Відео

I reach a different conclusion regarding a future coming of Christ and a tangible kingdom that is not yet a reality on earth (see the video on Matthew 24:29-31 for my thoughts on the pivot in the last section of the Olivet Discourse from AD 70 to a more distant second coming). However, I fully concur that the point of the teaching is not to give a roadmap to the future but rather to give us principles that should guide our life choices in the here-and-now. The Kingdom is "not yet" in its fullest expression, but it is definitely "already here" in the most critical of ways: that Christ is our Lord and King right now. I also agree on the importance of taking the parallels in the gospels into account and of considering how the differences should inform our understanding both of what Jesus taught and of how the writers shaped what He taught. As inspired writers of scripture, the four evangelists should be trusted to shape the teaching of Jesus accurately, setting the words in a context that gives the reader a valid sense of the meaning. Bible students should ask why the gospel writers put a certain teaching in a different sequence or in a different context or with different wording. We may not have a definitive answer to that question, but the search for an answer is itself helpful in understanding the teaching of Christ.

Before any other reply, let me say that I am pleasantly surprised you still keep an eye on this channel. Given your disbelief in the core tenets of Christianity, I take it as a compliment that you invest any time at all engaging with my content and adding your comments. As to the comment about the stones, I believe Jesus was referring to the visible superstructure that was awe-inspiring to visitors of the temple, not the retaining walls and foundations below their feet. I believe the paragraph of Matthew 24:32-44 makes it clear that two distinct events are in view in the Olivet Discourse: one that is predictable and one that is not. Any approach that sees the Discourse as engaging with only AD 70 or only the ultimate Second Coming is oversimplifying the content. This includes the position that Jesus was speaking of His second coming when he said, "this generation will not pass away before all these things have taken place." Some assert that references to AD 70 were retrojected into teachings of Jesus at a later point. This is as unprovable as the assertion that every word came directly from the lips of Jesus exactly as recorded in the gospels. All we have is the text as it stands, and it is on the basis that the text is as reliable as any ancient witness to historic dialogues that I draw my conclusions. Personally, I think Paul mistakenly believed that he would be alive to see Jesus' second coming. At least that was his impression when he wrote, "we who are alive, who remain until the Lord's coming, will not possibly precede those who have fallen asleep" in 1 Thessalonians 4:15. Other writings suggest that he may have realized he was wrong on that point. Jesus said Himself that only the Father knew the day and hour for that to occur (Mark 13:32), so I'm not surprised Paul could only make a guess. I believe the book of Revelation was given in part to correct this misperception and adjust expectations so that not every judgment from God would be interpreted as a sign of the ultimate second coming. In that regard, many modern Christians have taken it exactly the opposite of that intention.

There are two early references to Matthew having written something in the native tongue of the Jews, which is more likely to be Aramaic than biblical Hebrew. Unfortunately, there is no existing copy of that writing. The oldest manuscripts in a Semitic language are those in Syriac, most notably the Peshitta. The Peshitta dates to no earlier than the 4th century, which puts it among the oldest in that language family. There are no manuscripts in a language other than Greek that are dated older than the 4th century. By contrast, there are fragments of manuscripts in Greek that date back to the late 2nd century. The preponderance of evidence is that all the New Testament, including the gospel of Matthew as we have it, was composed in Koine Greek. Jesus may well have spoken in Aramaic. I believe He probably did. But there is no written record of what He said in that language. The Greek is the closest we have.

I just today acquired a book in a bundle from Logos Bible Software. The book is 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘑𝘦𝘴𝘶𝘴: 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘰𝘴𝘵-𝘉𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘑𝘦𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 𝘞𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘤 𝘓𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦. I figured if any book would have something relevant in it to your question, this one would. Unfortunately, it does not directly cite any of the verses from Matthew, Mark, or Luke that deal with the stars, and the index of Greek terms examined does not include aster, the Greek term that is translated as stars. It was a dead end for research. That implies that there would not be new insights suggested by considering the Aramaic wording for "stars." I will keep my eyes open for any references in this regard I run across later. Thanks for the question.

Cutting roots isn't mentioned in the biblical text. I found cultural context only in the Greek-English Lexicon by Liddell and Scott, where there are a handful of words related to the practice. All are related either to medicine or magic, two fields that overlapped much more in the ancient world that in ours. In First Enoch the magical connotation was likely quite strong. I'm not sure when plant hybridization became a common practice. It may have been later than the First Century, though my intuition is that it might have already been practiced in the viniculture of Rome. Even if it were, I think your assumption here is likely accurate.

It really is! I dip into Unseen Realm for topical reference, but I read every page of Reversing Hermon.

I agree that the "kingdom that shall never be destroyed" mentioned in Daniel 2:44 is the kingdom established by the Messiah when He announced that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand in, for example, Mark 1:14. However, I take the phrase from Daniel "in the days of those kings" more abstractly, not just referencing the particular kings the divided earthly kingdom of the iron and clay feet. This is, I think, justified by considering the dream-vision of Nebuchadnezzar in its entirety. In the dream, the statue was made up of multiple materials, representing imperial power in general, with that power being expressed as distinct empires over time. The stone topples all of them at once, suggesting the end of human imperialism as a form of governance on earth, replaced entirely by God's Kingdom, something that did not happen even in the time of Jesus nor has happened yet. That ultimate destruction of all imperialism is described, I believe, in the picture of the fall of all the [capital] cities of the nations in Revelation 16:19 and becomes the lived reality on earth with the downfall of the last holdouts against the reign of Jesus and the establishment of the New Jerusalem, as prophesied in Revelation 20 and 21. My view is that the feet of clay and iron represent the divided kingdoms that came after the death of Alexander the Great, with particular emphasis on the Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria. That the Greek nation states post-Alexander are in view in Daniel is made explicit in Daniel 8, and I believe that chapter provides the key to understanding the rest of the visions; nowhere else in the book is there so clear an identification of the imagery. Accordingly, I interpret the end of Daniel 9 as a description of the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the one who desecrated the temple in Jerusalem for three and a half years before its rededication. The two videos on this channel covering the 70 weeks of Daniel 9 lay out my thoughts in detail.

I searched my commentaries for more explanation on the phrase. One pointed to the fact that the idea of a land eating people is found in a couple of other places: Leviticus 26:38 and Ezekiel 36:13-14. The context of Ezekiel suggests that the inverse of a land that eats its people is a land of bounty and cultivation with populous towns and villages. My feeling is that the phrase is about a territory that would be dangerous to enter, with threats from many different sources, not excluding the giant Nephilim already living there.

Ok thank you. Enjoying the content. ​@storeroomofscripture

I love follow-up questions that get me back into the text and finding new nuggets.

Thank you i really enjoy trying to understand the word better. So many layers.​@storeroomofscripture

I'm honored you find this channel helpful in that effort.

I relate strongly to this line from Weird Al's song "White and Nerdy": "The only question I ever thought was hard is, 'Do you like Kirk or do you like Picard?'"

@ oh yes, me too. Great song. Great album. “Start Trek, Generations” is one of my favorite Star Trek movies because you get both captains.

I found a link to this, an homage to Kirk and Spock and other characters using the nexus of the movie Generations as a locale. Enjoy. ua-cam.com/video/mgOZFny7F50/v-deo.html

@@storeroomofscripture that was awesome. Thanks for sharing. I see there is at least one video on that channel about Q, one of my favorite characters. I’ll be watching that soon.

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I do not share your apparent premise that Paul's writing and John's teach doctrine that opposes what Jesus Himself taught. I am curious about how much of the New Testament you do see as reliable testimony about Jesus. Because you cite Matthew, I would assume you feel that it is reliable. But you reject the writing of John, so I would conclude you reject the gospel of John. The gospel of Luke is associated with Paul because of the close ties between Luke and Paul in the book of Acts, so I would assume that you reject the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts. Do you rely only on the gospel of Matthew for your belief about Jesus? Do you give Mark any credence or any other writings of the traditional canon?

@storeroomofscripture I do not believe in a jesus man god idol. The gospel teacher and the jesus of Paul are not the same. Matthew gospel chapter 13 clears this up. The teacher came in GOD'S name and taught me I absolutely must obey the commandments and regulations 9f Moses to death if need be. See Matthew gospel chapter 5,7,18,19. The gospel sends us back to find our roots, to Abraham and Moses and s the prophets. Just mattan/matthew gospel(mattan means gift) teaches us to go back to remember GOD and to repent, taking up the commandments to fight our inner evil. To stop breaking the beautiful commandments and to see just how perfect they are for making us acceptable to GOD. GOD has never changed a word we were taught. From Deuteronomy to the mattan gospel, the commandments are chief. I can not understand why anyone would hate GOD so that they would abandon GOD to make their own religions which allow constant sin against GOD and each other. Even the Matthew gospel wheat has been mixed with the tares but if we have roots we find the truth and obey The Teacher who came in GOD'S name and taught GOD'S laws. Why would anyone choose a new god no one ever heard of before. That is a failure to understand. Deuteronomy chapter 13 clears it up. If you love GOD you will hate the jesus and vice versa. If you love this world and its money, you can not love GOD. If you love religions and their teachers who are not sent by GOD, then you hate GOD. How can anyone reject the gospel and then accept some murderous psycho instead. A psycho who destroyed the gospel followers and put in place the idol which was used to consolidate all the roman idols with one man god that can be used by man as they say they speak for it. Judahism started it and birthed Catholicism/christianity and then islamism. Now the whole world has rejected the Laws of GOD and they have been lost in sin. Paul is the man of lawlessness. He laughingly told us what he would do. Evil always announces itself. We always have the truth and the lies to freely choose from. GOD or idols that comes with carved images and fake gods.

Why do you say that "Even the Matthew gospel wheat has been mixed with the tares"?

@storeroomofscripture Some of mattan gospel teaches the truth, matthew gospel chapter 5,7,18,19. It sends us back to learn from Moses. There is alot that is contrary to GOD'S torah. The chapter 13 explains this and so does Deuteronomy chapter 13. Matthew gospel chapter 24, show Paul and John as the ones we definitely should not listen to Because the teacher was not coming back. Matthew 24:20, 26 (NLT) And pray that your flight will not be in winter or on the Sabbath. “So if someone tells you, ‘Look, the Messiah is out in the DESERT,’ don’t bother to go and look. Or, ‘Look, he is hiding here,(the cave) don’t believe it! Here Paul shows the man of lawlessness which is Paul himself. 2nd thessalonians. Paul also admits at one point he knows the satan was masquerading as an angel of light that was pretending to be the teacher but is the idol maker. Why reject the gospel to go one and have Paul as your teacher and father. The gospel said do not call anyone else your teacher and no one else Father as only GOD is our Father. If you know the Law and prophets you immediately see the difference between Paul and the Teacher sent by GOD. The teacher comes in the name of GOD and Paul comes in the name of his jesus man god that comes with its own graven image and all it's other monuments, churches and other graven images they pray to and bow to. I serve GOD alone because the gospel teacher sent me to GOD, up the narrow path that very very few will ever find. I am by myself in obedience to GOD alone by GOD'S perfect commandments and regulations. We can only keep the regulations that are available while in exile but the 10 are permanent forever and will never be left by the way side because they are perfect. If all mankind obeyed with their hearts the world would be perfect. There would be no sin. I love the commandments. What do you have against the gospel teacher and his GOD that you would go follow another who was an admitted murderous lion looking to destroy all the gospel teachers followers. You know Paul had a stroke in the desert and from then in he taught the tares that keep all mankind in sin. Peace

It seems you only accept the parts of Matthew that conform to your personal view of torah. If you deem a section as "contrary to God's torah," you feel free to ignore it altogether. You set yourself up as the arbiter of truth.

Thank you!

Thank you for clearly walking us through this. I enjoy listening to these.

So glad you are finding the content helpful! Be blessed.

Thank you!

You are so welcome! That is pretty much exactly why I created this channel -- to take the results of the time and effort used to prepare each lesson for an in-person class and share it with a wider audience.

It can be helpful to observe that the plural language of Genesis 1:26 can include both the divine council and the trinity. Just because one is primarily in view doesn't mean the other one isn't there. The first audience of the book of Genesis could view it as God addressing the divine council, and a Christian audience later can view it as God speaking out of His divine plurality -- and they can both be correct. Indeed, as a trinitarian Christian who also accepts the presence of the divine council as part of the creation narrative, I would confidently claim both are correct. Going slow, being patient as people process new ideas gradually, and being open to lots of questions -- yes, these are the best ways to broach the topic of the biblical view of the supernatural realm. I completely agree.

@@storeroomofscripture great advice on including the trinity in the divine council when explaining it. They are there with the created being as well.

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Thank you! There is more to come as I continue a quick walkthrough of Dr. Heiser's book.

There is a fourth reason God could use watchers. He could be using them as witnesses to prove that His judgments are just. He demands that we have witnesses of events for our trials to be just so it is also a strong possibility that He is using them to serve as witnesses in the trials of the unsaved. (this is just speculation on my part)

In Revelation 3:5, Jesus tells the church in Sardis that He will declare the names of those who conquer "before my Father and before his angels," which is a detail that is mentioned only here but seems to take place at the judgement when the books are read in Revelation 20:11-15. The angels are never given an explicit role in testifying for or against the souls being judged, but it is an interesting speculation.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Hope you enjoy it! If you can pick up the book Supernatural by Dr. Michael Heiser, I recommend it. There is more in it than I can cover in the lessons here on UA-cam.

Delegated authority is the lynchpin in my mind. God legitimately delegates power to His created beings, both in the seen and unseen realms. He allows the choices of those created beings to have their effects on creation and on our relationship with Him. There are some things that He will step in to ensure so that His ultimate will is not thwarted. But short of that, He lets the laws of nature and our free will operate without intervention.

@@storeroomofscripture agreed. God wants to share with his families, in the seen and unseen realms. And once the new heavens and new earth are here, we will rule and judge angels. Those kinds of verses finally make sense with the DCW.

Agreed. Many verses about reigning with Christ seemed like abstract metaphor, but the DCW and whole biblical metanarrative suggest that those verses are not mere metaphor.

@@storeroomofscripture exactly!

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The dots he connected radically changed the way I read and understand the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.

@@storeroomofscripturesame - I’ll never read the Bible the same again. He did that for many of us. Shows that he was a good teacher.

The second video in this series is available now! Hope you enjoy it as much as the first.

@@storeroomofscripture fantastic. I’ll watch it when I get off work.

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I'm not an official representative of the school, but I looked on their web site and found a statement of faith, with this ahead of it: "the following statements are given and all trustees, administrators, and faculty affirm their unqualified acceptance of the following."

Most Christian faith traditions embrace trinitarian belief to describe the relationship between the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Islam rejects trinitarian belief and views Jesus as merely a prophet, indeed a prophet inferior to Muhammad. Combining the two faiths would do violence to both of their fundamental theologies, so I do not see that as a likely phenomenon outside of perhaps a few adherents who would be considered heretics by both sides. As this video and the next in this series explain, I favor the view that the Temple does not play a necessary role in biblical Christian eschatology; rather, the language of temple is used to speak of sacred space more generally, often to speak of the church as the temple of God. I could be incorrect, but even if some future Temple does play a part in the unfolding of end times, I do not see a "Chrislam" being responsible for the fulfillment.

Glad it was helpful!

Thank you for your detailed response to three minutes of the video. Some of your criticisms are answered in the earlier videos of the series on Dr. Bass' book of which this one is the fifth. Rather than rehash what I already presented in those lessons, I will suggest going back to those earlier videos. I do find it mildly amusing that you view the four gospels simultaneously too similar and too different to be taken seriously. For a scholarly treatment of the approach to First Century literary biography and how that is reflected in the synoptic gospels particularly, I recommend Dr. Licona's book 𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘈𝘳𝘦 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘋𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘭𝘴?: 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘞𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘯 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘈𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘉𝘪𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘺, which exhaustively compares differences in the gospel narratives with differences in multiple biographies written by a single author, Plutarch, that cover the same people and events. Please note that the claims I make are not coming solely from me. I drew upon the work of several New Testament scholars, particularly Dr. Justin Bass upon whose book the series is based. I supplemented his writing with the work of Dr. Michael Licona and Dr. N. T. Wright and a few other scholarly resources as well. While I doubt the credentials of my sources will alter your own point of view, I want to dispel any impression on other readers of your comment that the claims and assertions in this or any video in this lesson series are originating from a naive wish to believe something no truly educated person would fall for. The sources I have relied on for the content of this series are well aware of the best arguments against belief in the resurrection of Christ along with the arguments in favor of such a belief. They land on the side of belief, as do I.

​@@storeroomofscripture Thank you for your reply. I view the gospels as anonymous works, written by men with no direct knowledge of the events they describe. Justin Bass has his degree from DTS, which explicitly supports an inerrant reading of your scriptures. He is employed by The fact that much of the material is copied from one to the other is clear evidence that they are not independent sources. The fact that they have many incontrovertible contradictions is evidence that each author altered, molded, and massaged the stories to fit his own viewpoint and target audience. And I do not consider Mike Licona a very reliable scholar. He was educated at Liberty University, and is employed at HCU. Liberty is a truly terrible school, with academic standards far lower than most high schools - they actively teach creation science. HCU requires, as a condition of employment, a faith statement that literally requires all faculty to specifically and constantly accept and defend the inerrant accuracy of your scriptures. Poor education and plain bias do not a reliable scholar make. (I'm not attacking Mike personally. He seems a decent person and sincere in his beliefs. I simply question his value as a scholar.) Justin Bass has his education from DTS, which explicitly supports and enforces the belief that your scriptures are inerrant. Also, he is currently employed by JETS in Amman, ehich requires a statement of faith which would immediately lead to his dismissal if he did not absolutely agree that your scripture is inerrant. Again, not exactly an independent or reliable scholar. NT Wright is, in fact, a well-educated and relatively independent scholar (as much as any scholar can be). His views are well-argued, but most scholars - believing and skeptics alike - disagree with him on most of his major claims. Scholarly consensus is not absolute certitude of correctness, but those who oppose a large and strong consensus need very persuasive evidence to overcome it. And Wright fails to produce such extraordinary evidence. His scholarship, except in the narrow area of his blind bigotry, is excellent; he simply does not have available the evidence to be convincing to the overwhelming majority of scholars. (Wright is a raging homophobe. His views regarding biblical injunctions against homosexuality are more extreme and vile than the pope's. That does not, in my view, impact his scholarship in any other area.) I did not mean to suggest that you simply believe what you believe on a whim, or without thought. Educated, intelligent people may sincerely disagree on this, as on many, things. And you are entitled to your beliefs and opinions, whether I or anyone else agrees with you. All of that should go without saying but unfortunately many things do need to be said.

My aim is for the comments on my channel to be a place for edifying dialog and civil disagreement. There are far too few such spaces on the Internet as a rule. Thanks for participating in that vein here.

@@storeroomofscripture You're welcome. My mother had a saying (she had a lot of sayings): Show respect to everyone until they give you a reason not to. It has worked for me. I am perfectly capable of returning nastiness and attacks with the same; here there was a respectful disagreement. Replying to that with venom would be childish.

We could all do with less venom these days.

Death by crucifixion was a horrific experience. No reputable scholar denies that Jesus died in such a manner at the hands of the Romans under Pontius Pilate. My guess is you call it immoral to suggest that God required Jesus to die as a consequence of sins that were not His own. My suggestion would be to leave the question of why Jesus died aside for the moment and consider the arguments for the resurrection independently. If one concludes that Jesus did rise from the dead, then the question of why He died becomes relevant. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, he was just another of the countless victims of Roman cruelty killed in the name of keeping the Pax Romana.

@@storeroomofscripture Christianity teaches a negative view of the self and the only way to remedy this negativity is through blood sacrifice. You can not put that to one side whether the resurrection happened or not, which we have no good evidence to suggest it did. It’s the central tenet of Christianity and it is immoral and harmful to people’s self worth.

I would assert that the central tenet of Christianity is that Jesus rose from the dead. Everything follows from there. Whether the evidence presented in the book 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘦𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 and the other sources cited in this lesson series is good or not is a matter of evaluation, but it stands or falls regardless of theology.

@@storeroomofscriptureyou are avoiding the whole theological reasoning behind the belief that Jesus rose from the dead and I suspect it’s because you don’t want to put out publicly the fact that Christians believe people are inherently evil. Such a negative view of humanity.

Theology follows after the lived experience of those who witnessed God at work in their midst. I believe many people experienced interactions with the risen Jesus. I trust the testimony of Paul and others that Jesus rose from the dead. This gives me unwavering confidence that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. This, in turn, affirms the validity and authority of the Jewish scriptures as well as the writings of those among whom Jesus walked and taught, the New Testament. Those writings certainly do observe that humanity is capable of great evil (the practice of crucifixion itself not least among that evil) and that every human acts against God's good design at some point; i.e., sins. The Jewish scriptures also teach that God will Himself address the problem of sin by bearing the load of guilt upon Himself. While the gospels do not theologize the crucifixion except to say that Jesus anticipated it and understood it to be in accordance with God's plan, the later writings of Paul and others reflect on the death of Jesus and identify it as the point at which God did take the guilt of sin on Himself on behalf of humanity. The subsequent resurrection is viewed as the confirmation that through Jesus God has also defeated death on behalf of humanity, securing the eventual resurrection and eternal life of all those whom Jesus will call from the grave. In order for the death of Jesus to be the point at which God takes the guilt of sin upon Himself requires a form of trinitarian thinking, i.e., that Jesus is the incarnate God. If it is not the case that God Himself chose to go to the cross but rather sent some other innocent individual to do it, then your accusation of an immoral act on God's part would stand. N. T. Wright put it this way in his book 𝘌𝘷𝘪𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘑𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘎𝘰𝘥: "Jesus on his cross towers over the whole scene as Israel in person, 𝗮𝘀 𝗬𝗛𝗪𝗛 𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻, as the point where the evil of the world does all that it can and 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻. Jesus suffers the full consequences of evil, evil from the political, social, cultural, personal, moral, religious and spiritual angles all rolled into one, evil in the downward spiral hurtling towards the pit of destruction and despair. And he does so precisely as the act of redemption, of taking that downward fall and exhausting it, so that there may be new creation, new covenant, forgiveness, freedom and hope." (emphasis mine)

I have sought to stay true to the original contexts of scripture and culture into which John added the record of his vision on Patmos. I'm glad my approach is helping make sense of Revelation without manipulating it to fit a pre-conceived notion of what it should mean. Though in my teaching I don't usually go so slowly through the text, I do always seek to put the teaching of scripture in its full context, including the relevant Jewish scriptures when considering the New Testament scripture.

I read a little on social contagion of memory. From that admittedly limited exposure to the theory, I would observe that the phenomenon has been shown to be influential among people with neutral emotional investment in the details of the memory or positive emotional investment in the others reporting the memory, a form of social conformity. I have not seen anything that would convince me it would have been effective on Paul or any others who were emotionally invested in _disbelieving_ the report of Jesus rising from the dead. James might be included here, as the gospels are clear that Jesus' familial brothers did not believe Jesus was anything but crazy until after the resurrection. Is it not the case that mystical experiences almost always inspire a person to be more fervently devoted to something they already believed or suspected prior to the experience? Apart from Paul and any other visions of Jesus throughout history, has a mystical experience turned a person 180 degrees around in his or her convictions? I'm not familiar enough with the literature to say for sure, but my recollection would say such examples outside of Jesus are rare if not altogether absent. I'm open to being shown otherwise. Of skeptical scholars who view the citation of the 500 as Paul inviting independent validation of his claim by seeking them out, Michael Licona names Gerd Ludemann in his book _The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry_ (2004). Bass adds Jerome Murphy O'Connor in a 1981 article "Tradition and Redaction in 1 Cor 15:3-7" and Wolfhart Pannenberg in the book _Jesus: God and Man_, published in 1977. The claim is not that even most skeptical scholars view Paul's statement this way, but that it is a view taken by at least some skeptical scholars, and these are among them. You seem to think it possible that a person other than Jesus was putting himself in places where the disciples would happen to be after Jesus died and pretending to be Jesus, and the disciples went along with it because it suited their wish that Jesus still be alive. For my money, that is more unbelievable than the resurrection. It might not require a supernatural event, but it requires a stretch of the imagination even more incredible, in my opinion. It doesn't have any explanatory power regarding the ascension either. If someone is pretending to be Jesus, wouldn't that person want to continue pretending indefinitely and not disappear just weeks after convincing everyone he was the resurrected messiah?

@@storeroomofscripture My conjecture was that disciples met one or more other people whom they -- meaning the disciples -- later decided to have been the risen Christ, not that anyone pretended to be Jesus. When Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell that some people, including Tetrarch Herod, thought Jesus was John the Baptist risen from the dead, do you think the Gospels are saying that Jesus pretended to be John the Baptist? Such stories come about without anyone intending to deceive. Paul is a different a case, because he never claims to have know Jesus in life nor to have been there when Jesus appeared to other disciples. His letters do not say what he witnessed to convert him and in Acts he's witness to a magical voice from the sky. My opinion on Paul is not popular with Christians. I've known zealous control freaks and a change to that aspect of their personality is vastly less likely than merely switching sides. In our own time we have seen new religious movements -- a few of which gave "cult" a bad name -- with devoted converts, so we have data on how such things come about. Devotees' religious beliefs are overwhelmingly socially acquired from within the group. They can believe delusions for which they can become martyrs. Now of course Christians such as yourself and your students deserve better than to have your faith and community likened to notorious cults of our time. Nevertheless, data indicate that formation of new religious movements, in which members believe they have witnessed miracles, is a social phenomenon. No miracle required.

The key difference between Jesus' appearances and Herod's suspicion that Jesus was John risen from the dead is that Herod based his suspicion on reports of what Jesus was doing and not first-hand witnessing of Jesus in person. In most cases after the disciples saw the risen Jesus, they spent a substantial amount of time with Him as He taught them and ate with them. In order for your conjecture to address the end of the gospel of Luke (24:36-51), someone would have to impersonate Jesus. This passage is one that includes the doubts and disbelieving by some that Jesus was truly resurrected, and those doubts are resolved by being with him in person, not by seeing him at a distance or only hearing about someone far away doing something like Jesus did.

@@storeroomofscripture Matthew and Mark are the only sources saying Herod though Jesus was John the Baptist risen from the dead, and Luke 9:7-9 disagrees. though Luke agrees that the apostles noted some people thought Jesus was the risen John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke could all be wrong on the matter. What the data does show is that all three came to be accepted as canonical, indicating that for people of the time to accept that someone rose from the dead, the risen version could be a different person. Our only source of the stories of the risen Jesus spending any significant time with known Apostles is author of Luke/Acts. He put together his orderly account many decades after the fact, which is plenty of time for the devout community to develop legends, as new religious communities in our own time have. Your "Bedrock Passage" from Paul says no such thing, and doesn't even claim the people to whom Jesus appeared recognized him.

I believe the "many decades" description overstates the time elapsed. The "Bedrock Timeline" lesson points out that there was no great length of time between the crucifixion of Jesus and the Damascus experience of Paul, likely single digits of years. The author of Luke-Acts was a companion of Paul on his second missionary journey -- evidenced by the "we" language that begins in Acts 16:10. He would have been collecting biographical information about Jesus from his first exposure to Paul and the Christians with him, supplementing it with more research as time allowed. My guess is that he composed the Luke-Acts narrative during the house arrest described at the end of Acts, which is why that is the end of the narrative. In any case, it would have been two or three decades at the most when it was composed, based on information gathered long before the putting of pen to parchment. Luke-Acts records memories, not legends.

I am indebted to Dr. Heiser for revolutionizing how I read the Old Testament and many New Testament passages too. However, I think his comments on this passage omit Greco-Roman cultural touchpoints that are stronger than the Genesis 6 Watchers idea. His stated purpose for the podcast episodes on Revelation was to bring forward the Old Testament and Second Temple lit echoes, so it is not necessarily a fault to leave out the Greco-Roman culture when it isn't in the scope of his purpose. The Watchers tie certainly makes sense when only the Jewish background material is brought to the question of the identity of these plainly supernatural "locusts." My feeling is that the vision is communicating that YHWH God is in command not only of supernatural powers experienced throughout Jewish history but also of the supernatural powers that have dominated Gentile experience as well. In the case of the fifth trumpet, that power is Apollo and his minions.

Sorry you are having trouble. Thank you for watching anyway!

Before anything else, I want to thank you for continuing to watch the videos and comment. I know you are doing so in an effort to find the weaknesses in the argument and to highlight them in order to undermine the train of thought. Yet even so, it is an investment of time and thought that I appreciate. Does Paul's claim that he received the facts of the Last Supper "from the Lord" deny the possibility of human agency in that process? It seems you and others, such as Dr. Robyn Walsh, believe it does. Most Christian commentators do not; at least, I have not found any among the several commentaries on 1 Corinthians I own. This only becomes a major point when it is coupled with the idea that 1 Corinthians 11 is the sole origin for the Last Supper narrative and not one of four passages recording testimony from participants in the event. Were I aware at the time of this lesson of the extent of the Pauline priority theory of the origin of the New Testament, I would have engaged with it in the lecture. I knew as I was editing the audio for release on this channel that it would come up in your response should you give one. However, I believe the discourse analysis of the passage justifies a pre-Pauline articulation of the creed in 1 Corinthians 11:3-7 even if Paul does not credit a source himself. As for the validity of the discourse analysis, I understand and agree with the argument that Jesus and His first disciples most likely spoke Aramaic as their native language. However, Greek was the lingua franca of the day, especially in Palestine, a place far removed from Rome and dominated by Hellenistic influence since the time of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms. The mere existence of the Septuagint is testimony to the widespread use of Greek among Jews in the Second Temple period. Acts 2:5-11 testifies to an almost immediate spread of Christianity among Jews from many parts of the Roman Empire, and Greek would be the common language among them all. It is, therefore, not at all a stretch to believe that a creedal statement of very early origin would be composed in Greek and not Aramaic. I do not have formal training in Greek. This is a fact I have made in my class at various times, and which is in some of my recorded lessons in the UA-cam channel, especially when I stumble over pronunciation of Greek words. Saying that an argument based on the parsing of a Greek verb is geeky is not an assertion of expertise in Greek. Even though I do have some formal training in biblical Hebrew, I rely on my Bible study software to identify the basic parsing of any original language words, and I rely on scholarly writings to explain the import of the grammar when it has bearing on the exegesis of a passage. I do not rely on just one. I have invested heavily in language resources for biblical Greek and Hebrew to enable engagement with the text as closely as possible without the layers of translational bias to obscure its meaning. Yet I am not a language scholar, and I make no claim to be one.

​@@storeroomofscripture First, thanks for letting me have my say, and it's more fun to talk to the creator than to drown in thousands of comments most on topics tangential at best. I'm not suggesting Paul could not have learned of Jesus from others. I'm pointing out it is not what he wrote. There are many ways other than a meeting with the original apostles. Paul claims to have persecuted Christians. Did they get trials, at which they testified? Paul could be the author of the message and yet be repeating others' words. Perhaps he taught the Corinthians in longer sermons and arguments, then it was they not he who phrased the succinct creed in their native Greek. Paul pulls rank as the teacher to his students in 1 Corinthians. How much more effective to cite their own words in reminding them who taught them that. Alas, we have only the two letters of Paul, nothing from Corinth. Apart from that and Acts 18-19, record of the ancient church in Corinth is lost. Lots of plausible guesses; no bedrock. Greek was the international language of higher learning, but the story in the New Testament is vastly different from its authorship. Apart from Joseph of Arimathea, did Jesus have wealthy elite followers? Scholarly consensus is that the vast majority were illiterate even in their native language. Also, while the NT story reflects the patriarchy of the time and place, the women in the accounts understood and spoke the language. Were there schools teaching Greek to girls in that place and time? Paul is our first source on the creed, and our next several are decades later and clearly got it from Paul. Fortunately, the pre-Pauline origin of this creed is a case where if the theory is true, the data could be there. Perhaps one of the archeological projects in the region will uncover the evidence. One finds bedrock by digging.

I am committed to delete only comments that are belligerent or purely derogatory toward myself or others. I welcome differences of point of view, especially when given with constructive critique or substantive argumentation. If the standard of "bedrock" is a scientific certainty, then it is true Christianity does not rest on bedrock; there is a certain degree of trust in the manuscript evidence, or more precisely, in the people who wrote the manuscript evidence. My view is that the New Testament manuscripts meet or exceed the level of trustworthiness ascribed to most ancient documentation. That was the main point of the discussion of Ehrman's rubric for assessing the reliability of such sources. As for the place of Greek, it is a bit of a red herring to invoke the rarity of literacy as a reason to doubt that the creed of 1 Corinthians 15 was articulated in Greek before Paul. According to Acts 6:1 there was a significant number of Hellenist Jews in the nascent Christian community, including women -- notably the widows. Most commentaries identify this group as Greek-speaking. One does not need to go to school to learn a language when it is spoken in the home, even if it is not the parents' primary language. In fact, the impulse to form a creedal statement with succinct clauses and repetitive language ("according to the scriptures" twice, "that he X" several times, "he appeared to X" several times) may well be a hint that this was designed for oral transmission. (It occurs to me that Paul is rarely so pithy in his writing as this passage; his sentences tend to go on for line after line and have multiple subordinate clauses such that modern translations break them into pieces to help modern readers keep the train of thought coherent. I'm not saying Paul is incapable of turning a pithy phrase; he certainly has his share, but it isn't his usual MO.) If archeology turns up more first or second century documents that can shed light on the early development of Christianity and the role Paul played in it, I will be thrilled, even if they reveal a more complex or fraught influence than has been pieced together from the New Testament alone. Whatever the truth is, it should be welcomed.

@@storeroomofscripture Didn't mean to toss a red herring. The Bible commentaries I read are unanimous that Jesus and his disciples spoke in Aramaic. Paul was the leader in spreading the word in Greek. I'll admit that I have heard a serious scholar (I think it was Robert Cargill but I haven't specifically found it) say that he thinks literacy rates were higher than his peers estimate. Acts 6 notes complaints of Hellenistic Jews, but neither their gripes nor the resolution had anything to do with the Greek language. The New Testament doesn't give us much to go on. In various places, language other than Aramaic may be in play, but the issue is ignored. You write, "If the standard of 'bedrock' is a scientific certainty, then it is true Christianity does not rest on bedrock..." Ah, now we're talking. I'm a STEM guy, not a Bible scholar. Scientist disclaim "certainty", as the theories are always open to revision in light of new data. That said, science and math are by far our most reliable sources. Of course you mean "bedrock" figurative, but people use the term because science and engineering have given bedrock a good name. In New Testament Studies, the ratio of guess-work to data is absolutely staggering. "The Bedrock Passage" is a mess. If it is pre-Pauline, so what? We get it from Paul and he makes no claim to have known Jesus as a man. He does not say "according to the witnesses"; he says "according to the scriptures", and no one can find what scriptures he's talking about. He's brow-beating the Corinthians with his authority as an apostle, not making any kind of logical argument from facts.

Any idea that we are not dependent upon the testimony of witnesses for knowledge of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection is mistaken. The validity of belief in what those witnesses say is directly related to the reliability of those witnesses. The main thrust of the apologetic approach in Justin Bass' book Bedrock of Christianity is that scholars of history accept as reliable the testimony of witnesses with much less proximity to the events about which they give testimony than Paul, and with much less personal involvement in elements of the testimony. Just about the only reason historians -- or anyone -- would reject the testimony of Paul as unreliable is the a priori belief that the supernatural claims are false. This does not automatically prove that the a priori belief is inaccurate. The next four lessons in the series deal with the claims of the creed in what Justin Bass calls the bedrock passage. They will provide reasoning for accepting the testimony despite the supernatural claim of resurrection, but there again it is heavily dependent upon witnesses. More than half the content of the creed is a list of witnesses to the resurrection. It is not exclusively dependent upon witnesses, however. In the sixth lesson, concerning the resurrection claim itself, I will present the argument that _something_ happened to create major and sudden shifts in the theological understanding of Jews and Gentiles concerning (among other things) the idea of resurrection itself. N. T. Wright has written on what some of the other things are, but I did not elaborate on the full list in the lesson for want of time. What that something might be that caused titanic shifts in the theological landscape of fervent Jews might be answered in various ways, but the testimony evidence of the New Testament is one clear and coherent explanation for it. On the one hand, one could say (as you might) "You have no bedrock, only testimonials ." But on the other hand, for knowledge of the life of an itinerate man who eschewed worldly power and who lived in a time without recorded audio or video, what other evidence could be given? I will not deny that believing in the testimony of the New Testament involves a degree of faith. But I will deny that such faith is irrational, a mere fanciful wish, and the result of mindless followers wanting to be led by the nose by manipulative religious zealots. There are some Christians who fall into those categories, but that does not negate the validity of the testimony itself.

I don't understand what you mean. This video is a substantive discussion of the imagery in the biblical book of Revelation related to economics and commerce. It is not clickbait. Further, I am not using any bots or attempting to manipulate the recommendation algorithms for this channel or for this specific video. If you believe something is doing that, please let me know why.

I have not read widely of Hitchens, but I did read all of "god is not Great." I presented quotes from that book, and in that book he makes mythicist statements. I trust you that he was not firmly in that camp. It was not my intent to do a critique of Hitchens per se but to use his statements in the chapter on Christianity in that book as a representative sample of common atheist arguments. I have watched some videos of Christopher Hitchens, and I agree he was brilliant and witty, and there was a great void of intellect left when he died.

I teach a weekly adult Bible class, and the content of this channel is largely the recordings of that class along with the PowerPoint slides I use during the lecture, often supplemented to account for ad hoc citations made in the course of the lesson. Frankly, I too am surprised no one called me on it during the class. I wish someone had. I feel that the correction in advance that I added to the opening is the best accommodation I can make for my blunder, though I understand you feel it is inadequate. The mistake is mine to own. Dr. Bass' book presents the same type of comparison but with accurate identifications of the individuals referenced.

@@storeroomofscripture A class of adults? Not little kids in Sunday school, early in their learning, driven there by their parents, and mostly waiting for it to end so they can play or smart-phone with their friends. Can I infer English was an appropriate language in which to lecture these adult students? They chose to be there to hear you, though social conviviality no doubt played a part. A class of adults did not catch, or for some reason did not clue you in, that the foundational philosopher in the Western tradition was Socrates, not his contemporary dramatist Sophocles. A class of adults?

Yes, adults.

Glad it was helpful!

Thank you for taking the time to watch the video and post comments. I appreciate that investment of time, especially given your apparent skepticism of biblical claims about Jesus. "Bedrock" is a common metaphor for the most fundamental claims underpinning a belief. It is used in this way so frequently that it is part of the dictionary definition. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives the word "basis" as part of the definition. This is the meaning of the word in the title of Dr. Bass' book and the lesson series. If you believe Dr. Ehrman is a legitimate authority on what is unquestionably true about the claims of the New Testament, then please note that Ehrman affirms the claim that Paul new Peter and James in the same video clip. I will concede that Peter as the source of Paul's awareness of Jesus' specific teaching is an inference based on Paul's direct testimony that he spent two weeks with Peter and James in Jerusalem in Galatians 1:18-19 coupled with the fact that Paul makes statements about certain specific teachings of Jesus scattered throughout the four main letters. From this, Dr. Bass infers (along with many others) that Paul learned the specifics from Peter, James, and possibly other eyewitnesses to Jesus' life and ministry. No other known facts of Paul's life would so readily explain Paul's knowledge of Jesus' teaching, unless one would assert that Jesus Himself taught them to Paul during the three years in Arabia and Damascus mentioned in Galatians 1:17. I assume you would not accept that as an explanation.

@@storeroomofscripture Where is the factual evidence that Paul had knowledge of what Jesus had previously taught? Best we can tell, Jesus never wrote anything. We only think we know what Jesus taught from writing that started Paul's. Apologists make up lots of inferences, but the facts simply are not there. What's the most significant learning that Paul credits to a contemporary human source? Does Paul claim to deliver lessons to other apostles and disciples? Over and over. Where does he say he took lessons from them? According to Paul his sources were scripture -- and this was before Christian scripture -- and supernatural revelation. And no, no one is, "authority on what is unquestionably true about the claims of the New Testament". There is no bedrock here.

One of the teachings from Jesus included by Paul is in 1 Corinthians 11:24-15, where Paul recounts the events of the Lord's Supper and includes direct quotations of Jesus. These quotations are quite close in wording to the account of the Lord's Supper in Matthew 26:26-28, though not identical. Paul could not have known what Jesus said by direct experience; someone had to tell him about what was said in the upper room that night. It is reasonable, in my estimation, to conclude it was Peter. If Paul's own testimony of being in Jerusalem with Peter is to be believed, the two of them could well have been in that very room, though that is mere speculation of course and not necessary for the overall point.

@@storeroomofscripture "someone had to tell him about what was said" Wrong. Paul could have been the source of of it. Paul claimed to get his info by divine revelation, not by direct experience and not by word of mouth. The author of Matthew doesn't say where he got it, and a plausible but untestable theory is that he got it from Paul's letters. Scholars have reason to believe that Paul's letters had been circulating for decades by the time the gospels were written.

I agree with the consensus that Paul's letters came before the gospels in order of composition. However, if someone were lifting the words from Paul, why not just copy them exactly? If they were believed to be the words of Jesus Himself, surely some later Christian would not feel justified in improvising new statements. It is more plausible to me that Matthew's account and Paul's stem from the same oral transmission of what transpired in the upper room, transmission by the eyewitnesses to the events. That variation in wording may be the result of the vagaries of human memory or perception as to what words of Jesus were key and which incidental. Admittedly, relying on Paul's testimony about Christ depends on trusting Paul as a reliable witness about himself and about Jesus. If you wish to assert that Paul is simply making up the words of a fiction, then you need to establish that Paul is the sort of person that would do such a thing. The second video in this series addresses what can be ascertained about Paul himself from the written record. I find the evidence favors a view of Paul as a person who regarded truthfulness as a high virtue and would not merely invent facts or quotations. I'm interested to know why you think otherwise.

I love you too, Gabe.

Thank you!

Thank you! Indeed -- Praise God!

I agree that the contexts of Daniel 9 and the Olivet Discourse point primarily to the Second Temple. Daniel was speaking of the interruption of sacrifices under Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 167 BC and Jesus was speaking of the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Whether one or both of these can apply through analogy to the end times spoken about in 2 Thessalonians and Revelation is a matter for discussion. Ezekiel's Temple, though, does not seem to match the Second Temple at any point, whether the structure built under Zerubbabel or the expanded structure erected by Herod the Great. The dimensions measured by the angelic figure are too grand, and the experience of indwelling by the Spirit never happened for the Second Temple. That is why I agree with Luther that the whole long description is an extended metaphor for the Temple that Christ spoke about when He said that His body is the Temple; that is, the church.

That is quite an impressive set of excerpts from scripture. However, I am not sure what your main idea is. Can you summarize the point you want to make through this collection of verses?

Are you speaking of the Dust Bowl situation? I don't know of any suffering in the Grand Canyon or the badlands of South Dakota during the Great Depression that might be connected to the sixth seal. Even the Dust Bowl seems more similar to the famine third seal or the burned-up grass of the first trumpet rather than the signs of the sixth seal.

The biblical descriptions of hell involve punishment for wickedness, not natural phenomena like microwave energy.

Hubble is a telescope, not a projector. It could not put anything onto the face of the moon. As for the celebrities, I'm all for them showing humility before God and praying, but I don't see a connection with the meaning of John's vision. The sixth seal does describe people of all stations in life recognizing that the wrath of God is imminent, but modern pop culture is not part of his own context at all.

I don't see evidence of Satan's arrival at these moments in the vision. The closest could be the mention of Abaddon with the fifth trumpet, because that figure is called a king over the creatures in the abyss. The dragon/Satan does play a part in the events of the sixth bowl/vial, but the dragon has been involved since the start of chapter 12, so it is not his arrival on the scene. Can you help me understand your statement with some elaboration on it?

Wonderful!

I respect your position. I'm on the other side of the fence and do not find the arguments compelling to switch my thinking either. But in the end, the essential fact is that Jesus will return, and when He does, we both want to be on His side. If we are, we will rejoice together no matter how the events unfold.

Opposers to God's good plan for His creation are always around, from the serpent in the Garden to the beast from the sea. Our blessed hope is that Christ has overcome death itself and will ultimately throw death and Hades into the lake of fire, so there will be no more opposers of God and no more tears among the faithful people of God.

As I read it, the passage that hints at the events of the second coming are in Daniel 12, particularly the promise that those sleeping in the dusty ground will awake, some to everlasting life and some to disgrace and contempt. This truth is stated many times in the New Testament also, and is of course depicted as happening after Jesus returns in Revelation 20:12-15.

I'm not sure what passage you mean when you describe a battle. In my view, the battles between the kings of the north and south in Daniel 11 are about the Seleucid kings of Syria and the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt. Though the ending comments in Daniel 12 do seem to look forward even to the end of the age when Michael will arise and there will be a time of distress, which to me sounds a lot like Revelation 12.

That's why they were so scared they thought he could see the future... Jesus just saw facts a calculated with facts into a prediction...they really didn't want to loose there power ,greed and slavery.. especially over women..

Jesus did not use the specific term antichrist, but He did speak of pseudochrists (translated as "false messiahs" in many versions of Matthew 24:24). And He spoke of the "abomination of desolation spoken about by the prophet Daniel standing in the Holy Place" in Matthew 24:15. Personally, I believe Jesus is teaching that something similar will happen in the Temple as what happened under Antiochus IV when he desecrated the Temple in 167 BC. This came true when Roman authorities attempted to put Roman emblems inside the holy places of the Temple, eventually resulting in Jewish uprising and the Roman reprisal that destroyed the Temple in AD 70.