Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
John 0:00
Well, you know, in John 3, you know, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night and wants to talk with him and Jesus starts talking about the necessity of being born again of water in the spirit in order to enter the Kingdom of heaven. And Nicodemus is just completely, you know, appears to be completely confused by these concepts. And Jesus gets a little bit frustrated with him. And, you know, from the earliest age when I was reading that passage, you know, I thought to myself, you know, Lord, why are you getting frustrated with Nicodemus? I mean, how can you understand this idea of being born of water in the spirit clearly, that's a reference to baptism, but Lord, you haven't fully introduced baptism yet. So how could you possibly expect Nicodemus to get it and thus why are you getting you know, a little bit frustrated with him for understanding isn’t that kind of unfair?
Seth 1:25
Here we go. Hello, everybody. I'm Seth, this is the Can I Say This At Church podcast? Fantastic episode for you today before that a few brief announcements. So I am in the middle of trying to rework the logo a little bit basically, for those of you that have seen my picture on anywhere, I don't have a lot of hair on top of my head and so my head gets cold. And I would really like a Can I Say This At Church beanie or toboggan? I grew up in Texas so we call them toboggans. And I'm going to make one it'll be added to the store So get yourself some swag head over the website. look at a few things. If you see something like yeah, I don't like that I would like this instead, let me know and I'll make it will throw it up there. But head on over there. See what there is and get you something!
If I'm entirely honest, I don't know anything about the Dead Sea Scrolls really at all the little that I do know is really bits and pieces of overheard and misread articles Da Vinci Code type movies, History Channel specials, and really weirdly produced documentaries. And that is why I'm so thrilled about today's conversation. So I had the honor of talking with John Bergsma it is a fantastic story. And you'll hear some of that in the episode but we talked about the Dead Sea Scrolls, why they matter and how they intersect with the Gospels, how that impacts the life of Jesus, the ministry of Jesus, and so much and this is fascinating. And you hear me get so frustrated at the end of the episode because there are so many things in here that I wanted to talk about, and there's just not enough time in an episode of the podcasts and so I would highly encourage you to grab a copy of this book. For those that support the show on Patreon at the level to get a book, this is November's book. So do not go out and buy it. I'm sending it to you. But for the rest of you highly consider it; it's one of the best books that I've read all year. If you're one like me that you just love facts and data, and I do so I was really I had a lot of fun geek out on this one, and really digging into the weeds of how the Dead Sea Scrolls matter. And all the different correlation. Here we go. Let me show you what I mean. Here comes a conversation with Dr. John Bergsma
Seth 3:45
Welcome to the show. And thank you and your people for sending me an advanced copy of your book Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls. I know if people will buy the book and I highly recommend they do. They will be as blown away as I was because so much of what is in there. I was just entirely ignorant up, but I think a lot of people are, but I want to table that for a second. And I'd like you to kind of walk us through a bit about what makes you because in the book I read, you know, it seems like your religious journey has had a few different roads or on and off ramps or service roads because I'm from Texas, so we've always got that massive service road next to the interstate. Talk a little bit about what makes you you kind of your story just in a in a nutshell, if you could.
John 4:27
Sure. So I grew up in a very devout Protestant family. My dad was a US Navy chaplain, preacher man, in the military and I followed that track as well. I grew up all over the US mostly on the coast, being as they are near water and being in the Navy, good to be near water, the boats and stuff, you know. So I spent a lot of time in Hawaii growing up as there's a lot of Navy out there that went to West Michigan, to our denominational college and seminary spent 10 years there getting various degrees and was a pastor in West Michigan for a number of years. Ended up going on for a doctorate in Scripture at the University of Notre Dame and South Bend, Indiana, great football school. Aside from football they are also a major center for Dead Sea Scrolls research, which I did not realize when I was accepted there.
But I quickly realized when I got there, so that's where, you know, the the origins of this book lie, because that's where I got introduced to the scrolls at Notre Dame. I also got introduced in a close way to the Catholic church there; encountered some very remarkable, faithful Catholic people who were living their faith in able to explain it, and that pretty much blew me away. I'd never met Catholics like that before in my life, and they got me to read the church fathers and eventually got convinced that the Eucharist is the body-blood of Jesus Christ. [I] entered the Catholic Church in 2001 and ended up getting a job at Franciscan University of Steubenville here and been teaching here for 15 years.
Seth 6:13
I'm jealous of the ability to be in Hawaii for a job or at least a family job. And then I have a follow up question that does the Navy have bases that aren't attached to the water?
John 6:23
Well, not exactly. Let me think here they're all near bodies of water but she got some some odd naval bases like on the Great Lakes, which kind of doesn't seem to know really, but its water. Yeah, this there is there is a naval base near Chicago. Yeah, I guess they're all near water.
Seth 6:42
That's that's to defend against, I guess the Canadian naval and invasion coming, I guess. Well good, I want to drill down to the Dead Sea Scrolls and we alluded to this before we got going. I know very little about them except for they are a thing, and apparently an important thing. You see them come up once or twice a year, you know, during some big discovery. I actually read something not long ago that after, 50 years of translated research and they're about to come up with something like some some big text on it. And I might be saying that wrong but that it's, you know, an ecumenical there's Hebrews and Catholics and Protestants and a bunch of people bringing their minds together to try to pour through them. But I wondered if you could kind of give us context like, what are the Dead Sea Scrolls? Why should people care? How does it matter?
John 7:35
Yeah, those are great questions. Let's see how we can tackle that. What are the Dead Sea Scrolls?
The Dead Sea Scrolls are the library of a Jewish monastery that was active during the lifetime of Jesus, and they are our only documents that we still have in existence that were written contemporary with the lifetime of Jesus and the Apostle. You've got First Century, you know, documents here, not just that they were composed at that time, but I mean, they were actually written, you know, pen on —not paper—they're written on leather, which is called parchment. And sometimes on papyrus which is an early form of paper. But you are going back to the first century with these things, their current, you know, contemporary documents physically, and that's absolutely fascinating, because as well, as we'll discuss, it gives us a picture of Jewish life; a window into Jewish life and thought that's contemporary with the Gospels and oftentimes sheds light on little cultural details in throwaway information that we don't pay attention to in the Gospels, but you know, actually has some cultural significance in light of the scrolls. So that's one reason they're important. They also contain our oldest copies of Scripture, you know, the oldest copies of the, of some of the books of the Old Testament, in some cases over 1000 years earlier than any other copies of the Scriptures that we have certainly in the original language, which is, which is Hebrew.
So, you know, that makes them big-a window into this pivotal period when we have the origins of our faith, as well as the oldest copies of our sacred books, the older copies of the Bible.
Those are biggies and besides other kinds of, you know, archaeological and historical data that they give us. That's it in a nutshell. Let me leave it at that and then you take it where you want to go.
Seth 9:54
Has there been anything in the decades since their finding-founding, whatever that word is, since they were unearthed or exhumed, that has kind of changed the landscape of the church proper? Where we thought something at one point and now because of the scrolls, we have to reinterpret everything?
John 10:12
No, I wouldn't say anything that drastic. Rather, I would say, you know, the scroll have served to confirm quite a number of things that we've always believed. And now we're able to put specificity to it, and produce stronger arguments for things that we've always held to be true. One of the things that it comes immediately to mind is the Gospel of John, you know, Christian tradition has always held it to be from the Apostle John, written in the first century by this man named John who actually knew Jesus. And for a couple centuries, the Gospel of John was just kicked to centuries later and people said, “Oh no, this can't be a contemporary account of Jesus. It has signs being influenced by later Greek philosophy, yada, yada, yada”. And so German scholars were dismissing the authenticity of this Gospel, and we didn't have a lot of resources to combat these arguments.
But then, with the discovery of the scrolls, we suddenly found, Seth, the phraseology, the language, the diction, kind of the slang, if you will, that you find in the Gospel of John is contemporary with the lifetime of Jesus. You have unusual phrases and terms of speech, you know, expressions, etc, that are only found in the Gospel of John and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written in the first century AD and first century BC. And suddenly the light went on for scholars that oh my goodness, the Gospel John is not a later document. It is using the language of Jews that were living In the time of Jesus and even earlier, so I mean, that's it in a nutshell. But I mean, it could go into greater specifics on that. But it made a whole sea change in scholarship on the Gospel of John.
And now it's rare to find a scholar who doesn't at least admit that the Gospel of John is a first century document a document written within the lifetime of somebody who knew Jesus. That's big, because it's, you know, the most important Gospel for our faith. So just things like that and we could mention others as well, but the scrolls have tended to confirm what we kind of believed already, but give us a way of arguing it and get some data to support it.
Seth 12:46
I'm gonna, I'm going to temper my questioning mentality, but I really want to rip apart that last thing that you said of John being the most important Gospel for our faith, but that's an entirely different topic, and maybe an entirely different time. But I really want to rip that apart. But that's okay we will table that. I want to talk about a different John. So you at the beginning a book you kind of, you know, for listeners, you kind of set up the ”here with the scrolls are, here's kind of how we read them”, you know, in some of the books and there's one called War. And then there's a bunch of acronyms that I still don't quite understand, in my limited understanding of like, there's like QMMT. And from what I understand those are different manuscripts and the abbreviations for those manuscripts as a reference point, correct?
John 13:26
That's right. Oftentimes, you know, scholars use jargon to refer to the scrolls. And the scrolls are often given names in Hebrew, and then, you know, are known by acronyms. So a famous scroll that relates to St. Paul's writings, is called for QMMT. And that's a lot. You know, that's a big mouthful, but it's short for a long phrase in Hebrew, basically that would be even harder to remember and say so.
Seth 13:57
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was it was easy to enough for me to at least remember part of it as someone uneducated in it. So I think that it is serving, its most certainly serving its purpose. I remember it better than some books of the Bible, probably, you know, that I'm not as acquainted with. I want to drill down. So, you know, this these dead sea scrolls there in the Qumran community. And can you tell us a little bit about why that community existed kind of how it stood apart from the community proper with the other sects of the Pharisees and the Sadducees? And then kind of you correlate that to John, which is the part where I began to actually it took me, john, it took me took me many months to actually read through the book, because I kept setting it down. Because it was so much new information, especially about John, I never really given much credence to John. I always kind of looked at John as a means to an end, and then being Christ. But I can see now where I was wrong in that, especially if some of the correlations that you bring forth are correct. So can you kind of set the context of why Qumran had to exist and then kind of how that relates to John the Baptist?
John 15:02
Sure. So, you know, in the first century, the decades leading up to the life and career of our Lord, there's basically three major schools of thought within Judaism at the time. And the first two schools of thought are very well known to us from the pages of the Gospels. You know, they're the Sadducees and the Pharisees and you know, the Sadducees were this wealthy elite group, quite snobbish that controlled the temple. And you have to understand about that, that the temple was a huge source of revenue. So whoever control the temple made a ton of money. And that enabled, you know, the Sadducees to live a very affluent lifestyle, which did not ingratiate them with the rest of the populace, you can be sure, and they also collaborated with the Romans quite a bit that didn't make them popular either. So that's a Sadducees. Then you got the Pharisees: Who were more like middle class scholars and really bookish sorts of people, they dominated this Scribal trade. And they wanted to get everybody to live by a very, you know, precise observance of the Mosaic law. And course you see that reflected in the Gospels, and they sometimes went overboard on very Picayune issues well, neglecting you know, larger subjects like faith and love and justice and so on and Jesus gets on their case about that. So we're familiar with the Pharisees, but then there was a third movement, Seth, actually, we do find them in the Gospels, but they're not named. And that's a group that we call the Essenes. We know them from a historian of the time period, a man named Josephus which is just Latin for Joseph, but this this man, Josephus, he was a Jewish scholar and General went over to the Roman sides during the war that took place in the year 70 that ended up with the destruction of Jerusalem. This man Josephus, he wrote voluminous histories of the time period we're very lucky that he did because it gave us a ton of information about characters that we find in the Scriptures like Herod the Great and the other Herod's and Pontius Pilate, etc.
But this man Josephus tells us about this third sect of the Jews, these Essenes, and they're basically a holiness group-a group that was practiced asceticism-life of self denial, life of poverty, they expected the Messiah to come at any time, you know this sort of like, one of these End Times groups. I don't know folks remember the Branch Davidians from when I was a teen out in Waco, Texas. A little bit like that, you know, one of these little bit crazy eyed groups expecting the Messiah to come anytime and they break off and, you know, form separate communities. These Essenes, Seth, they were unique among the branches of Judaism because they practiced celibacy and monasticism and one of the monasteries that they established, the only one that we have, you know, good data for was on the shores of the Dead Sea. It flourished from about the year 150 BC to around the time that Jerusalem was destroyed around the year 70. And they lived out there a community of 100 to 200 men praying, working, copying the Scriptures, you know, the basic things that monks typically do. And they hid their library up in the caves around their community when it looked like they might get attacked by the Romans.
And it's a good thing they did hide their library because that preserved it and we stumbled across it beginning in 1947 and the remains of their library is what we know of as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Seth 19:06
I want to drill back down to how that relates to John in a minute but you said something there. So is there any evidence from any of the scrolls or anything else archaeologically that there was more than one monastic community of the Essenes or were they really just there in Qumran?
John 19:20
Well, that's a bit of a debate, you know, we have three ancient authors that describe them, you know, Josephus and Philo the famous philosopher from Alexandria-Egypt, as well as Piney, famous Latin geographer and historian and scholar. And all three of these guys described the Essenes, and then we have their internal writings as well.
And the only archaeological evidence we have for a monastery from their group is the famous one at Qumran on the shores of Dead Sea that gave us the famous scrolls. But from their internal documents, as well as from the external historians that describe them, it seems like they were more widespread than just one location. So I am among those scholars that think that they must have had some other established communities in other places in Israel that we have not discovered yet or may never discover, recover. Maybe we're still completely destroyed and there's nothing to find. But they felt like they were more widespread, certainly than just one location.
Seth 20:40
How did the Essenes relate to John the Baptist?
John 20:43
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, one of the most famous scholars of the Gospel of John, Father Raymond Brown, wrote a famous commentary on the Gospel of John and the Anchor Bible series, etc. But anyway, Father Brown points out that almost everything that said about John the Baptist in the Gospels, seems to have some kind of connection to the Essenes and to this current location. So let's see, where should we jump in? John the Baptist, you know there's an interesting statement and Luke that he was out in the desert until basically his career began.
And that's kind of a funny comment, Seth, because it makes it sound like
Seth 21:32
Child abandonment?
John 21:36
(Slight laughter)
Yeah, like Elizabeth and Zechariah just sent this little five year old out into the desert to raise themselves, you know, like, what is going on there?
Seth 21:42
Times are tonight then…I mean, it'll be fine. He'll be totally fine. Right.
John 21:48
But I think the scrolls help us to understand what's going on there because this is a monastery out in the wilderness and they took in boys and raised them in and literally ”formed them”. That's actually what the historian Josephus says. He says he formed them using that term, you know, like we use formation. So I think that Zechariah and Elizabeth sent, you know, John, their son out to the monastery to be raised and formed by these monks. And you know, them being elderly and all that would kind of make sense. Maybe they didn't feel they had the even the strength and gumption to raise a little boy at that advanced years. And they also wanted to give him a good education. And clearly these monks from the remains of their library, these are some of the best educated religious scholars in the whole of Judaism at the time.
So anyway, that would explain why John was out in the wilderness until he begins his career. And then when John is described to us in the Gospels, you know, one of the curious features about him is his diet, right? So he's eating bugs and honey and stuff like that. So what's up with that? We just take it for granted because from childhood, we've been told that John the Baptist does this; so we don't think twice about it. “Oh, that's just what John the Baptist does!” right? Why is he doing this? There's no command in Scripture that if you want to be super holy, you got to eat grasshoppers and honey or something. But I think there's an explanation for it. Because again, getting back to this historian Josephus, who tells us about this group called the Essenes he mentions that folks that got excommunicated from their monastic order with sometimes nearly starve to death because they had taken oaths when they joined the order never again to eat food prepared anywhere outside of the monastery.
The reason they took those oaths was at the major form of punishment in the community was having your rations reduced. And of course, if you're free to, you know, go down to McDonald's and get a Big Mac that reduces the effectiveness of you know, having rations in the monastery reduced. So to make this effective, they put everybody under the severe oaths and then, you know, if you didn't follow the rules, you had your rations reduced, etc. and that was pretty serious.
And then if you were excommunicated, why then you didn't have anything to eat at all. But apparently a loophole, Seth, around this was eating stuff that was just available in the environment that was not, per se, food that wasn't prepared by anybody. So Josephus mentions people eating grass, people eating bark and John is finding stuff that has a little bit more protein and carbohydrates than grass and bark. You know, the honey and the grasshoppers, but this would explain his funny diet if he had been excommunicated from the community and was out there living on the land. That would you know, it suddenly makes sense of what otherwise it's just kind of a bizarre off the wall detail about his lifestyle.
Then he's out there, he's got to be within a few miles of the north end of the Dead Sea. It describes him as “baptizing people in the Jordan” of Judea, which was very close to where this monastery was, so he had to encounter them, or be in some kind of contact with them. And, the question arises like, why would he have been kicked out? My theory is because he wanted to bring the message of repentance and preparation for the Messiah, to a bigger audience, including non-Jews, including Gentiles and that's something that these monks were not doing.
When we read the Dead Sea Scrolls, we see that they were very much all about preparing for the coming of the Messiah. But just for Jews, they did not want to bring the message to the other nations to the Gentiles. John, however, is at the fords of the Jordan preaching to Roman soldiers, pagans, whoever comes along, and that's actually prophesied in the book of Isaiah.
Isaiah is all about bringing the good news of God's salvation to all the nations. And John is all about Isaiah-he identifies himself with Isaiah 40:3 when he's asked about his life mission. So I think personally that John was reading the prophet Isaiah said, “Look, Isaiah says we got to bring the message of God's salvation to all the nations”, but the monks were too, you know, chauvinistic, shall we say about their Jewish ethnic identity. And they're like, No, we’ve got no use for the Gentiles. We can't bring this out to the nation's despite whatever Isaiah says. And I think it got to be a sticking point between the two of them, and they just had a parting of the ways. And John said, Fine, you know, if you guys are not going to bring this message to a broader audience, I'm going to do it.
And so he goes a few miles up the Jordan where there's a huge trading crossroads where almost literally the whole world travels through on their way to different parts of the Near East. And he begins preaching and is enormously successful and doing it.
Seth 28:10
There are…you reference often trying to find the right way to phrase this question. A concept is one of them…I'm saying this wrong. So there's a concept of ”two messiahs”. And in the book, you know that I guess, John, and because of the lineage that Luke puts in at the beginning for kind of his lineage is where he comes from, and then how that relates to Jesus. But that's not a concept that I'm very familiar with. And I'm also curious, is that a concept that the Pharisees and Sadducees would have held as well or is that just an Essene thing? But I guess we should start with what are you even talking about when you're talking about two messiahs? Because that's something that when I read that I highlighted and said, Wh…What did you just say? Because I'm pretty sure that that I have a Messiah, and it's never been John. Can you break that apart a little bit?
John 29:00
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, we're kind of conditioned by our tradition to just take it for granted that there would only be one Messiah. Now, what does the word Messiah mean? It's Hebrew, anglicised Hebrew. So the Hebrew word is messiah. It means somebody who's smeared with oil, it's the smeared one. So, we render that in English as Messiah and then the Greek is Christos, or Christ. That's what smeared means in Greek. And so Christ the Messiah, I mean the same thing, somebody who's smeared with oil.
Why would he be smeared with oil? Well, it was a sign that you were being set apart for a special role, typically kingship but also priesthood and prophethood as well. The folks were marked with oil at the beginning of their ministries as well. So when we look at the Old Testament, there are prophecies particularly aimed at the Royal House of David. David, the great king that one day David's son would come back and he would be the anointed one. And he would restore all the good things of David's reign to the people of Israel.
But, Seth, when we look at some of the prophets, they give indication that there will also be a priestly figure. So if you look in Zechariah, for example, Zechariah makes references to two sons of oil, he calls them, who will appear in the later days. And this seems to be a reference to an End Times priest and also an End Times King.
So the Essenes tool Zechariah rather seriously on that issue, and they expected that there's not just going to be one Messiah, but this can be two messiahs, a royal one and a priestly one. That was probably fairly unique to them. We don't have indication from the Sadducees believed that the Messiah was going to come at all. They were non messianic, the Pharisees their hopes were focused on probably just one Messiah, a Messiah from the line of David a royal Messiah.
But the Essenes thought, well, maybe there's going to be two of them. And what I argue in the books, Seth, is that St. Luke, especially, the way he sets up the Gospel, he seems to be reaching out to the Essenes and saying, “Hey, guys, I know you were expecting a priestly Messiah and a royal Messiah. But if you look at it at a certain angle, that's indeed what God sent us in John the Baptist and Jesus.” Because John is a kind of priestly Messiah. He's got a priestly lineage to his father Zechariah and he comes in, preaches prepares and anoints the Royal Messiah who is Jesus of the line of David. And if that's what you're expecting, that's kind of what God gave us. So get on board with the Jesus program you Essenes, because this is kind of fulfilling what what you're expecting. So yeah, I think Luke is kind of a Gospel for the Essenes in a certain way, not just for them but in part for them.
Seth 32:25
Yeah, the way you say Essenes there it almost sounds like a pejorative, like get on board you Essenes, just but maybe that's just because of the way the word is said. I'm curious and this is not really in the text. So this many centuries later I think that when we hear the word Messiah, all we think of is Jesus and Lord, and so the ancient Near East would be using the word Messiah as a verb, as a title almost, but not as a salvific title, but as a calling title, or am I hearing you wrong in saying that?
John 32:56
I don't think so. Although I'm not I'm not sure where exactly we'd want to go with that.
Seth 33:02
Just an aside question because, yeah, because if Messiah just means, you know, smeared with oil or anointed, you know, I think you could argue, David would be Messiah, because he was anointed as well as every King of Israel, they would they would be anointed as well. Correct?
John 33:20
Exactly, exactly. Right. So when we read in the Psalms, you know, the Psalms will refer to the Lord's anointed, or, you know, the Anointed One, etc. in Greek, it comes off as your Christ. That's right, we're, as Christians we think of applying the term as Christ only to Jesus but we should be aware that the term has a pre-history and in the Old Testament, there were many anointed ones, many if you will, messiahs, you know, they were anointed priests. They were anointed Kings etc. Yeah, but in time, you know, under the influence of the prophets, you know, the the hope to the people became associated with a unique, anointed one.
The Messiah, not just a Messiah but the Messiah that would fulfill everything and that's kind of the concept that that we're more familiar with.
Seth 34:22
I'm going to bypass some of my questions in the interest of time. And so I'm going to try to summarize some of this into this question. And so, you know, in the Gospel of john, we've got Jesus meeting Nicodemus, you know, who was a leader in the faith community there at the time, and he basically tells him this, you know, the story about you know, nickname is you're missing it, you're going to kind of have to be, you know, reborn, and, he references, you know, water in this type of stuff. And so as I was reading through that, it seems unfair, and you argue as well, it seems unfair for him to expect it's like me trying to explain algebra to my fifth grader like, Why do you not understand this boy of course, you should. understand this?And so you talk very well about you know, Nicodemus and why that matters and kind of the community that that's written to and so can you break through and I will say Nicodemus is just one of my favorite stories in the entire Bible and all the of all of the pages that that whole scene is just fantastic. But can you kind of walk through how Nick a demon's kind of relates back to the Dead Sea Scrolls? Kind of how those two come together?
John 35:23
Yeah, sure. Well, you know, in 3, you know, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night and wants to talk with him. And Jesus starts talking about the necessity of being born again, of water in the spirit in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. And Nicodemus appears to be completely confused by these concepts and Jesus gets a little bit frustrated with him. And, you know, from the earliest stage when I was reading that passage, you know, I always thought to myself, you know, Lord, why are you getting frustrated with Nicodemus? I mean, how can you understand this idea of being born of water in the spirit? Clearly that's a reference to baptism. But Lord, you haven't like fully introduced baptism yet. So how could you possibly expect Nicodemus to get it and us Why are you getting, you know, a little bit frustrated with him for not understanding isn’t that kind of unfair? And scholars looking at that have proposed that, oh, gosh, you know, this doesn't make sense. This is early Christian storytelling. You know, a conversation about baptism in the lifetime of Jesus is anachronistic. It's, you know, it doesn't make sense in Judaism.
So clearly, this is Christians decades even centuries later, who by that time are very familiar with Baptism, they're kind of writing their Christian theology of baptism back into the story of Jesus's life and concocting a fictional story about how Jesus discusses baptism with a Jew within his own lifetime, which of course doesn't make sense blah, blah, blah! So if you follow me that far the light that the scroll shed on this is that you know, up to 100 years before Lords birth, these monks out on the shores of Dead Sea. They're already practicing a daily washing with water that they believe is forgiving their sins and communicating to them the Holy Spirit.
Now, I don't think that their daily washing, in their ritual pools out there in their monastery where the Dead Sea, I don't think that they were actually getting the Holy Spirit - I think that rhey were getting ahead of themselves. I think that the Holy Spirit was not poured out until Jesus came, okay. But they were moving in the right direction is what I'm saying, you know, they're kind of getting ahead of themselves in salvation history. But they foresaw that when the Messiah would come, there was going to be this water washing for renewal that was going to you know, give the Holy Spirit etc. So the reason this becomes so fascinating is that this is going on for decades, you know, prior to the life of Nicodemus, our Lord, etc.
And so when we go back to John 3, these concepts about water washing to receive the Holy Spirit, etc. These were in the air this is this is part of the Jewish theological conversation of the time. And Nicodemus should have been aware that if he had been keeping up with the theological journals, if you will, or you know, at least reading the papers, you know, whatever.
You know, if you've been keeping up at all with with, with theological conversation, and apparently he wasn't. Here he was one of the ruling members of the Jewish Council and and he wasn't even taking the time to kind of keep up with the theological conversation of the era. And so suddenly, my point is, John 3 makes sense within that time period, because people really were talking about the necessity of water washing and his connection with the Holy Spirit, etc. at that time. So we don't need to say that the gospel of John is fictitious, late, you know, etc. This this really make sense within the lifetime of our Lord and of Nicodemus.
Seth 39:47
And I want to keep in that concept of time. And so again, I'm going to abbreviate a few questions into one because for those listening earlier, we talked about kind of some of the topics that I wanted to get to, and we're not going to make it to all of them and that's entirely fine, but also slightly frustrating. But again, I have the book here. So for those of you that want to know more, you should definitely matter fact I'm actually going to send the book out. John, you don't know this, but there's a certain level of patrons supporters that I send them a book every month. I think I'm going to make this one November’s, October’s has already come out. So like I really have enjoyed it. So in the interest of time, so many of the pushback that I get from so many people that hold to, you know, an errand see view of Scripture, which I don't necessarily, you know, if there's any contradiction, it's either intentional, or all of the bath water goes out with all of the baby and then I’ll light the whole house on fire because my God can't handle any inconsistencies. And what you hear from a lot of people and you allude to it in the book as well, very popular people like a Bart Ehrman, or a bunch of people will basically say, you know, all of these stories of the Passover, the crucifixion, The Last Supper, everything doesn't line up.
And then in the book, you talk about well there were two liturgical calendars which really shouldn't be a surprise to people because we still have one you know that our Eastern Orthodox, brothers and sisters, they usually celebrate Easter on a different timeline than we do. And every once in a while, they may be around the same day, which is really beautiful. But I wondered if you could break that through a bit. And then I had alluded to I had a thought process with that, and I may be off base and you can tell me if I am but kind of how did those two timelines sit with the Synoptic Gospels and John, and how can the two be reconciled?
John 41:23
Sure. Well, one of the major apparent discrepancies between the Gospels is about the dating of Passion Week. The first three Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke portray our Lord celebrating the Last Supper on Passover. But John seems to suggest that Jesus is being crucified on the day before Passover. And if you look at the relevant passages in the Gospels, you can see this. So some make a huge deal about this, you mentioned Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman brings this up and employs this as a argument to try to disabuse Christians of their confidence in the Gospels etc. Like, look at this, the Gospels can't even get the dating of passion week correct. So how can we trust them on anything else and like you said, throw the baby out with the bathwater?
Now, there's different possible explanations of this. But what I argue in the book and what I'm personally convinced of is that, first of all, there were more than one liturgical calendar operational among the Jews at this time. There was an older calendar that was followed by the Essenes and probably some other, more conservative groups that always celebrated Passover earlier in the week on a Tuesday evening, because Passover itself was on a Wednesday in this calendar. And then there was a more recent calendar that had been introduced in about the year 150 BC that involved whats called a lunisolar calendar, involves a clumsy correlation of the cycles of the moon and the cycles of the sun. And in this calendar, Passover moves around quite a bit.
And in any event, this provides us though an explanation of why the different Gospel authors could be referring to Passover taking place on different days. In fact, it's striking because the Gospel of John actually refers to the Passover of the Judeans on a number of occasions. And when you think about it. So that's kind of an odd phrase. It's like saying, so like, you know, the Fourth of July of the Americans. Who else celebrates the Fourth of July? Right, you know, the Fourth of July of the Russians, you know, what are you talking about?
But actually, the Passover of the Judeans is not a throwaway line, because in the lifetime of St. John the Apostle, there were several different Passover’s. There was the Passover of the Samaritans, who had a different cultural history, they were descendants of the Northern 10 tribes or they had a different temple up on Mount Gerizim which is mentioned in John chapter 4.
There was the Passover of the Essenes, who by the way did not call themselves Jews or Judeans they refer to themselves as Israelites and they observed a different Passover. So it's actually significant that John mentions that he's, you know, following the Passover the Judeans, and that's not mentioned in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And so what I propose in the book is that Matthew, Mark and Luke are following this older liturgical calendar, which Jesus seems to have sympathies for but John is following the Judean calendar, the main calendar that was followed by the temple. And the different gospels are dating the events attached week according to these different calendars. Our Lord celebrated Passover according to the older calendar with the disciples but then ended up being crucified on Friday, the day before the Passover that was according to the temple calendar at that time. This provides a historically plausible explanation for this apparent discrepancy. I find rather convincing actually.
Seth 45:16
You argue in the book too it…I'm reconciling two calendars and you have a nice breakdown I cant remember what page it's on, maybe 97 or 102, something like that of, you know, if we're interpreting both calendars and we're using all four texts, you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, you get a little more time for Jesus to actually maybe be on trial that he was crucified for, as opposed to zipping through all that in the matter of, you know, midnight to the morning or maybe even to the evening like that's a lot of I mean, wouldn't hit like 3,4,5,8 too many trials to fit into effectively a morning, which I like and I never really put that down together, but I really liked that logical time travel of things to fit in a little logic box. And that made a lot of sense to me. And then here was kind of my thought on that.
So when you reconcile the two calendars, and I think this is my thoughts, maybe you wrote it and I just don't remember reading it and maybe that's where I took it from but correct me if I'm wrong.
So for me, you have Christ, Jesus Christ, reconciling both Passovers so he's able to in one calendar, do the last supper and the Passover feast with one text and then he's also able to actually be crucified and reconcile things again on another Passover on the cross, which I find beautiful; a reconcilement of everything, and maybe that's me.
Maybe you wrote it, and I just can't remember reading it. I honestly can't remember, but am I off base with that where it's kind of it can be interpreted as maybe reconciling both of those calendars and all of the Israelites as well as Samaritans and everyone else together at the same time?
John 46:54
Yeah, I mean, that's how I see it as well. If this calendar explanation is correct then you have our Lord celebrating Passover, according to one, and then he appears not to drink the final cup.
You know, that's a separate discussion. But he, our Lord, appears to break off the Passover celebration with the disciples before drinking the last and fourth cup of the Passover. He undergoes his passion but then he significantly drinks wine at the cross. We see that in John 19, he very clear takes that final drink and then says it is finished, which could be a reference to the Passover liturgy that he had begun in the upper room, and then he dies as the great Passover lamb at the time that the lambs are being sacrificed in the temple for Passover. And you're right so he bridges the gap between two liturgical calendars, it seems like he's uniting in himself, all these divisions that the Jews had broken themselves into? And, you know, reconciling Judaism, reconciling the liturgy, transforming the Jewish liturgy into himself; transforming the old Passover into the new Passover. Yeah, it's really quite beautiful. Yeah, if this theory is true, it kind of works out quite nicely.
Seth 48:24
There's so many more things that I want to talk about, you know, baptism, water, Mark, Paul, and we don't have time for any of that, because I had made a time commitment. I feel like I could honestly because this is so much new information, probably talk for hours about it. But I can't and I don't think either, can you? So John, where would you point people to grab ahold of the book? I'm sure it's available everywhere that fine books are sold. To hear more about this. I know you've got a couple videos online, like where would you direct people to to begin to dip their toes into this slowly and I would advise slowly because it is new information and it's a new lens to see Scripture through. And I know for some people that can be uncomfortable, but I also think necessary, but where would you send people towards?
John 49:10
Sure? Well, you can get you know, a copy of the book that you know this is a Penguin Random House. So you can find it at Walden books or Borders or, you know, all those places; Amazon as well. If you want a signed copy, you can go to my website, CatholicBibleteacher.com and go into the store and order a signed copy if you want. But, yeah, I recommend the book. I mean, I wrote the book for believers, for Christians, to kind of introduce them to the scrolls, you know, highlighting the information that's most interesting for people that are practicing Christians.
And so you know, there's lots of other books on this, on the scrolls, out there but oftentimes they are very technical and they're not concerned with what would be of interest to people that they're trying to live a life of prayer, you know, follow the Christian faith, so that is a Avenue there.
And also on my website, you can get a audio of kind of like a highlight reel of the book on an audio talk called the Dead Sea Scrolls for Catholics. lLighthouse media has an even shorter version of that, just a one hour excerpt of that. That I think it's available on their website as well, when our introduction to the scrolls. So that's available. I've also got a like a 30 hour audio course on the scrolls that folks can jump into, but I would recommend maybe getting one of the shorter audios before you do that. So this the resources that are out there, like get folks started.
Seth 50:57
Perfect. Thank you so much again for your time early this morning on a Monday, and thanks for coming on the show. And really, I can't stress this enough like I really enjoyed your book. I read every book that I talked to people about, but I don't always really enjoy the books but I really just the way that my brain likes to rip apart facts and like suck them all in like really, really, really enjoyed it. So thanks for writing it. I look forward to digging more into it. And thanks again for coming on.
John 51:24
You bet. Thanks so much. Take care. Everyone.
Outro 51:54
I want to stress again, just how much I did not talk about with John on this book, so much in here, I've not really made correlations to had no context for. I genuinely think that we do a disservice by not digging further into the Dead Sea Scrolls, and all the different correlative properties of it. If I've learned anything over this last, you know, five, six years, there's so much interweaving together of the Ancient Near East, and it only makes scripture more beautiful, it makes Jesus more beautiful, it makes so many things much more rich and deep. And it is worth the effort and so highly encourage you get the book it is worth. It's worth it. Go get the book, and very special thanks to Neon Feather for the use of their music in this episode. And if you like that song, or any of the other things that you ever hear on the show, there is both an apple music playlist as well as a Spotify playlist for Can I Say This At Church. I tried to update it as frequently as possible. There's hundreds of songs there. They're all special to me for their own reason, but it's fantastic. Go get that there. I cannot wait to talk to you all next week. Be blessed everybody.