The REAL Story Behind The 1947 Dead Sea Scrolls Discovery | Dan Hummel

0:00College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwreck up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, true, chelp. Thank you. So, Alessia Laman is working me for a very long time. I've had a chance to talk with you. And he said, you are the guy when it comes to looking at modern day religion through the scope of geopolitics and how things have been maybe, you know, changed all over the place. How do you even end up like covering this kind of topic? It's obviously like hot button at the moment right now, but certainly a tough space for there's people with a lot of opinions in it.

1:04Yeah, so I'm a historian. So I came to all the stuff we're going to talk about today from being trained as a historian. I was really interested as a grad student in merging diplomatic history, which is how you, you know, study sort of the relations between different states and then religious history. And there's a bunch of different topics you could do on that. But the one I picked was Christian Zionism. I didn't pick it in this was like early 2010s. I didn't do it because it wasn't particularly hot topic then. I mean, it was something that some people had studied and some hadn't. But I grew up in evangelical Christian. I sort of knew a bit of this world of the evangelical arguments for supporting Israel. Where'd you go up? I grew up so I was a missionary kid. So that's my parents were Christian missionaries. And that meant that we moved around a lot. So I was born in Orange County, California, both my parents are from there. But then moved to Texas when I was a baby and then ultimately moved to Germany. So he just read a seven. I was in Germany.

2:06You just said missions, smooth time, cruise missions. That's right. My parents were for sure. Actually, it was a really exciting time for them as American Christian missionaries. This would be in the late 80s. So there was still an East and West Germany. And they were there. And we were there as a family when the Berlin Wall came down in 89 and then the country reunified as what we know today is Germany. And so East Germany was communist up until then and was very much opposed to organized religion, particularly sort of American Christianity. So my parents were there and got to work in a very what we call the mission world sort of an open field at that point. So right after reunification, there was a bunch of church planting and growing in East Germany. So we were there for four years, moved back to California and then ultimately landed in Colorado Springs, which in the 90s was one of the hotspots for evangelical organizations moving and cheap land, growing economy, sort of centrally located.

3:07If you think it's it's not on either the coast. So you can fly to both the coast a little quicker and and a beautiful place Rocky Mountain. So I ended up spending a pretty normal middle school high school in Colorado, Colorado Springs, my wife in Colorado Springs, we ended up dating all through college at Colorado State. That's where I really got interested in history was a Colorado State. And particularly history that I was in middle school when 9-11 happened. Iraq War followed when I was in high school. So I was very interested in foreign policy and the Middle East in particular. So at Colorado State, I majored in history and philosophy. And then I went back, we were just talking about this before, I graduated in 2007 job markets pretty rough. And so as many people who graduate with a history degree do they just go back and do more schooling and that's what I did. And so I ended up taking classes in Arabic, the language and then Middle East history.

4:08And really got into that. So I ended up getting a master's degree in Middle East studies at Colorado State. Hey guys, three quick things. Number one, if you haven't subscribed, please subscribe to huge help. Number two, if you'd like to join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes, you can join via the link in my description or in the pinned comment below. And number three, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make content from the show and make money, you can join via the discord link in my description below. You still speak Arabic a little bit? I do not. I never really spoke it. I was really interested in reading it. So as a historian, the sort of the coin of the realm is being able to read sources. And so as someone who was interested in diplomatic history, you want to be able to read the transcripts or the memos that are being sent between different, you know, officials. So I didn't, you know, that was part of the frustration of taking Arabic at a place that Colorado State is they really emphasize the, you could say the social and casual talking or verbal skills.

5:08And I was really interested in like pretty narrow vocab on government functions and things like that. I didn't really care about those. Does that say bomb, please come on intelligence and, you know, economic terms, all the kind of stuff. So, so I know I can't speak it. But I did have that training and that fit into my PhD program at University, Wisconsin, where I ended up taking Hebrew, modern Hebrew. And I did actually more of that than than the Arabic because of the topic I picked Christian Zionism. I was very interested in understanding how do these Rayleigh government think about and perceive American Christianity. And what years that were you're in grad school looking at that approximate? So I went to, we moved to Madison, my wife and I in 2010. So from 2010 to 2015, I graduated 2016. I was at Madison. I spent a year in Israel. There's a great exchange program with a, it's called the Mossy program at UW with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

6:08So every year there's a bunch of students that go to the Hebrew you from UW Madison and vice versa. So there's these. What was that like? It was a really interesting year. This was 2012. It was basically July 2012 to July 2013. There was a Gaza. Encursion during that, I believe it was pillar of smoke or something was the name of the operation. And it was the first time I'd ever had like a missile siren in my life. So that happened for a few weeks. There were a bunch of missile sirens. You know, we were students. So I was a student. And so we were very, we lived on a little the whole year. But we got to live right down next to the old city, which is the sort of, you know, historic space. We're about five minute walk from there on Yafo street. So it was an eye opening year. I had very little knowledge on the personal knowledge of Israel as a country of the West Bank of any of that stuff.

7:08What do you think of it living there for a full year? So growing up in the evangelical world, you are presented with a very spiritual and sort of, yeah, spiritual and clean. I guess you could say image of what Israel is like. And I think a lot of people who go on a tour of Israel, particularly Christians in America, they spend 10 to 14 days there. I think they get that view because they get to see the nice things that are built specifically for tourists. When you live there, you realize it's no different than any other place on the planet in a lot of ways. I mean, there's plumbing and there's electricity. There's dust, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, but growing up in a religious home where Israel, the nation of Israel sort of spoken about is like fulfillment of prophecy. You just get a high view of like, oh, this must be like, like there's some liminal space. I'm going to cross and it's going to be something more than what the rest of the earth is. Then you take a shit and your toilet cloths and it's all reality. I got you. That's right. And people are just as, or maybe even more, there are a lot of nice people there. But, you know, just as grumpy and short with each other is anywhere else.

8:16It definitely opens your eyes to the reality of the occupation. You know, we lived in downtown Jerusalem. It wasn't more than five miles away. Our major checkpoints that if you were not an American citizen or Israeli citizen, you can't really, you know, cross at any point. And where do they, where do those checkpoints go into the ones I'm thinking about the West Bank. So, Jerusalem is sort of right on the eastern edge of the pre 1967 line. And in fact, East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel in 1967. And that's one of these things that's being, you know, in some future diplomatic solution, something with East Jerusalem will have to happen. So that's even closer than five miles. I mean, that would have been a 10 minute walk from me. But, but East Jerusalem's different. It was annexed. So it's open flow. Anyone can sort of go on either side of the city, but not the case in the West Bank. Before you took this year, by the way, how long had you been in grad school at that point studying specifically like Christian Zionism, Zionism related topics?

9:18Oh, it's Christian Zionism specifically very little. So the first couple years of a PhD program, you're doing general classes. So you think a class on American economic history and another one on religious history. One of, if not the most common DMs I get on Instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are. Today's your lucky day because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter, I'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations right now. Also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show, you can do so via the discord link in my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link in my description below. As always, please take one second to hit that subscribe button. If you haven't already, I really appreciate that. Also the like buttons, a big help. And you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. So I almost, I knew I was nothing. I'd read after you take those classes, you have to do what is called a prospectus for your dissertation. So you have to write up about 20 pages and say, this is what I want to study. And this is what I intend to find. It's a total shot in the dark. You're sort of just trying to project like what you think you'll find.

10:22So I'd read maybe, you know, five books or something on modern Israel and Christian Zionism. So I had very little background knowledge. I was reading a lot that holds sort of in the six months to the lead up. I was reading a bunch of articles and stuff. Was it was any of it? More thing your opinion to something new as opposed to what you had just heard grown up. I'm going to come back to your childhood a little bit. I like staying with this because this is interesting. You spent a full year there early on. Yeah, yeah. So one of the biggest, there were a ton of things I just had no idea about before, before moving there. One of the ones specific on my topic was when I read about Christian Zionism from large American historians and political scientists, I assumed it was mostly an American movement. I assume the mo and there's a sort of famous or infamous whatever journal articles from the 80s and 90s that we talk about the oddness of like southern Baptist preachers meeting with Israeli officials and how big clash of cultures that is. When I went there, I realized actually the Christians who are interested in Israel for prophecy reasons or theological reasons, the vast majority of them are not American.

11:31They're Christians from what we call the global south. So from South America, from Africa, from Asia. Like in terms of numbers, I went to different sort of as an observer went to rallies. One of them had 5,000 people in the room. I would guess there were no more than a few hundred Americans. As an observer. As an observer. That's right. I did actually a lot of that. That's one of the things that is not historians tend not to do that as much as an anthropologist or something. But I was not waving my flag at the same time. You didn't put the fist in the air just to pretend to blend in. It's also a different type of Christianity. So the typical Christians at these things are very charismatic. They speak in tongues. They raise their hands. This is very common in that world. I didn't grow up in that world. So I felt out of place just even though we're all sort of Christians. It was not my type of worship music. It was not I don't speak in tongues. I don't sort of I mean, I remember there were healings happening in the room.

12:33You know, people claiming to be healed from long term sicknesses and things like that. Speaking in tongues though. Yeah. You know what that is? You know, the Voldemort kind of speak. The snake. A version of that. Well, I don't that would be really offensive to the to the Pentecostals. But the idea is that the Holy Spirit gifts is sort of like speaking through you. And it's in a language that you don't understand, but it's a holy language. So this is very I mean, there's hundreds of millions of Christians who do this. Hundreds of millions. Yeah. Around the world for sure. Yeah. Does does it have any like real patterns to it? Or is it just like making sounds? I'm a little skeptical. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Many many people are skeptical. As we get older, many of us fight the good old battle of trying to keep good healthy hair up top. And one of the best things you can do for healthy hair upkeep is using red light therapy. That's why you got to check out my friends at I restore and their red light therapy cap. I restore elite, especially if you've experienced thinning, shedding,

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14:36By the way, someone who does this is Paula White, Kane, who's Trump's spiritual device. She's a real gem. You can get YouTube videos of her speaking in tongues. Yeah, that's not exactly endorsement for it. Yeah, it for most in most cases, the the tongue being spoken is it's only it's sort of a again, I'm on the outside of it, but it's no one understands it except for the Holy Spirit. So the original so this is about a hundred and so years old 1906 is when the Pentecostal movement started the original first years after that so 1906 to 1916 say what was meant by speaking in tongues was a miraculous ability to speak in another human language that you didn't know. So you could go to get back to like missionary work, you could go as just a total uneducated in the sense of like Japanese language to Japan and the Holy Spirit would gift you the ability to speak in Japanese when you got there. And so there were reports of that. They were of course, plenty of people were skeptical, even within the Christian world, but that was the original idea of what speaking in tongues was it developed over time to be something that was much more about this language that no one can understand.

15:47Now other people might have the gift of translating it that that's another one of these. Translate the thing that no one else can understand, but in most cases that that's not happening. It's it's only sort of an utterance that you're supposed to basically acknowledge the spiritual power of the person doing it. Dave, can we pull up Paul, Dean doing this doing the tongue stuff? Paul can white cane. Paul, Paul, Dean, I think I did, you know, I did that on other podcasts that I'm sorry Paul, Dean, that's twice now. Damn it. Yeah, Paul, it's Paul, it came white. Is that we said, Paul, a white cane, Paul, a white cane and cane is the journey guy, I think. Yeah, all right. So she really does this. Is this Paula white speaking in tongues with sometime? With. Paul, okay. We should leave this. This is happy to get the translation right here. All right, let's see. Ah, I don't know what's so cool. Mahanda, I can say that.

16:52That's not what I thought was going to sound like. Yeah, I'm a God. I'm going to be a city. I can no, I can no city. Power. So, so the idea too is when they when they do the video on the crowd is that every a lot of those people are doing the same thing, but they don't have the mic. So, right. Yeah, so that's a version of that is one of the things I experienced going to these Christian Zionist rallies in Israel. And that was just totally so again, if you read the literature still, I think this is the case though there's been a lot of good literature in recent years, but still when you read the literature, you assume when you're going to see is a bunch of Southern Baptist, who are pro Israel. And they're there, but they're like in a little corner of the of the stadium or the auditorium. And the vast majority of these people are from Nigeria or Brazil or South Korea. And they're they're still very pro Israel. We don't care about them as much when we talk about geopolitics because Brazil and Nigeria aren't as important geopolitically as the US is to the you know, fate of the state of Israel.

18:01But in terms of numbers, there's way more than there. So that was one of the things I wrote a book in 2019. It was my dissertation turned into a book where I spend an extra year writing that to get a handle on like what is what's now called global Christian Zionism. What is this movement that is somewhat connected to the American Paul political religious scene, but also is its own life. And to try to sort of see how are those things connected and how are they basically different phenomena. All right. Can I pull you back for one second and then we'll come back around to that. I just want to get an idea of like some of the origins of how you looked at this. So you mentioned the beginning as a child, you were the son of Christian missionaries. So your parents were obviously highly involved living out there. Christian spirit like in the best kind of way traveling the world trying to spread the word. But that means as I'm taking it, it was really ingrained in you from a young child that you were going to be in the evangelical Christian. This is what we believe. And you know, this is what it is. Like how would you describe how you came to believe in like the religion of Christianity?

19:04And just something that was always there, therefore you believed or did you have your own journey with it growing up where you're like, OK, I buy this. I don't buy that. You're asking me for my testimony. That's what we called in the evangelical world. Right. So yeah, I did. I never had. I don't remember a time where I didn't sort of just assume Christian Andy was true. I could be having grown up in it. But I do have my sort of conversion story or the day. I don't know the actual date. But when I was seven, so this is back. We moved back from Germany. We were in California for a year before moving to Colorado. I remember walking with my dad along the street that our house was on. And doing a version of what's called the center's prayer. So like praying to God that I'm a sinner. I need forgiveness. I, you know, I'm asking you to come into my heart Jesus. And I want to follow you that type of prayer. So I sort of date my formal status as a Christian, I guess you could say to that. So I was seven. I never had like a huge rebellious phase where I rejected all that and tried out other religions or something. But I definitely in college.

20:08I was a history and philosophy major at major state school. So most of my professors were not Christians. Some of the philosophy professors were very opposed to Christianity. And at least they're opposed to any type of Christianity that that sort of relied on theology to argue for the validity of Christianity. And so that was a challenging period. I never had a crisis of faith. I remember I read a ton. And that's where I really got confirmed that like, oh, I think I, I've always sort of believe this as a kid. I now have reasons that I can actually talk about for why I believe this. Some of that was reading people like CS Lewis, which is sort of very common. Some of this reading. This was sort of before my time about I read his stuff a guy named Francis Schaeffer who in the 1970s and 80s wrote a bunch of books thinking about modern thought and culture and how Christianity sort of intersected with that. And then some of it was reading around some of these hot issues. This was back in the 2000s. The new atheists were a big deal. Then so people like Richard Dawkins. And Christopher Hitchens. And so I read their stuff. I read the rebuttals to their stuff. And I ended up sort of becoming much more intellectually mature, you could say, as a Christian.

21:17So I think the bigger change for me was coming out of the particular subculture of Christianity. College football is back. So Hilton called me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. The Aleminati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything, even our music. That hits on named after the color of lemons. Not a coincidence. Big lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years. Think about it. But now, seven up is fighting back with their new lime lemon soda. Now lime comes first. Seven up. Flip the set.

22:23Which was the subculture that was dispensationalist, which we'll get into that. That's the sort of particular theology that often a lot of the pro-Israel evangelicals have. Moving into a broader tradition of Christianity that I appreciate where I grew up and particularly I grew up really caring about the Bible and reading it for myself. I like that. But in terms of the conclusions drawn, I now locate myself much more in a sort of general, still evangelical, but Protestant Christianity. That was the bigger, I mean it's not nearly as dramatic to most people, but that was the bigger change, was sort of like working through that, relating to my family, which many of them are still in that subculture. And then also, you know, thinking about how I now write about that. So I write about dispensationalism, Christian Zionism, how to write about that in a way that sort of respects where I came from, but it's also pretty different in my conclusions.

23:25So you're going to, even though you guys are moving around a bunch, you're going to churches all the time, as you're growing up, you're hearing pastors preaching all that. Do you remember the first times you heard them talk about the state of Israel and how it was framed? I honestly don't, no, I don't, but there's a moment, it couldn't have been the first time, but in Colorado Springs, I went to a mega church, I've gone to mega churches a lot of my life. So these are these big 2000 plus, you know, membership churches, often in auditoriums. And it happened to be the mega church that a guy named Jerry Jenkins went to. And Jerry Jenkins is one of the co-authors of the left behind novels, which were these really popular novels in the 90s and 2000s. It was a fictionalized version of the End Times, the rapture was in the first book, and then the Antichrist and all that kind of stuff. This is a big touch point, like beyond just Christian culture in the 90s, the book sold like 80 million copies or something.

24:26I think it was like the best-selling series until Harry Potter or something like that. Really? At least in those few decades. And that guy went to our church. Now, it's a huge church, so it's like I never actually met him. But he was like one of the Sundays in the main service. We sort of like gave him a round of applause or something. And I assume it was because he published a book because they're publishing all these books. And that drove me to be more interested in that series. I ended up getting really into the left behind books as a 10-year-old, 11-year-old. And that's where I really started reading more than hearing about Israel, because in those books, the state of Israel plays a good guy role in what happens in the world. And then there's these particular characters who are Jewish that are very admirable and are portrayed as like really protagonist-type characters. And I think that was probably, so I was 10-11. That was probably the first time I really was like, oh, that's a real, you know, they're talking about this country. And I can see that country on the map.

25:29It's a real place. And it was a very much inflicted through those books and that particular theology that was informing those books. So what's that, there's that famous, I guess, like, verse in there that you'll hear like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee always quote, it says something like God protects those who protect Israel and everything. Yeah. And I think where a lot of people go, wait a minute, is in the Bible when it's referring to that, it's referring to something different than the state that was created in 1948. Is that fair to say? Yeah, well, that's the debate is what is it referring to. So yeah, it's Genesis 12, 3. So this is at the front end of the Bible. He's on it. Oh, yeah, this is the, this is probably the verse right now in this conversation. Yeah, there's a lot of verses. So this is the one you. I'm from Jay Z. Here we go. So the first 11 chapters of Genesis are the creation and then like the Noah's flood and then the Tower of Babel. And so the Tower of Babel happens in chapter 11.

26:32What happens there again? So the humans tried to build a tower up to heaven and God confounds them and sort of disperses them all around the world. And many Christians traditionally thought this is where we get languages and even sort of racial and ethnic differences sort of interesting. And so the idea here is like humans were so had so much hubris that they thought they could reach God and then God sort of confounds them. And so, so this is in the story of, so the book of Genesis is setting up like the world, God creates a beautiful world, human screwed up. How's God going to correct it? And so Genesis 12 is where we're introduced to this character Abram who turns into Abraham. And this is like one of the first things God tells Abraham. He says, I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you, I will curse. And that actually has worked out through the rest of Genesis and and it has sort of its own narrative purpose in the Bible.

27:32But what Christians, I and I do what people like Ted Cruz do is they make some interpretive jumps from, okay, this is a verse blessing Abram, Abraham. Now, Abraham is the father of the Israelites and so is the father of the Jewish people you could say. But the jump here is saying when God says, I will bless those who bless you, God doesn't mean just Abraham. He means all the people who are part of Abraham's family and that the nation of Israel today is in the lineage of Abraham from Genesis 12. In Ted Cruz's mind, that is a very easy move to make because in dispensationalism in the sort of conservative evangelical world, there's a lot of continuity between the Jewish people of the Old Testament and the state of Israel today. For other traditions, frankly most Christian traditions, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, a lot of other Protestants.

28:34God has a chosen people always and they're called Israel, but in the Old Testament, that is the nation of Israel, the kingdom of Israel, in the New Testament after Jesus comes, it's the church. Can I ask about the nation real quick? Is there a specific like geographic area given for that when they were referring to the nation or was it an idea of like a group of people themselves? So in Genesis 12, there's no specific territory laid out, but just a few chapters later in Genesis 15, God restates the covenant. This is the beginning of the covenant. So another thing like, I'm going to bless you as long as you serve me. And in that there is territory laid out and this is the very, when Tucker Carlson interviewed Mike Huckabee, the ambassador, the US ambassador to Israel, they got into a debate about this. And in Genesis 15, the territory is very vast. It's from the Nile to the Euphrates is what God promises. So that's like a lot of modern Egypt, all of modern day, the original thing.

29:39Yeah, yeah, this is the greater Israel thing. So in that text, that's what God promises Abraham is like your descendants will have this land. So that's another one of these sort of things where people have have different takes on that. But what one question on this, you know, how do you even let's say that that was all exactly what it is and everything. How do you even draw everyone back to Abraham when there were so few people in the earth at the time that frankly his spawn is everywhere. And you also have like here in America, we have a melting pot of everybody right in Israel. They have some of that too because they have people whose ethnicity is derived from that region of the world. And then they have people whose ethnicity is derived from Eastern Europe, but they put it all under one umbrella. So how do they put two and two together to be able to fit, you know, that feels like a square and square pegging around home to me. Yeah, I think for a lot of Christians and frankly a lot of Jews, it's it's through, I mean, I guess today they might do like DNA testing or something. But it's through like this, this through the mother. I mean, that's what the traditional Jewish way is, is if your mother was Jewish or Jewish.

30:49So the idea here is that there's a continuous group of people that at least in the Bible are documented, you know, generation after generation. And then when the biblical story ends are continue to be sort of part of this community. Some of it's now there's always people that are not genetically related to Israelites who are who are coming into the Israelite kingdom. So even there's the book of Ruth. So Ruth is this character. She's not Israelite. She's another nation. She comes in. And so it's never just genetics. But there is this idea that God has covenanted himself to a particular people group largely genetic, not not totally genetic. And that that is a continual like sort of unit through history that, you know, it has documentation going all the way from back then to the Middle Ages to today. There's a lot been a lot of people over the, you know, centuries who've been skeptical of that or said it's been, it's been so diluted through all the different ways that of course a big part of the Jewish stories they get scattered over and over again.

31:56And so they're intermarrying and and that dilutes the understanding of who's in and who's out. So the idea here is there's always been a remnant and the remnant can be traced and that the, you know, the Jews who founded the state of Israel or part of that lineage. And so the state of Israel is is part of that lineage and part of that too is the way that evangelicals understand the prophetic so the prophecy books in the Bible talk about Israel will be scattered and then regathered in its land. And so that that's something that for the for these evangelicals, they see that as something that when the prophets said it would be fulfilled many, many centuries in the future. And so they see a continuity here, which is these prophets spoke to a particular nation of Israel back in say 600 BC. And then in 1948, it's happening like the sort of prophecies being fulfilled. And so there's a continuity to the story there. So that that's another way they they would make that case.

32:56Okay, you and I were talking off camera before we got on about the nature of pass down text with any ancient text, including in the context we were talking about it with the new testament to where there's some arguments about when each gospel was written how long after the facts were they therefore what's true, which been changed, what's not. And I recognize that as I was telling you like all ancient texts are some level of error there because humans are flawed and you know we change stories sometimes over time, but like if there's a monochrome of truth in a bunch of these texts, I think that's really, really interesting to me. When it comes to the Old Testament text, I keep thinking as well, you're talking and I don't even know if we've talked about the son of podcasts, I'm not entirely sure. But when we're talking about like, for example, the book of Genesis, or you mentioned the book of Ruth or the book of revelations, what's the what do we know about the records of when news were written and who wrote them and you know, I guess as best we can do it how long after the fact they're writing this stuff. Yeah.

33:58Yeah, and that's definitely not my my area specialty, but I know the basics here and the basics are particularly the old the further back you go, the less we know about the origins of the texts, like who originally wrote, you know, the creation story. The idea, I mean that the sort of classic Christian, you know, the classic Christian teachings that Moses did because in one of the books early books, Moses sort of inserts himself as the narrator, but I think we can say Moses probably did some of it. There's probably a lot of other things going on. I think a lot of the scholarship talks about there's an editor that comes along centuries later and sort of smoothed it out and makes it a thematically linguistically more coherent. And that we're talking about, you know, in the sort of 1,800 BC time period. Now the things in Genesis are purported to be have happened thousands of years before that and all that. And some of this is is there's there's it's narrated in the Bible that there's our discoveries of old scrolls in the temple of sort of after the King David era.

35:04And so we at least from the stories in the Bible, we know that they're actually recovering their own scripture through the story of the Bible. And so the sort of you know, you have some that are dated really old like that. And then many scholars date the book of Daniel as the last book written in the Old Testament. And what are they date? What are they based that on it being the last book written? So some of it is, is there a prophecies in that book that seem to be fulfilled in the second century. So the depending on your metaphysics, if you don't think prophecies are true, then you would say, well, if the prophecies fulfilled, then this must have been written after that. What are those prophecies? So those are largely about the destruction of different sort of kingdoms in the second century. Some of them have new like Alexander the Great and the consequences of his conquest of that whole sort of Hellenistic area. There's also part Daniel's also partially written in Aramaic. And that's a language that's more to the what we call the second temple period.

36:07So like the second century BC through the second century, well through AD 70 when the temple is destroyed. And so it's the only book of the Bible that has Aramaic in it. And so the idea is that's probably a later written book. So you're talking about a collection of books that are written over like a thousand years and edited throughout all that time. It seems like every AI expert you hear from recommends a different tool. There's the big ones we first heard about when this was all starting like Chachy, BT and Claude. Now there seems to be an AI program you can use that has some sort of specialty in anything. You can use it for better research, another's better writing, another coding. And suddenly you have several subscriptions that can't even talk to each other. That's why I like using perplexity computer. Instead of locking you into one model, it orchestrates leading AI models, automatically picks the right one for each part of your project. In what I do every day, that could include things like researching the market, finding the best flights to get guests in here, and even automating some email follow ups. You give the computer the whole project,

37:08and it breaks down the work into tasks and keeps going till it's finished. The limited time only you can try perplexity computer yourself for free. Just go to pplx.ai slash julian that link is in my description below. You can click it right down there. That's pplx ai slash julian link in my description below to try perplexity computer today. Most AI tools answer questions perplexity computer completes full projects. By the time we get to, well certainly by the time of Jesus, be it even before that, there's a pretty standard text that every Jew is referring to as the law, the prophets, and the poetry and proverbs type of things. That's where we get the word Tanakh. Tanakh? Tanakh. So that's in English it'd be T-A-N-A-C-H. This would be the Torah, which would be the first five books, and that's sort of the law. I'm going to forget the word. Now the Nevi-Eem I think is the prophets,

38:13and then there's the historical books that would be like First and Second Kings, First and Second Sanma. They're just sort of narrating through the history of Israel. That's sort of the corpus that we call the Old Testament Jews called the Hebrew Bible. By the time Jesus is referencing these various parts of the Old Testament during the Gospels and they're pretty set by that point. We know from that point what's interesting too is when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 40s. These are sort of, they are from the First or Second Century, and no one's really touched them between then in 1947. These are in caves that are just outside of the Dead Sea in modern day Israel. When those were discovered, they had copies of, say, the Book of Isaiah. That was really helpful to scholars because it was like, well, if we can sort of see what they thought Isaiah was like in the year 100.

39:16And compared to today, we'll know how much has changed since then. And overall, not much changed. There's a lot of grammatical things and small differences. But the 80-90% of what we have today is Isaiah, is what the Dead Sea Scroll people had as well. 80-90%. Yeah, it might even be more than that. There were tons and tons of grammatical things. Part of that is Hebrew doesn't have vowels. And so it can be hard to know exactly what words are and stuff like that. Yeah, it also has a limited number of total words, right? I forget maybe it's like 30 or 40,000 words or something like that. I might be misremembering that as opposed to other languages that have much more. English certainly has way more. Yeah, and part of that's the verb structure. So like all Semitic languages, Hebrew has, most of their words come down to a root of three consonants. And then you build up all different types of words out of those consonants. And so it creates a smaller sort of corpus of words than something like English,

40:19which doesn't have that verb structure and also is global and assimilating words all over the place. Can we pull up the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls? That's crazy that they find something like 1900 years later. And their nitpick and define grammatical changes and things like that. And as you said conservatively, speaking 80 and 90% of it. So I mean, there's a crazy political part of this too. So it's 1947. That's the interesting. So it's right. The, you know, the creation of Israel's like the next year. And so this actually becomes tied up in a sort of politics of claiming who's land is this, right? So it's like the Dead Sea community was, we think, part of this, like this sort of a radical set called the Essens, who were around the time that Jesus was around. There's some people who speculate that John the Baptist might have been in the scene. They were sort of separatists. And so the idea here is like, well, if we can discover things in the state of Israel that are from the first century,

41:26then like this, you know, that's a pre, that goes back before all the Muslim conquests. And so it can be a claim by Jews that like, hey, we're older here. Like we have, of course, they have the Bible and sort of the stories, but these are like actual artifacts being found. And then most of the scholars who end up studying the Dead Sea Scrolls first are either Western, American, or French, or British, or Israeli scholars. So there's, there's some pretty significant Israeli politicians who started out as scholars or Israeli scholars who were studying the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 40s and 50s. As you and I both know so much of this stuff when it comes to these arguments where religion meets politics and stuff is based on semantics and based on narrative. Wouldn't you think that if you found something as... Call us footballers back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality.

42:29Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwreck up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. 7 Up, Flip the Sepp Potentially groundbreaking is this. You'd want to make sure you had representation from all the different types of religions or groups in the world and their best scholars to be able to come in altogether.

43:33And not even come to a consensus but everyone have a chance to review it and find what they can and then put it out to the public. All the different perspectives and allow people to decide. I find it interesting when right away you say it's just some western guys and some Israeli guys coming in and looking at this stuff when there's a whole big world out there of other types of people. Hey guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button. It's a huge help. Thank you. Yes, well so part of it would be yes, there is a big world. How many people have the expertise to read for century texts? I do not. Most people do not. And the people who do tended to be in the year 1947, tended to be in western universities, including some of these Israeli scholars were trained in Europe in previous before World War II and stuff like that. So that's part of it. I think they tried to give them credit. They tried to make this a more cosmopolitan global effort to study these Dead Sea Scrolls.

44:33A big part of the effort was actually just understanding. So these are parchment papers wrapped around in sort of scrolls. We pull them up, while Dan's explaining this. There's a good picture of that. Yeah. And there were often in jars. And the reason they're even still around is because they were in very, very dry caves where water is the enemy of keeping paper. And so you can see from the pictures there, I mean, there's like scraps. A lot of these are like scraps. You're like peeling apart layers of these scrolls. So big challenge was just understanding what did they say? And that's where you can start, you know, you start pulling these away. And you see some of them are basically like the texts of the Bible. And you can then start comparing them to the text we have now. So big challenge was that. So in that sense, they gathered, I mean, it was under the auspices of the Israeli government. That's a big part of the politics here is who controls the caves.

45:34And this is before it was created too. So four to seven is the discovery. Yeah. So 47 is the discovery. And there's a whole interesting story, which I don't remember all the details to about who actually gets to buy these things. Because it's sort of on the black market for a while or it's on, I mean, these are recognized to be very valuable. They're discovered, I believe, by some shepherds who, yeah, let's pull that out. Who sheep or other animal sort of like go into one of these caves. So deep scatter right here. The first seven original Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947 were initially bought from Bedouin Shepherds by two distinct buyers through Bethlehem and Teaks dealers. Archaeologists, Elizara Leipa, Sookranek bought three skulls, scrolls for the Hebrew University and Archbishop Marr Athanas, Yeshue, Samuel bought the other four for the Syrian Orthodox Church. And can we hit the Wikipedia, the CIA, a pdf one right there? Let's just see what they say. So the Dead Sea Scrolls do do go up a little bit.

46:34Dead Sea Scrolls is the narrow sense identical with the Kumron Caves Scrolls or a set of ancient Jewish biblical manuscripts from the second temple period. That's that like 100 year kind of thing you were saying. Okay. They were discovered over a period of 10 years between 1946 and 56 at the Kumron Caves near Eine Fishkin in the West Bank in the northern shore of the Dead Sea dating from the third century BCE to the first century CE. The Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the various Jewish and Christian biblical canons including Dudo canonical, Dudo canonical manuscripts from the late second temple Judaism as well as extra biblical books as such they cast new light on the emergence of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity and their relationship with Jewish religious traditions and the wider sense the Dead Sea Scrolls also includes similar findings and elsewhere in the Judean desert and are sometimes called Judean deserts. Some of the scrolls found outside Kumron are from later centuries almost all of the 15,000 scrolls and scroll fragments are held in the shrine of the book at the Israel Museum and Jerusalem. So they were bought off these guys who were selling them.

47:41Did we ever get the story of how they like they just walked into the caves one day and they're like, oh shit. I believe the story is they had like an Aaron animal like either a sheep or something that went into one of these caves and these caves are we. I don't know if you can pull the caves are sort of like on a call on at least some of them are on a cliff and so it's not something where people would be walking by regularly and obviously for centuries no one you know no one walk by. Yeah, so you see like the top left. Yeah, see the one over one over right there. Whoa, so all those holes right there are the caves. Yeah, so obviously that the Dead Sea down below like we're looking from where the Dead Sea is or might. That's a good question. I don't know. Damn, a Dan you're supposed to know. My geography is not that good but yeah, they're right there. You can go to them today or you can you I don't know if you can go in them but you can go and drive by them still today. Yeah, look at that one on the left. Do you see it gray on the far left over. Yeah, perfect.

48:43Oh, those people. Those are people inside. Are they living in wait they have like cavemen. Yeah, I think those are excavators. Okay, well, they were they were peering out like there were trolls under the yeah, sorry excavators. All right, wow. So a sheep went in there and I think that's the sort of that's the full history. I don't know if there's like a better documentation that but the idea is like they stumbled upon them. Yeah, they've been shown out to that sheep. Right, right. So yeah, so for centuries, no one knew these existed. If they had, they probably would have done something with them. And it's just through the sort of fortune of the dry desert that they were preserved. And so they become this huge bombshell. I mean, it's sort of a it's a really dramatic moment in archaeology history, which doesn't have too many dramatic moments where you suddenly get to pull back almost 2000 years and see like, oh, how much of this is human construction between then and now? And what's interesting though too is going back to who got to do this.

49:46So as you mentioned, Western some Israeli scholars did this. It's actually not the kids. So a lot of those scholars actually ended up becoming quite they were not Zionists in the way that we might think of Christian Zionists today. Even if they were Christian, they were actually many of them became critical of Israeli politics. Israeli policy because for an archaeologist, your desire is to preserve whatever is around. Wars don't preserve things. And for most of these archaeologists, they wanted access to the whole region. And besides Israel, the whole region is full of Arab and Turkey and Iran of nations that are hostile to Israel. So there's famous sort of archaeologists in the 60s and 70s who are very critical of Israel because in a you want to give them credit, they want open, they don't want war, they want to preserve things. If you think about just their own self-interest, they want to be on the good side of Arab countries because they want access to Jordan, they want access to Egypt.

50:53And to be very pro-Israel is a quick way to sort of get on the bad list of those countries. It's not going to get you inside the bars there. Yeah, I feel you. So they find all this stuff. And what was interesting there in the language is how when they describe in these books that the Dead Sea Scrolls, or these scrolls, I should say, where it's between, I want to say it was like 3rd century BC and 1st century CE. And it used some sort of phrase like the Judeic and then Christian traditions. Yeah. Obviously, and I'm way over some flying here, you can go way more academic on me. But with Judaism, they follow the Torah, which is effectively the Old Testament, right? And then with Christianity, it adds in the New Testament and this figure is a Messiah, Jesus Christ. And that's where the difference between the two religions are. So when they say they found stuff within those traditions, thinking of the timeline, it's overlapping for before, during and after Christ, based on the years right there.

51:53But how do they, if you're finding both, how do you make sense of deciding that both can be right? And let me ask that in a better way. If Christianity's right, the Messiah happened and it was Jesus. And it already, it happened. And therefore the Judaism religion that's waiting for the Messiah to happen is incorrect. If Judaism is correct, Jesus was just a guy who talked and he wasn't an actual Messiah. So not that I care, but like it has to be one or the other there, but it sounds like they found evidence and said, it's not like it can all be true, or am I just misunderstanding that? Well, I think what they were saying there was that the Old Testament texts that were in the scrolls are claimed by both Christians and Jews. So Christians claim the Old Testament as part of their scripture Jews do, Jews claim the Hebrew Bible. So if you find a scroll of Isaiah or Jeremiah, it's both interesting to Christians and to Jews.

52:56Now, you bring up a much bigger question about how does Judaism Christianity, how do Jews and Christians think about themselves in relation to each other? And for a lot of the last 2,000 years, it's been a story of conflict and antithesis, the idea that, like you said, that Jesus came in the theological language we use now, the church superseded Israel. So superseding has taken the place of. So yeah, God worked with Jews in the Old Testament. Now he's working with anyone who believes in Jesus. And so, you know, the implications of that, theologically, if you look at like Augustine, he says, well, the Jews are going to stick around, but as an example of what happens when a people rejects Jesus. They're going to be they're going to wander, they're not going to have a state. They're going to be guests in other people's lands. And it'll be a good, it'll be a good teaching tool for the rest of us to remember what happens.

53:59So that's what Augustine said. That was in the 4th century. What about the other religions that do have states though that don't accept Jesus? How did he? Yeah, so he would say, I mean, this is part of the particular thing is like there's a particular both, you could say closeness and animosity between Jews and Christians because of the claim that, you know, both are claiming the Old Testament. And so that wasn't, Augustine wasn't creating a bigger, I guess, a theology of, you only get a state if you're a Christian type thing, but he was saying the particular way that the Jewish people lost their sovereignty, particularly they were occupied by the Romans. And then in the year 70, they tried to revolt or they tried to vote in 67. And by 70, you know, the Romans come in and destroy their temple, scatter them. The Roman army puts salt on where the temple is as a sign of like nothing will grow here ever again. And then since then, you know, up until Augustine's time, up until you could say the 20th century Jews are wandering people.

55:03They don't, they don't get to claim statehood. So Augustine was saying that throughout the Middle Ages, you get other types of Christian views. This is where like the anti Jewish idea of like blood libel comes from. There's also bigger theological ideas. So the idea that the Old Testament is about laws and rules. And the New Testament is about grace and love. And so Christianity is a superior religion to Judaism. These are sort of the categories that Christians and Jews have through the 20th century. So what changed? Yeah. And again, I don't know if there were up to me no one would fight over this stuff. You believe what you want to believe. If we all have in common that we don't know what the fuck happens to the lights go out anyway. But since people do, and this is like a really big deal, the split in the 20th century, it sounds like obviously it's even before 1948 when an actual state forms. But what changes such that suddenly there's now a group of Christians who become, you know,

56:03and then they're probably in support of like the Jewish state in particularly. Yeah. Well, it's part of a bigger movement, you could say between Jews and Christians. So some of what happens is you get more liberal ideas of religion in the 19th century that are less exclusiveist. And so you get Christians who say, yeah, Jesus is a way to the afterlife to heaven, but it doesn't have to be the only way. And so in 1893, there's a world fair in Chicago. There's something called the world parliament of religions put on by these more liberal people. The world parliament of religions. Yeah, funky. Yeah, let's call up some images of that. Interesting. And so you're getting not just Muslims, Jews and Christians, but you're getting Hindu and Buddhist leaders. And sometimes it looks so they're all very different. So that's it. That's in 1890 September 11th to 27th in 1893. Yeah. So it's all like chilling. So this is this is in Chicago. And the idea here is maybe there's a there's a larger truth that all the religions are pointing toward.

57:10So that's one thing that just sort of softened some of the some of the edges. Another is by the 20s and 30s, you start getting this idea that the difference between communism and then fascism and the West is this religious tradition that goes back to the Hebrew Bible. And so you start getting this is where the term Judeo Christianity comes from. Oh, it comes from that from the 20s and 30s. Yeah, explain that some more like in detail. Yeah, specifically that rose. So so the idea here is it's really important that it's in the 20s and 30s. So it's post World War One. Yeah. Bullshake Revolution happens. Major Red Scare in the US. And one of the questions that a lot of Americans are asking is sort of what makes democracy and capitalism distinct from communism. And one of the things that a lot of not just, you know, people like Woodward Wilson would come up with this, but but not not just politicians come up with is well, these ideas like democracy and capitalism are based on Christianity.

58:15Christian ideas or more of the point biblical ideas. So that's interesting. The base capitalism on Christian ideas. Yeah, so for cap well, capables would be like, you know, the Bible assumes sort of something like property property rights. A lot of the rights language is in this era said like rights aren't just a natural thing out there. Like we wanted we have to source them like. And this goes back to you know, people are endowed by their creator with life liberty and pursuit. Right. So it goes to sort of this idea of this tradition of of Western liberalism that isn't Christian, per se, but is inspired by sort of Christian ideas. A key text here is in Genesis. One when God creates man and woman, he creates them in their in his image. And so the idea is like every purse every man and woman is endowed by their creator with the image of God on them. So there's like a dignity to the individual person. A lot of this was about differentiating the collectivism of Bolshevism and communism and the individuality that was at the heart of Western ideas of rights.

59:27And you get capitalism and democracy and things coming out of that. It's interesting how that can go because like it's interesting how when I've read parts of the Bible and you heard heard some of the stories, I'm always struck by how there's almost a mix of the two. Like there's a mix of individualism and there's a mix of socialism. I don't mean that literally politically. I mean that like some of the themes are kind of interspersed together. And then when you look at how these systems, if you want to put labels on it, let's say you have radical socialism and radical libertarianism. If you saw either those put into place today in any type of large population, they technically don't work. But it's like they had like this weird balance in the Bible. People who are going to twist my words when I say that. But that's always interesting. Oh, I think you're totally right. And that's part of what we're seeing in the American context is a largely Protestant reading of this.

1:00:27So you go back to the Middle Ages, Middle Age Catholicism, not high on individual rights. Very communal, very, you know, they're... Pay your ties. Pay your ties, you're part of your, you're a surf or you're part of your community. That's right. The king runs things. It's like it's not democratic. So it's not like every Christian, every society that based on Christianity has to become a Western democracy. But you're getting into 20th century people in America, people in Britain making this case that particularly a Protestant reading of the Bible would put these ideas about individualism, dignity as sort of the unique contributions of Christianity to modern civilization. And they're hitting that against communism first. And then when fascism becomes a bigger deal in the 20s and 30s against fascism. Both of them are seen as these authoritarian, absolutist type collective projects. Can we take one tangent on this? Because obviously we're talking about the change that happened to where Christian Zionism really rose in the 20th century out of the 19th.

1:01:34But just for like some historical context, because I always throw this around all the time, but there's a huge story in the middle of this involving Martin Luther and all that. When the Protestant Reformation, I think it was happened to where they split Martin Luther led the movement and they split off from the Catholic church. That was back. I want to say in the 15th century, correct me if I'm wrong. 16th century. 16th century. What led to that? And what how was it set up differently? Obviously we know there are different sects today. But like what back at the beginning, what were the key differences between what became the Protestant church and the Catholic church? Yeah, I mean, so Luther, Martin Luther is the guy that sort of kicks this off. He nails his 95 feces to a wall in Vittenburg, that sort of the beginning of the Reformation. His big concerns were about corruption in the Catholic hierarchy and the church hierarchy. And then he was really worked up over this idea of, well, not forgetting the term. Not tithes, but.

1:02:35Something involving payments. Yeah, yeah, involving payments for getting rid of your sins in the next life. Maybe we can. Yeah, that's on the tip of my tongue. I know what you're talking about. Maybe deep and finite. Yeah, yeah. The thing that the cat, the 95 feces, the thing the Catholic church would make people do. One day starts with a C, but I'm not paid to get rid of their sins. What's the term for what the Catholic church is? Indulgences, it's not C. Indulgences. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip, full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below.