the head lead pastor in the

Ephesus region. There's a strange passage. Maybe I can just read it out of an

English version quickly. Yeah, no Greek here. No, no, no, no, no.

I'm gonna use like the ESV because that's a common English Bible. But this particular passage has a lot of trouble for translators, actually.

So it wouldn't matter which one I read it from, basically. It's gonna have the same concerns.

So I'm gonna go to 1 Timothy 2, verse 8.

We'll just start there because that's a popular place for different arguments to be made from. I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling.

Likewise also that the women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel with modesty and self -control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire.

But what is proper for women who profess godliness, that is, with good works?

Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man.

Rather, she is to remain quiet. This is the point where most of our minds go, what? What are you about to tell me right now?

Yeah, what does that mean? Because there's been debates on this all over the recent last 40 years,

I would say. Yeah, women shut up and stay silent. Right. And then over in verse 13,

Paul makes an interesting argument as if this helps explain the matter, okay? For Adam was formed first, then

Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became the transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self -control.

And it's clear that he's not talking about Eve here because Eve is already passed on. Oh, he's not? I thought for sure he was talking about Eve.

Well, when he says, if they continue in faith and love, they're dead and gone. They can't continue in any action.

So he's talking about something else. He's kind of switched gears and talked about something else.

If they will continue in faith and love and holiness with self -control. And it seems he's talking back about the women now.

The women in Ephesus. Right, right. Now, this passage is fraught with problems.

I'm going to be presenting something on this in Boston this fall at the

SBL and one of the guests, it's a hosted event from the

Stone Campbell Journal. So I'll be there and speaking on this passage. And I don't want to spill all the beans here, but here's some things that I noticed about this passage.

If people can go to this show, I'll add the link below. So people can hear the rest of this because this will be great.

And if it isn't possible, I can always do a presentation again after the event and talk about what we said.

But here's the first thing that stands out to my mind. If we read that passage in isolation and then couple that with another passage that was written to the

Corinthians and it also has something in there about silence. And then you start thinking, oh, this is a general first century

Christian Messiah follower stature, a statute.

And it goes in the face of some other evidence. Wait, I'm lost.

So the women being silent in the gatherings goes in the face of other evidence where we read that there are other women in the

New Testament who say things. So it's like, what does that mean? And how does this fit what

Paul is trying to accomplish and what the apostles in general are generally trying to accomplish?

Then I remember in Ephesus, Timothy's hometown where he's the head pastor. That's not his hometown, by the way, but that's where he's the head pastor currently.

There's a major goddess religion and it's very strong and it's so strong that Caesar doesn't have a lot of Caesar worship that's happening.

They may do something token wise and as soon as the Romans are out of the picture, they're done with that. And this area has so many things evolved around the

Artemis worship. And I have to think that especially with the things that are given here in this order, that there's something about Artemis here.

Artemis, she was born in Greek mythology to another goddess and she was the eldest child.

She's still very small, very young when her sister is about to be born and she helps her mother deliver the child.

Now it's very interesting - This is like the legend of Artemis. Okay, got it. Which is very interesting to me that we have a saved in childbearing phrase tucked in here in the middle of this story when this whole region knows

Artemis as the one who saves people from childbirth. What happens with her mother's childbirth?

Well, her mother was in terrific labor pains and she helped deliver her sister, basically.

Oh, okay. Got it, got it, got it. Okay. So she goes down in history as the goddess that's really good at helping save people through childbirth.

Now I've heard all kinds of interpretations of the saved through childbirth passage in 1

Timothy 2 .15, but there's something about all of it that rings true with elements of the

Artemis account. So Artemis is somebody who saves women through childbirth.

Artemis, in the creation story of Artemis, she's the one who comes first, not second.

Why does he have to tell us that Adam is first, not Eve? Because in the Artemis account,

Artemis comes first. Something else Artemis does is she falls in love with a human, a male.

And her brother, I think it's her brother, is so upset with this that he tricks her.

She becomes deceived. He tricks her into telling her, making her believe that that guy out there has actually violated her temple.

So she takes out her archer's bow, fires an arrow, and kills him. So she is a perpetual virgin.

She never marries once she realized she's slain her lover. And in Greek mythology, she never marries.

So what we have is an interesting set of things that coincide with one city.

We have a worship of a goddess that is something about nature generally.

She was considered like a huntress, somebody who went and hunted animals. She was good with the bow and arrow.

Most of the Amazonian women, if you recall, we said this earlier, this is related to the

Amazonian cult that entered the Greek world. They were archer women. That's who they were.

They ran around on chariots and shot arrows. Hunting was part of their pastime.

So their goddess resembles them in many ways. And that's not unusual for the different pagan cults, for people to take on characteristics of their favorite deity.

But when we come down here to the New Testament, this is a woman, this is a goddess in the

Ephesus region who is revered so much that this area doesn't really bend in towards Caesar worship like some of the other

Greco -Roman cities did. They're hanging on to this one, because most of the people are quite afraid to get away from her.

This is very important to them. Wait, what? Oh, they're afraid to leave their religion? Yeah, I didn't say that quite well.

But yeah, they're afraid to ignore her. Because they think she will attack them? Yes, and there was a tradition all the way back through Greek literature long before the

Roman Empire, that if a woman was in childbirth and in immense pain,

Artemis could do one of two things. She could help make the delivery easier, or she could put the woman out of her misery with an arrow.

So some of the prayers to Artemis were saying things like, shoot me with one of your arrows so that I don't have to experience this anymore.

Exactly. So there's just like this fear that she can do that at any time. Got it.

Okay. Yeah, or that she won't shoot the arrow and you'll have to go through intense misery and pain and have a terrible death from labor pains or whatever.

Different deaths. So this ancient culture so focused on this kind of idea that they empowered the women of their village to hire and host all kinds of speaking events.

In this area, women were the ones that ran things. They were the ones who hosted guest speakers, pulled the crowds together and had a teaching event or had a special person come in.

Men seldom were involved in this because it was the women that were very closely connected to this worship system.

The men were only connected by proxy. So it was, to some extent, a female -dominant culture because of this religion.

The other thing that we find, we see this mentioned in some other places to the

Ephesians, but to be careful about who they hire to teach and be careful to vet the people who are teaching that they're really not going to mix things with truth and falsehood together.

So it seems like there's an ongoing general problem in this region of people who are in power, who have the financial clout, who have the connections in the village to be the persons who sponsor guest teachers from wherever.

And they're not vetting them because they look good if they bring all the favorite teachers. And so this is the same group that is mentioned.

They bring people to teach them things and because they have itching ears, they want to learn more, learn more, learn more, but they're ignoring the truth.

So this is all within Ephesus. All within Ephesus. So I'll do a little aside and I'll come back to this.

But one of the things that we typically do in New Testament studies is we study books according to their author.

So we study the Pauline Corpus as a unit. We study the Johannine literature as a set.

We study the Gospels as a set because they're kind of like the same category, even though they're different authors.

And what ends up happening is that we've so focused on author corpora, author bodies of literature, that we think that we've interpreted them the best way because we understand how that author generally talks in other things, which is logical.

It can happen that you can glean some things by realizing that the same author who wrote this wrote that, so something he's concerned about here could be reflected here, and you cross the dots and you can make some connections.

Something we haven't done as well in New Testament studies is trying to figure out what was taught to X place.

In other words, what was taught to Rome? Well, you got the letter of Romans. That's it. What was taught to Syria?

You got Gospel of Matthew. What was taught to Ephesus? Now you've got 1

Timothy, 2 Timothy. You've got letter to the Ephesians, and I would include the letter to the

Colossians. It's a neighbor city in the same province. 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and Revelation 2 and 3.

All to Ephesus? All to Ephesus. Revelation was to Ephesus? Pretty much. The whole book is, but the letters to the seven churches in chapters 2 and chapters 3 give specific concerns about the people in the

Ephesus region. And we've been blanketing all of those textbooks that all cultures all over the world.

Well, there's things, there's elements where you can extract something that's universal and universally applicable.

But the problem that we haven't done is we haven't created what is the Ephesus region.

And is there some reason why Paul or John or someone else had to say this to Ephesus that they didn't have to say somewhere else?

So I've kind of collected like sayings that were said to Ephesus in the

New Testament. And I've also done some background research into the Artemis worship. And there's an amazing amount of points, things that are hit upon that are mentioned in 1

Timothy 2, 8 through 15 that really ring in a way with the

Artemis culture people. They're not saying things exactly like he would have said it to somebody else.

Okay, let's get into it. So one of the things that stood out to me is the word silence in verse 12.

We mentioned that it's not the normal word for silence. It doesn't mean be quiet. No, it doesn't, unfortunately.

But that's where our translations have largely gone. The best translation we could give for that word is peaceable.

In Hebrew or Greek? Uh -huh, Greek. Yeah. Greek, okay. So instead of silence, it's peaceable.

So like calm down. Like find a way to make peace happen in arguments.

Oh, okay. Kind of like the blessed are the peacemakers. Right, no, you can't be silent and do this.

You have to make noise. Okay, okay. So what's happened is there's been a lot of rivalries and fusses in Ephesus, both men and women.

And the men have done this with physical blows and women have incited some people to fight by spreading false rumors.

Well, partly this is what he's addressing with the men lifting up the hands without anger.

Okay, no violence. If you're going to lift up hands in the assembly and worship God, don't be involved in this violence.

And the other thing is people need to be involved in peacemaking and peace building, not in rivalry and friction.

So you get this anti -friction culture that Paul is trying to build. He doesn't have to say this other places.

He does here. And so this is where we see it. Now, the reason why this word silent gets translated silent, the word is

Irenae. That's the word that's there. No, actually not.

It's the word Hesuchia. Sorry, Irenae is elsewhere. But in the end of that verse, the word is

Hesuchia. And Hesuchia is another goddess. That's the thing a lot of our translators have missed.

A goddess in the Greek pantheon? In the Greek pantheon, yes. Okay. She is the one who serves in the court of the gods and keeps them from fighting each other.

Oh, so she's peaceable. She's peaceable. And that's what her name means. However, this is where we get into not being careful by mapping the

Greek pantheon over onto the Roman pantheon and then borrowing the Romanized versions. The Roman equivalent to Hesuchia is

Silencia, which means silent and be silent. My brain hurts. How can we possibly understand this with all these meanings?

Well, the problem is, is our translators have picked up the Roman equivalent to the

Greek goddess and have been focused on the meaning of the Roman goddess's name, which is silence, and translating it silent, even though the word doesn't mean silent.

I see. Okay. Thank you for that bridge. Yeah. So this is what I meant by you have to really unpack the

Greek versions of these pantheons and the culture behind them if you want to know what

Paul is saying to Ephesus. Yeah. I mean, I was taught about Greek pantheon for like a couple weeks in elementary school, and then

I read some Greek books and Homer, and that's it. That's all I know. Yeah. And most people have watched, what is it?

The kids' version of... Oh, what is it? It's a cartoon, or at least it's animated,

I would say. I can't think of the name of it. I didn't watch it. A lot of kids watched it and told me about it.

But anyway, there's a very popular kids' version of the Greek gods and the Roman gods.

Hercules? It might be Hercules. I mean, amazing Disney movie. Yeah. Or like Descendants or something.

The lore of it is so intriguing, but it's not like it gets to this depth of Hesychia is

Silencia and Diana is Artemis. Right. And some of the

Bibles that we have will say Diana instead of Artemis.

So that's another thing too. So it just gets more confusing. Okay. And it's because the

Roman world that came after the Greek world, the Roman Empire kind of said, well, this is the equivalent to that.

This is the equivalent to that. But their stories aren't equivalent. And the lore behind these gods and goddesses are not equivalent.

Even though they have a basically similar function in the Pantheon, they are not identical.

And we can misinterpret some of these words if we're just constantly saying, oh, this is kind of hard to figure out what it is, but I know what the

Roman one is. Let me just translate that. No, you can mess up things. And this is what I think's happened in this passage.

We have some translations that have come to us in English, maybe based off the Vulgate to some extent, maybe not.

But the idea that this was about being silent is a very heavy interpretation, not based on the word's meaning.

The word's meaning is about peace. So what is the accurate translation that we should interpret today? Well, for the whole passage, that's probably more than we can get into.

But the idea in verse 12 is that Paul is asking the woman about being peaceable rather than argumentative and fight -causing, which would be something we would expect in non -religious settings as well.

And not because he had something special to say to women, but because the women were doing that. Because he was addressing an issue that was specific to the women in Ephesus, not in general, women need to stop yapping.

No, no, no. I don't think so. Whoa. He endorsed several women in the course of his ministry to spread the gospel and to teach others.

I mean, just to kind of cap on a couple of things, there's Priscilla, who's with Aquila, who teaches

Apollo better the ways of the gospel. Then you've got Lydia, the Seller of Purple, who becomes the evangelist to a new region.

There's a Junia who is well -known among the apostles. And that phrase, well -known among the apostles, is more likely meaning that she is one, where if they wanted to say that she's just well -known by the apostles, they would not have used among.

They would have said by. So it's interesting that we know that it means that because some of the manuscripts were fudged.

Somebody didn't like that was a feminine name and changed it to a masculine name, Julius. But it is

Junius, and all the ancient manuscripts, the oldest and best, show that it is Junia. Junia, not

Junius. I said it wrong, but Junia versus Junius. And so we have masculine versions of the name in later manuscripts because people were saying, well, he must have meant

Junius. Well, there's no Junius tombstones from that first century. There are plenty of Junia tombstones.

So the idea that this masculine name even existed in the first century is pretty hard to verify.

So she's a woman. They wouldn't have fudged the name if they thought it didn't mean she was an apostle. So that's why they fudged the name.

When you get to Augustine's era, the late 300s, the early 400s, and also the time the

New Testament's being canonized, there are no women leaders in the church. So this is a period of reinterpreting the

New Testament. They were reinterpreting phrases that no longer made sense to them. So the

Vulgate translation comes out in the same time period. And even though the

Protestant Reformation and many Protestant Bibles were trying to fix some of the problems that were in the

Vulgate, they didn't fix all of them because the culture was still similar. They didn't see that those were a problem and they didn't fix them.

But the world of textual criticism has shown us that Junia, the feminine name, is the original word there, well -known among the apostles.

I want to circle back to, because this is insane. And I know we could talk about translations all day long, which is why you're the expert of them.

But knowing what we know now with regard to the influence of the polytheistic religion and how it was evolved with the

Caesars and then how the books of the Bible need to be understood within context, is there a version of that today?

How do we modernize and contextualize all of this into the polytheistic religions that exist today?

Because I know that in part one of this conversation, it was the Mayan civilizations came and then what happened to them?

The enemy is still here. And so Jesus interacted with these polytheistic religions.

They were changing over time. And now today, I would argue, yeah,

I would argue it'd be like new age. I would argue it would be greed and money and all the things that we idolize.

But that's my interpretation. I'm the curious and confused Christian. What would you say? One thing I would do is to create a pattern, know what the pattern is for idolatry.

One of the things about idolatry, a key feature of it, is that first of all, it's not what

God said. It's something different from what God said. But that can be interpreted several ways. The other thing that's characteristic of idolatry is that you, the person, must do a bunch of stuff a certain way, exactly right, in order to get that result that you are desiring.

So it involves your desire, what you wish to have happen, and then your works or efforts to achieve it, whether it's holding up a, what do you call it, warding off something, a talisman, saying a ritual, all these things.

Regardless of what form it takes, it is you trying to manipulate the outcome through interceding through a spiritual force, whatever it is.

Because that's what they did back then. And it looks like that's what you're doing today. It sounds like, I mean,

I'd love to hear your ideas, but it sounds like manifestation. It sounds like certain rituals to heal yourself, these breathing rituals.

It's like taking control of your own destiny, your own well -being, your own future by your own doing.

There's a bit of that that connects, yes. The one thing that I would say makes ancient polytheism different from the modern equivalent is that many of these ancient cultures were intact for centuries and developed these things over a very long time and blended ideas together, built enormous hierarchies of these ideas because they were very stable for a long time.

What we see in today's world is we're not that stable. We're constantly in flux, constantly moving.

So trying to build a lore around a particular, I don't know, a new polytheism is very hard for a culture to do and have other cultures recognize it.

So it isn't going to happen the same way, but you're going to see the same behaviors. You're going to see, oh,

I need to do better in my life. I'm losing my focus. What should I do?

Oh, I should say this 10 times. I should go over here and visit the shrine. I should.

And then it's interesting because you also have to rethink back, have Christians done this too? Think about pilgrimages.

Think about, you know, holy talismans. Think about, and sometimes Christians have been guilty of some of the same practices, thinking that they were holy or divine.

But if they're different from what God said to do, they're different. And that is the key around what is not worshiping

God. It's doing things different from what God said to do them. That's the tough part is do

Christians do it? Because they do it with a good heart, but it's become something entirely different. And sometimes they could be completely ignorant that this thing isn't something

God wanted done or said to do. And they're very pious, and they're still very focused on God and very focused on what

God generally wants. And it may not actually hurt them or hurt others. But the thing is, is if you build a habit or a practice, that it's all up to you.

And you've got to do this and that and this other thing. It's just such a right order. A modern psychiatric condition is called obsessive compulsive disorder, right?

You can imagine people that have, well, I didn't do that just right. I need to turn the knob three times.

Now I'm good. You know, whatever it is, obsessive cult. And those are real issues that are treatable.

But some versions of religiosity resemble this. And I think sometimes religion has become a talisman to some folks.

And they're not interacting with God when they just do, this is my habit.

This is my perception. This is the outcome I want. And it becomes a self -centered religion.

It's not God -focused. It's self -focused. And that's the thing with polytheism.

It's really self -focused while appreciating other deities and their roles. It's what do

I get out of it? Okay. Is there just things to be weary of within your own doctrines?

I would say. Like, how do you know? It's like, well, this is just what Baptists do. This is just what the Catholics do.

It's like, I'm within this denomination. This is what we do. This is what makes it a denomination. But each one has their own set of things.

I think it can be pretty hard for the typical Christian to sort out what things they typically do are actually from God and how many of them are from a local tradition.

It'd be difficult for a Christian to recognize that? I think it is. Because we all come into some tradition of following Christ and we interact with the traditional elements of it.

But then we realize there's a lot of different traditions of how to follow Christ. There's two things that I think are central.

One is actually read and study the Bible more than church traditions. That's primary.

I know that's not the end -all answer because, you know, ten people can read the same

Bible and end up in different places just from interpreting it differently. But I think our focus needs to be on what's actually handed down through the centuries and not what's been just handed down through the last four centuries or some other shorter period of time.

The other thing is to take seriously the command that God gave the Israelites when the law first was given to them.

And that is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your much.

And that word much can be variously interpreted, but most common interpretation is strength.

What does this mean? This means to put all of our efforts towards worshiping God. If we do that well, we're not building a religion or following a religion when we're trying to please ourself.

Simply put. And I would say it's probably a good idea to take one day a year and just reflect how much of what

I'm doing in my religion actually focuses on God and how much of it really focuses on just me.

If we did that, we would fix some things. Spicy, spicy. Oh my gosh.

Dr. Sedlicek, thank you. Thank you so much. This is one of those things

I'll call you in a week or two and we'll just talk about this and I'll wish it was recorded. I've never heard this.

I've never heard any of this be spoken about like this. So thank you for literally breaking it down. So, oh my gosh.

How do you feel walking around with all this in your head all the time? How do you interact with people and just want to tell them everything you're thinking?

Almost anything has to come out in a conversation. So unless I'm in a conversation, conversations like these pull it out, honestly.

And there's other types of conversations that are had as well, where this comes out.

But sometimes it starts with a set of well -directed questions. I really appreciate you giving us time two weeks in a row to talk about this.

For those that don't know, this is a part two of part one, all in one episode. The enemy could not stop our tech difficulties and stop this conversation being had.

So it clearly was needed. Always welcome back on the show. We will find another way to bring you back on. And thank you so much for your time today,