Transcript: Episode 0101

This transcript:
  1. Was machine generated.
  2. Has not been checked for errors.
  3. May not be entirely accurate.
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Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.

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I am Corey J.

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Mahler.

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And I'm still, whoa.

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Today's Stone Choir is Episode 2 of our Septuagint Series.

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Beginning with Episode 99, we did a prequel called Context Window, where we discussed the framework that we're using for covering a very expansive subject.

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And the point that I made there that I reiterated in the first episode of the Septuagint Series, and I'll reiterate here briefly.

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We're covering so much ground, particularly in this episode.

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There's no possible way for you to keep it all in your head.

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And in the last episode, we covered a lot of time, but we focused on a relatively short list of events.

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As I said in that episode, none of this is revolutionary, none of this is new information.

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But the way it has been framed in the modern world, looking back through history, is false.

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So everyone will repeat the same facts, but they'll lie about the context.

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And that's where the confusion has come today about understanding why the Septuagint matters or doesn't matter.

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Until a couple of years ago, I knew it was just trivia.

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It was the Greek Old Testament and okay, whatever.

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That's a Jeopardy answer.

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It wasn't relevant to the Church.

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This episode, we're going to be covering basically the European portion of the history of Scripture.

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So in episode 100, we went through a couple thousand years, was focused on the Near East.

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And in the Context Window episode, I mentioned if you hear something that you disagree with or you think we're nuts or whatever, I beg listeners, if you get mad, write it down, take notes, and then try to set it aside so that we can make the case.

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This episode, I'll repeat that, but I don't think there's probably going to be very much the people are going to get mad about till we get to the end of this episode, because you're probably not going to recognize most of the names that come up today, or you'll know a little bit about them, but they won't seem to have anything to do with the Septuagint.

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So, while I would encourage you, if you do get mad to continue taking notes, you probably won't need your notepad much this time.

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I knew a few of these names before we started, and it didn't seem to make much difference.

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One of the fascinating things about this subject, as we look at the European history of the Bible itself, what we find is that although this is part two of our Septuagint series, on the historical aspects of it, and just to recap, part three is going to be specifically focused on Old Testament differences, and then part four will be focused specifically on New Testament quotations of the Old Testament, which is when we will finally validate what we've been saying all along.

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The Septuagint is the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles in the early Church.

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We'll prove that in the fourth episode, Beyond Any Shadow of a Doubt.

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And I kind of waffled about four versus five episodes.

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The fifth episode of the Septuagint series, we're going to do it.

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It's kind of going to be bonus content, because we're going to talk about how to fix this mess.

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But that's going to be entirely opinion.

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It's got nothing to do with history or the Bible itself.

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It's just what we think we need to do to solve it.

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So you can take or leave that episode, depending on what you think of our opinions.

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But this stuff is just facts.

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In this second historical episode, as we're focusing on the European history of scripture, the Septuagint never comes up once.

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None of the men that we're going to talk about ever talked about the Septuagint.

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And that's the reason we're talking about them.

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Because if we're telling the truth about the Septuagint being the Old Testament of Jesus and the Apostles and the Early Church, not only, hey, where did it go?

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But B, why did no one ever notice?

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And so at every point, we're going to highlight these minor inflection points where a decision was made in the Church, some decisions were bigger than others.

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Some of these moments that we're going to mention are pretty small.

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None of them by themselves add up to a complete rejection of the Septuagint.

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But what they add up to is every time there was an opportunity for someone to ask the question, hey, what about that old Bible?

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What about those codices that we have that are from the fourth century, the Bible of the Council of Nicaea?

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Why don't we look at that?

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There were opportunities for that question to be asked and nobody ever asked them.

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And so we're going to highlight 15 or 20 moments from like 400 through Reformation.

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We're basically going to cover Jerome very briefly again up through the Reformation, specifically focusing on Europeans this time.

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No one ever talks about the Septuagint.

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And that's why this is part of our Septuagint series is to say, hey, where to go?

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Because when we're sitting here in the 21st century asking the question, what is this old thing and why is it relevant to us?

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You have to understand all the moments in church history where someone could have asked that question and then didn't.

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And so when we lay out the pattern, you're going to see that moment after moment, someone who could have asked the question didn't.

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As I was trying to come up with a way of framing this to sort of make it more obvious what it is we're trying to accomplish, there are a few metaphors that came to mind.

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The first is if you listen to classical music in particular, because it has much more dynamic range than modern music, you'll have pianissimo sections which are followed by a crescendo, where it's very soft and then there's this swell of sound as the music flushes out loudly, boldly.

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The function of that pianissimo is to draw attention and build anticipation for the loudness that comes next.

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Not loud in an abrasive sense, but just way more decibels, way more volume, way more intensity.

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And so, the quiet part, actually, you don't focus necessarily on the quiet part when you're listening, other than it makes you anticipate.

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But the loud part, the crescendo that comes after, is accentuated by the contrast with the quiet part.

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Another metaphor for kind of what we're dealing with here would be a pregnant pause in a conversation.

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I can't really do it here because the audio software I use chops out the hesitations.

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But, you know, a pregnant pause in a conversation, someone says something, maybe something weighty or interesting or whatever, and then there's a pause that's too long for the normal flow of conversation.

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It just sits there.

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And then the conversation continues.

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And so what happens with a pregnant pause?

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It accentuates what came before and what came after by silence, by the complete absence of anybody talking.

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And so you don't notice the pause, you notice what's on either side of it.

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But what's on either side of it is amplified by that absence, by that pause.

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And last metaphor that I think is perhaps the most apt for what's going on here is negative space in a visual composition.

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If you're looking at a painting or a photograph, oftentimes someone who is skilled and has a particular idea in mind, they're not just going to put the subject right in the center.

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The subject may be off to one side and maybe most of the canvas or the photograph is empty space or it's kind of neutral, it's not detailed.

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And then you have something perhaps off to one side where your eye is drawn.

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And the function of negative space is the absence of something on most of the canvas, most of the picture, forces you naturally to focus on wherever there is something.

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So the composition would be completely different, it would just crop down to the thing itself.

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And so what we have in each of these cases is the absence of something accentuating and making far more important the thing that actually happens.

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And so really what we're talking about in this episode is a whole bunch of negative space moments, where when you look at Church history, you're not going to look at any of these moments as having anything to do with Septuagint.

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Because I said the Septuagint doesn't come up, and that's the point.

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The negative space here is the conversations that did not take place when they could have, and we are arguing should have.

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At every one of these points, Christian men should have said, hey, what happened?

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Why are we not using that?

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And what we're going to demonstrate by this series of seemingly small, for the most part, historical moments is that they were solving an immediate problem naturally.

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It's a what problem are you trying to solve situation for almost all of these?

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And so, they weren't stupid, as we said earlier on, they're not faithless men, they weren't dumb.

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They had an immediate problem to solve, and it never occurred to anyone that the solution to their problem might have been to use the Bible of Jesus and the apostles in the early church.

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The question simply never came up.

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And so, these examples, these moments will demonstrate why those decisions were made.

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And in almost every case, what we're going to have is fundamentally two false decisions, because they never thought about the third question they could have asked.

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They were making a false choice between two options that were both bad in some way, never considering the third option of use the Bible of Jesus and the apostles in the early church.

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I keep repeating that phrase because it's true, and it's ridiculous that it never came up.

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But in the moments when they were dealing with immediate problems, it simply didn't matter.

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And so, to briefly revisit one of the last moments that we covered in the previous episode, we have Jerome.

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Jerome was tasked initially by Pope Damascus I, initially just to harmonize the four Gospels and to get a Latin translation that was good and was consistent with the manuscripts that they had in Greek.

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Because already, and we're going to round numbers here, there's so many more names that we could discuss.

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We don't want to confuse and overwhelm you.

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So we're going to be a little bit sloppy by omitting names and actually generalizing some of the dates so as not to confuse you.

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So I'm just going to talk about AD 400.

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Jerome AD 400, the very beginning of the 5th century, is tasked with translating Greek into Latin.

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Why?

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Because Greek was already being lost in the West.

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The Western Roman Empire was losing the ability to read and to speak Greek, so they needed Latin Bibles.

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There was a proliferation of Latin Bibles.

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Virtually all of them were based on the Septuagint until Jerome.

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When Jerome was tasked by the Church very sensibly with coming up with a new Latin translation of initially the New Testament and he chose to do the Old Testament as well, he was solving the right problem to have a good solid Latin translation in Latin because it was the vernacular.

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That was the vulgar language of that day, which is why Jerome's Vulgate, his name Vulgate, it was the vulgar language.

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It was the language of everyone.

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Because they were losing Greek, they had to have something they could read.

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That was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

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Jerome, unilaterally, without permission, without any discussion, without any church council, chose to use Hebrew as the basis for his Old Testament.

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No one had done that in church history previously.

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Now, we mentioned that Origen, about two centuries before him, had compared the Hebrew to the four exemplars that they had of different Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint versions.

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But he was principally solving the problem of A, arguing with the Jews and saying, hey, look, it's consistent, and B, just demonstrating like which one is going to be the best.

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So that was Hebrew scholarship, but it never entered church practice, and it was never an argument that we got to learn Hebrew to understand.

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He was doing something that was very specifically academic.

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He was doing something that was very specifically academic to just make sure that the Septuagint was being used consistently.

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When Jerome chose to use Hebrew, it was an entirely different thing.

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And we made the argument last week that what Jerome did in that moment was satanic.

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He did something that rejected the scripture that the church had adopted to that point.

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But the point of bringing it up again is that no one talked about it apart from Augustine.

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Augustine fought it.

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There was some controversy.

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After a couple decades, it died down completely, and the question went away.

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After Jerome translated the New Testament and then the Hebrew into Latin, now we just have another Latin Bible floating around.

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And crucially, there was no Hebrew scholarship after that point for 800 years.

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And even Jerome's translation was not automatically dominant, although it had the blessing before Pope Damascus died of, they'd go do this.

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It was not immediately and universally accepted by everyone else.

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So just keep that in mind at the very beginning of this conversation, there was never a discussion about using Hebrew.

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Jerome just went and did it.

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He just decided he wanted to do it.

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And absent a fight apart from Augustine's quibbles, he fought for a little while, but then Augustine basically gave up.

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He just quit fighting.

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After that, it was just the Latin Bible.

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And past that point, no one really cared what the underlying text was.

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It was just their Bible in Latin, which incidentally was exactly what the Septuagint was to begin with.

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It was just the Bible in Greek, which is what everyone was reading and speaking in that day.

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So there was nothing wrong with the project that Jerome undertook, except for the fact that he changed the rules without permission, without discussion, and then everyone just kind of forgot about it.

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So that's going to be the predicate for this entire episode today.

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One decision by one man to reject the Septuagint never comes up again.

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Augustine fights it, and that's just the end of the discussion.

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By the time we get to the end and we're talking about the Reformation, it will come up a little bit, but the intermediary events that we're going to discuss have accumulated to the point that there is absolutely no possibility that the Reformers would ever consider the Septuagint.

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And so this episode is to show all the layers of decisions that prevented that question from ever being asked again in Church history until today.

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So for the sake of this episode, we are going to try to avoid going down too many tangents or rabbit trails just for the sake of time and being concise.

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But every so often, there are things that are worth mentioning.

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And so here at the outset leading into one of the other individuals who plays a part in this narrative, I want to mention what is called the quadriga, the traditional fourfold interpretation of scripture, because it winds up playing a role in how some of these things play out in time.

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And for those who are unfamiliar, the fourfold interpretation is first the literal interpretation, second the allegorical, which winds up playing a large role in some of this, third the tropological, which could also be called the moral, and then fourth the anagogical, which is sort of the spiritual, but in the higher sense almost eschatological.

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And these different senses of interpreting scripture become relevant because the focus on the allegorical is part of what lays the groundwork for a later return to a focus on the literal.

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We're not saying that you cannot have all four of these levels of interpretation, because of course there are certainly passages in scripture where all four of these are in play.

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One of the most commonly used examples would be the Exodus.

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And so of course you have the literal sense, which is the history.

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The Exodus literally took place.

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Old Testament Israel literally came out of Egypt.

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There was a literal, physical Exodus.

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Then of course you have the allegory.

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You can draw that out to Christ himself.

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You have the typology there of Christ who does in fact go to Egypt and then return.

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You have the tropological sense of it.

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You have the moral sense.

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So that could be tied to personal conversion, for instance.

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And then you have the anagogical sense, which would be the eschatological fulfillment of God's plan of conversion of his people, of the elect.

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And so you can draw that out from different parts of scripture.

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And there's nothing wrong with doing that.

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When it became a problem was when there was a focus on the allegorical at the expense of the literal sense.

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So when you abandon the literal sense of scripture and focus only on this spiritualizing away, which is what it became, of the proper foundational understanding.

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One of the men who is involved in this is Pope Gregory I, Pope Gregory the Great.

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He is not the one who introduces this into the church because this traces all the way back to the Church Fathers.

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But he sort of formalizes it and entrenches it in the Western Church because he is one of the very early Popes.

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He plays an important role.

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He is a faithful man.

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That is worth noting.

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He is on our calendar of saints.

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He introduced many good things.

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He did liturgical reform, for instance.

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He supported a number of churches.

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But he helps to lay the groundwork for this later focus on the allegorical, which then lays the groundwork for a return to the literal.

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As we mentioned, as we'll mention specifically in the opening and the introduction there, sometimes some of these decisions don't seem like they cause problems until later on.

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Or they may even not be bad decisions in that time.

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But what they did not take into account is the long-term consequences, or, in many cases, the source of the fruit of the thing that they are introducing into the Church.

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In the case of the fourfold interpretation, it is not in and of itself dangerous, but again it becomes a problem when allegory takes over from the literal sense.

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Now for instance, with Pope Gregory, that was not a problem for him specifically, because for instance in his comments on the Book of Job, he says that the literal interpretation must be taken first because it lays the foundation for the spiritual interpretation, for the other levels.

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That is correct.

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You have to take the literal sense first and foremost.

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But Satan is willing to take something that can be used for good and later on use it for wickedness.

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And so we will see that as we proceed through this episode, through these individuals down through these centuries, that this allegorical interpretation is part of what Satan then uses in order to, later on, not according to the allegory, but according to the right desire to return to a literal sense, Satan uses that as an opening, as an opportunity to say, well, if you want the literal sense, well, you should go talk to the Jews.

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You should look at the Hebrew.

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And that is going to be a constant refrain here.

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Almost anytime you see a decision, a question comes up, a decision needs to be made, and the decision winds up being, well, we should go talk to the Jews.

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That's where things go off the rails.

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And as Christians, of course, as mentioned in the first episode, and as we've mentioned elsewhere, you should recognize this as a danger.

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Because as a Christian, you do not go to those who have rejected Christ and hate Christ to ask them questions about the Word of God.

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Because to them, the Word of God is a closed book.

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Moses' veil remains.

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They cannot see the truth.

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They have nothing to tell you.

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They have nothing that is good to give you.

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But Satan takes as an opportunity to bring back in this Jewish influence and to undermine the Church.

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And we will see that as we proceed through the episode and some later individuals.

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And this is one of many examples as we're going through these, where there's a lot of bouncing back and forth from century to century.

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So, when Gregory the Great begins to push the allegorical, as Corey said, not exclusively, he wasn't bad.

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But his arguments became the basis for later, much heavier pushes into very, very heavily allegorical readings.

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And this came up in the previous episode when we mentioned Philo, the Jew from Alexandria, who was not a racial Jew.

00:20:51.412 --> 00:20:54.792
He converted into Judaism probably after they murdered Christ.

00:20:54.792 --> 00:20:56.912
He said, yeah, this is my team.

00:20:56.912 --> 00:21:03.292
One of the things that Philo did was to import this sort of allegorical reading from Platonism.

00:21:03.292 --> 00:21:10.952
So, it wasn't a typical argument that was made by the Jews at that time, unless you're looking at their Kabbalah.

00:21:10.952 --> 00:21:20.952
They have sort of two different tracks where historically the rabbis, when they're talking about things, especially when they're talking to Christians, are going to focus on the literal.

00:21:20.952 --> 00:21:31.852
If you get them talking about their Babylonian black magic, their Kabbalah, then everything gets allegorical, mystical, symbolic, completely departs from the literal reading.

00:21:31.852 --> 00:21:37.152
But ironically, when Philo converted into Judaism, he didn't get that sort of allegorical read from Kabbalah.

00:21:37.152 --> 00:21:38.652
He got it from Plato.

00:21:38.652 --> 00:21:40.572
And as we mentioned, Origen picked up on it.

00:21:40.572 --> 00:21:41.412
He liked it.

00:21:41.412 --> 00:21:43.912
And so, some of the early Church fathers used it.

00:21:43.912 --> 00:21:49.952
But interestingly, we mentioned this previously, Augustine and Jerome agreed on literalism.

00:21:49.952 --> 00:21:56.312
Augustine, because he was a faithful reader of scripture, and Jerome, because he'd been talking to the rabbis.

00:21:56.312 --> 00:22:02.912
So both of them agreed with literalism over rejecting Origen's allegorical reads.

00:22:02.912 --> 00:22:04.952
Pope Gregory comes along two centuries later.

00:22:04.952 --> 00:22:06.792
This is around 600 AD.

00:22:06.792 --> 00:22:13.232
So two centuries after Jerome and Augustine had their fight, Gregory begins to go in the other direction.

00:22:13.232 --> 00:22:14.832
He begins to make it more allegorical.

00:22:15.432 --> 00:22:27.552
And from this moment on, from about 600 AD until about 1200 AD, which we'll talk about later, more and more and more of the reading becomes very, very heavily allegorical.

00:22:27.552 --> 00:22:33.952
Basically, the pitch was that the literal sense was seen as merely a husk that contained the richer spiritual kernel.

00:22:33.952 --> 00:22:46.832
And some of this was actually pushed because when they could make allegorical the readings of scripture, they could push some of the monastic ideas that were being developed in the West.

00:22:46.832 --> 00:22:50.852
And when you talk about monasticism, everyone wants to talk about the doctrine.

00:22:50.852 --> 00:22:53.252
Maybe we want to talk about the history.

00:22:53.252 --> 00:22:55.492
Nobody ever wants to talk about the money.

00:22:55.492 --> 00:23:03.432
The reason that Rome today is the single largest holder of real estate on the planet was monasticism.

00:23:03.432 --> 00:23:12.032
It was a cash grab that specifically targeted rich families to make sure that as much as possible the Church could be the inheritor of those estates.

00:23:13.052 --> 00:23:17.272
Not a dig, like this happened well well before the Reformation.

00:23:17.272 --> 00:23:27.432
But when you hear these hermeneutic choices, don't always assume that it's just specifically someone making a better argument from scripture, a different kind of argument.

00:23:27.432 --> 00:23:28.992
Sometimes there are political reasons.

00:23:28.992 --> 00:23:40.052
Now that was not Gregory's reason, but later on part of the reason for pushing it was that it turned scripture into more of a wax nose that could sort of justify where the Church wanted to go anyway.

00:23:41.472 --> 00:23:48.232
One other thing to note, we're already past the fall of the Western Roman Empire here.

00:23:48.232 --> 00:23:59.512
And today when we talk about the Western Church Rome and the Eastern Church, which we just typically call the Orthodox, those are visible remnants of the Rome itself.

00:23:59.512 --> 00:24:06.032
The Roman Empire, which was geographically the size of North America, it was the entire surrounds of the Mediterranean.

00:24:06.032 --> 00:24:07.192
It was a big place.

00:24:08.372 --> 00:24:13.792
In the early 300s, that was divided administratively.

00:24:13.792 --> 00:24:20.652
And then by the end of the 4th century, it was officially divided into the Eastern and Western empires.

00:24:20.652 --> 00:24:28.172
And that is when Byzantium was renamed to Constantinople, Constantine city.

00:24:28.172 --> 00:24:32.712
The capital of Rome was moved from the West to the East.

00:24:32.712 --> 00:24:38.212
And not long thereafter, the Western Roman Empire essentially collapsed.

00:24:38.212 --> 00:24:39.492
Some call that the Dark Ages.

00:24:39.492 --> 00:24:41.752
Some people get very mad and say it wasn't that dark.

00:24:41.752 --> 00:24:48.972
But there was so much turmoil in the Western Roman Empire, which then went away and there was no longer any Roman Empire.

00:24:48.972 --> 00:24:52.072
In the East, the Roman Empire lived on.

00:24:52.072 --> 00:25:04.652
And so today, what we call orthodoxy, historically, you know, ignoring doctrine and everything else, there is a degree of continuation right from when Constantine was Christianized and he was a Roman Emperor.

00:25:05.832 --> 00:25:17.952
So these divisions of West in one direction with Latin, and East in the other direction with Greek and maintaining Greek, are not only theological, but they're political.

00:25:17.952 --> 00:25:19.592
And they're principally political.

00:25:19.592 --> 00:25:22.312
The theological is really just along for the ride.

00:25:22.312 --> 00:25:26.292
Because ultimately, wherever you live on the planet, you're going to speak the local language.

00:25:26.292 --> 00:25:28.232
You're subject to the local laws.

00:25:28.232 --> 00:25:30.532
You're stuck with your local neighbors for good or ill.

00:25:31.352 --> 00:25:40.252
So, it's important when you're looking at historical moments, you know, like the fall of the Roman Empire and then what came after.

00:25:40.252 --> 00:25:46.372
If you're trying to focus just on religious things, just be aware that you're missing a huge part of the picture.

00:25:46.372 --> 00:25:49.552
Because these were all political moments too.

00:25:49.552 --> 00:25:51.492
And that's a big part of this.

00:25:51.492 --> 00:25:57.132
Again, small pieces of this thing happened because the West forgot how to speak Greek.

00:25:57.852 --> 00:26:02.852
As we mentioned in the last episode, Greek was the language of the Roman Empire.

00:26:02.852 --> 00:26:10.772
And then over centuries, Latin became predominant and essentially wiped out Greek in the West but not in the East.

00:26:10.772 --> 00:26:15.112
And undoubtedly, that was one of the reasons why that empire ended up splitting.

00:26:15.112 --> 00:26:20.972
There was just a natural separation because they were being alienated by mutually unintelligible languages.

00:26:22.192 --> 00:26:37.952
Another important thing to consider is that when Rome lost Greek and transitioned into Latin, this was no different than what we've seen previously, where Israel lost Hebrew and switched to Aramaic because they were conquered by Babylon.

00:26:37.952 --> 00:26:44.512
And then they lost Aramaic and switched to Greek because they were conquered by Greece and then conquered by Rome.

00:26:44.512 --> 00:26:50.412
Rome lost Greek, gained Latin, developed Latin, and everyone just went along with it.

00:26:50.532 --> 00:26:55.052
So, as I said, Jerome's translation into Latin was absolutely necessary.

00:26:55.052 --> 00:27:09.332
And this is a speculative claim on my part, but I'm fairly confident in saying that I believe if someone other than Jerome had done that translation, it would have in effect been a inspired translation of Latin.

00:27:09.332 --> 00:27:28.272
Because one of the crucial things that happened when God killed Hebrew and replaced it with Greek as the language of Scripture, is it was put into a proper, fully fleshed out, advanced, modern written language, which meant that there was no more need for any oral tradition whatsoever.

00:27:28.272 --> 00:27:42.992
It also meant that among the other European languages, the languages of the sons of Japheth, you can take any oral or written Greek and translate it into Latin identically, such that there's zero ambiguity.

00:27:42.992 --> 00:27:45.692
They're both rich, nuanced languages.

00:27:45.692 --> 00:27:55.792
They have sufficient complex structure for all the various parts of speech that are necessary to capture some of the complex thoughts that are present in scripture.

00:27:55.792 --> 00:28:03.172
As we mentioned previously, notably Quina Greek that was used for scripture was much less sophisticated than Attic Greek.

00:28:03.652 --> 00:28:06.732
In last week's episode or the last episode, I called it Hillbilly Greek.

00:28:06.732 --> 00:28:12.332
I realized when I relistened that some Southerners who haven't listened previously were probably offended by that.

00:28:12.332 --> 00:28:14.852
Half my family is from the South, they're Tar Heels.

00:28:14.852 --> 00:28:18.812
They lived in exactly the spot in Western North Carolina that was destroyed.

00:28:18.812 --> 00:28:25.292
I'm a Yankee, I was raised a Yankee, but my kin, going back over 300 years, are Hillbillies.

00:28:25.292 --> 00:28:27.732
So I meant nothing derogatory by that.

00:28:27.732 --> 00:28:32.972
We all know the difference between the King's English and Hillbilly English, and that was a distinction I was trying to make.

00:28:32.972 --> 00:28:35.872
So if I offended anybody with that Hillbilly comment, I apologize.

00:28:36.292 --> 00:28:40.632
I was trying to distinguish the fact that it was simplified, which was necessary.

00:28:40.632 --> 00:28:44.972
Just as Aramaic was a very simple language, it was a Shemitic language.

00:28:44.972 --> 00:28:49.632
That's why we say Semitism today, because it's the same language group.

00:28:49.632 --> 00:29:03.912
If someone other than Jerome, who had been a faithful Christian, had done the translation of Greek into Latin and had used exclusively Greek sources, I think we can have every confidence that that would have been an inspired translation.

00:29:04.812 --> 00:29:09.192
Because you can correlate Greek to Latin with no ambiguity.

00:29:09.192 --> 00:29:30.972
So, absent someone making some sort of mistake or deliberately manipulating it, I think it's reasonable to argue and to assume that God would have blessed that translation effort, just as he blessed the much more difficult translation effort out of Hebrew into Greek that occurred by numerous anonymous scribes prior to the birth of Christ.

00:29:30.972 --> 00:29:40.352
As I said before, we will make the case extensively in the fourth episode, the Septuagint, when it's quoted almost exclusively in the New Testament, is not limited to the first five books.

00:29:40.352 --> 00:29:44.052
It's not limited to the Pentateuch, which incidentally is a Greek word.

00:29:44.052 --> 00:29:45.252
It's all of them.

00:29:45.252 --> 00:29:51.152
It's all the books of the Bible that are quoted in the New Testament are quoted from the Septuagint.

00:29:51.152 --> 00:30:06.512
So again, there could be no argument that there was, even if you take the story, the legend, the factual reporting depending on your perspective, of the 72 rabbis, the 72 scribes, miraculously translating the first five books.

00:30:06.512 --> 00:30:14.972
According to Jesus and the apostles, all the books were miraculously inspired because they quoted them extensively and said, this is breathed out by God.

00:30:14.972 --> 00:30:29.632
There's no reason to believe if God did that for Greek coming out of Hebrew, that he would not have continued to do that into Latin, into German, into French, into English and subsequent generations, except that Jerome introduced the Hebrew.

00:30:29.632 --> 00:30:36.892
He departed from the faith by subscribing to something that Jesus and the Apostles in the early Church had expressly abandoned.

00:30:36.892 --> 00:30:40.312
Without a comment, they never said we renounced this.

00:30:40.312 --> 00:30:43.712
They just acted like it didn't exist because it didn't.

00:30:43.712 --> 00:30:55.612
And so this history is one of that one decision by one jerk that was never evaluated by anyone reverberates without any further conversation until today.

00:30:55.612 --> 00:30:56.872
It's perfectly reasonable.

00:30:56.872 --> 00:31:00.112
In fact, it's intended by God that scripture be in the vernacular.

00:31:00.512 --> 00:31:03.452
That's one of the other things that the Septuagint proves.

00:31:03.452 --> 00:31:05.992
There's no magic Bible language of Hebrew.

00:31:05.992 --> 00:31:10.292
And to be explicit, we're not saying that Greek is a magic Bible language either.

00:31:10.292 --> 00:31:21.872
The only thing that's special about Greek is that it is the sole language with which God chose to transmit his word that he breathed out to the early church and to us.

00:31:21.872 --> 00:31:23.532
That doesn't mean you have to learn Greek.

00:31:23.532 --> 00:31:26.572
Doesn't mean you have to be an expert in it by any stretch.

00:31:27.372 --> 00:31:51.512
Anyone who can learn Greek sufficiently to translate into English can produce a translation that if it's faithful, you know, there are famous men in the past, Lutheran, German, Tyndale in English and a number of others in various languages, who went to great lengths and were blessed by God in the work that they did translating into the vernacular, so that God's word could be shared locally.

00:31:51.512 --> 00:32:06.192
I think that we have lost sight of the fact that the proliferation of all these translations is unhealthy and unnatural, but it's going to happen when, frankly, you don't have someone politically sort of minding the store.

00:32:06.192 --> 00:32:07.992
And that's the next thing that comes up here.

00:32:07.992 --> 00:32:10.632
We're going to talk about Alcuin of York.

00:32:10.632 --> 00:32:13.252
This is 200 years after Gregory the Great.

00:32:13.252 --> 00:32:15.312
Alcuin was an Englishman.

00:32:15.312 --> 00:32:20.532
He was an English theologian who was dispatched by his regent to Charlemagne's court.

00:32:20.532 --> 00:32:27.712
This is Charles the Great, Carolus Magnus, the emperor of France and much of Europe at that time.

00:32:27.712 --> 00:32:30.652
Charlemagne assembled quite a court.

00:32:30.652 --> 00:32:31.952
He was a very serious man.

00:32:31.952 --> 00:32:35.892
He was very learned and he was very devout.

00:32:35.892 --> 00:32:44.212
And one of the purposes of the men that he assembled in his court was to reinvigorate learning.

00:32:44.212 --> 00:32:48.012
Because this is on the far side of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.

00:32:48.012 --> 00:32:49.132
He's trying to rebuild something.

00:32:49.432 --> 00:32:53.752
He's unifying a bunch of disparate, much smaller kingdoms.

00:32:53.752 --> 00:32:56.492
I'm descended from Charlemagne, like virtually everyone listening.

00:32:56.492 --> 00:32:59.112
Because most people listening are Western European.

00:32:59.112 --> 00:33:05.512
Virtually everyone descended from Western European stock, as Charlemagne is one of their ancestors.

00:33:05.512 --> 00:33:07.712
I'm also descended from Pepin I.

00:33:07.712 --> 00:33:11.092
I don't know if everyone is, but I should have to be if you come through Charlemagne.

00:33:11.092 --> 00:33:14.972
So yeah, we're all descended from the King of Paris too, which is a pretty cool title.

00:33:15.292 --> 00:33:20.812
But it's a much smaller domain than the extensive empire that Charlemagne had.

00:33:20.812 --> 00:33:28.872
When Alcuin of York was dispatched to Charlemagne, he very quickly became one of Charlemagne's very favorite men.

00:33:28.872 --> 00:33:36.212
He was learned and he became Charlemagne's personal tutor and a tutor for his sons.

00:33:36.212 --> 00:33:38.172
And, sorry, Pepin was Charlemagne's son.

00:33:38.172 --> 00:33:39.152
I can't remember the name.

00:33:39.192 --> 00:33:41.472
Charabère was the king of Paris.

00:33:41.472 --> 00:33:43.112
Apologize for that.

00:33:43.112 --> 00:34:05.732
When Alcuin became Charlemagne's tutor and became his really spiritual guide, his spiritual head, even though Charlemagne was his king, they mutually came to the conclusion, and Charlemagne so ordered, that the proliferation of Vulgate versions was causing problems in Charlemagne's kingdom.

00:34:06.432 --> 00:34:10.452
800 AD, there were a bunch of different Latin translations floating around.

00:34:10.452 --> 00:34:18.152
Incidentally, the exact same problem that Pope Damascus I had 400 years previously, that he tasked Jerome with solving.

00:34:18.152 --> 00:34:24.532
The difference is between 400 and 800, Jerome's Vulgate had mostly won over.

00:34:24.532 --> 00:34:28.212
It took many centuries of adoption before it became predominant.

00:34:28.212 --> 00:34:31.732
And by this point, it had mostly won, but not completely.

00:34:32.252 --> 00:34:42.912
And so, Alcuin and Charlemagne in concert with each other, determined that they were going to standardize the entire empire on Jerome's Vulgate.

00:34:42.912 --> 00:34:50.632
And so, Alcuin's task was to derive Jerome's original Vulgate from the various manuscripts were floating around.

00:34:50.632 --> 00:34:55.812
Because what had been happening for four centuries is there were still a bunch of Latin translations floating around.

00:34:55.872 --> 00:35:08.032
Some, the Old Latin, the Watus Latina, that was based on the Septuagint, some based on Jerome, and then variations of the manuscripts of Jerome's translations, so they weren't all the same.

00:35:08.032 --> 00:35:09.412
Alcuin fixed this.

00:35:09.412 --> 00:35:12.832
He produced a single Bible that was the Latin Bible.

00:35:12.832 --> 00:35:33.192
Charlemagne had many copies of that printed, and we're talking about 800 AD, so this is printed by hand, dispatched to many of the great churches and learning centers throughout his empire, with the specific orders that this is the Bible that is to be used from now on, and crucially, if you're going to copy a new Bible, use this as the basis.

00:35:33.192 --> 00:35:36.252
Let's stop copying those older versions that are floating around.

00:35:36.252 --> 00:35:37.252
We have one Bible now.

00:35:37.252 --> 00:35:38.872
Let's standardize on it.

00:35:38.872 --> 00:35:45.392
So this is the very first time that Jerome's Vulgate from 400 AD, 400 years later, is finally sort of official.

00:35:45.392 --> 00:35:50.692
And even at that, it wasn't complete adoption in the West, because obviously Charlemagne didn't rule all of the West.

00:35:51.452 --> 00:35:59.532
And even within the tradition of Jerome's translation, you have things like the Psalter, where he did his own translation from Hebrew.

00:35:59.532 --> 00:36:04.352
The other Psalter, if you're a music nerd, you're going to know about this better than me.

00:36:04.352 --> 00:36:06.072
The Jerome's Psalter was not typically used.

00:36:06.072 --> 00:36:12.152
There was another one based on the Septuagint that was usually used, because it was more beautiful and it was the tradition.

00:36:12.152 --> 00:36:17.532
And so you have a case where scripture would read one way, and then the chanting would read another way.

00:36:17.532 --> 00:36:18.392
That was the reason why.

00:36:18.872 --> 00:36:24.232
So even once Jerome's Vulgate was blessed, it still didn't become completely universalized.

00:36:24.232 --> 00:36:27.052
A few centuries later, it did standardize.

00:36:27.052 --> 00:36:29.052
But crucially, what have we talked about?

00:36:29.052 --> 00:36:30.552
The Septuagint.

00:36:30.552 --> 00:36:36.292
Alcuin's choice of adopting the Septuagint and his encouragement of Sholem to do the same.

00:36:36.292 --> 00:36:41.472
Hebrew was never in question, because Jerome was the last guy in church history to learn Hebrew.

00:36:41.472 --> 00:36:45.692
There were no Jews around to teach it, and no one else ever went looking.

00:36:45.692 --> 00:36:54.412
Four centuries later, Alcuin didn't know Greek, he didn't know Hebrew, he knew Latin fluently, and so his translation was just, let's fix the Latin.

00:36:54.412 --> 00:36:56.812
He didn't refer to any other languages.

00:36:56.812 --> 00:37:00.772
That's a really important part of this story, because you don't hear that today.

00:37:00.772 --> 00:37:11.072
You might hear it as a historical aside, but it's never put in the context of there's no continuity of Hebrew, or frankly, Greek scholarship in the West.

00:37:11.072 --> 00:37:15.252
That's not how we're told post-Reformation the Church has operated.

00:37:15.252 --> 00:37:21.112
We're told that every pastor for all times always learned Greek and Hebrew, and that's just what you do if you're a cleric.

00:37:21.112 --> 00:37:25.652
Well, 400 years after Jerome, no one knew Hebrew, nobody knew Greek.

00:37:25.652 --> 00:37:27.252
All they had was the Latin.

00:37:27.252 --> 00:37:28.652
So what didn't they discuss?

00:37:28.652 --> 00:37:30.192
What's the negative space here?

00:37:30.192 --> 00:37:31.812
Septuagint never came up.

00:37:31.812 --> 00:37:35.552
There was no discussion of the textual source that Jerome used.

00:37:35.552 --> 00:37:37.552
It was simply, this is the Bible, this is the Latin Bible.

00:37:38.032 --> 00:37:39.812
They respected Jerome's scholarship.

00:37:39.812 --> 00:37:41.632
It was popular, let's use it.

00:37:41.632 --> 00:37:43.632
And that was the extent of the conversation.

00:37:43.632 --> 00:37:46.032
The Septuagint never came up.

00:37:47.192 --> 00:38:01.552
So we aren't going to get deeply into the intellectual movements underlying some of this here, but just briefly in passing, it's worth noting that this is sort of the first Renaissance we see happening here in the Carolingian court.

00:38:01.552 --> 00:38:03.612
This is what's known as the Carolingian Renaissance.

00:38:03.792 --> 00:38:10.172
And then what will follow on the heels of this sort of, there's a little bit of time in between.

00:38:10.172 --> 00:38:13.352
By a little bit, I mean a century and a half or so.

00:38:13.352 --> 00:38:20.172
Scholasticism is what follows on that will become relevant for this episode and for future episodes as well.

00:38:20.172 --> 00:38:28.252
Then we have Humanism, which is relevant for this episode, the Protestant Reformation, which is where we will end, and then the Enlightenment.

00:38:28.252 --> 00:38:36.832
And I'm not drawing a direct line between each movement and the subsequent one for those who think that I'm saying the Protestant Reformation caused the Enlightenment.

00:38:36.832 --> 00:38:38.632
That's not what I'm saying.

00:38:38.632 --> 00:38:47.012
This is similar to how the allegorical interpretation became a tool in Satan's handbag later in time.

00:38:47.012 --> 00:38:53.592
Just because something is good does not mean it cannot be used for evil.

00:38:53.592 --> 00:38:56.212
That is what we see taking place.

00:38:56.212 --> 00:39:01.652
This Renaissance in the Carolingian Court is by and large a good thing.

00:39:01.652 --> 00:39:13.052
The problem, of course, is that it is using this already corrupted version of the Old Testament instead of the true version of the Old Testament, which was on hand.

00:39:13.052 --> 00:39:23.552
It was something that was available, certainly in Rome, more so than some of the outlying parts of Europe, which were very quickly becoming not outlying, but the core parts of Europe.

00:39:23.552 --> 00:39:46.232
Because politically, this is the era where you see the transition, as it were, from the Roman Empire and the regions that were part of the Roman Empire proper into what will become the Holy Roman Empire, the First Reich, as it is typically called in German literature, and then subsequent to that, the other ones as well.

00:39:46.232 --> 00:39:58.612
And so this is where Northern Europe is starting to become the political center, even as some of the religious center of the Western Church is still, of course, located in Rome.

00:40:00.212 --> 00:40:10.812
And indeed, by and large, the Church, because we have not yet had the Great Schism at this point, because that, of course, happens a little later than this.

00:40:10.812 --> 00:40:23.732
And for a number of reasons, many of which are, in fact, political and not theological, but also, as we already mentioned, some of that, of course, was due simply to drifts in culture and particularly language over time.

00:40:23.732 --> 00:40:27.812
Because, of course, the Eastern Roman Empire continued to use Greek.

00:40:27.812 --> 00:40:37.292
The Western Roman Empire basically started using only Latin, because, of course, initially Latin was the language of the Empire.

00:40:37.292 --> 00:40:41.772
Greek was the language of everyday life, and so they sort of split between the two.

00:40:41.772 --> 00:40:45.712
The Western Roman Empire adopted the Imperial language and kept it.

00:40:45.712 --> 00:40:49.672
The Eastern Roman Empire adopted the everyday language and kept it.

00:40:50.852 --> 00:40:54.792
Unsurprisingly, considering that Greece is in the East indeed.

00:40:56.172 --> 00:41:15.232
So, subsequent to this sort of interest that we have in cleaning up the Latin, we see the beginnings of the movement of Hebrew influence into various European courts and particularly into some of the schools.

00:41:16.452 --> 00:41:26.752
Now, as we have already mentioned and gone over a number of times, the Hebrew language is still effectively a dead language at this time.

00:41:26.752 --> 00:41:29.092
There are no Hebrew speakers.

00:41:29.092 --> 00:41:36.832
You can't just go to someone and learn Hebrew because it's not a real live language at this time.

00:41:36.832 --> 00:41:48.092
It is, in fact, basically an entirely dead language, as we've mentioned previously, not like Latin, where you have always had those who know Latin.

00:41:48.092 --> 00:41:55.712
There have actually always been Latin speakers down through the centuries, not many at some points in European history.

00:41:55.712 --> 00:42:00.472
But Latin never really died in the sense of being gone.

00:42:00.472 --> 00:42:18.472
Latin died in the sense of no longer being an everyday language, a language of any particular region as the first language, because it was a language that was used for communication between academics, for instance, because they all learned Latin, so they could all use Latin.

00:42:18.472 --> 00:42:22.912
But Latin wasn't their first language, it wasn't the one that they used in their everyday life.

00:42:22.912 --> 00:42:30.752
So if you lived in Germany, or what would become Germany, your actual language was German, but as a scholar you used Latin.

00:42:30.752 --> 00:42:32.752
Not the case with Hebrew.

00:42:32.752 --> 00:42:40.052
The rabbis use a little bit of Hebrew in secret at this point, because they're not pushing Hebrew quite yet.

00:42:40.052 --> 00:42:42.052
That will come a little bit later.

00:42:42.052 --> 00:42:47.072
But by and large, they're still using Aramaic, because most of the Talmud is indeed an Aramaic.

00:42:47.072 --> 00:42:55.032
Aramaic is a language they've sort of maintained in their own enclaves, but they're also using pidgin forms of the local language.

00:42:55.032 --> 00:43:02.752
And so the equivalent of what would become Yiddish in German lands, and whatever the option is in French speaking lands, etc.

00:43:05.552 --> 00:43:26.992
But you see a sort of revival of an interest in Hebrew, because if you're using this version of the Old Testament, the Vulgate, which is based on Hebrew of some kind, as we went over in the last episode, we don't actually know on which manuscripts Jerome based his translation, because we don't have them.

00:43:26.992 --> 00:43:28.432
He didn't give them to Augustine.

00:43:28.432 --> 00:43:30.072
He did not provide them to the pope.

00:43:31.232 --> 00:43:33.372
We don't know what he received from the rabbis.

00:43:33.372 --> 00:43:38.572
He received something in Hebrew, and then they told him what it meant.

00:43:38.572 --> 00:43:44.152
But we start to see this growing interest in Hebrew in Europe.

00:43:44.152 --> 00:43:51.792
And there are a number of individuals who play an outsized role in this revival.

00:43:51.792 --> 00:43:56.412
Part of that is due to a growing access to writings of rabbis.

00:43:56.512 --> 00:44:03.232
Again, we see this theme that will recur throughout this entire episode and in others as well.

00:44:03.232 --> 00:44:10.652
You see Christian men who have questions, and they go to the rabbis, or they read rabbinic literature.

00:44:10.652 --> 00:44:19.632
They ask the Jews questions despite the fact that the Jews have explicitly rejected Christ for over a thousand years at this point.

00:44:20.612 --> 00:44:33.912
Because one of the next relevant individuals is Rabbi Shlomo Yitzake, however, you want to pronounce that last name with a sufficient amount of phlegm, born shortly after the year 1000.

00:44:33.912 --> 00:44:44.592
So at this point, again, remember, the Jews have been deliberately, openly, intentionally apostate for a thousand years.

00:44:45.892 --> 00:45:00.452
Praying multiple times a day, three to five times a day against Christians, cursing Christians, cursing Christian rulers, cursing Christ, reading in their Talmud that Christ is boiling an excrement for eternity.

00:45:02.312 --> 00:45:04.032
And these are the readings.

00:45:04.032 --> 00:45:11.372
This is one of the authors whose works Christians start reading in order to understand the Old Testament.

00:45:14.512 --> 00:45:17.932
This is completely and utterly ridiculous.

00:45:17.932 --> 00:45:23.452
I should note that one of the names by which this rabbi is most commonly known as Rashi, that's probably the name.

00:45:23.452 --> 00:45:26.872
If you are aware of this individual, you'll know him by that name.

00:45:26.872 --> 00:45:33.432
He was a French rabbi and he commented on the Torah, on the books of Moses, on the Old Testament.

00:45:34.572 --> 00:45:37.812
And so Christians start to read these commentaries.

00:45:39.452 --> 00:45:48.692
There are a number of individuals who really go all in on reading the rabbinic commentaries and bringing this stuff into the church.

00:45:49.872 --> 00:46:04.232
And insofar as such a thing existed at this time, Rashi was known as a master of the Hebrew language, which basically just means that he could, to some degree at least, read the Hebrew portions of the Talmud.

00:46:04.232 --> 00:46:06.852
Because that was really the focus of the Jews.

00:46:06.932 --> 00:46:10.232
The Old Testament is not the focus of the Jews, ultimately.

00:46:10.232 --> 00:46:14.312
The Talmud is the focus of the Jews and squabbling over the Talmud.

00:46:14.312 --> 00:46:22.372
Because again, I will remind you, the most common, most well-known saying about the Talmud is what Torah forbids Talmud permits.

00:46:22.372 --> 00:46:27.892
It is essentially a direct inversion of what God has said.

00:46:27.892 --> 00:46:41.452
And so, if God has said, you cannot do X, the Jewish rabbis will do everything they can to explain away that prohibition and make it so that, in reality, you can do X just with these caveats.

00:46:41.452 --> 00:46:52.572
One of the best examples we can think of in the modern context, of course, is their special little rope that they place around certain cities because then they can declare it to be a home.

00:46:52.572 --> 00:47:02.512
And the reason they do that is because they have created certain rules about what you can do on the Sabbath if you are in your home versus if you are outside your home.

00:47:03.272 --> 00:47:19.392
Now, if you put up the special little rope, then everything inside the rope is your home, technically, according to their interpretation, and so you're permitted to do more things on the Sabbath because you couldn't do them without the rope because then it would be outside your home.

00:47:19.392 --> 00:47:23.052
And they actually get very weird about when there's a break in the rope.

00:47:23.052 --> 00:47:28.532
It is completely anti-Christ, anti-Christian, and anti-God.

00:47:29.972 --> 00:47:35.072
You cannot imagine anything more evil than attempting to Jew God.

00:47:35.072 --> 00:47:47.752
Trying to get around God's rules by creating your own interpretations of his rules is wicked to a point that could probably not be overstated.

00:47:47.752 --> 00:47:56.832
And yet, these are the men to whom Christian scholars are going to learn about, supposedly, the Christian religion.

00:47:59.792 --> 00:48:06.972
So, Rashi's work was exclusively within the community of Jews that were living in Europe.

00:48:06.972 --> 00:48:09.792
He had no contact that I could find with Christians.

00:48:09.792 --> 00:48:28.392
These commentaries that he wrote that are considered to be authoritative until today, they were tremendously influential in later Jewish activities, and they were immediately recognized as such, which is why he's honored by having that acronym, and Rashi is his common name today.

00:48:28.392 --> 00:48:32.192
So, he wasn't directly interacting with Christians, and no Christians were coming to him.

00:48:32.192 --> 00:48:37.612
When Corey described Christians seeking out Jewish teaching, it was not yet.

00:48:37.612 --> 00:48:47.512
The seed was planted by Jerome, but the question was never asked, because until Jews started moving into Europe, there was nobody to ask.

00:48:47.512 --> 00:48:55.372
It was a dead language, it wasn't a written language at all, until, incidentally, the Masoretes had just finished their work shortly before Rashi's birth.

00:48:55.372 --> 00:49:02.152
And, as we mentioned earlier, crucially, Rashi's commentaries are very literalist.

00:49:02.152 --> 00:49:09.232
So, when he's writing about the Old Testament, he's writing literally when he's discussing the text.

00:49:09.232 --> 00:49:27.652
That's sitting there in those commentaries until some Christian comes along, and what we see next is the door finally being opened by Satan for direct interaction for the first time since Jerome between Christians and those who pray multiple times a day for every Christian to be murdered.

00:49:27.652 --> 00:49:30.292
In Paris, a man named Hugh of St.

00:49:30.292 --> 00:49:32.892
Victor, he led the school there.

00:49:32.892 --> 00:49:35.532
He died around 1140.

00:49:35.532 --> 00:49:47.252
He was tremendously influential in the Western Church from the time that he took over that school, principally because he strongly advocated for the primacy of the literal historical sense.

00:49:48.072 --> 00:49:54.892
So, in effect, we have a period of time from Pope Gregory the Great around 600 to Hugh of St.

00:49:54.892 --> 00:50:03.632
Victor in Paris around 1140, when he died, where allegorical readings were predominant in the West.

00:50:03.632 --> 00:50:07.752
Hugh went back to what Jerome and Augustine had argued.

00:50:07.752 --> 00:50:09.172
He wanted literalism.

00:50:09.172 --> 00:50:10.512
He rejected Origen.

00:50:10.512 --> 00:50:12.452
He rejected Gregory.

00:50:12.452 --> 00:50:12.992
Hugh of St.

00:50:12.992 --> 00:50:14.612
Victor said, I want literalism.

00:50:14.612 --> 00:50:15.272
I think it's better.

00:50:15.692 --> 00:50:17.052
He was right.

00:50:17.052 --> 00:50:18.792
That was the Christian read.

00:50:18.792 --> 00:50:26.812
When you look at some of the allegorical readings that came out of some of the fathers that went down that path, as I said the last episode, it gets weird.

00:50:26.812 --> 00:50:31.192
You're reading some of this stuff and it doesn't seem like a Christian voice at all.

00:50:31.192 --> 00:50:35.572
Like not that it's evil necessarily, it's just like, why are you talking about this?

00:50:35.572 --> 00:50:37.512
This isn't what the Bible is about.

00:50:37.512 --> 00:50:42.112
It's completely alien to us today and it's alien in large part because Hugh of St.

00:50:42.112 --> 00:50:43.732
Victor rejected it.

00:50:44.452 --> 00:50:46.152
And Hugh of St.

00:50:46.152 --> 00:50:50.152
Victor himself did not interact at all with Jews.

00:50:50.152 --> 00:51:01.132
He didn't know Hebrew, but the emphasis that he replaced on literalism shaped Christian Church doctrine in the West from that point on.

00:51:01.132 --> 00:51:03.672
One of his pupils was Andrew of St.

00:51:03.672 --> 00:51:07.032
Victor, same place, next generation.

00:51:07.032 --> 00:51:09.732
Andrew was his student, Hugh was his teacher.

00:51:10.252 --> 00:51:14.472
Andrew basically took over in leading this effort after Hugh of St.

00:51:14.472 --> 00:51:15.612
Victor died.

00:51:15.612 --> 00:51:22.512
Andrew Augustinian in Paris went beyond what Hugh did because of what Rashi did.

00:51:22.512 --> 00:51:28.172
So this is why these pieces are present, why they're starting to come together to paint this picture.

00:51:28.172 --> 00:51:30.092
Andrew learned Hebrew.

00:51:30.092 --> 00:51:30.872
How did he learn it?

00:51:30.872 --> 00:51:32.312
He obviously learned it from Jews.

00:51:32.312 --> 00:51:38.872
The only way to learn Hebrew was to go talk to Jews who prayed to Satan, and the Christians die.

00:51:38.872 --> 00:51:45.032
Andrew, following the footsteps of his teacher, his master Hugh, said, I want literalism too.

00:51:45.032 --> 00:51:47.372
He found out, who has it?

00:51:47.372 --> 00:51:49.112
The Rashi commentaries.

00:51:49.112 --> 00:51:53.612
These guys who have the Hebrew, these Jews, look how literal their interpretations are.

00:51:53.612 --> 00:52:05.132
He's looking at the past six, seven centuries of Western Christian writing, and he's seeing increasingly strange to his eyes and his heart, allegorical readings.

00:52:05.132 --> 00:52:09.172
And then he looks at what the Jews wrote, and it seems pure and clean.

00:52:09.172 --> 00:52:10.832
And so what's just happened?

00:52:10.832 --> 00:52:12.592
No one talked about the Septuagint.

00:52:12.592 --> 00:52:14.192
No one talked about the Greek.

00:52:14.192 --> 00:52:15.172
What happened?

00:52:15.172 --> 00:52:21.412
You have bait of correct hermeneutic, of literal interpretation of what is written.

00:52:21.412 --> 00:52:31.312
The Jews maintain that publicly when they weren't doing Kabbalah against, again, they get far beyond allegorical when you look into their black magic practices.

00:52:31.312 --> 00:52:36.072
But the basic straight readings you're going to get when they're talking to Christians, very literal.

00:52:36.072 --> 00:52:37.932
And so it was pleasing to his ears.

00:52:37.932 --> 00:52:40.772
And so what does he naturally conclude?

00:52:40.812 --> 00:52:44.572
I need Hebrew so I can know the Old Testament better.

00:52:44.572 --> 00:52:47.712
I need Hebrew so I can know God better.

00:52:47.712 --> 00:52:57.092
He was one of the first who went back to what Jerome had said talking about the Hebraic awareness, the Hebrew truth, which is completely oxymoronic.

00:52:57.092 --> 00:53:03.472
It was never something that was part of the Christian Church between Jerome and Andrew of St.

00:53:03.472 --> 00:53:04.412
Victor.

00:53:04.412 --> 00:53:07.592
But Andrew learned Hebrew from rabbis.

00:53:07.592 --> 00:53:09.412
He read Rashi's commentaries.

00:53:09.412 --> 00:53:10.112
He went nuts.

00:53:10.112 --> 00:53:11.012
He loved it.

00:53:11.012 --> 00:53:13.632
Like this is the stuff.

00:53:13.632 --> 00:53:15.552
He preferred Rashi's literalism.

00:53:15.552 --> 00:53:25.332
When we look at the literalism versus allegorical readings, again, we have Philo of Alexandria, the converted Jew went allegorical.

00:53:25.332 --> 00:53:28.692
Origen, the Christian, followed Philo.

00:53:28.692 --> 00:53:32.112
Jerome, Augustine, literalist.

00:53:32.112 --> 00:53:38.152
Then you have Pope Gregory 600 AD, more allegorical, reshaping the church.

00:53:38.152 --> 00:53:39.112
Until Hugh of St.

00:53:39.112 --> 00:53:44.792
Victor comes along and says, no, we need to get back to the literal interpretation.

00:53:44.792 --> 00:53:49.612
His pupil comes along, Andrew, learns Hebrew and says, look, the Jews have it.

00:53:49.612 --> 00:53:52.232
And this was one of the key moments.

00:53:52.232 --> 00:53:54.412
Some of these other things could have happened or not.

00:53:54.412 --> 00:53:57.732
Like Alcuin of York, it did happen, but it wasn't huge.

00:53:57.732 --> 00:54:08.592
It was a nudge in this direction because it standardized and formalized the Vulgate as being the Bible of the entire Western Church, which hadn't been the case previously.

00:54:08.592 --> 00:54:18.432
Here in the 1140s, 1175, is the very first time that Christians are studying Hebrew since Jerome.

00:54:18.492 --> 00:54:19.612
That's crucial.

00:54:19.612 --> 00:54:21.532
That's less than half of Church history.

00:54:21.532 --> 00:54:27.312
Has any Christian been studying Hebrew, with the exception of Origen and Jerome?

00:54:27.312 --> 00:54:36.612
I found a couple other names of other writers in the first millennium who had quoted things in Hebrew, but it's clear that they didn't know Hebrew.

00:54:36.612 --> 00:54:39.492
They were quoting what had been written principally by Jerome.

00:54:39.492 --> 00:54:42.872
So they're basically kind of saying things like Yahweh, which you hear today.

00:54:42.872 --> 00:54:45.212
Sounds more authentic, but they didn't know Hebrew.

00:54:45.212 --> 00:54:46.932
They weren't, they never learned it.

00:54:46.932 --> 00:54:55.492
They were using Hebrew phrases occasionally as what they perceived as scholarship, but they were not personal participants.

00:54:55.492 --> 00:54:56.092
Andrew of St.

00:54:56.092 --> 00:55:07.952
Victor is the first man after Jerome to actually open the door to consulting with Jews, to learning at the feet of rabbis, and to saying, yeah, we need Hebrew to have the Bible.

00:55:09.572 --> 00:55:19.252
For those of you paying careful attention, some of the comments about the Hebrew language may seem confused or confusing, and there's a reason for that.

00:55:19.252 --> 00:55:26.932
It's because a lot of this is a mess, a giant rat's nest mess.

00:55:26.932 --> 00:55:42.852
When it comes to the Hebrew language, it's important to bear in mind that when we say Hebrew, when really anyone says Hebrew, it's an umbrella term that is encompassing a number of different languages that are related to each other.

00:55:42.852 --> 00:55:49.592
And so you have Biblical Hebrew or Ancient Hebrew, which is the lost language.

00:55:49.592 --> 00:55:53.312
That was the one, no continuity, not maintained.

00:55:53.312 --> 00:56:00.672
God caused the Old Testament to be translated into the Greek in order to preserve it and then kill the Hebrew language.

00:56:01.432 --> 00:56:05.252
It is dead and gone beyond being able to be resurrected.

00:56:06.932 --> 00:56:30.532
Then you have what is developed by the Masoretes, because they are the ones who create the vowel-pointing system and interpret what they have written down of the older form of Hebrew, but without having any continuity to do so reliably, because that inspired oral tradition was dead and gone for centuries at this point.

00:56:31.392 --> 00:56:36.332
And so they are attempting to resurrect something that cannot be resurrected.

00:56:36.332 --> 00:56:49.552
You have, in addition to those two, a sort of pigeon form of Hebrew, Mishneic Hebrew, which is used to interpret the portions of the Talmud that are in Hebrew.

00:56:49.552 --> 00:57:07.312
This is something over which the rabbis constantly squabble, and in fact they fight amongst each other with how to interpret simply the words, insofar as they are written, that are written on the page, which is to say the consonants they fight over which vowels to put in between them.

00:57:07.312 --> 00:57:10.832
The rabbis don't even agree with how to read their own documents.

00:57:12.192 --> 00:57:42.612
It is a combination of Masoretic and Mishneic Hebrew that winds up becoming Medieval Hebrew, which even calling it Medieval Hebrew is somewhat misleading, because the Jews in Medieval Europe do not have a unified Medieval Hebrew, because they have regional variants of it, because they actually pull in bits and pieces of the languages around them when they're interpreting this supposed Hebrew language.

00:57:42.612 --> 00:57:54.712
And so you'll have a version of Medieval Hebrew in Germany that is distinct from Medieval Hebrew in Paris, in France, that is distinct from Medieval Hebrew in Rome.

00:57:56.312 --> 00:58:01.132
You have to bear in mind that Hebrew is not a monolithic thing.

00:58:01.132 --> 00:58:10.292
It is this umbrella term for a very complex history, and a very complex history of deceit, of lies.

00:58:10.292 --> 00:58:21.952
Because what it is used to convey oftentimes, particularly to the modern ear from modern false teachers, is some sort of continuity that was never there.

00:58:21.952 --> 00:58:43.052
There is no continuity from Biblical Hebrew, again, an entirely lost language, except for we have the consonants, which aren't useful unless you have the ability to interpret them, for which you need the inspired oral tradition, which is dead and gone, because God rendered his judgment on that by causing it to go extinct.

00:58:44.752 --> 00:59:03.152
But you have that beginning and then the line through these other ones, up to modern Hebrew, which is yet another language, another child of this Hebrew umbrella, if you want to take it in that way, that is spoken in modern-day Israel, so-called.

00:59:03.152 --> 00:59:04.812
Not the same language.

00:59:04.812 --> 00:59:07.052
It is not a direct line from one to the other.

00:59:07.052 --> 00:59:12.532
It is this convoluted rat's nest, this mess of deception and lies.

00:59:13.432 --> 00:59:20.512
Because the Hebrew language dies and is dead for centuries before it is resurrected.

00:59:20.512 --> 00:59:30.872
In fact, by the time we get to the resurrection that is modern Hebrew, this constructed artificial language, Hebrew had been dead for basically 2,000 years.

00:59:30.872 --> 00:59:38.412
Because you have these offshoots that are created from this dead branch, from this dead root.

00:59:38.412 --> 00:59:41.012
But they are not all the same language.

00:59:41.552 --> 00:59:47.472
They are not like, for instance, Old English, Middle English, Modern English.

00:59:47.472 --> 00:59:49.212
There is a direct line there.

00:59:49.212 --> 00:59:53.532
Each one is essentially a daughter language of the previous one.

00:59:53.532 --> 00:59:56.372
The same thing occurs with every European language.

00:59:56.372 --> 00:59:59.772
You have Old High German, you have Modern German.

00:59:59.772 --> 01:00:01.212
You have some different forms of it as well.

01:00:01.212 --> 01:00:06.792
You have Low German, for instance, which is a child language of the older version of German.

01:00:06.792 --> 01:00:08.032
That is not the case with Hebrew.

01:00:08.772 --> 01:00:22.052
So, bear in mind, when speaking of Hebrew, when we say Hebrew, it is a shorthand for this complex and complicated underlying and, again, deceptive reality.

01:00:22.052 --> 01:00:32.412
What they are using as medieval Hebrew is this thing that they have cobbled together and constructed in order to pass it off to Christians.

01:00:32.412 --> 01:00:42.892
Yes, they use it among themselves as well to squabble over their texts, but, by and large, they are having their discussions in Aramaic, because Aramaic is still an extant language.

01:00:42.892 --> 01:00:48.352
Aramaic is an actual language, unlike this medieval Hebrew.

01:00:48.352 --> 01:00:58.132
But when Christians come to them, or when they go to Christians, they try to pass off this medieval Hebrew as being this is the actual language of the Old Testament.

01:00:58.132 --> 01:01:08.172
You need this language in order to understand what God actually wrote, and above and beyond that, actually, you need more than just the language, because, well, those are only the consonants.

01:01:08.172 --> 01:01:10.392
You actually have to talk to me.

01:01:10.392 --> 01:01:12.232
You have to talk to a rabbi.

01:01:12.232 --> 01:01:17.332
You have to come and talk to the Jews in order to understand the Word of God.

01:01:17.332 --> 01:01:23.152
And we see all sorts of wicked fruit down the line from this wicked tree.

01:01:23.152 --> 01:01:29.552
This is one of those concepts that we repeat very often, and it's important.

01:01:29.552 --> 01:01:31.312
It's one of the reasons it's on the challenge coin.

01:01:32.972 --> 01:01:37.032
Wicked trees produce wicked fruit.

01:01:37.032 --> 01:01:39.032
This is similar to something that we have.

01:01:39.032 --> 01:01:44.692
In fact, it is directly comparable to something that we have in our courts of law.

01:01:44.692 --> 01:02:19.872
In our courts of law, we have the concept of the fruit of the poisonous tree, which basically means in, I'll give the most common concrete example, in a criminal case, if law enforcement violate your rights in the law, during their investigation, the evidence obtained subsequent to, pursuant to that violation, cannot be admitted, typically speaking, because it is the fruit of the poisonous tree of that violation of your rights, of that transgression of the law.

01:02:19.872 --> 01:02:39.492
And so, if they obtain a murder weapon because they illegally searched your vehicle, illegally searched your house, it will probably not be admissible, because it is the fruit of that poisonous tree, unless they can say in some other way that they would have necessarily discovered it, for instance.

01:02:39.492 --> 01:02:42.432
But that starts to get complicated legally.

01:02:42.432 --> 01:02:49.372
The point is, we have a similar thing here with regard to theology, with regard to spiritual matters.

01:02:49.372 --> 01:02:58.812
You do not go to a poisonous tree to get good fruit, because you will never find good fruit on that poisonous tree.

01:02:58.812 --> 01:03:12.272
Even if, for instance, in some of these cases, you have things, where Satan has taken something that was good and used it for evil, it is never the case that what you have that is good came from the poisonous tree.

01:03:12.272 --> 01:03:14.232
It came from something else that was good.

01:03:14.232 --> 01:03:16.832
It came from a good tree.

01:03:16.832 --> 01:03:19.412
Good trees produce good fruit.

01:03:19.412 --> 01:03:21.452
Wicked trees produce wicked fruit.

01:03:22.612 --> 01:03:28.372
And this is sort of a constant refrain throughout this entire narrative.

01:03:28.372 --> 01:03:37.212
You will see very few, unfortunately, but a few Christians will recognize that's a poisonous tree.

01:03:37.212 --> 01:03:42.312
But usually they will only go so far as to get rid of the poisonous fruit that's lying on the ground.

01:03:42.312 --> 01:03:43.552
And they'll say, no, we'll keep the tree around.

01:03:44.352 --> 01:03:45.852
The tree is okay.

01:03:45.852 --> 01:03:47.412
We'll keep dealing with the tree.

01:03:47.412 --> 01:03:51.332
Poisonous trees don't ever produce good fruit.

01:03:51.332 --> 01:04:09.872
That is the error that keeps being made by these otherwise Christian men because they are not examining the source, which is sort of a great irony because one of the cries, eventually, we will see in this narrative, becomes ad fontes, back to the source, back to the spring.

01:04:09.872 --> 01:04:23.332
And you see that, of course, even with Jerome, who tries to argue for going back to the Hebrew, a thing that you could not do, a thing that you cannot do, you should be wanting to look back at that source.

01:04:23.332 --> 01:04:27.252
You should be wanting to find the tree that produce the fruit.

01:04:27.252 --> 01:04:28.092
They don't do that.

01:04:28.092 --> 01:04:36.612
These men don't actually do that, because what they look at is they say, we're going back to the source, and then they decide Hebrew is the source.

01:04:36.612 --> 01:04:37.092
They don't look.

01:04:37.092 --> 01:04:38.632
What is the source of this Hebrew?

01:04:38.632 --> 01:04:43.532
What is this thing that I have been given by the rabbis?

01:04:43.532 --> 01:04:46.712
Don't believe what the rabbis told you.

01:04:46.712 --> 01:04:51.732
The rabbis are going to say, oh, this is the Old Testament, this is the Hebrew, this is the Word of God.

01:04:51.732 --> 01:04:54.992
We have kept this thing for thousands of years.

01:04:54.992 --> 01:04:56.152
We preserved it faithfully.

01:04:56.152 --> 01:04:58.092
Here you go.

01:04:58.092 --> 01:05:11.532
But if you actually look at what they did, if you look at what God did, that thing that they hand to Christians and on which they base their various commentaries and then you have Christians like Andrew of St.

01:05:11.532 --> 01:05:13.192
Victor, like Peter Comastor.

01:05:13.192 --> 01:05:15.012
We will talk about him next.

01:05:16.052 --> 01:05:26.012
You have these Christians going to these writings based on this false version of the Old Testament, this corrupted text that is not God's Word anymore.

01:05:26.012 --> 01:05:32.932
It is simply something the rabbis have spun out of their own minds, in some cases, in many cases, in fact, with demonic influence.

01:05:34.252 --> 01:05:42.192
This is not a valid source for Christians, because again, it is poisonous fruit of a poisonous tree.

01:05:42.192 --> 01:05:54.152
And it is particularly damning, when we actually have the Old Testament as preserved by God in the Septuagint, because the Septuagint at this point is sitting in archives, in various places in Europe.

01:05:54.152 --> 01:05:55.312
It exists.

01:05:55.312 --> 01:05:56.912
There's access to it.

01:05:56.912 --> 01:05:58.792
The Greek language isn't dead.

01:05:58.792 --> 01:06:00.872
The Greek language is still spoken in the East.

01:06:01.512 --> 01:06:06.332
It's been lost by and large in the West, but it can be relearned.

01:06:06.332 --> 01:06:13.672
Just like today, you could pick up and learn Latin, because Latin is a dead language in the sense that people don't use it as an everyday language.

01:06:13.672 --> 01:06:17.772
It's not dead in the sense of being gone and unrecoverable.

01:06:17.772 --> 01:06:28.312
The same was true of Greek in this day and age, of which we are speaking right now, in the Western context of Western Europe.

01:06:28.312 --> 01:06:29.332
They could have used Greek.

01:06:29.332 --> 01:06:30.312
They could have learned Greek.

01:06:30.392 --> 01:06:34.512
They could have gone and looked at the Septuagint, and they didn't do so.

01:06:36.392 --> 01:06:41.252
The reason that Peter Comestor, who was one of the contemporaries of Andrew of St.

01:06:41.252 --> 01:06:59.112
Victor at the same school, so same place, same time, 12th century Paris, he didn't learn Hebrew, but he was very much in the vein of the literalism that Hugh had pushed and that Andrew found exemplified in the commentaries that he got from Rashi.

01:07:00.132 --> 01:07:10.572
The reason that Peter Comestor is important is that he wrote the Historia Scholastica, which was a Bible textbook that was used throughout Christendom.

01:07:10.572 --> 01:07:25.152
Just to give you some idea of how much of an impact Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica had, today there are over 800 extant manuscript copies that were produced between his death at 1175 and about 1600.

01:07:25.152 --> 01:07:37.132
800 copies of a manuscript survive, so that tells you how prolifically it was copied, how important it was, how valued it was, and what did it carry?

01:07:37.132 --> 01:07:39.772
It carried a literalist interpretation of Scripture.

01:07:39.772 --> 01:07:40.652
Great.

01:07:40.652 --> 01:07:41.792
That's my interpretation.

01:07:41.792 --> 01:07:43.152
I agree completely.

01:07:43.152 --> 01:07:45.612
But what did it do as well?

01:07:45.612 --> 01:07:50.392
Which question was imported by that because of the questions they didn't ask?

01:07:51.912 --> 01:08:02.792
The question that the literal interpretation, the commester's book that was standardized in the West, caused to arise in people's minds was who has the best literal interpretation?

01:08:02.792 --> 01:08:32.492
And because of the influence of Pope Gregory I, Gregory the Great, who was a good Christian man, but because of what came after him with allegorical readings, you have from sometime after 600 through 1200 roughly, almost everyone writing was writing very allegorically, certainly more so than after that, enough that when this Paris school basically repristenated the literalist interpretation, it was revolutionary.

01:08:32.492 --> 01:08:34.612
It reshaped the Western Church.

01:08:34.612 --> 01:08:35.892
What does that mean?

01:08:35.892 --> 01:08:38.532
It means that from Gregory through Hugh of St.

01:08:38.532 --> 01:08:44.712
Victor, you hardly have any Christian writers that are going to be commenting in a literal interpretation.

01:08:45.232 --> 01:09:00.752
So, if you go back and read their writings in this day, if, you know, when you're talking about Andrew and Peter's day, if they went and read someone from two or three hundred years previously, they're going to get a whole bunch of allegorical slop that no longer seems good to their eyes or their ears.

01:09:00.752 --> 01:09:04.312
That has created a situation where they're now hungry.

01:09:04.312 --> 01:09:06.952
They're desperate for literal interpretations.

01:09:06.952 --> 01:09:08.172
And where do they find it?

01:09:08.172 --> 01:09:09.512
In a rabbi's commentaries.

01:09:10.552 --> 01:09:16.692
Satan planted these seeds all along, just to be sitting there waiting for someone to get hungry.

01:09:16.692 --> 01:09:19.652
And the tree would spring up and the fruit would come forth.

01:09:19.652 --> 01:09:24.572
And the Christian, who never asked the question, who is this from?

01:09:24.572 --> 01:09:25.712
What are they doing?

01:09:25.712 --> 01:09:27.492
How did we get to this point?

01:09:27.492 --> 01:09:30.392
What did we not think about to get here?

01:09:30.392 --> 01:09:33.772
They only ever thought about the question that was right in front of them, which is how everyone behaves.

01:09:34.432 --> 01:09:37.632
They weren't stupid, that's how normal people behave.

01:09:37.632 --> 01:09:41.652
You don't think in terms of centuries and millennia if you're a normal human being.

01:09:41.652 --> 01:09:42.952
It's too much trouble.

01:09:42.972 --> 01:09:48.272
If anything, it's mostly just going to confuse you, which is why we did episode 99 on the context window.

01:09:48.272 --> 01:09:52.972
Because this story that we're telling here could be confusing if you want it to be.

01:09:52.972 --> 01:09:55.052
We're trying to make this as straightforward as possible.

01:09:55.052 --> 01:10:01.572
But it's moving pieces going back and forth where you have, you know, Augustine and Jerome agree about literalism.

01:10:01.972 --> 01:10:08.032
They disagree about Hebrew origin, and Pope Gregory agree about allegorical readings.

01:10:08.032 --> 01:10:12.292
And then the church rejects that in the 12th century with you and Andrew of St.

01:10:12.292 --> 01:10:13.452
Victor.

01:10:13.452 --> 01:10:19.672
And then Peter Comastor's book is standardized throughout the Western Christian world, up through the days of the Reformation.

01:10:19.672 --> 01:10:27.352
Everyone who is reading about the Bible, remember, they're not reading about Hebrew here, they're just reading about how to interpret the Bible, how to understand it.

01:10:27.352 --> 01:10:28.172
What do they find?

01:10:28.532 --> 01:10:35.252
They want, they find literal interpretations, a literal approach to the scriptures, which we agree with.

01:10:35.252 --> 01:10:42.152
But there was almost no one in church history that had produced something, there was a pure version of that, prior to Hugh of St.

01:10:42.152 --> 01:10:43.152
Victor and Andrew of St.

01:10:43.152 --> 01:10:47.572
Victor, and the men from that school, and then what was produced afterwards.

01:10:47.572 --> 01:10:55.412
So right at this moment, the very first Christian since Jerome, who learns Hebrew, is the one who says, I want to be a literalist.

01:10:56.172 --> 01:10:59.212
This is one of those false choices that I mentioned earlier.

01:10:59.212 --> 01:11:11.712
All along, Satan has executed this perfectly, where suddenly, right in the moment where we fix the hermeneutic, we get rid of the crazy allegorical stuff that at some point went off the rails, and like, it's not worth reading.

01:11:11.712 --> 01:11:17.492
These guys came to the same conclusion, rejecting their Christian fathers up to prior to Gregory.

01:11:17.492 --> 01:11:22.432
But instead of looking at some of the earlier church fathers, they said, you want, this rashy commentary is amazing.

01:11:22.432 --> 01:11:23.952
He's got the Old Testament locked down.

01:11:23.952 --> 01:11:24.532
It's so literal.

01:11:24.532 --> 01:11:24.892
It's great.

01:11:25.312 --> 01:11:29.092
Everything I could ever want, I get from a Jew in Hebrew.

01:11:29.092 --> 01:11:34.252
El Rejoices, what a perfect execution of that plan.

01:11:34.252 --> 01:11:35.472
And no one noticed.

01:11:35.472 --> 01:11:37.252
No one looked, because they were just trying to learn.

01:11:37.252 --> 01:11:41.572
It's a bunch of scholars in a school trying to learn more about God.

01:11:41.572 --> 01:11:53.592
And if they had asked the one bloody question that Corey just raised, why am I talking to a Christ killer who prays multiple times a day for my death, who dances in the blood of Christ, why am I asking him about God?

01:11:54.492 --> 01:11:58.592
How can he possibly know more about God than the fathers and the faith?

01:11:58.592 --> 01:12:17.692
But because of the errors with allegorical reading, because of the abandonment of Greek, the loss of Greek entirely in the West, when the Paris School begins to pursue some learning of Hebrew, and again, Peter the Contemporary didn't know Hebrew, but Andrew did, somebody knew, so they could look at the commentary.

01:12:17.832 --> 01:12:19.172
So you have the specialist.

01:12:19.172 --> 01:12:23.972
Later on, it escaped to the realm of specialists, to being generally used.

01:12:23.972 --> 01:12:26.832
But even then, it wasn't used for the purpose of scholarship.

01:12:28.372 --> 01:12:41.592
As we go through this timeline and these individuals and their decisions, the actions, the undertakings, you can see how Satan plans things and then executes on them.

01:12:42.852 --> 01:12:51.512
He places the seeds, or whatever the object happens to be, and then he waits for someone to pick it up and look at it.

01:12:51.512 --> 01:13:02.312
That's sort of his MO, down through the ages, and particularly with regard to the Hebrew language, to this constructed Hebrew language as used by the rabbis.

01:13:03.572 --> 01:13:09.572
The next individual is another rabbi, and you'll see that Satan does the same thing here.

01:13:10.152 --> 01:13:13.892
This is Rabbi Radoch, also known as David Kimhi.

01:13:15.332 --> 01:13:18.652
He writes a number of commentaries.

01:13:18.652 --> 01:13:23.832
He writes also a Hebrew grammar.

01:13:23.832 --> 01:13:42.432
This is something that will be used by later scholars, because this is a man who, insofar as it is possible, of course, extensively studies the Hebrew language, the one that the rabbis are busily constructing to use to undermine Christianity.

01:13:42.432 --> 01:13:46.152
Now for some of them, that may actually not be the goal that they have in mind.

01:13:46.152 --> 01:13:52.312
They may just very well be squabbling over their Talmud and arguing with other Jews.

01:13:52.312 --> 01:13:55.432
But Satan has the larger picture in mind.

01:13:55.432 --> 01:14:09.352
That is a vitally important thing to keep in your mind, because there are many who will argue, this couldn't possibly have happened because human beings can't manage this sort of action over this many years.

01:14:09.352 --> 01:14:11.552
And that's very well true.

01:14:11.552 --> 01:14:20.032
Humans are very bad at planning on the scale of centuries and certainly bad at planning on the scale of millennia.

01:14:20.032 --> 01:14:21.872
But Satan isn't.

01:14:21.872 --> 01:14:24.592
Satan doesn't sleep.

01:14:24.592 --> 01:14:27.712
Satan is immortal.

01:14:27.712 --> 01:14:31.472
He doesn't have 60 years of productive lifespan.

01:14:31.472 --> 01:14:33.372
And then outside of that, he can't do anything.

01:14:34.412 --> 01:14:42.372
Or in some cases, even less, because if you're going to be a scholar, you may very well be in school for many years before you have any real influence.

01:14:42.372 --> 01:14:44.872
Satan doesn't have that problem.

01:14:44.872 --> 01:14:50.432
He can plan on the scale of centuries or on the scale of millennia.

01:14:50.432 --> 01:14:53.872
He has a patience that a human being cannot have.

01:14:53.872 --> 01:15:01.752
You can't have the patience to wait for something to happen in 500 years, because you and I will both be long dead 500 years from today.

01:15:03.392 --> 01:15:06.252
Long before 500 years.

01:15:06.252 --> 01:15:19.012
And so what Satan does with this particular rabbi is he sets up something that will be useful in about a century, maybe a couple centuries, depending on the individuals who pick it up and use it.

01:15:19.012 --> 01:15:28.112
Two of the men who pick up and use the materials produced by this rabbi are Nicholas of Lyra and Roychlin.

01:15:28.112 --> 01:15:37.192
Roychlin is going to become very relevant in this story, because he is one of the men who leads into what happens during the Reformation.

01:15:37.192 --> 01:15:43.832
There are a number of other men will get to before we get to Roychlin, but that is an important name in all of this.

01:15:43.832 --> 01:15:50.052
But you have this rabbi who doesn't really personally have much contact with Christians.

01:15:50.052 --> 01:16:00.452
Now, he's living in a Christian land because he is living in France, but by and large, he is keeping to his Jewish community, his Jewish ghetto.

01:16:00.452 --> 01:16:09.212
But he is producing these Hebrew materials that Satan will use to deceive others in the future.

01:16:09.212 --> 01:16:18.932
In fact, he will use them to deceive men who are perhaps not so much in the case of Roychlin, but in the case of Nicholas of Lyra, and otherwise Christian men.

01:16:20.012 --> 01:16:23.132
Because they didn't ask the important question.

01:16:23.132 --> 01:16:31.272
They didn't wonder about the source, about the providence of this material handed to them.

01:16:31.272 --> 01:16:33.752
Or, in some cases, they actually knew.

01:16:33.752 --> 01:16:36.172
They just didn't ask the important question.

01:16:36.172 --> 01:16:55.872
Because if you're looking at materials written by a rabbi, in the year 1000, or the year 1100, in this case, about the middle of the 1100s, you don't have any questions about, if you actually think about it, about the beliefs of this man.

01:16:55.872 --> 01:16:58.752
You know that he is a Jewish rabbi.

01:16:58.752 --> 01:17:02.092
To be a Jew is to reject Christ.

01:17:02.092 --> 01:17:08.372
To be a Jew is to curse Christ and Christians and his church and Christian rulers.

01:17:09.432 --> 01:17:24.412
And so, if these Christian men who go and pick up these materials a century later, two centuries later, whatever it happens to be, had thought about what they were actually doing, they may have realized what they were doing was wicked.

01:17:24.412 --> 01:17:28.592
They should never have been taking these materials from a rabbi.

01:17:28.592 --> 01:17:33.152
And yet, that's what they do because they don't ask the important questions.

01:17:33.152 --> 01:17:35.952
They don't ask about the Hebrew language.

01:17:35.952 --> 01:17:38.032
They are curious about the Hebrew language.

01:17:38.752 --> 01:17:43.252
Because they don't ask, what did God do historically?

01:17:43.252 --> 01:17:45.572
Has this language been maintained?

01:17:45.572 --> 01:17:51.072
Yes, to some degree, of course, we have the advantage of hindsight.

01:17:51.072 --> 01:17:56.512
We have the advantage of greater access to information than these men had.

01:17:56.512 --> 01:18:03.752
But at the same time, they cannot be fully excused because they knew the nature of Jews.

01:18:03.752 --> 01:18:05.652
They knew the nature of the Jewish religion.

01:18:06.692 --> 01:18:14.372
They knew they were dealing with men that Christ himself had called children of their father the devil.

01:18:14.372 --> 01:18:23.772
These are the children of the men who called for Christ's blood in Pilate's courtyard, who are proud of what their ancestors did, or they wouldn't be Jews still.

01:18:23.772 --> 01:18:26.192
They would have converted and become Christians.

01:18:26.192 --> 01:18:29.872
And we'll be talking about a man who did that, two men who did that.

01:18:31.352 --> 01:18:34.872
That's two, in two thousand years.

01:18:35.912 --> 01:18:48.192
But these men are going to those who are still proud to call themselves Jewish rabbis, who are creating these materials that, by and large, they're creating them for their own community.

01:18:48.192 --> 01:18:50.232
But Satan has other plans.

01:18:50.232 --> 01:18:57.372
Satan knows what he is going to do with these materials, how he is going to use them to infiltrate and corrupt the church.

01:18:58.232 --> 01:19:03.332
This is a plan that took him 1,500 years to execute.

01:19:03.332 --> 01:19:09.252
Really longer than that, because some of the fruit of it really becomes apparent.

01:19:09.252 --> 01:19:12.972
Some of these things come to full fruition in the 1900s.

01:19:14.112 --> 01:19:21.372
Again, Satan does not have the disadvantage of having a lifespan of 80 or 85 years.

01:19:21.372 --> 01:19:24.052
And so he can plan on this sort of time scale.

01:19:24.772 --> 01:19:28.052
It's not to say that we have an opponent and he's so powerful.

01:19:28.052 --> 01:19:29.112
What can we possibly do?

01:19:29.112 --> 01:19:31.052
We can never compete with that.

01:19:31.052 --> 01:19:33.152
Because we have God on our side.

01:19:33.152 --> 01:19:34.112
Christ is on our side.

01:19:34.112 --> 01:19:38.152
All we have to do is actually listen to the Word of God.

01:19:38.152 --> 01:19:50.152
Listen to what the Word of God says about the Jews, what it says about these wicked men who hate Christians, who hate Christ, who seek to destroy and undermine Christ's church.

01:19:50.152 --> 01:19:51.872
Even when they aren't actively doing it.

01:19:52.252 --> 01:19:58.372
Because this man, when he's creating a Hebrew grammar, is probably not actively seeking to destroy the church.

01:19:58.372 --> 01:20:00.532
But he's still a son of Satan.

01:20:00.532 --> 01:20:06.652
And Satan is going to use that work product in order to cause havoc in the church.

01:20:06.652 --> 01:20:12.692
This is just one particular waypoint, one step, one rung on the ladder.

01:20:12.692 --> 01:20:18.192
And one of the points that it's important to grasp is that virtually none of these men were essential.

01:20:19.332 --> 01:20:20.732
Satan could have used other men.

01:20:22.312 --> 01:20:30.192
Satan is very good at a bar fight, is an example that I used when Woe and I were discussing this before we started recording.

01:20:31.312 --> 01:20:34.372
Satan understands the concept of a bar fight.

01:20:34.372 --> 01:20:38.932
And in a bar fight, the best weapon is the one that is to hand.

01:20:40.812 --> 01:20:46.692
Satan is willing to use whatever man he can use to move the ball downfield.

01:20:46.692 --> 01:20:49.272
He's a lot better at politics than most men.

01:20:50.272 --> 01:20:52.352
He understands the nature of the beast.

01:20:52.352 --> 01:20:56.232
He understands that if you are making yards, you're winning.

01:20:56.232 --> 01:20:58.292
He doesn't care who's moving the ball.

01:20:58.292 --> 01:21:03.772
He doesn't really care that much if it is moving quickly or if it's not moving quickly.

01:21:03.772 --> 01:21:06.172
If it's moving in his direction, great.

01:21:06.172 --> 01:21:08.112
He's willing to take it.

01:21:08.112 --> 01:21:11.592
More Christians should understand that concept.

01:21:11.592 --> 01:21:14.692
And so it seems like here, not much is being done.

01:21:14.692 --> 01:21:24.032
You have a rabbi who is commenting on the Old Testament for other Jews because it's written in a language that no Christian understands.

01:21:24.032 --> 01:21:31.612
And he's writing a grammar, books, in order to understand this language for his own people in his own community.

01:21:31.612 --> 01:21:43.412
But Satan is going to use that because Christians, because of what we've already said about this timeline, this interest in supposed Hebrew scholarship has already been introduced.

01:21:43.412 --> 01:21:50.152
This poison has already infiltrated the church, particularly with Jerome as the major starting point.

01:21:50.152 --> 01:22:04.712
And it is going to accelerate, it is going to be exacerbated by the availability of these materials, by the presence of Jews in their ghettos in Europe, who are creating these materials under Christendom.

01:22:06.072 --> 01:22:16.572
This wickedness, this pagan evil, this deliberately, explicitly, virulently anti-Christian religion, because that's all that Judaism is.

01:22:16.572 --> 01:22:24.852
Judaism is the inverse of Christianity, because it is hatred of God, and it is hatred of his church, and it is hatred of his sheep.

01:22:24.852 --> 01:22:30.232
And this is being tolerated in Christian Europe.

01:22:30.232 --> 01:22:42.832
None of these problems would have occurred, none of these problems would have existed, if you did not have these Jewish communities living in Europe in order to pass off these materials to Christian scholars.

01:22:44.352 --> 01:22:46.432
Because the materials would not have been there.

01:22:46.432 --> 01:22:49.732
The materials probably wouldn't have even existed.

01:22:49.732 --> 01:22:57.532
This is an ongoing problem that we see down through the centuries, because Christian rulers keep kicking the can down the road.

01:22:57.532 --> 01:23:03.112
And in many cases, they do it because they're worshipping mammon, because Jews are allowed to give loans.

01:23:03.152 --> 01:23:05.732
Christians can't, because Scripture is very clear.

01:23:05.732 --> 01:23:07.612
You can't charge interest.

01:23:07.612 --> 01:23:08.492
That's usury.

01:23:08.492 --> 01:23:09.512
That's wicked.

01:23:09.512 --> 01:23:11.512
That's a sin.

01:23:11.512 --> 01:23:15.552
But the Christian princes, in many cases, are perfectly willing to let Jews do it.

01:23:15.552 --> 01:23:17.752
Because who cares if the Jews are sinning?

01:23:17.752 --> 01:23:23.672
Well, the problem is that Christian prince is himself sinning by dealing with the Jews.

01:23:23.672 --> 01:23:30.792
He is as guilty of their sins as they are, because he is the one facilitating it, encouraging it, and benefiting from it to a certain degree.

01:23:30.892 --> 01:23:34.832
He is also destroying himself and his people, ultimately.

01:23:34.832 --> 01:23:37.612
Satan has long-term plans.

01:23:37.612 --> 01:23:45.692
As Christians, we don't have to be so much worried about his long-term plans, as we need to recognize that that is a thing that occurs.

01:23:45.692 --> 01:23:52.032
We have this enemy, and we should be on guard when he is trying to bring things into the Church.

01:23:52.032 --> 01:23:57.152
In this case, it should be extremely easy, because he is doing it with Jewish rabbis.

01:23:58.192 --> 01:24:01.852
He is doing it with men who hate Christians.

01:24:01.852 --> 01:24:06.372
This should not have been a difficult question for our ancestors to get right.

01:24:06.372 --> 01:24:16.412
But because of all these seemingly minor mistakes down through the centuries, the stage was set for what comes next.

01:24:16.412 --> 01:24:17.812
Because that is all Satan is trying to do.

01:24:17.812 --> 01:24:22.772
He is just setting the stage to get another foot, another yard on the play, whatever it happens to be.

01:24:24.192 --> 01:24:59.072
And so we see these Jewish rabbis producing these materials that Christian scholars will turn to in later centuries to use, because you have already had the Church infiltrated with this corrupted version of the Old Testament, which is now in Latin, because Satan conveniently didn't preserve this use of supposed Hebrew, because now all you have is the Latin Old Testament, which is based on Hebrew sources to which you don't have access, on a language you don't speak.

01:24:59.072 --> 01:25:04.672
And now what do you do if you're a Christian scholar and you believe that that is the Old Testament?

01:25:04.672 --> 01:25:09.072
Well, you have to go to the Jews, and that's exactly what Satan wants.

01:25:11.212 --> 01:25:20.192
So after that very kind series of words about the Jews, we come to one of the only two faithful Christians in this entire story.

01:25:20.712 --> 01:25:23.012
And that includes every one of the reformers.

01:25:23.012 --> 01:25:26.892
The only two men who are blameless in this entire story are both Jews.

01:25:26.892 --> 01:25:29.052
The first name is Nicholas Donin.

01:25:29.052 --> 01:25:31.012
We've spoken about him previously.

01:25:31.012 --> 01:25:35.332
You can look up the Trial of the Talmud or the Disputation of Paris.

01:25:35.332 --> 01:25:40.072
He was a Jew who converted to Christianity sometime around 1230, roughly.

01:25:40.072 --> 01:25:42.032
We don't know exactly.

01:25:42.032 --> 01:25:46.552
When he became a Christian, he was horrified at how he had been raised.

01:25:47.132 --> 01:25:51.532
Because he had been raised his entire life to do all the things that we've just been complaining about.

01:25:51.532 --> 01:25:57.372
He was raised to pray the prayer that we've talked about now multiple weeks in a row.

01:25:57.372 --> 01:25:58.452
What did he do?

01:25:58.452 --> 01:26:04.272
He went to Pope Gregory and said, Do you know what these Jews are doing in Christian lands?

01:26:04.272 --> 01:26:12.552
And he went in great detail and told the Church, he told the world, he told the French government, these people are wicked.

01:26:12.552 --> 01:26:14.832
These people call for the death of Christians.

01:26:15.152 --> 01:26:17.112
They blaspheme our God.

01:26:17.112 --> 01:26:19.252
He was a faithful Christian.

01:26:19.252 --> 01:26:20.852
He ceased to be a Jew.

01:26:20.852 --> 01:26:22.532
He repudiated the Jews.

01:26:22.532 --> 01:26:27.372
And he spent the rest of his days going to war against them because of their wickedness.

01:26:27.372 --> 01:26:31.812
So all the things that you just heard Corey go off for a few minutes, like, well, that seems really mean.

01:26:31.812 --> 01:26:34.612
A Jew said this same thing and worse.

01:26:34.612 --> 01:26:39.752
When the Disputation of Paris or the Trial of the Talmud took place, he was the prosecutor.

01:26:39.752 --> 01:26:52.932
Nicholas Donin, the converted Jew who ceased to be a Jew, which is the only way you can know if someone has actually ceased to be a Jew, is when they go to war against the Jews, as this man did and as the later man did, we'll talk about at the end.

01:26:52.932 --> 01:27:01.452
Nicholas Donin went against the Jews in Europe because of their wickedness that they concealed in these secret languages that Christians did not know.

01:27:01.452 --> 01:27:10.912
And what happened was the equivalent of probably billions of dollars worth of blasphemous Hebrew and Aramaic scrolls were burned in public.

01:27:11.872 --> 01:27:13.372
They were reviled.

01:27:13.372 --> 01:27:24.372
And to this day, Jews hate King Louis IX because of this, because of the Disputation of Paris, because when the Talmud was put on trial by Nicholas Donin, it was burned.

01:27:24.372 --> 01:27:31.012
As many copies as they could get their hands on, cartloads of Jewish writings were burned in public.

01:27:31.012 --> 01:27:33.652
That's the Christian response.

01:27:33.652 --> 01:27:35.532
That's the response that we find in Acts.

01:27:36.372 --> 01:27:48.612
Remember the story where the men, the magicians became Christian converts and they brought out all the things that they had, their writings with black magic, and they burned them in the public square.

01:27:49.852 --> 01:27:51.372
This is the Christian response.

01:27:51.372 --> 01:27:53.952
This is what repentance actually looks like.

01:27:53.952 --> 01:27:58.772
You can tell whether or not a Jew has repented by how much he hates the Jews.

01:27:58.772 --> 01:28:03.832
That is the only way to tell that a Jew has repented because he was guilty of their wickedness.

01:28:04.252 --> 01:28:06.632
He was an active participant in his entire life.

01:28:06.632 --> 01:28:10.872
And when he did actually become a Christian, he was horrified.

01:28:10.872 --> 01:28:18.972
And he was filled with righteous anger and hatred at the murderous blasphemy taking place by his own blood.

01:28:18.972 --> 01:28:30.852
This is one of those cases where when you look at the commandment to honor your father and mother, for someone such as a Jew, the only possible obedience to that is to skip over all of those who rejected God.

01:28:31.492 --> 01:28:36.232
You cannot honor your father and mother in a godly fashion when they're wicked.

01:28:36.232 --> 01:28:40.272
So obedience to God involves the first table of the law.

01:28:40.272 --> 01:28:47.972
To respect God till have God as your only God requires repudiation of the evil that your race has participated in.

01:28:47.972 --> 01:28:55.532
Nicholas Donin and Johannes Fefferkorn, the other Jew we'll talk about near the end, are the only two Christian Jews I'm aware of in history.

01:28:55.532 --> 01:29:07.752
After we get out of the early period where the elect were being discovered, inside synagogues, that was why, as we said in the previous episode, up until AD 70, Christians and Jews were still meeting together.

01:29:07.752 --> 01:29:12.052
Most of the Christians were Jews who had converted and ceased to be Jewish.

01:29:12.052 --> 01:29:17.532
But they're still going to where worship was after God destroyed the temple.

01:29:17.532 --> 01:29:27.432
After God destroyed everything about what they pretended was left of their religion, they changed their prayers to call for the murder of Christians, to blaspheme God.

01:29:28.432 --> 01:29:30.452
At that point, there were no more Christians.

01:29:30.452 --> 01:29:34.052
There were only God haters and Christ killers inside synagogues.

01:29:34.052 --> 01:29:35.912
All the Christians were chased off.

01:29:35.912 --> 01:29:41.472
And so at that point, either you were a Christian who had ceased to be a Jew or you were damned.

01:29:41.472 --> 01:29:44.512
And we see that pattern consistently up until this day.

01:29:44.512 --> 01:29:51.852
People who claim to be Jewish converts have nothing but good things to say about Jews, except they're really sad that they don't have Jesus.

01:29:51.852 --> 01:29:54.852
And if only we could do more evangelism, then they would be better.

01:29:55.452 --> 01:29:57.372
It's absolute wickedness.

01:29:57.372 --> 01:30:01.932
Nicholas Donin was a faithful Christian, and I can't wait to meet him in the new earth.

01:30:01.932 --> 01:30:03.572
He was born a Jew.

01:30:03.572 --> 01:30:10.192
So for those who think that this is about race over religion, you're missing the point.

01:30:10.192 --> 01:30:12.412
The point is faithfulness to God.

01:30:12.412 --> 01:30:17.852
Where we find inexorable wickedness from a race, then we judge the race.

01:30:17.852 --> 01:30:20.812
But in the case where there's an exception, he's an exception.

01:30:20.812 --> 01:30:26.652
I have nothing bad to say about Nicholas Donin or Johannes Pfefferkorn, in this entire episode.

01:30:26.652 --> 01:30:28.472
And I can't say that of anyone else.

01:30:28.472 --> 01:30:30.052
I can't say that of Luther.

01:30:30.052 --> 01:30:36.732
Luther is guilty of heinous sins against God for listening to the Jews rather than listening to Nicholas Donin.

01:30:36.732 --> 01:30:40.612
Had the Church listened to Donin, we wouldn't have any of these problems today.

01:30:40.612 --> 01:30:42.452
Stone Choir wouldn't exist.

01:30:42.452 --> 01:30:54.392
If Donin had ignited a revolution against the Jews in Christian lands, if all of their writings had been destroyed and all of them had been driven out of Christian lands, we wouldn't have the problems we have today.

01:30:54.392 --> 01:30:57.552
We'd be living in a fundamentally different world.

01:30:57.552 --> 01:31:03.912
So I hope you're noticing that as we're dealing with these historical facts, it's not about doctrine.

01:31:03.912 --> 01:31:12.092
This is the fight that everyone post the Reformation wants to have, fighting over Protestant versus Roman Catholic doctrine.

01:31:12.092 --> 01:31:14.232
We're not talking about the things that matter.

01:31:14.232 --> 01:31:15.112
Those things do matter.

01:31:15.112 --> 01:31:16.492
Justification matters.

01:31:16.492 --> 01:31:17.852
Indulgences were crap.

01:31:17.852 --> 01:31:18.772
They shouldn't have existed.

01:31:19.952 --> 01:31:23.272
It was a fight that needed to have, that needed to be had.

01:31:23.272 --> 01:31:29.292
But the fact that we ignored the textual basis, and again, like the Septuagint is just gone.

01:31:29.292 --> 01:31:34.652
Unless we say the word Septuagint, you're not going to find anyone bothering to look.

01:31:35.752 --> 01:31:39.152
The things that were burned were all written in Hebrew and Aramaic.

01:31:39.152 --> 01:31:41.532
They were all in the possession of those Jews.

01:31:41.532 --> 01:31:47.672
And on one hand, you have Nicholas Donnan saying, hey, we need to burn all the Talmuds in virtually everything else.

01:31:48.172 --> 01:31:53.872
There's very little of the Jewish writing that was not destroyed at that time, because that was the godly thing to do.

01:31:53.872 --> 01:31:57.932
And as Corey said, even the king wasn't blameless, because he didn't destroy everything.

01:31:57.932 --> 01:32:07.872
He left these wicked people around because it was beneficial, as it had been for centuries in Christian lands to tolerate wicked people doing these wicked things.

01:32:07.872 --> 01:32:09.432
And they all kept the secret.

01:32:09.432 --> 01:32:16.932
Every single Jew for centuries living in Christian lands kept these secrets about cursing Christians, praying for our death.

01:32:17.472 --> 01:32:21.312
And the blasphemous things in their teachings that they prayed multiple times a day.

01:32:21.312 --> 01:32:22.692
They all were in on it.

01:32:22.692 --> 01:32:23.892
It's not a conspiracy.

01:32:23.892 --> 01:32:26.812
It's their religion and it's their race.

01:32:26.812 --> 01:32:31.512
Nicholas Donin converted to Christianity and he despised Jews.

01:32:31.512 --> 01:32:39.092
It's very hard to find an account of either Donin or Pfefferkorn that doesn't go insane calling them rabid anti-Semites.

01:32:39.092 --> 01:32:43.992
And they ginned up hatred and they engaged in tropes and stereotypes.

01:32:43.992 --> 01:32:49.432
And all the exact same crap that's said today was said about them and it has been said about them.

01:32:49.432 --> 01:32:52.692
Because if you can discredit the man's claims, you have to deal with them.

01:32:52.692 --> 01:32:55.892
You don't like the guy, then forget whatever he's talking about.

01:32:55.892 --> 01:33:02.232
That guy just, he was excommunicated from his Jewish community and then became a Christian and he was bitter.

01:33:02.232 --> 01:33:03.472
That's what they say about Donin.

01:33:03.472 --> 01:33:04.172
It was bitterness.

01:33:04.172 --> 01:33:05.692
It was sour grapes.

01:33:05.692 --> 01:33:07.392
Well, that was the purpose of the trial.

01:33:07.392 --> 01:33:11.592
Let's see if there's just sour grapes from one Jew who got kicked out of his shtetl.

01:33:11.592 --> 01:33:15.492
Or is it a Christian who's saying, hey, all these Jews are murderers.

01:33:15.772 --> 01:33:18.252
All these Jews are blasphemers.

01:33:18.252 --> 01:33:21.972
The result of the trial was that the Talmud was burned.

01:33:21.972 --> 01:33:24.172
That's the Christian response.

01:33:24.172 --> 01:33:33.192
So again, who Christians in this entire story are blameless and they're both Jews who became Christians and ceased to be Jews.

01:33:33.192 --> 01:33:39.732
You cannot talk about how we talk about these subjects and admit that we say such things.

01:33:39.732 --> 01:33:43.832
Because when you faithfully obey God, it's true.

01:33:44.292 --> 01:33:45.372
A Jew can be converted.

01:33:45.372 --> 01:33:47.092
Nicholas Donnan is proof.

01:33:47.092 --> 01:33:52.432
And Johannes Pfefferkorne, a couple centuries later, is the last time we have any proof of it happening.

01:33:52.432 --> 01:33:55.172
You don't find other Jews doing what these men did.

01:33:55.172 --> 01:34:07.072
You don't find other Jews converting out of this Christ-killing, Christian-hating, murderous, demonic cult and saying to Christians in their own lands, you know what these guys are up to?

01:34:07.072 --> 01:34:10.412
Find me a Jew who does that and I'll recognize them as a Christian brother.

01:34:10.412 --> 01:34:16.552
Otherwise, what you have is someone who's participating in the same kinds of lies that have been going on for 2000 years.

01:34:17.932 --> 01:34:32.732
As we pointed out a number of times, a lot of the men in this narrative are a mixed bag, and that shouldn't be surprising to anyone because basically all men ever to live have been mixed bags to various degrees.

01:34:32.732 --> 01:34:35.532
Some of these men were by and large faithful.

01:34:35.532 --> 01:34:43.912
You can go back to one of the first men we've mentioned, Pope Gregory the Great, was by and large a faithful Christian man.

01:34:43.912 --> 01:34:53.792
He made errors, he made mistakes, he laid the groundwork for some of the later problems, and that is the case with many of the men on this list.

01:34:53.792 --> 01:35:01.732
And that is certainly the case with basically any of the Reformation figures you can name, and that includes those who oppose the Reformation.

01:35:01.732 --> 01:35:15.492
So, regardless of what denomination or tradition, or whatever it may be, the men you like from the Reformation era made these same sort of mistakes.

01:35:15.492 --> 01:35:20.592
It doesn't matter if it's Luther, it doesn't matter if it's Melanchthon, and we'll get into that.

01:35:20.592 --> 01:35:28.612
It doesn't matter if it's Calvin or Zwingli, or any of the popes, or any of the men at the Council of Trent.

01:35:28.612 --> 01:35:31.932
All of these men made the same errors.

01:35:33.492 --> 01:35:42.652
And the great irony, as Woe just pointed out, is that the two most faithful men in this narrative were both former Jews.

01:35:42.652 --> 01:35:46.332
But they were former Jews in the fullest sense of that.

01:35:46.332 --> 01:35:55.252
They rejected having been wicked, apostate, demonic Jews and became Christians.

01:35:55.252 --> 01:36:01.032
We both fully expect to meet Donin and Pfefferkorn in Paradise, and we look forward to that.

01:36:01.812 --> 01:36:04.192
Because they are Christian brothers.

01:36:04.192 --> 01:36:09.192
Yes, they were Hebrew according to their genetic lineage.

01:36:09.192 --> 01:36:15.272
But they were Christians because they rejected what Jews have become as a people.

01:36:15.272 --> 01:36:26.632
Because the entirety of Jewish identity, of the Jewish race at this point, after two millennia of wickedness, is their rejection of Christ.

01:36:26.632 --> 01:36:28.372
That is what they are in their essence.

01:36:29.072 --> 01:36:35.212
And the way to become a Christian is, as Woe said, to reject that entirely and to fight against it.

01:36:35.212 --> 01:36:38.372
Because that is what it means to truly repent.

01:36:38.372 --> 01:36:41.732
Because to repent is to turn from your former wickedness.

01:36:41.732 --> 01:36:47.932
And in some cases where that wickedness is of a certain kind, there needs also to be public penance.

01:36:47.932 --> 01:36:51.572
This is something they had in the early Christian church.

01:36:51.572 --> 01:36:56.192
Now, to be clear, I am certainly not saying that penance saves you.

01:36:57.032 --> 01:37:19.152
What I am saying is the same thing that was said by the early writers, by the early theologians of the Christian church, who said of those who fell away, who went back to pagan practices under persecution, that in order to truly repent and come back to the Christian church, you need to publicly do penance for your previous wickedness.

01:37:20.312 --> 01:37:22.792
That is in order to show that the repentance is real.

01:37:23.972 --> 01:37:31.412
It is not just to show that the repentance is real to the world, but it is to show also that the repentance is real to yourself.

01:37:31.412 --> 01:37:36.472
It is necessary sometimes to repudiate former wickedness publicly.

01:37:36.472 --> 01:37:46.912
Private repentance is not sufficient in certain cases, and when it comes to what the Jews have done for 2,000 years, that repentance needs to be public.

01:37:46.912 --> 01:37:55.992
It needs to be a repudiation of that evil, and it needs to be a true turning away from that to the Christian life.

01:37:57.012 --> 01:38:02.972
And the next man in this list, as it were, is Raymond Martini.

01:38:02.972 --> 01:38:12.952
And that's why I started off by speaking of mixed bags, because he is another man who is a Christian man, but he gets some things wrong.

01:38:12.952 --> 01:38:15.432
He gets some important things wrong.

01:38:15.432 --> 01:38:18.712
He actually does go fairly hard against the Talmud.

01:38:19.592 --> 01:38:26.092
Which is good, because he agrees with Donin in terms of the Talmud and its wickedness.

01:38:26.092 --> 01:38:29.692
And so on that count, he is entirely right.

01:38:29.692 --> 01:38:35.132
Just to give you a little more background of him, he is a Spanish Dominican friar and a scholar.

01:38:35.132 --> 01:38:52.732
And so you can think of sort of the historical context of what is going on at this time in Spain, because of course they are currently having rather a large Muslim problem, which comes with, incidentally, and curiously, a large Jewish problem.

01:38:52.732 --> 01:38:56.252
But that's where Martini goes off the rails.

01:38:56.252 --> 01:39:11.432
Because while he recognizes that the Talmud is wicked, which is the core document, the core confession of Judaism, of the Jewish people, he is still willing to converse with Jewish scholars.

01:39:11.432 --> 01:39:13.372
He is still willing to consult them.

01:39:13.712 --> 01:39:19.132
He thinks that their insights, so-called, on scripture, are useful.

01:39:19.132 --> 01:39:21.752
And so he engages with Jewish scholars.

01:39:21.752 --> 01:39:31.432
He engages with these materials that have been produced by rabbis in either contemporary times in other places or in previous centuries.

01:39:31.432 --> 01:39:38.072
So he's engaging with these materials despite recognizing it's a wicked source.

01:39:38.072 --> 01:39:41.112
He's a very mixed bag, like so many other men on this list.

01:39:43.512 --> 01:39:48.992
It is important to examine your priors in many things in life.

01:39:48.992 --> 01:40:02.112
Certainly, it is important to do this sort of thing in the Christian Church, because if we are simply accepting materials blindly, we may very well be accepting materials that have come ultimately from Satan himself.

01:40:03.472 --> 01:40:07.072
This isn't something that we necessarily have to worry about all the time.

01:40:07.072 --> 01:40:09.172
I'm not calling for people to be paranoid.

01:40:09.172 --> 01:40:10.992
We would never advocate for that.

01:40:12.812 --> 01:40:21.452
But we should know better than to go to those who hate Christ and his Church, and ask them for insight about the Christian religion.

01:40:22.592 --> 01:40:24.392
We have the Word of God.

01:40:24.392 --> 01:40:26.652
It has been faithfully preserved for us.

01:40:26.652 --> 01:40:34.112
Thankfully, we don't have, and this is something that is worth bearing in mind throughout this entire series, we don't have these problems with the New Testament.

01:40:35.732 --> 01:40:41.752
No one has ever seriously contended that the New Testament is anything but Greek.

01:40:41.752 --> 01:40:51.052
I'm of course deliberately leaving aside the insane Judaizing scholars who've tried to argue that Matthew, for instance, was first written in Hebrew.

01:40:51.052 --> 01:40:56.912
As we proved in the previous episode, that's not only ridiculous, but impossible.

01:40:56.912 --> 01:40:59.592
The New Testament has always been Greek.

01:40:59.592 --> 01:41:03.692
The New Testament was faithfully translated into a number of different languages.

01:41:04.212 --> 01:41:07.432
We have faithful translations in Latin.

01:41:07.432 --> 01:41:09.352
We have faithful translations in German.

01:41:09.352 --> 01:41:10.272
We have them in French.

01:41:10.272 --> 01:41:11.572
We have them in English.

01:41:11.572 --> 01:41:14.292
We don't have to worry about these problems.

01:41:14.292 --> 01:41:18.952
There are some minor things here and there with word choices in modern English translations.

01:41:18.952 --> 01:41:21.712
Sure, I'm not leaving that aside.

01:41:21.712 --> 01:41:24.292
I'm not ignoring that fact.

01:41:24.292 --> 01:41:28.672
But we have faithful translations upon which we can rely.

01:41:28.672 --> 01:41:47.032
This entire series, this narrative, as should be obvious, because it's about the Septuagint, is about the Old Testament, and the ways in which the Jews have corrupted it and then snuck it into the churches, because Christians have been insufficiently attentive and insufficiently faithful.

01:41:47.032 --> 01:41:50.292
Because to be faithful, this man should have recognized.

01:41:51.572 --> 01:41:54.692
Okay, I see that the Jews created the Talmud.

01:41:54.692 --> 01:41:57.512
I see what they say about Christ in the Talmud.

01:41:58.192 --> 01:42:02.332
I should never ask these men any questions about Christ.

01:42:02.332 --> 01:42:08.632
I should advocate for the prince, for the local Christian authority to expel them from his lands.

01:42:08.632 --> 01:42:11.732
Because these are wicked men who blaspheme God.

01:42:11.732 --> 01:42:16.752
These are men who are calling down judgment on us by existing in our lands.

01:42:17.792 --> 01:42:19.952
Read through the Old Testament.

01:42:19.952 --> 01:42:29.212
Look at what God has done when wicked pagans, when those who blaspheme and deny God have been tolerated in otherwise Christian lands.

01:42:29.212 --> 01:42:35.672
Because bear in mind, Old Testament Israel, insofar as it was faithful, was indeed Christian.

01:42:35.672 --> 01:42:41.572
But when they tolerated the wicked in their lands, they wound up being cursed along with the wicked.

01:42:41.572 --> 01:42:45.392
The same thing has happened to Christians down through the centuries.

01:42:45.392 --> 01:42:47.032
That's what this is.

01:42:47.032 --> 01:42:51.732
Part of being cursed is the natural consequence of permitting this sort of evil in your lands.

01:42:52.332 --> 01:42:59.732
Because, again, if the Jews had not been permitted to come into Christian lands, these problems would never have arisen.

01:42:59.732 --> 01:43:03.712
Because no scholar would have ever thought, I should go talk to the Jews.

01:43:03.712 --> 01:43:14.332
And even if some crazy man somewhere had had that thought, it would not have been an option, because there would have been no Jews around, producing these wicked materials to pass off to Christians.

01:43:16.512 --> 01:43:20.072
What we want men to be is truly and fully Christian.

01:43:20.732 --> 01:43:22.632
That is what Donin was.

01:43:22.632 --> 01:43:24.632
That is what Pfefferkorn was.

01:43:24.632 --> 01:43:26.792
That's what it means to be a Christian.

01:43:26.792 --> 01:43:33.012
To be a Christian, you reject the wickedness of those who blaspheme and deny Christ.

01:43:33.012 --> 01:43:48.592
And above and beyond all others in history, the Jews are the most wicked, the most depraved of all blasphemers, of all deniers of Christ, because they are the ones who murdered Christ, and they are proud of it to this day.

01:43:49.352 --> 01:44:00.132
And every so often, one of them lets the mask slip a little bit, and says, sometimes on Twitter even, We are proud of what we did, and we do it again.

01:44:00.132 --> 01:44:05.992
Christian men should never go to anyone like that, to ask them questions about the faith.

01:44:05.992 --> 01:44:28.132
The only Christian response to that sort of wickedness is at a bare minimum to banish them from Christian lands, so that they can no longer corrupt Christianity, they can no longer corrupt the morals of the land, and they can no longer create and pass off these wicked materials that undermine Christ Church, and eventually wind up collapsing Christendom.

01:44:29.652 --> 01:44:33.932
One of the important things about Raymond Martini is the timing.

01:44:33.932 --> 01:44:43.232
One of the famous works that he produced is the Pugio Fidei, the translation of the full title, His Dagger of Faith Against the Moors and Jews.

01:44:43.912 --> 01:44:50.632
So as Corey said, he was a polemicist, he went hard against the Jews in Christian lands in Spain.

01:44:50.632 --> 01:44:55.532
This was 40 years after the trial of the Talmud in France.

01:44:55.532 --> 01:45:01.352
So on one hand, in French lands, we have the total destruction of Jewish writings.

01:45:01.352 --> 01:45:06.832
In Spanish lands, we have the Dominicans, which was a newly formed order in that century.

01:45:06.832 --> 01:45:23.232
The Dominicans and the Franciscans were both Mendicant orders that were basically created to move monasticism away from the cloistered life, to move them back into population centers, to be more focused on evangelism, on outreach, on doing more Christian things.

01:45:23.232 --> 01:45:25.092
It was a good idea in principle.

01:45:25.092 --> 01:45:36.012
And so the approach that the Dominicans took in these lands against the Jews was polemical and to some degree, it was evangelical in a sense.

01:45:36.012 --> 01:45:41.312
And the problem was that A, they were engaging with them, and B, they were specifically engaging in Hebrew.

01:45:41.312 --> 01:45:53.232
And so as part of the Dominican push to engage against the Jews, they founded the School of Hebrew Studies in Barcelona in the 13th century.

01:45:53.232 --> 01:45:59.392
This is the very first time that there was institutional teaching of Hebrew by any Christian in history.

01:45:59.392 --> 01:46:04.092
We have Jerome, and then in the 12th century, we have another man.

01:46:04.532 --> 01:46:09.012
And then here in Spain, the following century, we have a school being founded.

01:46:09.012 --> 01:46:11.152
This is the very first time the Hebrew is being taught.

01:46:11.152 --> 01:46:12.572
Now initially, it's being taught.

01:46:12.572 --> 01:46:13.332
Why?

01:46:13.332 --> 01:46:15.992
For reasons very similar to origins.

01:46:15.992 --> 01:46:18.252
When he learned Hebrew, it was to argue with the Jews.

01:46:18.252 --> 01:46:21.492
And so he could make sure that he could vet the Septuagint.

01:46:21.492 --> 01:46:23.572
The Dominicans had the same approach.

01:46:23.572 --> 01:46:29.752
They were learning Hebrew to argue with the Jews and to convert them if they could, because they wanted to convert both the Jews and the Muslims in their lands.

01:46:30.732 --> 01:46:36.892
That's the reason that we spent so much time going over the doctrine of shaking the dust off your feet.

01:46:36.892 --> 01:46:46.452
After centuries of murder and warfare at the hands of Jews and Muslims, how much more rope do we have to be provided before we stop doing this?

01:46:46.452 --> 01:46:49.892
The Dominicans chose to do something that, you know, on paper was the right thing.

01:46:49.892 --> 01:46:53.532
The problem was, it ignored one of the other questions, two of the other questions.

01:46:53.532 --> 01:46:56.352
One, should we still be talking to Jews or Muslims at all?

01:46:57.492 --> 01:46:59.572
Why are we tolerating them in our lands?

01:46:59.572 --> 01:47:03.772
And two, again, the fundamental question of this episode, where is the Septuagint?

01:47:03.772 --> 01:47:04.572
It's nowhere.

01:47:04.572 --> 01:47:05.352
There's no Greek.

01:47:05.352 --> 01:47:06.372
There's only Latin.

01:47:06.372 --> 01:47:09.672
And I guess we need Hebrew so we can argue with the Jews.

01:47:09.672 --> 01:47:12.872
So as Corey said, like, he went hard at Jews.

01:47:12.872 --> 01:47:14.952
He went hard at Muslims.

01:47:14.952 --> 01:47:18.312
He did the right things, but he did it in Hebrew.

01:47:18.312 --> 01:47:21.932
Because at that point, they were always begging the question.

01:47:21.932 --> 01:47:30.712
Because remember when we talked about in the previous episode, up until the murder of Christ, Greek was the only scripture that they used in their teaching.

01:47:30.712 --> 01:47:33.372
They were talking, they were arguing in Greek.

01:47:33.372 --> 01:47:36.352
Sanhedrin is a Greek word.

01:47:36.352 --> 01:47:46.432
I did a thread a while back on all the Greek loanwords in our modern lexicon that are considered to be Jewish, like synagogue.

01:47:46.432 --> 01:47:47.132
That's a Greek word.

01:47:47.132 --> 01:47:48.352
It's not Hebrew.

01:47:48.352 --> 01:47:50.712
Every time you say synagogue, you're saying Greek.

01:47:50.712 --> 01:47:58.692
Why is such a fundamentally Greek word, a fundamentally intrinsic part of the Jewish experience to this day?

01:47:58.692 --> 01:48:00.412
Because all they had was Greek.

01:48:00.412 --> 01:48:02.632
All they had was Greek.

01:48:02.632 --> 01:48:06.072
Their daily lives, their preaching, everything was done in Greek.

01:48:06.072 --> 01:48:08.192
All the talk about, oh, well, maybe it was in Aramaic.

01:48:08.192 --> 01:48:09.432
Where's the evidence?

01:48:09.432 --> 01:48:11.892
There's no evidence that any of that survived.

01:48:11.892 --> 01:48:18.652
What we have is Sanhedrin and synagogue and all these other things that were Greek, because that's what they had.

01:48:18.652 --> 01:48:30.812
So the repudiation of the Greek by origin, the repudiation of the Greek by Raymond Martini, not consciously in the latter case, but simply by virtue of, why would anyone think about that?

01:48:30.812 --> 01:48:39.972
We have the Bible and Latin in church based on the Hebrew, like Jerome provided, but that's what it was originally anyway, so who sees the problem?

01:48:39.972 --> 01:48:44.252
At no point did anyone ask the question that we're asking here, which is why they missed it.

01:48:44.252 --> 01:48:49.752
Had they asked the question, hey, where's the scripture of Jesus and the apostles and the early church?

01:48:49.752 --> 01:48:51.872
Many of these errors would have been avoided.

01:48:51.872 --> 01:48:56.412
At any point along the way, they could have asked those questions and they could have avoided these errors.

01:48:56.412 --> 01:49:00.392
Instead, we have the Dominicans founding the School of Hebrew Studies in Barcelona.

01:49:00.392 --> 01:49:05.692
This was something that later spread throughout Christian lands for similar purposes.

01:49:05.692 --> 01:49:21.272
In fact, Hebrew was studied in Europe for centuries before Greek was, because one interesting artifact of the split of the Roman Empire, all of the councils, all the ecumenical councils, were conducted exclusively in Greek.

01:49:21.272 --> 01:49:27.872
And later on, when the emissaries from Rome were there, it had to be translated from Greek into Latin.

01:49:27.872 --> 01:49:33.612
All the proceedings were in Greek, and the Western side had to have translators there.

01:49:33.612 --> 01:49:38.792
They were fundamentally alienated by a mutually unintelligible language.

01:49:38.792 --> 01:49:43.172
And so there was simply no Greek scholarship until the 15th century.

01:49:43.732 --> 01:49:49.392
It was not long before the Reformation before we see any concerted Greek scholarship whatsoever.

01:49:49.392 --> 01:49:52.372
But we find Hebrew scholarship centuries earlier.

01:49:52.372 --> 01:49:59.672
And again, it was polemical, and it was evangelical, but it was totally disregarding Christ's command to shake the dust off.

01:49:59.672 --> 01:50:04.152
It's a question that was never asked, just like the question of Greek was never asked.

01:50:05.532 --> 01:50:14.612
And so next, we have a man who was mentioned earlier in connection to the writings of a certain rabbi, because this man winds up using them.

01:50:14.612 --> 01:50:18.132
And that is Nicholas of Lyra, who is a French Franciscan friar.

01:50:18.132 --> 01:50:20.052
He's a biblical scholar.

01:50:20.052 --> 01:50:24.212
He's born in Normandy, winds up studying at the University of Paris.

01:50:24.212 --> 01:50:32.532
You'll see connections to that, particularly if you decide to look into this on your own, you'll see a lot of connections to some universities in Paris.

01:50:32.532 --> 01:50:40.032
But in his commentaries, we see from Nicholas of Lyra that he is familiar with the works of particularly Rashi.

01:50:40.032 --> 01:50:51.012
And so he is using these materials that were produced by Jews and using them to attempt to interpret scripture.

01:50:51.012 --> 01:51:00.632
And at risk of beating the dead horse, the Jews cannot understand scripture because scripture is very clear.

01:51:00.632 --> 01:51:03.572
It is a closed book for those who do not have the spirit.

01:51:04.132 --> 01:51:15.272
And certainly those who have not only rejected Christ, but in fact hate him and curse him and his followers daily, do not have the spirit.

01:51:15.272 --> 01:51:16.492
That should go without saying.

01:51:16.492 --> 01:51:19.132
It should be very obvious to all Christians.

01:51:19.132 --> 01:51:28.292
And yet here we have a man who is otherwise a Christian, using these materials in order to teach Christianity.

01:51:28.292 --> 01:51:31.452
And of course he has knowledge of the Hebrew language.

01:51:31.532 --> 01:51:39.252
He does indeed learn Hebrew because he believes that he needs it in order to read and understand the Old Testament.

01:51:39.252 --> 01:51:45.212
One of the biggest things we want you to take away from this entire series is that Hebrew is wicked.

01:51:45.212 --> 01:52:01.992
It was spun up by apostate Jews, pushed by apostate Jews, used by apostate Jews, infiltrated into the church in order to bring these teachings of the apostate Jews into the church and undermine the church.

01:52:01.992 --> 01:52:06.912
And we already have the Old Testament in a proper European language.

01:52:06.912 --> 01:52:08.932
We have it in Greek.

01:52:08.932 --> 01:52:15.012
And in fact, it's not very difficult to translate Greek into any other European language we happen to use.

01:52:15.012 --> 01:52:20.652
Whether it is the English we are speaking now, or the German of Luther, or any other language.

01:52:22.452 --> 01:52:25.192
There is no reason to learn Hebrew.

01:52:25.932 --> 01:52:28.892
In fact, learning Hebrew should be seen as a black mark.

01:52:28.892 --> 01:52:31.632
We will get into that more in future episodes.

01:52:31.632 --> 01:52:36.652
But Hebrew does not give you insight into the Old Testament.

01:52:36.652 --> 01:52:39.972
If anything, it denies you certain insights.

01:52:39.972 --> 01:52:54.912
It makes your understanding of the Old Testament worse, because you have corrupted yourself with this false and wicked interpretation of the Old Testament that has been passed off as true by the Jews.

01:52:56.172 --> 01:52:59.312
And that is what we see happening here with Nicholas of Lyra.

01:52:59.312 --> 01:53:16.272
He is one example among many, of course, because this is sort of the firm beginning of the use of the Hebrew language, the formal teaching and learning of the Hebrew language, to use it in order to supposedly exegete the Old Testament.

01:53:16.272 --> 01:53:28.752
And in doing so, they inevitably rely on rabbinic works, which is, again, that question that should always worry you, or that answer to a question, depending on how it's phrased.

01:53:28.752 --> 01:53:30.252
What do the Jews say?

01:53:30.252 --> 01:53:32.552
We should go ask the Jews.

01:53:32.552 --> 01:53:36.832
No Christian should ever have that thought.

01:53:36.832 --> 01:53:41.512
Certainly no Christian should ever pursue that thought.

01:53:41.512 --> 01:53:46.092
If you look at the Old Testament and wonder, what do the Jews say about this passage?

01:53:46.092 --> 01:53:48.092
That is an anti-Christian thought.

01:53:48.092 --> 01:53:49.752
That is not a Christian question.

01:53:50.932 --> 01:53:55.812
And I know there are those who will try to say, well, we need to know what the Jews think in order to interact with them.

01:53:55.812 --> 01:54:03.372
As Woe just said and as we've said previously, 2,000 years is more than enough time.

01:54:03.372 --> 01:54:09.292
The apostles did not wait 2,000 years to shake the dust off their sandals.

01:54:10.932 --> 01:54:21.872
We have waited 2,000 years for the Jews to convert, for the Jews to hear the voice of God in Scripture, which is again in Greek, not in Hebrew.

01:54:21.872 --> 01:54:23.672
And they have not done so.

01:54:23.672 --> 01:54:47.112
They have instead explicitly rejected it and created their own religion that is an inversion of Christianity, that is an opposition to Christianity, that seeks to destroy Christianity, that seeks to annihilate Christ Church, because they are of their father the devil, and he was a murderer from the beginning, and they desire only to do his will.

01:54:47.112 --> 01:54:48.392
Those are the words of Christ.

01:54:48.912 --> 01:54:59.672
So, if you are concerned about what I just said, if you think that it's mean or anti-Semitic or anything like that, then your problem is with God, because Christ is God in the flesh.

01:54:59.672 --> 01:55:02.212
Your problem is with him, it's not with me.

01:55:02.212 --> 01:55:22.092
You can think of the rebellious Jews, the rebellious Israelites in the desert, when they stand up against Moses and Aaron, and Moses said, Your quarrel is not with me, your quarrel is with God, because that is ultimately what they were rejecting when they were wandering in the desert, wandering in the wilderness.

01:55:22.092 --> 01:55:25.992
They weren't rejecting Moses, they were rejecting God.

01:55:25.992 --> 01:55:39.812
And so those who have a problem with the things that we say on this podcast about the Jews, we are simply relaying history and Christian teaching, and in many cases simply paraphrasing or quoting scripture.

01:55:39.812 --> 01:55:52.772
So if you have a problem with what we are saying, and I am saying this primarily not of course for our audience, but for those who are listening out of spite or malice, if you have a problem with the things that we are saying, your fight is not with us.

01:55:52.772 --> 01:55:55.472
Your fight is with God.

01:55:55.472 --> 01:56:03.052
And I know that I've mentioned things in this episode and elsewhere that makes it seem like Satan is this grand opponent that's powerful, and we should be concerned.

01:56:03.052 --> 01:56:04.372
Again, God is on our side.

01:56:04.372 --> 01:56:05.972
Laugh at Satan, mock him.

01:56:05.972 --> 01:56:07.432
He hates that.

01:56:08.512 --> 01:56:11.232
We don't have to worry about that sort of enemy.

01:56:11.972 --> 01:56:16.012
Yes, he's out there, prowling as a lion, seeking whom he may devour.

01:56:16.012 --> 01:56:18.512
But we are on the winning side.

01:56:18.512 --> 01:56:22.552
Our God is more powerful than the false God of the Jews.

01:56:22.552 --> 01:56:27.172
We don't have to fear these people, and we don't have to ask them any questions.

01:56:27.172 --> 01:56:28.452
These people are evil.

01:56:28.452 --> 01:56:29.632
They rejected God.

01:56:29.632 --> 01:56:32.252
They continue to do it to this day.

01:56:32.252 --> 01:56:34.812
And Christians should not be consulting them.

01:56:34.812 --> 01:56:43.452
And so when Nicholas of Lyra decides he has to learn Hebrew in order to understand the Old Testament, that was wicked.

01:56:43.452 --> 01:56:44.852
That was an evil thing to do.

01:56:44.852 --> 01:56:47.772
That was an anti-Christian thing to do.

01:56:47.772 --> 01:56:55.332
And it is possible, yes, to say that Christians have done anti-Christian wicked things, and yet they were still saved.

01:56:55.332 --> 01:57:00.212
I don't believe that most of the men on this list are in hell.

01:57:00.212 --> 01:57:03.092
I believe they were Christians who made errors.

01:57:03.092 --> 01:57:10.812
And so if we get to it in this episode, if we discuss the Reformation figures, I don't think that Luther is in hell.

01:57:10.812 --> 01:57:14.352
I don't think that Calvin is in hell.

01:57:14.352 --> 01:57:18.992
I believe that those men were Christian men who made mistakes.

01:57:18.992 --> 01:57:25.412
Yes, they made some pretty important ones, but by and large they were building on the errors of previous centuries.

01:57:26.752 --> 01:57:29.412
At this point, we've gone through a number of centuries.

01:57:29.412 --> 01:57:33.772
We've gone through five to seven hundred years, give or take.

01:57:33.772 --> 01:57:41.792
Those in the Reformation, by the time they got to the period of the Reformation, were building on almost a thousand years of errors.

01:57:41.792 --> 01:57:44.712
They didn't manage to correct everything.

01:57:44.712 --> 01:57:46.752
It's one of the points of this series.

01:57:46.752 --> 01:57:53.972
There is work to be done in correcting this error that has been allowed to persist in the churches for far too long.

01:57:53.972 --> 01:57:58.552
It's one of the points we will make in the fifth episode in this series.

01:57:58.552 --> 01:58:04.472
This is not something that necessarily endangers your soul if you get it wrong.

01:58:04.812 --> 01:58:05.732
There is a little danger there.

01:58:05.732 --> 01:58:07.352
I won't deny that.

01:58:07.352 --> 01:58:09.912
But it's not something that necessarily does so.

01:58:09.912 --> 01:58:13.992
You can still remain a Christian and make these mistakes.

01:58:13.992 --> 01:58:19.712
But it's the same sort of problem we've brought up in so many other areas and so many other episodes.

01:58:19.712 --> 01:58:27.272
You don't make these errors even if it doesn't damn you, because it may do so to your great-great-great-grandchild.

01:58:29.172 --> 01:58:32.232
And as a Christian, that should be a core concern for you.

01:58:32.792 --> 01:58:43.932
One of the greatest concerns of the Christian life is passing on the faith undefiled and intact to future generations, to make sure that they can also be Christian.

01:58:43.932 --> 01:58:47.212
Because look down through the pages of history.

01:58:47.212 --> 01:58:54.032
It is nothing but a constant series of men failing to transmit the faith with full fidelity.

01:58:54.032 --> 01:59:02.872
And so eventually their great-great-great-great, however many greats it happens to be, grandson, no longer has the faith.

01:59:04.372 --> 01:59:09.012
When Shem stepped off the ark, he knew the true faith.

01:59:09.012 --> 01:59:16.732
In fact, Noah says that God is the god of Shem, which is to say that he has the true faith.

01:59:16.732 --> 01:59:20.772
And yet look at what Abraham is when God calls him.

01:59:20.772 --> 01:59:22.272
He's an idolater.

01:59:22.332 --> 01:59:30.332
He's a moon worshipper, living in a land of idolatrous people who do not have the Lord God as their god.

01:59:30.332 --> 01:59:34.732
When Japheth stepped off the ark, he had the true faith.

01:59:34.732 --> 01:59:35.692
He was a believer.

01:59:35.692 --> 01:59:38.812
He was a Christian like Father Noah.

01:59:38.812 --> 01:59:42.612
But at some point along the line, he lost it.

01:59:42.612 --> 01:59:46.252
And our ancestors started worshipping gods who were not gods.

01:59:46.252 --> 01:59:50.552
It is possible to lose the faith even if it is done only incrementally.

01:59:51.312 --> 01:59:56.692
And the sins of the fathers do wind up burdening their sons.

01:59:56.692 --> 02:00:05.872
That is what we want to guard against because the consequences are disastrous, particularly if those of us in the West lose the faith.

02:00:06.912 --> 02:00:09.452
Because we're the only church left.

02:00:09.452 --> 02:00:15.712
We're the only church that can preserve the faith over a span of centuries across time.

02:00:16.852 --> 02:00:22.452
These are not minor matters, even if they seem like they are at the time.

02:00:22.452 --> 02:00:26.612
Even if they are, in fact, a small step.

02:00:26.612 --> 02:00:30.492
Any deviation from the path is not a small step.

02:00:30.492 --> 02:00:34.452
An example we've used before, because it illustrates this perfectly.

02:00:34.452 --> 02:00:36.172
If you launch a rocket from Earth.

02:00:40.312 --> 02:00:44.832
You are not going to be even in the vicinity of Mars by the time you get there.

02:00:44.832 --> 02:00:48.472
You're going to miss the moon by the time you get there.

02:00:48.472 --> 02:00:50.352
That's why these things matter.

02:00:50.352 --> 02:00:53.912
They matter because of the longitudinal consequences.

02:00:53.912 --> 02:01:03.252
And so when you look at those who bring in, for instance, Pope Gregory, starts to emphasize, perhaps a little too heavily, the allegorical, or at least he opens the door to it.

02:01:04.012 --> 02:01:06.932
Perhaps you don't lay the blame at his feet.

02:01:06.932 --> 02:01:12.952
But then you get others on down the line, who focus on that to the exclusion of the literal.

02:01:12.952 --> 02:01:19.232
And then you get those who bring back the literal, but they botch it by saying, well, we should go ask the Jews about it.

02:01:19.232 --> 02:01:22.352
These errors compound down through the centuries.

02:01:22.352 --> 02:01:27.352
If no one goes back and looks at it and says, that's where we went off the rails.

02:01:27.352 --> 02:01:29.632
We need to correct that.

02:01:29.632 --> 02:01:35.992
And incidentally, because all of this stuff is the fruit of the poisonous tree, we need to eject it.

02:01:35.992 --> 02:01:37.532
Let's read it as well.

02:01:37.532 --> 02:01:44.992
Because again, the goal, the over-arching goal, as is always the case, is fidelity to God and His Word.

02:01:44.992 --> 02:01:46.672
It's to the truth.

02:01:46.672 --> 02:01:50.832
That is the highest value of the Christian, is truth.

02:01:50.832 --> 02:01:53.452
In all of this, the goal is the truth.

02:01:53.452 --> 02:01:56.412
That's the case for every single one of our episodes.

02:01:56.412 --> 02:01:58.872
And it is particularly the case for this series.

02:01:58.872 --> 02:02:06.252
It's why we have said this series is such an important thing among all the things that we have done, and perhaps among all the things we ever will do.

02:02:06.252 --> 02:02:08.532
And I agree with Woe when he says that.

02:02:08.532 --> 02:02:11.812
One of the most important things we'll ever do is this series.

02:02:11.812 --> 02:02:13.592
Because this is a major problem.

02:02:13.592 --> 02:02:18.192
This is something that needs to be addressed, and we'll get into that again in the fifth episode.

02:02:19.312 --> 02:02:26.772
Just because it seems like it's minor does not mean that ultimately it is a minor thing.

02:02:26.772 --> 02:02:34.032
Tiny errors in your course will leave you miles off after a certain time.

02:02:34.032 --> 02:02:36.112
That is what we have here.

02:02:36.112 --> 02:02:44.632
Because this man, Nicholas of Lyra, what he does, doesn't seem, in his context, like that much of a problem.

02:02:44.632 --> 02:02:51.772
Now, if he'd thought about it again, he should know that you don't ask the Jews these questions, because they aren't Christian, they have no insight.

02:02:51.772 --> 02:03:04.292
But he was building on, and he was inheriting, centuries of this general sentiment that you go to the Jews to ask about Hebrew, because you have to know Hebrew, to ask about the Old Testament.

02:03:05.412 --> 02:03:08.312
It was false then, it's false now.

02:03:08.312 --> 02:03:10.572
It needs to be rejected.

02:03:10.572 --> 02:03:40.092
And as we continue through the rest of this episode, we'll see that this problem continues to compound, continues to get worse, because no men ask the necessary questions, and pinpoint the necessary point in time where the error occurred, with the exception, with regard to the right course of action, at least, the two Jewish men in the list, formerly Jewish men, now certainly Christian brothers, Donin and Fefferkorn.

02:03:42.112 --> 02:03:54.072
The way that things really went off the rail with Nicholas of Lyra was the degree to which he focused on literalism and pointed to the Jews in doing so.

02:03:55.232 --> 02:03:58.972
His magnum opus was the postilla literalis.

02:03:58.972 --> 02:04:15.212
He spent a great deal of time basically recycling Rashi's literalist commentaries and laundering them into the Christian church, so much so that his nickname was Simeus Solomonis or the Ape of Solomon Rashi.

02:04:15.212 --> 02:04:21.152
Everyone knew that he was just recycling what this Jew had said in his literal commentaries.

02:04:22.052 --> 02:04:28.852
But the impact was that those commentaries are the most widely circulated commentaries in that time.

02:04:28.852 --> 02:04:36.752
In fact, today there are probably about a thousand manuscript witnesses to Nicholas of Lyra's commentaries.

02:04:36.752 --> 02:04:40.872
They were even more impactful than Comastor's Historia.

02:04:40.872 --> 02:04:51.212
And so what we have here is a man who was aping a Jew was recycling what he said in his literal commentaries.

02:04:51.212 --> 02:04:53.772
Maybe someone was right, was quarry layout.

02:04:53.772 --> 02:04:54.952
It doesn't matter.

02:04:54.952 --> 02:04:56.312
It's not a question of who's right.

02:04:56.312 --> 02:04:58.172
It's where you're getting it from.

02:04:58.172 --> 02:05:02.192
If you're getting it from a bad place, don't repeat it, even if it's good stuff.

02:05:02.192 --> 02:05:03.432
That's what people say about us.

02:05:03.432 --> 02:05:06.872
If they were right about us being bad, the argument would be true.

02:05:06.872 --> 02:05:10.072
That's why the argument rings true with some people because it's good advice.

02:05:10.072 --> 02:05:17.532
If your kid finds a drug dealer who also happens to repair bikes or something, you don't send your kid there to have his bike repaired.

02:05:18.092 --> 02:05:19.212
You're going to get into trouble.

02:05:19.212 --> 02:05:28.552
Everyone understands this and everything except for religion, which is why we're adamant that you can't dismiss going to rabbis to learn.

02:05:28.552 --> 02:05:44.312
The school that Nicholas of Lyra was a part of came out of the Council of Vienne in 1311, 1312, which ordered study of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic basically at all the major universities in the West.

02:05:44.832 --> 02:05:49.972
So Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Salamanca, and the Papal Enclave itself.

02:05:49.972 --> 02:05:58.492
So this is the first time that throughout Christian lands, men are indirectly consulting with rabbis.

02:05:58.492 --> 02:06:08.692
And that's why the other rabbi who made the heated commentaries, but most of his work was on translation, on teaching people Hebrew.

02:06:08.692 --> 02:06:20.632
So when those were produced and those were distributed, it was possible finally, because again, the Mesirites had finally turned something like Hebrew into a fully fleshed out written language.

02:06:20.632 --> 02:06:27.712
You could actually learn Hebrew without talking to a rabbi, but you're only going to be learning the oral tradition that was finally written down.

02:06:27.712 --> 02:06:33.872
So it's a level of intermediation that means that you still have a rabbi in the loop, but you might not be talking to one.

02:06:33.872 --> 02:06:42.312
And that's why Nicholas of Lyre in particular did so much damage, is that he took Rashi's teachings and put them everywhere in Christianity.

02:06:43.032 --> 02:06:48.312
Which normalized studying in Hebrew and normalized studying from rabbis.

02:06:48.312 --> 02:06:50.412
And no one was the wiser.

02:06:50.412 --> 02:06:52.152
No one ever asked the question, why are we doing this?

02:06:52.152 --> 02:06:53.832
Should we be doing this?

02:06:53.832 --> 02:06:55.832
And so this is one of those inflection points.

02:06:55.832 --> 02:07:04.032
So while it doesn't seem obviously bad, if you consider the alternatives, it can kind of become horrifying.

02:07:04.032 --> 02:07:11.052
But again, this was a product of the 13th and 14th centuries, where they were coexisting with those populations.

02:07:11.672 --> 02:07:18.612
And they were trying to evangelize them, which, as we said in the previous episode, and we'll say again, on paper, that seems Christian.

02:07:18.612 --> 02:07:22.532
It totally ignores what Christ said and what Paul and Barnabas did.

02:07:22.532 --> 02:07:24.752
But it sounds Christian.

02:07:24.752 --> 02:07:27.072
And so they ignored the advice.

02:07:27.172 --> 02:07:29.512
I say advice, we're talking about God.

02:07:29.512 --> 02:07:35.772
They ignored the command of God to shake the dust off your feet against those who reject Christ.

02:07:35.772 --> 02:07:37.452
I said, no, we're going to keep trying.

02:07:37.452 --> 02:07:39.812
We're going to learn in their language and argue with them.

02:07:39.812 --> 02:07:40.672
And the Jews were happy.

02:07:40.952 --> 02:07:48.032
And that set the stage for what flows into the Reformation.

02:07:48.032 --> 02:07:52.492
Now, all of this to this point has been when everything had to be written down by hand.

02:07:52.492 --> 02:07:55.032
It was entirely manuscripts.

02:07:55.032 --> 02:07:57.792
So faithful transmission was a big deal.

02:07:57.792 --> 02:07:59.572
It was a very important skill.

02:07:59.572 --> 02:08:01.032
Headmanship mattered a great deal.

02:08:01.032 --> 02:08:06.972
There was the development of certain styles that were more readable, that were more clear.

02:08:06.972 --> 02:08:13.572
There were innovations like putting spaces between words and adding punctuation and lowercase letters.

02:08:13.572 --> 02:08:19.212
All those things are later innovations in language, including in European languages.

02:08:19.212 --> 02:08:24.672
By the time we get to 1440, we have a very brief moment where the Gutenberg Press was invented.

02:08:24.672 --> 02:08:34.312
When a movable type is created now for the very first time, it's possible to produce far more printed material without a huge budget.

02:08:34.312 --> 02:08:37.332
It was still expensive by the standards of those days.

02:08:37.912 --> 02:08:51.272
But relative to the cost of producing what, who knows how many of those manuscripts of Nicholas of Lyra were produced, for a thousand of them to still exist today is it's unbelievable when you consider the expense.

02:08:51.272 --> 02:08:59.592
That's why we mentioned the value probably in the billions of dollars of all the Talmuds and other Jewish writings that were burned at the trial of the Talmud.

02:08:59.592 --> 02:09:05.532
That stuff was worth a kingdom because it was so difficult because it was manual.

02:09:06.052 --> 02:09:07.932
This changes in the mid-fifteenth century.

02:09:07.932 --> 02:09:12.752
The creation of the Gutenberg Press sets the stage for everything that happens after.

02:09:12.752 --> 02:09:15.772
Everybody knows that, like we're not saying anything new there.

02:09:15.772 --> 02:09:24.932
But particularly when you're talking about the production of Christian or non-Christian documents, this was an inflection point.

02:09:24.932 --> 02:09:26.572
Previously, you had to be rich.

02:09:26.572 --> 02:09:31.992
Like you had to have seriously deep pockets to be able to produce written works.

02:09:32.892 --> 02:09:37.532
With the Gutenberg Press, suddenly, you could have tracts and stuff that were produced relatively cheaply.

02:09:37.532 --> 02:09:52.012
It basically introduced mass production into the realm of literacy, such that by the end of the 15th century, there were over 20 million volumes produced in circulation in Western Europe.

02:09:52.012 --> 02:09:58.872
That's just astonishing to go from everything had to be handwritten to 20 million volumes in circulation.

02:09:59.512 --> 02:10:03.712
That shows the impact of what mass production did for writing.

02:10:03.712 --> 02:10:10.952
And while it was frequently used for religious things, it was done for political purposes, it was done for other religions.

02:10:10.952 --> 02:10:21.052
Some of the things we're going to talk about next were Jewish writings also being mass produced, which never should have been permitted, but it was good money, so it happened.

02:10:22.432 --> 02:10:27.492
So as we mentioned earlier, Greek was not used in the West at all during this period.

02:10:27.672 --> 02:10:32.052
There were a few guys who popped up occasionally who basically taught themselves Greek.

02:10:32.052 --> 02:10:36.272
Interestingly, the only ones I could find virtually were in England or Ireland.

02:10:36.272 --> 02:10:43.472
Seemed like only in Great Britain did anyone really engage in Hebrew, in Christian history after it was lost in the West.

02:10:43.472 --> 02:10:49.352
That changed in the Italian Renaissance in the early 1400s.

02:10:49.352 --> 02:10:59.332
A man named Lorenzo Valla, he was a pivotal figure on reintroducing Greek scholarships specifically for Christian studies.

02:11:00.552 --> 02:11:17.292
The Renaissance humanist period, a lot of it was focused on, let's go back to antiquity, but they weren't focused on the Bible, they were focused on the other stuff, plays, writings, philosophy, all the stuff that's considered to be part of a classical education today.

02:11:17.292 --> 02:11:19.492
That was what they were mostly working on.

02:11:19.492 --> 02:11:34.492
Lorenzo Valla changed things by specifically creating a groundbreaking work that was published in 1444 or is written in 1444, but it wasn't until Erasmus published it in 1505 that it got significant circulation.

02:11:34.492 --> 02:11:41.752
Lorenzo Valla, he systematically compared the Latin Vulgate against Greek manuscripts and he pointed out a number of translation errors.

02:11:42.312 --> 02:11:52.332
He did a pretty good job, but this was one of the only times in Christian history that a Western theologian had looked at Greek and compared it to the Latin.

02:11:52.912 --> 02:11:55.652
That hadn't been done since it was translated.

02:11:55.652 --> 02:12:05.312
And so this is seminal and this flows directly into Erasmus' work because you remember right now just before the beginning of the Reformation, where that was a big deal.

02:12:05.312 --> 02:12:11.632
The departure from the Vulgate to look back to the original languages, the Greek was a laggard.

02:12:11.632 --> 02:12:14.652
It was Hebrew had been studied for centuries at this point.

02:12:14.652 --> 02:12:17.612
And again, that was mostly focused on polemics and on evangelism.

02:12:18.052 --> 02:12:22.732
It wasn't principally seen as a means of studying scripture.

02:12:22.732 --> 02:12:25.612
You still didn't have pastors learning Hebrew left and right.

02:12:25.612 --> 02:12:26.872
It really wasn't done.

02:12:26.872 --> 02:12:33.092
But they didn't have to because Rashi's commentaries were translated and republished by Nicholas of Lyra, put everywhere.

02:12:33.092 --> 02:12:39.732
So you don't need to read Hebrew if you could just read Rashi and the languages of Nicholas Lyra stuff was published in.

02:12:39.732 --> 02:12:44.452
So that's why the language story here is so interesting.

02:12:44.492 --> 02:12:46.452
And it's one that's basically unpulled.

02:12:46.452 --> 02:12:57.652
Because if you listen to guys who've gone to seminary in this century, this millennium, now we're in the third millennium here, the Church age, you would think that everyone is just learning Greek and Hebrew all along.

02:12:57.652 --> 02:12:58.812
It's just a fabrication.

02:12:58.812 --> 02:12:59.892
They weren't.

02:12:59.892 --> 02:13:03.592
Only two guys in Church history prior to the 13th century ever learned Hebrew.

02:13:03.592 --> 02:13:07.752
And fewer than that learned Greek until Lorenzo Valla.

02:13:07.752 --> 02:13:09.572
That's crazy based on what we know today.

02:13:09.572 --> 02:13:11.172
It's just a small historical tidbit.

02:13:11.592 --> 02:13:17.992
Except, don't pretend that looking at the original language as so called in the case of Hebrew has been the universal practice.

02:13:17.992 --> 02:13:18.972
It wasn't.

02:13:18.972 --> 02:13:20.892
Latin was the only Bible they had.

02:13:20.892 --> 02:13:24.392
Which is one of the reasons that Rome was so angry about the Reformation.

02:13:24.392 --> 02:13:25.312
Like, what are you doing?

02:13:25.312 --> 02:13:27.012
This is what the Church has always done.

02:13:27.012 --> 02:13:28.652
And they were right about that.

02:13:28.652 --> 02:13:31.252
The problem was that the Church shouldn't have done that.

02:13:31.252 --> 02:13:35.212
The Church should not have followed in the footsteps of Jerome.

02:13:35.212 --> 02:13:39.152
But as I said at the beginning, no one is asking the Septuagint question.

02:13:39.152 --> 02:13:40.672
They're just, okay, it's a Latin Bible.

02:13:40.752 --> 02:13:42.232
And we standardized on it.

02:13:42.232 --> 02:13:43.532
It's good to standardize.

02:13:43.532 --> 02:13:46.272
And it's good to standardize in the language you're using.

02:13:46.272 --> 02:13:49.392
What's not good is when the underlying text was the wrong one.

02:13:49.392 --> 02:13:50.932
So no one ever asked the question.

02:13:50.932 --> 02:13:52.972
And that's how we ended up here today.

02:13:55.072 --> 02:13:59.892
So as Will already mentioned, obviously the printing press plays a role in all of this.

02:13:59.892 --> 02:14:02.252
And we're all familiar with Gutenberg.

02:14:02.252 --> 02:14:06.872
So that's the end of the 1300s, early 1400s.

02:14:06.872 --> 02:14:12.632
You have he's born and then he dies 1468.

02:14:12.632 --> 02:14:17.332
But the two men we're going to mention here own printing presses.

02:14:17.332 --> 02:14:20.392
These are men who are involved in the production of these works.

02:14:20.412 --> 02:14:23.352
One is Jewish, one is not.

02:14:23.352 --> 02:14:26.832
The first, the Jewish man, is Gershom Sunsino.

02:14:26.832 --> 02:14:29.052
He's a Jewish printer and publisher.

02:14:29.052 --> 02:14:32.932
He works at publishing a lot of Hebrew writings.

02:14:32.932 --> 02:14:36.672
And he's named Sunsino because he was born in Sunsino in Italy.

02:14:37.752 --> 02:14:39.792
He later did move to Spain, though.

02:14:39.792 --> 02:14:43.392
But he is printing primarily works that are in Hebrew.

02:14:43.392 --> 02:14:48.952
So this is where you see the beginning of the mass availability of these works.

02:14:48.952 --> 02:14:57.772
Because as Woe mentioned, as we mentioned a number of times, it's very expensive to produce things when you have to reproduce them by hand.

02:14:57.772 --> 02:15:02.572
It is much, much cheaper when you can do it with a printing press.

02:15:02.572 --> 02:15:15.912
Still not as cheap as today, but you can produce tens of thousands of copies of something, whereas it would take much longer to produce a single copy prior to the invention of the printing press.

02:15:17.612 --> 02:15:25.752
The other man is Daniel Bomberg, which he plays perhaps an even larger role for a number of reasons.

02:15:25.752 --> 02:15:32.972
Partly is politics, which inevitably politics is going to be involved down through this entire narrative.

02:15:32.972 --> 02:15:39.812
We're dealing with popes in some cases, we're dealing with wealthy men and others, we're dealing with the courts of emperors and kings.

02:15:39.812 --> 02:15:44.072
Daniel Bomberg has connections to the papacy.

02:15:44.072 --> 02:15:55.832
And this is a pope many of you will know if you have studied Reformation history at all, Pope Leo X, gives Bomberg a multi-year monopoly on the printing of works in Hebrew.

02:15:57.432 --> 02:16:03.632
One of the things that he produces is the first complete printing of the Talmud.

02:16:03.632 --> 02:16:17.572
This is the first time that a printed as opposed to a copied or transcribed, in the sense of literally scribed by a scribe, printed versions of the Talmud are available.

02:16:17.572 --> 02:16:21.192
It can be produced far faster than before, far more cheaply.

02:16:21.792 --> 02:16:33.932
So now, many Jews who otherwise could not have access to this material personally, because it would have only been in the homes of the wealthiest of rabbis, well, now they can afford this.

02:16:33.932 --> 02:16:45.012
And so, the Talmud spreads far and wide, whereas it could not have done so without the advent of the printing press, and this support by the Pope.

02:16:45.012 --> 02:16:46.912
And not by just the Pope, incidentally.

02:16:46.912 --> 02:16:49.192
His nephew also provided financial support.

02:16:50.432 --> 02:16:53.312
This Pope, worth noting, was a Medici.

02:16:53.312 --> 02:16:56.852
And so, of course, his nephew also a Medici.

02:16:56.852 --> 02:17:01.592
But Bomberg advocates for the importance of Hebrew materials.

02:17:01.592 --> 02:17:07.712
He advocates, of course, to the Pope and to others, partly because he has this economic interest.

02:17:07.712 --> 02:17:09.732
This is making him a lot of money.

02:17:09.732 --> 02:17:27.032
There are many Jews who are willing to pay him a lot of money, relatively speaking, obviously, again, the hand-printed version, the hand-transcribed version, is worth a lot more, but it's much cheaper to produce these mass-produced versions of the Talmud with the printing press.

02:17:27.032 --> 02:17:35.752
And so he's making a great deal of money producing these resources, the sort of thing that no Christian should ever produce.

02:17:35.752 --> 02:17:48.892
There are some things that are, just as an example, sort of, quoted in the Book of Concord, and they're quoted in Latin, and it actually says it is something so wicked that Christians should hesitate to translate them.

02:17:48.892 --> 02:17:53.712
They're left in the Latin, in the German version, and in the Old English versions.

02:17:53.712 --> 02:17:58.112
This is the sort of thing that Christians should not be producing and disseminating.

02:17:59.912 --> 02:18:12.612
Things that are outright blasphemous and heretical like the Talmud, a Christian printer should not be producing, though certainly not with the approval of the Pope, and making money off doing so.

02:18:13.912 --> 02:18:36.892
But, that is the sort of wickedness that we see leading up here to the eve of the Reformation, because the Reformation, the very beginnings of it, sort of 1517 with the 95 Theses, overlaps the lifespan of both of these men, both the Jewish owner of a printing press and this Christian, otherwise supposedly Christian man who owned a printing press.

02:18:36.892 --> 02:18:42.552
But again, where there's money to be made, some men will compromise their principles.

02:18:45.232 --> 02:19:03.952
One of the greatest reasons why Suncino and Bomberg are important to our story of the Septuagint is that in 1494, Suncino published the Bresica Hebrew Old Testament, which was most likely the Old Testament that Luther used for his initial translation work.

02:19:03.952 --> 02:19:09.092
When he translated the first five books, the other Bible I'm about to mention didn't exist yet.

02:19:09.732 --> 02:19:18.012
And given the volume of production and the quality, it's most likely that Suncino's Bresica Hebrew was Luther's basis.

02:19:18.012 --> 02:19:23.132
The other book that was produced, Daniel Bomberg, produced a couple of Rabbinic Old Testaments.

02:19:23.132 --> 02:19:27.952
The first came out in 1516-17, and the second came out in 1524-25.

02:19:29.432 --> 02:19:40.792
The second Rabbinic so-called Bible Old Testament would have been the one that we know Luther used for all of his subsequent translation work, because it was more complete.

02:19:40.792 --> 02:19:59.952
So, yeah, it's a small part of the story, but it's important to know that prior to this ready availability, not being able to learn the Hebrew language, and not having access to readily available inexpensive sources, would have made it simply impossible to do fresh translations from Hebrew.

02:19:59.952 --> 02:20:07.912
That hadn't been done since Jerome, and that's a point that kind of gets lost here with all these names floating around.

02:20:07.992 --> 02:20:22.752
But another thing to keep in mind, the version of the Hebrew that's being published by Sonsino and Bomberg is downstream from the Masoretic text from 1008 AD.

02:20:22.752 --> 02:20:28.112
So when we think, oh, Hebrew Old Testament, that's 2,500 years old at this point, right?

02:20:28.112 --> 02:20:31.132
No, it was 500 years old at this point.

02:20:31.132 --> 02:20:32.712
That was what they were publishing.

02:20:32.712 --> 02:20:34.612
They were publishing a 500-year-old version.

02:20:35.312 --> 02:20:39.172
And crucially, we know that for a fact because it had the vowel pointers.

02:20:39.172 --> 02:20:43.152
It had enough that you could sit down with the Old Testament in Hebrew.

02:20:43.152 --> 02:20:47.652
And if you knew Hebrew, you could read it with no oral tradition whatsoever.

02:20:47.652 --> 02:20:55.052
That was made possible in part by the fact that Sonsino also published the grammatical works by Redocq, we talked about earlier.

02:20:55.052 --> 02:21:01.372
So see, that's why that Redocq's commentaries are not so important, but his grammatical work is crucial.

02:21:01.912 --> 02:21:12.592
Because once Sonsino shows up publishing it, so it was freely, not freely, but it was widely available in Europe, suddenly you could learn Hebrew, you didn't have to have a rabbi in the loop anymore.

02:21:12.592 --> 02:21:21.732
Which is why it became easier and easier and easier for Christians to think that they weren't doing anything wicked when they engaged with this Hebrew language.

02:21:21.732 --> 02:21:27.512
They were just learning an old language and they were reading God's word, so obviously it was fine.

02:21:27.512 --> 02:21:32.272
No one ever asked the important questions, which is how we end up in this place.

02:21:32.272 --> 02:21:38.932
The reason for presenting this swath of history is that no one ever talked about the Greek.

02:21:38.932 --> 02:21:45.832
The only time the Greek comes up when we're looking here is looking to the New Testament, because why would I want to look at the Greek Old Testament?

02:21:45.832 --> 02:21:46.932
That's just trivia.

02:21:46.932 --> 02:21:51.032
At this point, it's a jeopardy answer or jeopardy question.

02:21:51.032 --> 02:22:03.432
Everyone in the Renaissance, in the humanist vein, subscribed to Jerome's comment about the Pure Spring and the Muddy Stream, all of them, that was universalized.

02:22:03.432 --> 02:22:05.712
It became a mantra.

02:22:05.712 --> 02:22:11.032
We talk about things like the Sola, Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide.

02:22:11.032 --> 02:22:20.012
Jerome's comment about Pure Springs was one of those for all of these men, because they believed if they went to the Hebrew, they were going to get something more pure.

02:22:20.012 --> 02:22:21.692
They didn't look at his genealogy.

02:22:21.692 --> 02:22:23.212
They didn't look at its origins.

02:22:23.212 --> 02:22:23.852
What did they look at?

02:22:24.312 --> 02:22:33.932
They looked at the fact that a few centuries earlier, as soon as we started talking to rabbis again, looking at Rashi's commentary, we get really good literal commentaries.

02:22:33.932 --> 02:22:38.932
We get things that sound Christian when you're superficially looking at the arguments from scripture.

02:22:38.932 --> 02:22:40.172
It's like, great.

02:22:40.172 --> 02:22:42.712
That was how the discontinuity occurred.

02:22:42.712 --> 02:22:45.892
Jerome legitimized what we're going to use Hebrew.

02:22:45.892 --> 02:22:47.592
Augustine lost the fight.

02:22:47.592 --> 02:22:50.512
Everyone forgot Greek and Hebrew, so all they had was Latin.

02:22:51.512 --> 02:22:58.132
Then 800 years later, when they start looking at these old languages again, it's rejecting the hermeneutic.

02:22:58.132 --> 02:23:04.372
Not talking about languages at all, but rejecting the notion of allegorical readings versus literal readings.

02:23:04.372 --> 02:23:16.132
And ta-da, we have these Jews with their literal readings and their literal interpretations conveniently explaining the Old Testament better than we had in the church for centuries.

02:23:16.132 --> 02:23:17.932
Satan laid the table perfectly.

02:23:18.412 --> 02:23:23.232
And when the reformers showed up, they just gobbled it up because everything that they wanted was right there.

02:23:23.232 --> 02:23:24.952
They had the old language.

02:23:24.952 --> 02:23:27.072
They had literal interpretations.

02:23:27.072 --> 02:23:33.012
They had the ability to engage in the language themselves without talking to any rabbis who they didn't want to.

02:23:33.012 --> 02:23:36.312
And so, game set match.

02:23:36.312 --> 02:23:41.912
All these moving parts that seem to be disconnected are part of an infernal machine conceived in hell.

02:23:41.912 --> 02:23:44.612
Satan knew what he was doing with all these moving parts.

02:23:44.612 --> 02:23:46.692
You know, we did episode 99 about the context window.

02:23:47.172 --> 02:23:52.472
Look at how much crap I've put on the table for you to have to understand what's going on here.

02:23:52.472 --> 02:23:59.232
That's why we keep repeating certain elements because once you see how one part plays into another like, well, yeah, that makes sense.

02:23:59.232 --> 02:24:00.772
No one's ever looked at this before.

02:24:00.772 --> 02:24:02.672
They didn't look at it in the Reformation.

02:24:02.672 --> 02:24:03.712
They didn't look at it before.

02:24:03.712 --> 02:24:04.832
Like, why would they?

02:24:04.832 --> 02:24:07.252
They were solving the problem right in front of them.

02:24:07.252 --> 02:24:14.432
And the problem that Luther and the other reformers had right in front of them was they wanted to get a cleaner version of the Bible than the Vulgate.

02:24:15.092 --> 02:24:17.552
You ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer.

02:24:17.552 --> 02:24:22.392
They didn't ask the right form of the question, and so they looked in the wrong place.

02:24:22.392 --> 02:24:29.452
That's why it's, you know, so many of our previous episodes, we spent a lot of time defining terms and sort of making sure we're going down the right path at the beginning.

02:24:29.452 --> 02:24:36.792
Because if you go off just course, just slightly, as Corey said, you're going to blow a thousand miles past your target.

02:24:36.792 --> 02:24:43.392
If you're on a long enough timeline, on a long enough distance, a small error at the beginning can be catastrophic.

02:24:43.912 --> 02:24:49.112
By the time you would be at your target, if you had not made that minor error at the beginning.

02:24:50.632 --> 02:24:56.352
So the next prominent figure in all of this is Cardinal Francisco Cisneros.

02:24:56.412 --> 02:25:01.532
He has a longer full name in Spanish, but that's sufficient for our purposes here.

02:25:01.532 --> 02:25:04.632
Of course, as mentioned, he is Spanish.

02:25:04.632 --> 02:25:24.892
And so those of you who are more familiar with this particular point in time, this particular span of years in history, will recognize that we are now coming close to the Spanish Golden Age, which occurred subsequent to the expulsion of the Jews, which took place in 1492.

02:25:26.112 --> 02:25:34.432
This man is alive during that time and in fact does advocate for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

02:25:34.432 --> 02:25:46.652
However, he is again a mixed bag, because he does not advocate for the destruction of the Hebrew materials or using the Greek, certainly, he doesn't go that far.

02:25:46.652 --> 02:25:51.052
But he does view Hebrew as a tool for converting the Jews.

02:25:51.052 --> 02:25:54.252
This is one of those refrains we mentioned a number of times.

02:25:54.252 --> 02:25:57.172
You see this down through history, you even see it today.

02:25:57.172 --> 02:26:05.132
You see those who will learn Hebrew, modern Hebrew in this case, of course, and then go over to Israel to try to use it to convert the Jews.

02:26:06.692 --> 02:26:13.412
Well, the problem, as we mentioned a number of times, is one, it's being unfaithful to Christ's command to shake the dust off your feet.

02:26:13.412 --> 02:26:17.392
But two, the Jews just enjoy arguing with you.

02:26:17.392 --> 02:26:27.672
If you learn Hebrew to argue with a rabbi, you've already lost, because what you've done is in no way ever going to be productive.

02:26:27.672 --> 02:26:41.592
If the rabbi had a real interest in Christianity, if he had any inclination whatsoever to consider what you are trying to tell him, he wouldn't be using Hebrew with you.

02:26:41.592 --> 02:26:44.012
He would use whatever other language it happened to be.

02:26:44.012 --> 02:26:46.692
So in this case, they would have used Spanish.

02:26:46.692 --> 02:26:50.892
In the case of those in German lands, they would have used German.

02:26:50.892 --> 02:26:57.732
Because bear in mind again, the first language of any of these men was not Hebrew.

02:26:57.732 --> 02:26:58.892
It was always something else.

02:26:59.972 --> 02:27:16.972
And so Cisneros, while he does advocate for the Christian thing in expelling the Jews from Spain, which does of course happen, as we know, historically expelled again in 1492, he does not recognize the danger posed by Hebrew.

02:27:16.972 --> 02:27:24.932
And so he thinks still that learning the Hebrew language is useful in order to attempt to convert Jews to Christianity.

02:27:26.752 --> 02:27:46.252
This is again one of those men who should have known better, because historically, the reason, one of the reasons the Jews were expelled, is because the Jews had collaborated with the Muslims during the conquest of Spain, and then had collaborated with the Muslims again when the Spanish were expelling the Muslims from Spain.

02:27:46.252 --> 02:27:48.892
This is something that is ongoing at this time.

02:27:50.032 --> 02:27:59.972
And yet he still doesn't recognize, as a Christian man having dealt with all of these issues, that the problem is the Jews are present and producing these materials.

02:27:59.972 --> 02:28:01.952
He recognizes half of it.

02:28:01.952 --> 02:28:06.932
He recognizes the presence is a problem, and so he advocates for their expulsion.

02:28:06.932 --> 02:28:14.592
But he doesn't recognize that that poisonous fruit produced by that poisonous tree is also part of the problem.

02:28:14.592 --> 02:28:19.472
And part of that poisonous fruit is Hebrew and the materials produced in it.

02:28:19.472 --> 02:28:23.392
Satan is using the Hebrew language to undermine the Christian Church.

02:28:24.352 --> 02:28:41.252
And one of the reasons that we've picked individuals from various different places in Europe is we're showing that Satan was doing the same thing across basically all of Europe, everywhere that he had the possibility to do so, which is to say everywhere that he had managed to plant a Jewish community.

02:28:41.252 --> 02:28:42.712
This is happening in Spain.

02:28:42.712 --> 02:28:43.952
It's happening in Germany.

02:28:43.952 --> 02:28:45.172
It's happening in France.

02:28:45.172 --> 02:28:47.312
It's happening in Italy.

02:28:47.312 --> 02:28:50.952
This is not isolated to any particular place in Europe.

02:28:51.892 --> 02:29:02.752
This is happening everywhere, almost at the same time, because Satan has already set the stage, and now he is springing all of his traps into action.

02:29:02.752 --> 02:29:06.512
And it just so happens that some things played out rather perfectly.

02:29:06.512 --> 02:29:16.992
So, for instance, with technological development, that printing press came along at exactly the right time, yes, for the Reformation, but also for Satan's plans with regard to Hebrew.

02:29:16.992 --> 02:29:34.112
Because, as Wo mentioned, it wasn't just the printing of this Hebrew Old Testament, given to Christians by the Jews, it was also the printing of the materials created in Hebrew by rabbis, necessary to read that Hebrew Old Testament.

02:29:34.112 --> 02:29:36.892
And so you can feel like there is no rabbi involved.

02:29:36.892 --> 02:29:39.412
What I am doing, obviously, is fine, there is no rabbi.

02:29:39.412 --> 02:29:42.692
The rabbi created all of the materials you are using.

02:29:42.692 --> 02:29:46.392
The wickedness is already baked into the cake, and now you are eating it.

02:29:47.092 --> 02:29:53.252
Perhaps in clean conscience, believing that what you are doing is Christian, and it is not.

02:29:53.252 --> 02:29:56.612
As we see in so many cases, the issue is the half measures.

02:29:56.612 --> 02:29:59.392
He expels the Jews, he at least advocates for expelling the Jews.

02:29:59.392 --> 02:30:06.152
Of course, it is the king and the queen who ultimately expel the Jews, but he advocates for expelling them from Christian lands.

02:30:06.152 --> 02:30:10.272
That gets done, but he doesn't get rid of the poison that is left behind.

02:30:13.592 --> 02:30:30.712
So, one of the important things that came out of Cisneros was the production of the Complitensian Holy Bible, which similar to Origen's Hexaapila, contained usually both Old and the New Testament in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin.

02:30:30.712 --> 02:30:32.892
This was a very large multi-volume set.

02:30:32.892 --> 02:30:33.992
It was very expensive.

02:30:33.992 --> 02:30:35.612
There were 600 copies made.

02:30:36.512 --> 02:30:40.692
And so, obviously, this had a scholarly audience exclusively.

02:30:40.692 --> 02:30:48.792
And the timing was perfect because this was right when we have all the reformers looking at producing their own translations.

02:30:48.792 --> 02:30:52.272
And crucially, because it was a polyglot Bible, it was put side by side.

02:30:52.272 --> 02:30:55.352
As I said, you have Hebrew and Aramaic, Greek and Latin.

02:30:55.352 --> 02:31:08.332
And so, those can all be put in chronological order of when we think they entered Christian lands, which is going to be inverted because Hebrew in that list is the newest of all of them.

02:31:08.332 --> 02:31:10.372
It's the newest language on the list.

02:31:10.372 --> 02:31:14.992
But at the time of the Reformation, that's not how they were looking at this polyglot Bible.

02:31:14.992 --> 02:31:17.732
They were looking at it and thinking, well, the Hebrew is the oldest.

02:31:17.732 --> 02:31:20.972
And then we have this weird Septuagint thing that was interesting.

02:31:20.972 --> 02:31:25.032
Maybe it has some different translations we can consider.

02:31:25.032 --> 02:31:31.272
But you have the Latin translation and then the Aramaic is kind of the least important, but at least it's the oldest.

02:31:32.632 --> 02:31:35.792
Putting those side by side is useful for scholars.

02:31:35.792 --> 02:31:43.212
But what it did in practice was, on one hand, this is the first time the Septuagint actually shows up, but it really is a footnote.

02:31:43.212 --> 02:31:45.872
It's like, oh, well, here's this interesting thing.

02:31:45.872 --> 02:31:54.992
Having the Aramaic and the Greek side by side really kind of hammers home that it was only the Hebrew and the Latin that they were actually engaging in.

02:31:54.992 --> 02:32:00.112
And obviously, if you're a reformer, the Latin is the one that you're being critical of.

02:32:00.472 --> 02:32:03.132
And then the Hebrew is the one you're going to rely on.

02:32:03.132 --> 02:32:24.232
So between Sansino, Bomberg and the Complitancy and Polyglot Bible, you have multiple avenues for the reformers at the beginning of the Reformation to go consult, to learn Hebrew, to do their translations, and to never even think about the question of whether or not that was the Bible of Jesus and the apostles in the early church.

02:32:26.592 --> 02:32:42.532
So before we come to Reuchlin, whom we've mentioned a number of times, as one of the more important figures in this, sort of, because he is essentially a spider who has his strands of his web all over the place.

02:32:42.532 --> 02:32:43.852
He's involved in many things.

02:32:43.852 --> 02:32:48.312
He, for instance, corresponded with Cisneros.

02:32:48.312 --> 02:32:49.612
He's involved in many other things.

02:32:49.652 --> 02:32:55.472
But before we come to him, we have Jacob ben Yehiel Lones.

02:32:55.472 --> 02:33:06.872
He is a Jewish scholar and rabbi, as you might have guessed from the name, lives in Italy during the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century.

02:33:06.872 --> 02:33:10.692
He's a prominent figure in the Jewish community.

02:33:10.692 --> 02:33:16.092
He is a teacher of Hebrew, which is a vitally important fact here.

02:33:16.892 --> 02:33:27.072
He is one of those who helps to spread the Hebrew language to various other individuals, most notably Reuchlin.

02:33:27.072 --> 02:33:42.352
He is the one who teaches Reuchlin his Hebrew, and so he becomes prominent both in his own advocacy for the Hebrew language and in the advocacy for Hebrew that he bestows on his students.

02:33:42.352 --> 02:33:44.012
His students carry this forward.

02:33:44.892 --> 02:33:49.172
Reuchlin, again, is the most prominent of these, but there are a number of others as well.

02:33:50.972 --> 02:34:03.812
So, one of the reasons that Loans was so important was to use a personal position to Frederick III, the Holy Roman Emperor, not to be confused with the later Frederick III in German lands.

02:34:03.812 --> 02:34:12.572
When Loans taught Reuchlin Hebrew just before 1500, they formed a very close personal bond.

02:34:13.252 --> 02:34:20.492
We will put a link in the show notes to a paper that's titled A Unique Philosemitic Public Intellectual.

02:34:20.492 --> 02:34:26.532
It's a glowing review of Reuchlin, basically calling him the first philosemite in history.

02:34:26.532 --> 02:34:32.752
That's based upon in large part his relationship with Loans, which is why Loans is coming up here.

02:34:32.752 --> 02:34:45.432
I'm going to read you an excerpt from that paper just so that, because it has some of Reuchlin's own words, to give you an idea of how important Loans, this rabbi, this physician to Frederick III, was.

02:34:45.432 --> 02:34:46.572
Quote.

02:34:46.572 --> 02:34:49.292
In his letter, he addresses Loans as follows.

02:34:49.292 --> 02:35:02.572
My Lord, dear Master Jacob, my companion and my good friend, with deep longing, I wish to see your blessed face, to delight in the radiance of your bright countenance by hearing your most pure doctrine.

02:35:02.572 --> 02:35:05.552
And now I have written this scroll to you after I left you.

02:35:05.552 --> 02:35:09.052
I succeeded in my studies and made a great achievement.

02:35:09.052 --> 02:35:11.972
I know that you will be pleased and rejoice.

02:35:11.972 --> 02:35:21.272
Several years later, Reuchlin published this letter in a book that included his correspondence with eminent Christian scholars such as Erasmus and Perkheimer.

02:35:21.272 --> 02:35:34.572
This letter triggered harsh attacks from Johann Pfefferkorn, an anti-Judaic convert from Judaism to Christianity, who described it as an unbearable demonstration of Reuchlin's love for Jews and Judaism.

02:35:34.572 --> 02:35:46.432
In his rudiments of the Hebrew language, Reuchlin praised, My teacher, in my opinion, the powerfully learned Jacob Lohnes, a Jew, and my most humane teacher, the excellent doctor.

02:35:46.432 --> 02:35:54.592
So this introduces us to sort of the political situation just before Luther comes up.

02:35:54.592 --> 02:35:57.272
You have Lohnes, very closely connected.

02:35:57.572 --> 02:36:01.352
He is a court Jew in the Holy Roman Empire.

02:36:01.352 --> 02:36:08.772
He teaches Reuchlin, and Reuchlin describes him as teaching most pure doctrine.

02:36:08.772 --> 02:36:20.312
Now, we have gone overboard talking about how despicable it is to go to Jews to learn doctrine, but think about that sort of comment from an alleged Christian.

02:36:20.312 --> 02:36:23.772
Because, you know, Lohnes Reuchlin was ostensibly a Christian.

02:36:23.772 --> 02:36:25.612
That's why he had access to these places.

02:36:26.612 --> 02:36:34.372
When he says that Lohnes, the rabbi, has pure doctrine, what are we as Christians to make of that?

02:36:34.372 --> 02:36:36.672
Well, maybe you don't know what to think.

02:36:36.672 --> 02:36:47.092
I will tell you, because another link that we're going to have is going to be one that shows Reuchlin's extensive Kabbalistic treatment.

02:36:47.092 --> 02:36:53.752
The incredible achievement that he mentions in his letter was a Kabbalistic work.

02:36:54.752 --> 02:37:05.292
One of the first things that Lohnes did when he taught Reuchlin Heber was also to teach him Kabbalah, and Reuchlin was invigorated by learning about Kabbalah.

02:37:05.292 --> 02:37:21.812
He felt that this unlocked the secrets of Christianity, and so one of the first things that he did in this glorious achievement that he knew that his teacher of pure doctrine was going to be delighted in was Reuchlin's Kabbalistic Tome, where he tried to synthesize Kabbalah, Christianity, and philosophy.

02:37:22.732 --> 02:37:25.352
Thankfully, the church rejected that.

02:37:25.352 --> 02:37:30.792
Unfortunately, Reuchlin was not burned at the stake as the heretic that he was.

02:37:30.792 --> 02:37:38.872
A Christian ruler, a truly Christian ruler, would have ended Reuchlin's life on the spot for publishing that, but he was a nerd.

02:37:38.872 --> 02:37:40.612
He was an intellectual.

02:37:40.612 --> 02:38:02.572
He was just publishing really interesting stuff he was excited about and thought it was cool, so he let it slide, and everything that happens afterwards, just remember, Reuchlin saying the pure doctrine is coming from a rabbi, is publishing the Kabbalah, is trying to import Jewish Babylonian black magic mysticism into the Christian faith.

02:38:02.572 --> 02:38:07.312
He's the man who teaches our next appearance, Hebrew.

02:38:08.672 --> 02:38:21.132
What we see in Reuchlin's presence here in the Holy Roman Emperor's Council, by having access, he wasn't a direct participant, but again, he was close friends with a member of the court.

02:38:21.132 --> 02:38:23.252
He was very well connected politically.

02:38:23.252 --> 02:38:26.732
And that mattered a great deal because it meant you can get away with more things.

02:38:26.732 --> 02:38:33.532
You know, it's kind of like the president's son who gets caught doing stuff, probably going to get treated differently than you or me.

02:38:33.532 --> 02:38:40.412
Another thing that was mentioned in that letter was that Reuchlin had a dispute with a man named Johannes Fefferkorn.

02:38:40.412 --> 02:38:47.912
As we mentioned earlier, there are only two good guys in this entire story of this episode, or the previous episode, really.

02:38:47.932 --> 02:38:53.372
One was Nicolaus Donnan, the Jew who became a Christian in France in the 13th century.

02:38:53.372 --> 02:39:00.232
The other is Johannes Fefferkorn, who is a Jew who became a Christian at this time in these lands.

02:39:00.232 --> 02:39:07.552
Fefferkorn, when he saw what Reuchlin, the ostensible Christian, was saying about Jewish teachings, was horrified, rightly.

02:39:07.872 --> 02:39:09.172
He was like, this is despicable.

02:39:09.832 --> 02:39:17.712
And so Fefferkorn did exactly the same thing that the other honest convert did centuries earlier.

02:39:17.712 --> 02:39:25.852
Fefferkorn campaigned with the support of the Dominicans to confiscate and destroy Jewish books, particularly the Talmud.

02:39:25.852 --> 02:39:27.972
And this is based on an imperial mandate.

02:39:27.972 --> 02:39:30.592
And initially he did have approval to do it.

02:39:30.592 --> 02:39:36.572
Reuchlin, the ostensible Christian, swooped into the defense of the Jews.

02:39:36.572 --> 02:39:40.672
So again, we have these inversions that have happened over and over again in this story.

02:39:40.672 --> 02:39:43.612
This is really them coming to a complete head.

02:39:43.612 --> 02:39:50.512
On one hand, you have the man born a Jew, Fefferkorn, becomes a Christian, and is opposed to the wickedness of the Talmud.

02:39:50.512 --> 02:40:10.072
On the other hand, you have an ostensible Christian named Reuchlin, who learns Hebrew, instantly gloms onto the Kabbalah, instantly gloms onto wickedness of the lowest degree, the most perverted stuff imaginable, coming from ancient Babylon, not truly demonic stuff, we're never going to get to remotely touch, and you shouldn't either.

02:40:10.072 --> 02:40:16.232
We're going to link to a demonic page that talks about how excited they were about Reuchlin.

02:40:16.232 --> 02:40:22.412
I trust that you'll have the sense to read the bits about Reuchlin and not go exploring on the rest of that page.

02:40:22.412 --> 02:40:32.972
You're a grown up, I don't need to sanitize things for your protection, but please just understand, some of the wickedest people imaginable love Reuchlin and they hate Fefferkorn.

02:40:32.972 --> 02:40:39.932
They love the Christian, the wicked men love the Christian, and they hate the Jew who became a Christian, Fefferkorn, because of this.

02:40:39.932 --> 02:40:51.812
Because when a Jew converts, he ceases to be a Jew, and he despises the Talmud, he despises Jewish teaching, and he knows that no Christian should be going near a rabbi to learn pure doctrine.

02:40:51.812 --> 02:40:53.672
That's why he was horrified.

02:40:53.672 --> 02:40:56.472
Fefferkorn was as horrified as I was when I learned that.

02:40:56.472 --> 02:41:00.932
I didn't know of Reuchlin's name before I began this investigation over a year ago.

02:41:00.932 --> 02:41:12.312
When I discovered this, it was like the lights came on, and suddenly it became clear that this moment began with Jerome and ends with Reuchlin entering.

02:41:12.312 --> 02:41:16.672
These were the two moments in this entire story where men were lynchpins.

02:41:16.672 --> 02:41:19.532
They were absolutely pivotal in Satan's plan.

02:41:19.532 --> 02:41:29.992
Because without Jerome going to rabbis, consulting with them, falling under their spells, importing their stuff, and then burying in Latin, no one ever noticed.

02:41:29.992 --> 02:41:41.112
At the other end, 11 centuries later, we have Reuchlin going to another rabbi, learning Kabbalah, learning black magic, bringing it into the church saying, look at this amazing stuff.

02:41:41.532 --> 02:41:45.892
I know so much more about God now that I've studied Kabbalah.

02:41:45.892 --> 02:41:49.312
He was excited to teach Hebrew to as many people as possible.

02:41:49.352 --> 02:42:00.912
As Corey said, Loans had numerous Hebrew students, but Reuchlin was his most prolific because of the access and the influence that he had on the Reformation itself.

02:42:00.912 --> 02:42:07.012
That's why I've said for a while, this episode in this series is going to upset absolutely everyone.

02:42:07.012 --> 02:42:15.872
Because what we are saying, in no uncertain terms, is there was a direct demonic influence on the men who shaped the Reformation.

02:42:15.872 --> 02:42:17.672
Does that mean that the Reformation shouldn't have happened?

02:42:17.732 --> 02:42:18.232
No.

02:42:18.232 --> 02:42:21.612
It was obvious that they were solving the right problem.

02:42:21.612 --> 02:42:24.892
And that's why the context window episode was done.

02:42:24.892 --> 02:42:28.232
That's why we say that this stuff is not cut and dried.

02:42:28.232 --> 02:42:30.752
There are no complete bad guys here.

02:42:30.752 --> 02:42:37.152
Even Jerome was not a complete bad guy, even though he was profoundly wicked in many of the things that he did.

02:42:37.152 --> 02:42:41.372
Reuchlin, I would say, I take that back, Reuchlin absolutely burning in hell.

02:42:41.372 --> 02:42:45.332
He was demonic beyond compare because he was a Jew.

02:42:45.332 --> 02:42:53.692
Whether he was won by blood or not, he became a Jew the second he learned Hebrew, which incidentally is something we see left and right to this day.

02:42:53.692 --> 02:43:05.952
The problem is that when Reuchlin consulted with loans, learned Hebrew, and then he took it into the Reformation, which is what we're about to get to, it shaped everything that came after.

02:43:05.952 --> 02:43:08.532
The Septuagint was out of everyone's mind.

02:43:08.532 --> 02:43:09.872
They were excited about Hebrew.

02:43:09.872 --> 02:43:11.212
They wanted to learn it.

02:43:11.212 --> 02:43:12.972
They wanted to go back to that pure spring.

02:43:13.632 --> 02:43:17.492
For centuries, that lie had been told over and over again.

02:43:17.492 --> 02:43:19.912
Not that the idea is wrong, as I said in the last episode.

02:43:19.912 --> 02:43:22.472
Of course, this is exactly what we are saying here.

02:43:22.472 --> 02:43:25.252
Return to the pure spring of the Septuagint.

02:43:25.252 --> 02:43:28.992
It's begging the question to assume that the Hebrew is older.

02:43:28.992 --> 02:43:29.892
It's not.

02:43:29.892 --> 02:43:44.292
It was 500 years old at this time, and it was used under demonic influence of rabbis through Reuchlin, the Kabbalist, such that the Reformation was poisoned at its very inception by the Hebrew language and by the men who practiced it.

02:43:44.292 --> 02:43:46.172
They never stood a chance.

02:43:46.172 --> 02:43:48.192
Now what are we not talking about here?

02:43:48.192 --> 02:43:50.092
We're not talking about doctrine.

02:43:50.092 --> 02:43:53.872
We're saying that you don't go to a poisonous well for any purpose.

02:43:53.872 --> 02:43:55.172
You don't hang around it.

02:43:55.172 --> 02:43:56.832
It doesn't matter if you're drinking from it or not.

02:43:56.832 --> 02:43:58.532
You don't go near it.

02:43:58.532 --> 02:44:01.612
This is precisely and certainly what people say about Stone Choir.

02:44:01.612 --> 02:44:03.872
The people who hate us agree completely.

02:44:03.872 --> 02:44:06.112
You don't go anywhere near evil men.

02:44:06.112 --> 02:44:07.472
It doesn't matter what they get right.

02:44:07.552 --> 02:44:12.732
You don't listen to anything because their designs are always turned in evil directions.

02:44:12.732 --> 02:44:14.672
I agree with that completely.

02:44:14.672 --> 02:44:19.772
That assessment is 100% true, which as I said earlier is why it rings true with people.

02:44:19.772 --> 02:44:20.852
Don't go near that guy.

02:44:20.852 --> 02:44:21.352
He's evil.

02:44:21.352 --> 02:44:23.092
I don't care what he gets right.

02:44:23.092 --> 02:44:26.892
We're saying this of Lohns, the physician, the rabbi.

02:44:26.892 --> 02:44:29.292
Reuchlin should never have gone near him.

02:44:29.292 --> 02:44:33.832
Frederick III should never have permitted a Jew in his court, but of course that was common at that point.

02:44:33.832 --> 02:44:36.692
It was basically stylish to have court Jews.

02:44:37.132 --> 02:44:38.932
That's a term of art, the court Jew.

02:44:38.932 --> 02:44:39.712
It's a thing you do.

02:44:39.712 --> 02:44:41.912
It shows that you're serious.

02:44:41.912 --> 02:44:45.032
How far did Christendom fall that we got to that?

02:44:45.032 --> 02:44:52.472
At one point, we have Louis IX incinerating Talmuds in the public square, and Jews lined up shrieking about it.

02:44:52.472 --> 02:44:57.692
And then we have the Holy Roman Emperor celebrating him and passing off Hebrew as scholarship.

02:44:57.692 --> 02:44:59.652
That's how quickly things went wrong.

02:44:59.652 --> 02:45:03.872
Now, quickly in the sense of the story, but we're talking about centuries.

02:45:03.872 --> 02:45:05.272
This was Satan's long game.

02:45:06.092 --> 02:45:07.592
He put these pieces in play.

02:45:07.592 --> 02:45:18.432
He made these moves so that right at the very beginning of the Reformation, you have a demon Kabbalist teaching Hebrew to the fathers of the Reformation.

02:45:19.932 --> 02:45:36.352
And to give you an idea of how connected these individuals were to each other, and also politically, Loans convinced the Holy Roman Emperor to gift to Reuchlin his first personal copy of the Hebrew Bible.

02:45:36.352 --> 02:45:44.612
So he received that as a gift from the Holy Roman Emperor because his court Jew told him he should do so.

02:45:44.612 --> 02:45:49.732
And Reuchlin is indeed very connected to the Reformation.

02:45:49.732 --> 02:46:05.512
And the reason that he's connected to the Reformation is not just because of materials that he produces and indeed Jewish materials, Hebrew materials that he protects, but also because he is actually related to Philip Melanchthon.

02:46:06.792 --> 02:46:16.612
And so that relationship is used by Reuchlin to convince Philip Melanchthon to learn Hebrew.

02:46:16.612 --> 02:46:23.772
Not just to learn Hebrew, but he is the one who gets him his first position in a university to teach.

02:46:23.772 --> 02:46:30.052
Incidentally, he starts off teaching Greek, but he does end up teaching Hebrew and other things as well.

02:46:30.052 --> 02:46:48.972
And Melanchthon, of course, for those who don't know, close confidant of Martin Luther, wrote some of the confessional documents in the Book of Concord, prolific writer, reformed the educational system in Germany, by and large a faithful and good man.

02:46:48.972 --> 02:46:59.092
Except for this influence from Reuchlin, except for the fact that he believed that Hebrew was necessary in order to truly understand the Old Testament.

02:46:59.092 --> 02:47:04.252
It's that same poison that we see down through the centuries in this narrative.

02:47:04.252 --> 02:47:22.592
Reuchlin, because of how well placed he is, and because of everything that came before him, leading him to have this viewpoint that it is okay to go and talk to rabbis about Christianity, Reuchlin loses his soul in this bargain because he goes and talks to loans.

02:47:23.112 --> 02:47:31.372
And, as Woe said, loans doesn't just tell him, here's Hebrew, I'll teach you Hebrew, you can learn this and then you can really understand scripture.

02:47:31.372 --> 02:47:35.852
He goes further and he does exactly what Jews do given enough time.

02:47:35.852 --> 02:47:53.612
What he does is he tells him, well, you have the scriptures, but here's the real religion, here's the real truth, here is how you actually understand what's written in this book by interpreting it in this way with these other materials.

02:47:53.612 --> 02:48:02.332
That may sound familiar to you because it's similar to what was done with the allegorical interpretation of scripture when it was taken too far.

02:48:02.332 --> 02:48:13.192
When you take the allegory and disconnect it, untether it from the literal reading, from the actual meaning of scripture, you wind up with a new religion.

02:48:13.192 --> 02:48:15.552
It's the same thing we see the Jews doing here.

02:48:15.552 --> 02:48:21.152
It doesn't matter what is actually written in that Old Testament, that he gives to Reuchlin.

02:48:21.152 --> 02:48:23.952
Because ultimately what he gives Reuchlin is Kabbalah.

02:48:23.952 --> 02:48:25.992
That's his religion.

02:48:25.992 --> 02:48:32.192
It's the wickedness, it's the black magic that came from Babylon and probably also Egypt to some degree.

02:48:32.192 --> 02:48:42.552
It's this chained down through history of a demonic religion passed from Jew to Jew to Jew, and sometimes pawned off on non-Jews.

02:48:42.552 --> 02:48:44.732
In this case, Reuchlin.

02:48:44.732 --> 02:48:52.972
Now if you go and examine his family history, you'll probably find some things that point to a possibility of Jewish heritage.

02:48:52.972 --> 02:48:59.812
However, it wasn't raised by those who attacked him at the time for what he was doing, which was open-Judaizing.

02:48:59.812 --> 02:49:02.992
It was not brought up by Pfefferkorn, for instance.

02:49:02.992 --> 02:49:08.792
So by and large, it seems like he was probably actually originally a Christian.

02:49:08.792 --> 02:49:14.212
Not a Jewish convert to Christianity, a Christian who essentially converted to Judaism.

02:49:15.812 --> 02:49:21.212
And then goes to work poisoning the well of the Reformation.

02:49:21.212 --> 02:49:39.812
Not in the sense, again, as Woe said, not in the sense of doctrine, but in the sense of this belief that you need to go to the Hebrew, which isn't even a thing, but you need to go to this thing that was created by the rabbis and passed off as the Hebrew in order to understand the Word of God.

02:49:39.812 --> 02:49:41.092
Don't go to the Septuagint.

02:49:41.092 --> 02:49:41.972
Don't go to the Greek.

02:49:42.412 --> 02:49:53.652
Don't go to the actual foundation of the church used for centuries by Christians who had zero access to Hebrew because Hebrew was dead and gone.

02:49:53.652 --> 02:49:55.452
Don't go to that.

02:49:55.452 --> 02:50:01.152
Take this thing that was given to us by rabbis who worship Satan.

02:50:02.252 --> 02:50:06.672
And that's where we start off, unfortunately, in the Reformation.

02:50:06.672 --> 02:50:10.452
But again, it is worth remembering, this is both sides of the Reformation.

02:50:10.512 --> 02:50:12.452
It is not just the Protestants.

02:50:12.452 --> 02:50:16.132
Yes, you have this direct connection between Reuchlin and Melanchthon.

02:50:17.512 --> 02:50:23.232
But Trent also affirms, for the Roman Catholic position, the use of the Hebrew in the Old Testament.

02:50:24.352 --> 02:50:28.432
This is an error that is made by all Christians at this time.

02:50:28.432 --> 02:50:43.992
Again, the only two men who stand up in this narrative and say, no, you need to destroy these materials, these materials are wicked, you cannot use them as a Christian, are the two men who actually converted from Judaism to Christianity and repudiated their former wickedness.

02:50:43.992 --> 02:50:59.812
Because Pfefferkorn, just like Donin before him, says, you have to destroy these materials, it is not sufficient not to use them, they have to be destroyed because they are wicked, what they contain is blasphemy, it is heresy, it is anti-Christian.

02:50:59.832 --> 02:51:04.332
Using them, simply permitting them to continue to exist is wicked.

02:51:04.332 --> 02:51:05.652
That's the Christian response.

02:51:06.552 --> 02:51:09.772
And the only two men, again, who do it are the two men who used to be Jews.

02:51:09.772 --> 02:51:19.972
All the Christians in this narrative are quite happy to use the Hebrew materials, they are quite happy to go and talk to rabbis, even though they should know better.

02:51:19.972 --> 02:51:24.872
But that sets the stage for what happens from that point forward.

02:51:24.872 --> 02:51:33.112
And it is what we are dealing with today, it is the same sort of problems we have now, because all the way back with Jerome is when things went off the rails.

02:51:34.052 --> 02:51:41.992
And Christians have just been doubling down on it since, despite the fact that there have been dozens of times in history to turn from the wickedness.

02:51:41.992 --> 02:51:53.032
They have not done so, because they have always fallen for this trap of believing the Hebrew is older, or the Hebrew is necessary to understand Scripture.

02:51:53.032 --> 02:51:56.772
As we demonstrated in the previous episode, it is not older.

02:51:56.772 --> 02:51:58.752
It is not necessary to understand Scripture.

02:51:59.332 --> 02:52:05.792
God gave us an inspired Old Testament in Greek, which we have had all along.

02:52:05.792 --> 02:52:11.352
All of these men could have learned Greek, and they could have gone and found a copy of Septuagint and used it.

02:52:11.352 --> 02:52:13.852
Not one of them did so.

02:52:15.352 --> 02:52:21.732
I want to impress upon our listeners just how connected Reuchlin was Philip Melanchlin's life.

02:52:23.272 --> 02:52:27.352
Johannes Reuchlin was Philip Melanchlin's great uncle.

02:52:28.672 --> 02:52:34.852
At age 11, Melanchlin's father and grandfather died within two weeks of each other.

02:52:34.852 --> 02:52:41.392
As a result, Philip immediately moved in with his great aunt, who was Reuchlin's sister.

02:52:41.392 --> 02:52:43.992
Put them in the same place at the same time.

02:52:46.132 --> 02:52:48.792
Philip Melanchlin's original name was not Melanchlin.

02:52:49.412 --> 02:52:51.432
Philip was born in Schwarzerge.

02:52:53.132 --> 02:52:55.212
Guess who named him Melanchlin?

02:52:55.212 --> 02:52:56.652
It was Reuchlin.

02:52:56.652 --> 02:53:02.612
Reuchlin literally gave Melanchlin his name at this time when he was 11 or 12 years old.

02:53:02.612 --> 02:53:05.012
Because Philip was a brilliant young man.

02:53:05.012 --> 02:53:07.112
He was absolutely brilliant.

02:53:07.112 --> 02:53:09.852
He was a precocious student.

02:53:09.852 --> 02:53:15.132
He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Heidelberg at age 14, just two years later.

02:53:15.132 --> 02:53:16.692
And he finished his BA in two years.

02:53:17.172 --> 02:53:22.572
He wasn't going to Heidelberg yet when he met Reuchlin, or when he spent time with him.

02:53:22.572 --> 02:53:24.372
I'm sure he met him before.

02:53:24.372 --> 02:53:42.012
But when he moved in with his great aunt, he was suddenly very near to Reuchlin, his great uncle, who took him very much under his wing, tutored him, taught him languages, taught him classical Renaissance humanism, everything that he needed to be a scholar.

02:53:42.012 --> 02:53:42.852
Reuchlin did that.

02:53:43.312 --> 02:53:52.092
Reuchlin was positioned to do that when Philip's father and grandfather died at almost the same time.

02:53:52.092 --> 02:53:54.592
So Philip gets his BA at 14.

02:53:54.592 --> 02:53:58.172
Two years later, he gets his master's degree in Tubigint.

02:53:58.172 --> 02:54:01.772
Within five years of that, he gets a professorship.

02:54:01.772 --> 02:54:07.012
But within five years, he's appointed Professor of Greek, as Corey said, in Wittenberg.

02:54:07.012 --> 02:54:10.072
And this was with Reuchlin's direct orchestration.

02:54:10.632 --> 02:54:16.952
So 1518, just a year after the 95 theses are posted, less than a year, because I think it was August.

02:54:16.952 --> 02:54:17.572
Yeah.

02:54:17.572 --> 02:54:21.032
August, when he shows up in Wittenberg.

02:54:21.032 --> 02:54:26.692
One year after the 95 theses are posted, Luther's gone gangbusters.

02:54:26.692 --> 02:54:29.712
There is an introduction of Luther to Melanchthon.

02:54:29.712 --> 02:54:32.132
And this is effectively how they met.

02:54:32.132 --> 02:54:34.592
I'm just going to read a summary here.

02:54:34.592 --> 02:54:39.172
And because it does a really good job of capturing everything that was going on at this moment.

02:54:39.612 --> 02:54:48.292
Four days after Melanchthon arrived in Wittenberg, he delivered his inaugural lecture, which was titled On Improving the Studies of Youth.

02:54:48.292 --> 02:54:54.472
In elegant Latin, Melanchthon laid out a program for educational reform grounded in humanist principles.

02:54:54.472 --> 02:55:02.712
He strongly advocated in returning to the classical sources, ad fontes, and emphasized the critical importance of studying Greek and Hebrew.

02:55:02.712 --> 02:55:09.952
Not just for appreciating classical literature, but specifically for understanding the original text of scripture accurately.

02:55:09.952 --> 02:55:18.192
He critiqued the dry logic chopping methods of late medieval scholasticism that dominated university theology.

02:55:18.192 --> 02:55:20.752
Luther was present and was electrified by the speech.

02:55:20.752 --> 02:55:25.952
Any initial skepticism that he had of this very young, slight man vanished.

02:55:25.952 --> 02:55:32.672
He immediately recognized the profound significance of Melanchthon's vision and skills for his own burgeoning theological reformation.

02:55:33.352 --> 02:55:35.292
Melanchthon wasn't just a classicist.

02:55:35.292 --> 02:55:46.112
He was advocating for the very linguistic tools necessary to bypass centuries of potentially flawed interpretations and engage directly with the Bible's original languages.

02:55:46.112 --> 02:55:52.292
Luther saw Melanchthon's program as perfectly complementary to his own theological aims.

02:55:52.292 --> 02:55:57.272
Luther was deeply impressed by the young scholar's intellect, his eloquence and substance of his argument.

02:55:58.112 --> 02:56:07.132
Luther wrote enthusiastically about Melanchthon almost immediately in a letter to Georg Splatton, who was Elector Frederick's secretary.

02:56:07.132 --> 02:56:11.052
This was just a couple of days after the speech that Melanchthon gave.

02:56:11.052 --> 02:56:20.432
Luther lavished praise on the inaugural address of Melanchthon himself, dismissing any concerns about his slight physical stature compared to his immense intellectual gifts.

02:56:20.432 --> 02:56:29.652
Luther saw Melanchthon not merely as a language teacher, but as a powerful ally whose humanism could serve the cause of theological truth.

02:56:29.652 --> 02:56:35.252
So where did Melanchthon get his love of Hebrew and Greek?

02:56:35.252 --> 02:56:37.592
He got it from Reuchlin.

02:56:37.592 --> 02:56:41.852
His notion of ad fontes is Jerome.

02:56:41.852 --> 02:57:01.752
We have 1100 years lining up perfectly so that this precocious young man, this brilliant young man who is going to go on to become a prolific scholar, at the seminal moment in his life when his father and grandfather struck down so that there's no one else to take care of, and there's no man in his life anymore except for Reuchlin.

02:57:01.752 --> 02:57:13.372
His great uncle in effect became his custodial father, certainly by virtue of the influence that he had, to the point that he literally renamed him, which was common at that time.

02:57:13.372 --> 02:57:18.652
It was typical for them to take on a name that indicated their proficiency as a scholar.

02:57:19.932 --> 02:57:24.672
But for Reuchlin to be the one naming Melanchthon, Melanchthon is still a pretty big deal.

02:57:24.672 --> 02:57:26.832
That shows you how much influence the guy has.

02:57:26.832 --> 02:57:37.812
Imagine you're 11 years old, your father and your grandfather die, and some incredible scholar with all these worldly connections and this amazing secret knowledge, of course you're going to be thrilled.

02:57:37.812 --> 02:57:41.772
What young man, no matter how brilliant he was, isn't going to get excited about that.

02:57:41.772 --> 02:57:51.672
The smarter the kid is, the more exciting that's going to be, particularly in the dire circumstance of almost becoming, well, he effectively wasn't an orphan, so he's living with his great aunt.

02:57:53.712 --> 02:58:00.352
This is nothing short of Satan's plan snapping into frame.

02:58:00.352 --> 02:58:23.732
Everything lined up for this moment, not because Luther's theology was demonic, but because this moment with Reuchlin taking Melanchthon under his belt, and then Luther glomming onto the much younger Melanchthon's, astute scholastic abilities, ensured that no one was ever going to look at the Hebrew.

02:58:23.732 --> 02:58:28.612
So we see later on when Luther is translating Esther, he doesn't want to do it.

02:58:28.612 --> 02:58:29.612
He despises it.

02:58:29.612 --> 02:58:34.832
He doesn't want to include Esther in the Bible, because it doesn't include a single mention of God.

02:58:34.832 --> 02:58:37.592
He considered to be a godless, wicked book.

02:58:37.592 --> 02:58:39.772
It's not really a great story.

02:58:39.772 --> 02:58:41.452
There's no mention of God.

02:58:41.452 --> 02:58:42.832
He didn't want it in the Bible.

02:58:42.832 --> 02:58:44.492
He wanted to go down to 65 books.

02:58:45.892 --> 02:58:49.892
The tragedy of that was that Luther was well aware of the Septuagint.

02:58:49.892 --> 02:58:53.972
He was aware of the so-called additions to Esther in the Septuagint.

02:58:53.972 --> 02:58:57.692
And we'll put a link in the show notes in a couple weeks.

02:58:57.692 --> 02:59:07.212
Well, next week, we'll include in the show notes an article that lays out the many differences between Esther in the Septuagint and Esther in the Masoretic text.

02:59:07.212 --> 02:59:09.492
It's a completely different book.

02:59:09.492 --> 02:59:20.592
Luther knew that the Septuagint version talked about God, and yet because of the blinders that Satan brought of Reuchlin with Melanchthon into Luther's life, he wouldn't even consider it.

02:59:20.592 --> 02:59:35.132
Because for his mind to open to even the possibility that maybe there was something worthwhile in the Septuagint would have raised too many questions, Luther in his own mind couldn't risk asking the question.

02:59:35.132 --> 02:59:40.352
If he had translated Esther from Greek instead of from Hebrew, he would have loved it.

02:59:40.352 --> 02:59:41.052
It's a great book.

02:59:41.452 --> 02:59:42.832
You know what's great about it?

02:59:42.832 --> 02:59:44.372
The king is a Christian.

02:59:44.372 --> 02:59:46.652
The non-Jewish king is a Christian.

02:59:46.652 --> 02:59:48.052
Very clearly.

02:59:48.052 --> 02:59:52.272
It's a very Christian and very God-fearing book.

02:59:52.272 --> 02:59:54.572
So guess why it got censored?

02:59:54.572 --> 02:59:58.072
The Maseratic version of Esther is demonic.

02:59:58.072 --> 02:59:59.172
Every copy should be burned.

02:59:59.172 --> 03:00:00.052
It should not exist.

03:00:00.052 --> 03:00:01.352
It is a wicked book.

03:00:01.352 --> 03:00:02.852
Luther was right about that.

03:00:02.852 --> 03:00:06.112
The Holy Ghost was warning him when he looked at Esther, this is crap.

03:00:06.112 --> 03:00:07.952
So we'll detail that next week.

03:00:08.052 --> 03:00:18.252
But just remember this precise moment in history, Reuchlin, the Kabbalist, takes Melanchthon under his wing, teaches him Hebrew, makes him love Hebrew.

03:00:18.252 --> 03:00:26.192
Of course, Luther, who was not nearly as good at this point at Hebrew as Melanchthon, is going to be like, great, this guy can solve my problems.

03:00:26.192 --> 03:00:27.592
It was the perfect setup.

03:00:27.592 --> 03:00:34.972
It ensured that godly men like Melanchthon and Luther, who were asking the right questions, would never ask the one that mattered most.

03:00:35.572 --> 03:00:37.852
They were tackling justification.

03:00:37.852 --> 03:00:39.592
They were tackling big ticket items.

03:00:39.592 --> 03:00:44.652
They were tackling all the things that we're told are the most important things about the Reformation.

03:00:44.652 --> 03:00:49.192
The single most important question of Reformation was never asked.

03:00:49.192 --> 03:00:53.212
The question was, what is the textual source for the Old Testament?

03:00:53.212 --> 03:00:57.312
From Jerome to that day, everyone just assumed that it was going to be Hebrew.

03:00:57.312 --> 03:00:59.532
There was no fight after Augustine.

03:00:59.532 --> 03:01:00.892
No one put up a fight.

03:01:00.892 --> 03:01:02.852
No one pointed to the Septuagint.

03:01:02.852 --> 03:01:04.172
No one cared about Greek at all.

03:01:04.732 --> 03:01:12.372
And as soon as they do start caring about Greek again, you know, less than 50 years later, it's only for the New Testament, which was fine.

03:01:12.372 --> 03:01:13.032
That was a good thing.

03:01:13.032 --> 03:01:14.632
That was important too.

03:01:14.632 --> 03:01:17.552
But the Latin New Testament is not in bad shape.

03:01:17.552 --> 03:01:21.612
It's the Latin Old Testament that had a problem because it was not based on Scripture.

03:01:21.612 --> 03:01:23.692
It was based on Hebrew.

03:01:23.692 --> 03:01:38.572
So, as I said before, and for over a year now, the conclusions of what we must face when we're looking at evaluating the church history with regard to the Septuagint, our dire, it puts us in an impossible situation.

03:01:38.572 --> 03:01:44.792
It puts us in the same situation that Luther found himself in 500 years ago.

03:01:44.792 --> 03:01:52.092
He was in a situation where it turned out that there was an accumulation of errors for centuries and facing those errors, he had to do something.

03:01:53.192 --> 03:02:00.892
Those changes ended up having to be radical because when you unwind the errors, you have to do things that maybe were accepted for centuries.

03:02:01.392 --> 03:02:14.372
And that's why the Reformation was such an ultimately violent and terrible split in the Western Church because you have centuries of tradition and teaching and doctrine that had to be excised.

03:02:14.372 --> 03:02:20.072
The Church went in two different directions and that's always going to be painful and ugly.

03:02:20.072 --> 03:02:30.052
What Satan did with Jerome and Reuchlin as the two pivot points of this entire story was to ensure that no matter what happened in the Reformation, no one was going to look at the Septuagint.

03:02:30.492 --> 03:02:31.912
It never happened.

03:02:31.912 --> 03:02:35.712
The engagement that they occurred with the Septuagint was trivial.

03:02:35.712 --> 03:02:40.852
It was like, okay, let's look, it's incidental, but it was genuinely trivia.

03:02:40.852 --> 03:02:42.272
It was not important.

03:02:42.272 --> 03:02:47.192
It was certainly not seen as the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles in the early Church.

03:02:47.192 --> 03:02:51.992
They just ignored that entirely because they bought the lie that Jerome told.

03:02:51.992 --> 03:02:56.012
Satan put a couple men on the board and then filled out the rest of it with filler.

03:02:56.012 --> 03:02:58.652
Like we said, most of these people are kind of filler.

03:02:58.732 --> 03:03:02.012
They could have come and gone and it wouldn't make much difference.

03:03:02.012 --> 03:03:11.212
With Jerome and Reuchlin on the board, Satan ensured that there was never going to be any consideration of Greek after the Reformation.

03:03:11.332 --> 03:03:16.592
So here we are over five centuries later, and we'll see if there's any consideration.

03:03:16.592 --> 03:03:18.672
We'll see if the question is finally asked.

03:03:18.672 --> 03:03:26.172
We're raising it, and we're raising it with full knowledge that this is the most disruptive thing that's happened in many centuries in the Church history.

03:03:26.792 --> 03:03:34.412
Because if you honestly take a look at what the New Testament says about the Septuagint, you can't follow the path of these people.

03:03:34.412 --> 03:03:39.712
And the reason that's such a winding path is that there are so many false choices put in front of men.

03:03:39.712 --> 03:03:47.632
You have arguments over allegory versus literalism, and then the argument is, okay, well, literalism comes from the Jews.

03:03:47.632 --> 03:03:49.252
We need more Hebrew.

03:03:49.252 --> 03:03:54.112
It was always a series of wrong choices, and in every step the choice was, let's get more Jews in here.

03:03:54.672 --> 03:03:58.012
We see that just taking off like a rocket today.

03:03:58.012 --> 03:04:03.332
The reason that we have Seder meals in churches in the 21st century is a Masoretic text.

03:04:03.332 --> 03:04:13.512
It's because the Septuagint was rejected by the Church falsely under demonic oppression, under the direct involvement with Satan, ensuring that the question would never be asked.

03:04:13.512 --> 03:04:15.012
It's a simple question.

03:04:15.012 --> 03:04:25.192
And as we're raising it, it's with full knowledge that if they had asked the question genuinely as we're asking it, they would have arrived at the same answers.

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The only reason that they didn't use the Septuagint in the Reformation or at any point previous is no one asked the question.

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That's why it's humorous at the second even longer episode about the Septuagint.

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None of the guys ever talk about it.

03:04:38.092 --> 03:04:41.312
Until that Polyglot Bible, it doesn't show up once.

03:04:41.312 --> 03:04:41.932
Why would it?

03:04:41.932 --> 03:04:44.352
No one in the West could even read Greek.

03:04:44.352 --> 03:04:48.512
Until the mid-1400s, the Septuagint was never even possible.

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And then at the very moment, when you have reformers doing true reform to the churches was necessary because of the false doctrine that had accumulated, and they were looking at the textual sources, Reuchlin relamed Philip Melanchthon, put him in front of Luther and guaranteed that question would never be asked.

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Had Luther lived longer, had Reuchlin not lived at all, we would have seen some very different answers.

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Now that's, it's a counterfactual to history that can't be proven, but when you look at the end of Luther's life, historically, the trajectory he was on, he probably would have started asking some of these questions, even though it would have proven him a fool at certain points, because he became a lover of Hebrew.

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He spent time on it.

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We see that today.

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The guys who spend a lot of time learning Hebrew love it.

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They think that it's so alien and foreign and it has richness, and it's just, it's defining for them that they've learned this because they were told that it was the original language.

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They should have just learned Greek.

03:05:47.452 --> 03:05:48.972
It was wasted time.

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Every one of them wasted time.

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But crucially, as part of this story, it wasn't until the 13th century that anyone was learning Hebrew.

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It's a joke.

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The way that pastors are raised up today and trained is an ahistoric joke.

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It has no basis in the history of the church.

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And at every point, the wrong question was asked and the wrong path was taken, because they were trying to solve a small problem, not the great one.

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At this point, we are about halfway through this series, because in reality, it has four core episodes.

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We'll be doing the episodes actually properly comparing the texts in the next two weeks.

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Well, not the next two weeks, but the next two episodes.

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And then we had the introductory episode and then sort of the hanger-on episode, where we will be discussing what needs to be done in our opinion.

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Again, we won't be the ones doing this.

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This is a task for other Christian men.

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This is not a task for us.

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And so we are not going to be the ones doing the new translations, creating what needs to be created for the sake of the Christian Church, for the sake of a future Christendom, for the sake of restoring the things that have been lost down through these centuries of men failing to do what it was their duty to do.

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But I would like to echo what Woe said and perhaps emphasize it a little bit.

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I do firmly believe that if God had given Luther another 10-20 years of life, he would certainly have figured out his error on this particular question.

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Because he died in 1546, but in 1543 you have On the Jews and Their Lies.

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And then his final sermon, in fact, before dying, that he preached the night before he had his final health issues and then wound up dying sometime in the night.

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He preached against the Jews.

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He preached against their wickedness.

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He preached against the synagogue and the evil that it had brought into Germany and into Christian lands.

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And there are those who like to condemn Luther for seemingly, they think, going overboard.

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Given what we've laid out in this episode and the previous one and in our series on the Jews, I hardly think that a Christian could consider anything that Luther did or said to have been overboard with regard to the Jews.

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And for those who think that when Luther describes the synagogue as an incorrigible whore and an evil slut, if you think that that language is inappropriate or overboard or unbecoming of a Christian, I would point out that realistically he is simply paraphrasing Chrysostom, because Chrysostom in his Homilies Against the Jews calls the synagogue a brothel and a theater.

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And in fact, he says, it is the domicile of the devil, a place of idolatry.

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The synagogue is worse than a brothel.

03:08:44.232 --> 03:08:48.212
It is a den of robbers, a hideout for wild beasts.

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Chrysostom, of course, was preaching back before Hebrew became a problem.

03:08:55.612 --> 03:09:01.092
He was preaching from the Old Testament in the inspired Greek.

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That's the Christian position.

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That is what true Christian teachers have taught down through the centuries.

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Unfortunately, for a period of time, we simply forgot that we had the Septuagint.

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Some of you will have undoubtedly have already connected these two events together, but I would remind you of something we have mentioned in a number of episodes.

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For a period of time, Old Testament Israel lost the Bible, what portion they had of it, in a wall, in the rubble, in the temple.

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They totally forgot they had it.

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We did the exact same thing with the Septuagint, except we forgot it was in the archives at the Vatican and wherever else copies were stored over the centuries.

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We had the Old Testament in Greek the entire time.

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At any point in this span of 1,500 years, at this point longer, someone could have gone, taken that, learned Greek, and translated it into languages that were then in use.

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That was always on the table.

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That was always an option.

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God preserved his word faithfully as he promised he would do.

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We never lost the Greek.

03:10:15.292 --> 03:10:17.892
We misplaced it for a period of time, stupidly.

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Not even truly misplaced it.

03:10:20.192 --> 03:10:22.072
We knew it was there.

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The Jews had totally forgotten and didn't even know where it was.

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We still knew that we had it.

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Some of these scholars were aware of the existence of the Septuagint.

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They had to be because the Church Fathers wrote about it.

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They just never managed to connect together.

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We have the Greek.

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We have the Old Testament as God preserved it for us.

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We should be using that.

03:10:45.832 --> 03:10:52.052
There is this sort of spell that falls over most men when it comes to foreign languages.

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If you use a foreign language, people assume that you must be highly educated and highly intelligent.

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Peasants living in Palestine in Christ Day knew two or three languages.

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Men who were otherwise uneducated generally couldn't even read, but they knew three languages.

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There are many today who have virtually no education and speak two or three languages.

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Knowing a second or a third language should not particularly impress you.

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Yes, to some degree, depending on when you learn it, it is an intellectual or an academic achievement, but it's not a particularly great one.

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And so this sense that we have of being wildly impressed because someone managed to learn Hebrew, how great is that you learned this foreign language?

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You should not have that reaction to it.

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Think of it in the same way that you'd think of someone who becomes obsessed with Japanese culture learning Japanese.

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Okay, great.

03:11:48.972 --> 03:11:50.892
I know some tidbit about your life.

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You have a weird hobby.

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Except in the case of Hebrew, the language itself is evil because it came from the pits of hell.

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Learning Japanese isn't going to endanger your soul.

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What we have seen down through the centuries and even today, particularly today and particularly in response to this episode, Hebrew endangers the soul of the men who learn it because it was created for wicked purposes by a wicked people inspired by Satan himself.

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That may seem like it's an extreme statement, but look at the fruit of this tree.

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We went up to the Reformation.

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We didn't even go beyond that.

03:12:28.672 --> 03:12:35.032
To some degree and in some ways, it gets worse after that because dispensationalism is fruit of this tree.

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Judaizing in the modern form is fruit of this tree.

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The modern nation state of Israel, so called, is fruit of this tree.

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The world wars, to a large degree, are fruit of this tree.

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So much wickedness and suffering and death has flowed from this error, from this evil on the part of those who knew what they were doing and those who should have known better.

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There is no way that a Christian can possibly interpret it other than to look at it and recognize that it comes from the pit of hell and must be rejected.

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We need to have new translations of the Old Testament from the faithful Greek, because the Greek is what God preserved.

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The Greek is what God gave us.

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And I want to emphasize that point again.

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God preserved the Greek.

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What does God promise in his word?

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He says that he will preserve his word.

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He says that none of it will be lost.

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Did that occur with the Hebrew?

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From what we have told you of the history in these two episodes, and by all means go and research it for yourself if you are so inclined.

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The Hebrew was not preserved.

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If the Hebrew was not preserved, then you have two options.

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It's not the word of God or God lied.

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And that's in either or.

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We advocate, we are stating firmly and in no uncertain terms, that the Hebrew is not the preserved word of God.

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It is not the divinely inspired word of God.

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And the reason that we say that is that we believe what God says in his word, and he says that none of it will be lost.

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And incidentally, we have that in the New Testament over which no one is squabbling about the original language.

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We all know that is Greek.

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God says nothing will be lost.

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Nothing was lost of the Greek.

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Almost everything was lost of the Hebrew.

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That's a simple choice for a Christian.

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God said he will preserve his word.

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God preserved the Greek.

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The Greek is my Old Testament.

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The Greek is the Old Testament of the Church Fathers.

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The Greek is the Old Testament of the Early Church.

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The Greek is the Old Testament of the Establishment of Christendom in the lands of Japheth, as Father Noah promised and as God fulfilled.

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All we have to do is believe what God has said.

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That's the baseline for being a Christian.

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Yes, to be a Christian, you have to have faith in Christ, and we all know the creeds and the doctrines and those things.

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We've gone over them at length in other episodes.

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But a foundational matter is simply believing the word of God, not believing the things that God says are actually true.

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What we are saying is that God has spoken the truth, he has fulfilled his word in time, and that we believe him according to the things he has said, according to the way that he has brought it about in time.

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Others are telling you that you instead have to believe what rabbis say, what those who blaspheme God daily say, what those who hate you and call for your death and your destruction say.

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Don't believe them.

03:15:57.492 --> 03:16:01.392
It's similar to how we mention in politics, you have two options.

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When it comes to politics and social issues, you can believe what your ancestors said about the Jews, or you can believe what the Jews say about your ancestors.

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Again, fourth commandment should not be a difficult decision for Christians.

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I believe what my Christian ancestors said.

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I don't believe what the Jews said about them.

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And similarly, in the same vein, I don't believe what the Jews say about God.

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I believe what God says about himself.

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I believe the words of Christ, and the words of Christ are that nothing will be lost.

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And incidentally, when Christ says that, he's speaking Greek, and he's talking about the Greek, and we still have the Greek, and we should rely on and use the Greek, because that is the Old Testament of the Church, it is the received Old Testament of the Church, it is the foundation of the Church, because it is God's Word.