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Is Jesus God? Three YouTube Personalities Answer || SLP563 · The Speak Life Podcast

0:13
SPEAKER_08: I think that the belief that Jesus is God is something that develops in early Christianity after Jesus died.
0:17
SPEAKER_08: I think there's nothing that Jesus had himself that can make us confidently say that he was walking around claiming to be God.
0:22
SPEAKER_05: But why would they claim that for him if he was not claiming that for himself?
0:25
SPEAKER_05: And certainly he's killed on a blasphemy charge, which is a charge of claiming to be God.
0:30
SPEAKER_05: The idea that there's a more primitive form of the words of Jesus that never claimed divinity just goes completely against the evidence.
0:37
SPEAKER_05: The earliest stuff we have from Mark or from Philippians or from Colossians, the earliest stuff we have about Jesus is of Jesus with this exalted divine identity.
0:46
SPEAKER_05: Alex might want to tell a just so story about how Jesus claimed very little for himself, and then the story snowballs, but that falls foul of the evidence.
0:54
SPEAKER_05: The evidence that we have is that Jesus was claiming to be God from the earliest time.
0:58
SPEAKER_05: What do you need in order to believe that Jesus is God?
1:01
SPEAKER_05: Ordinarily, I'd say scripture is the best way of figuring out who Jesus is, but you've got to let the scriptures speak to you on their own terms, and I don't think that Alex did that in this debate anyway.
1:13
SPEAKER_05: Let's have a look at somebody else's approach to who is Jesus, and that is Jordan Peterson.
1:16
SPEAKER_05: Stephen Bartlett wants to nail him on the question of what do you believe really, Jordan Peterson, and do you really believe that Jesus is God?
1:24
SPEAKER_02: I think that the claim that Christ is the embodiment of the prophet and the laws, I think that's true.
1:30
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
1:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:32
SPEAKER_02: That that's complicated.
1:33
SPEAKER_02: It's very, very complicated, but I think it's true.
1:36
SPEAKER_03: Do you believe that Jesus was God?
1:39
SPEAKER_03: God.
1:40
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
1:40
SPEAKER_05: I actually really love that answer.
1:42
SPEAKER_05: The just the kind of, do you think Jesus is God?
1:46
SPEAKER_05: Who is Jesus of Nazareth?
1:48
SPEAKER_05: It's perhaps the key question in all of history.
1:50
SPEAKER_05: And in the last three weeks, three different YouTube personalities have given three different answers.
1:55
SPEAKER_05: There's been uh Joe Rogan, as he was asked by Wes Huff.
1:59
SPEAKER_05: There is Jordan Peterson, as he was asked by Stephen Bartlett, aka the Diary of a CEO.
2:04
SPEAKER_05: And there is Alex O'Connor, who on the Jubilee channel wanted to defend the notion that Jesus never claimed to be God.
2:10
SPEAKER_05: Now, what's interesting to me is that all three of these people took different routes in order to answer the question, and they came to different destinations.
2:17
SPEAKER_05: Let's look at Wes Huff as he asks Joe Rogan this key question.
2:21
SPEAKER_01: In all of this, what do you think of Jesus?
2:23
SPEAKER_01: Like in terms of your own like journeying and trying to find answers to ultimate questions.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: What do you think of the historical person of Jesus?
2:33
SPEAKER_00: Well, it certainly seems like there's a lot of people that believe that there was this very exceptional human being that existed.
2:41
SPEAKER_05: So the first thing he does is go back to the historical impact of Jesus.
2:44
SPEAKER_05: Go back to the first century, and something erupted in the middle of human history.
2:49
SPEAKER_05: There began to be questions about Jesus of Nazareth 2,000 years ago.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: So the question is, what does that mean?
2:56
SPEAKER_00: Does it mean he was the son of God?
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Does it mean he was just some completely unique human being that had this vision of humanity and this way of educating people and spreading this ideology that would ultimately change the way human beings interact with each other forever?
3:18
SPEAKER_05: He has definitely had an unprecedented historical impact.
3:21
SPEAKER_05: What explains that?
3:22
SPEAKER_05: Is it that he is the son of God, or is it that he is simply an exceptional human being who has nevertheless taught the world to see everything differently?
3:31
SPEAKER_05: What you cannot deny is that Jesus of Nazareth has had an epochal significance on planet Earth.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell So what is is is he the son of God?
3:40
SPEAKER_00: Well, are we all?
3:41
SPEAKER_00: That's another question, right?
3:43
SPEAKER_00: Or do we all have that inside of us?
3:45
SPEAKER_00: Do we all have that ability to change everything around us inside of us?
3:48
SPEAKER_00: Do we all have that unique connection to the divine?
3:53
SPEAKER_00: And is he a representation of the best version of that, or was he an actual person that was the son of God?
4:00
SPEAKER_05: Are we all sons of God, or is it just Jesus who is uniquely the Son of God?
4:03
SPEAKER_05: Well, he's already answered that Jesus has a unique place in humanity.
4:08
SPEAKER_05: He has a unique place in history.
4:10
SPEAKER_05: Um there has been a big bang that has kind of led to an expanding universe of Christian civilization, and he is at the heart of that bang.
4:18
SPEAKER_05: Now, we might reflect back on that and we might start to consider, oh, perhaps there is a brotherhood of man and a fatherhood of God, and we can all be sons of God, sons and daughters of God together.
4:28
SPEAKER_05: Well, we only now think that because Jesus was this unique figure who invites us into his family.
4:35
SPEAKER_05: So I think you can account both for the uniqueness of Christ the Son of God and that we might participate in some kind of very exalted nature if we come to this unique individual called Jesus.
4:46
SPEAKER_05: But these are the sorts of things that Joe Rogan thinks about when he thinks about the unique person of Jesus and how he has led us to start thinking some quite exalted things about humanity more generally.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: And is it important?
4:58
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what does it mean?
5:01
SPEAKER_00: It it's just the fact that it's a question to ponder is a miracle in itself, in a way.
5:09
SPEAKER_05: The fact that we are even talking about Jesus of Nazareth in the year 2025 is a miracle all by itself.
5:15
SPEAKER_05: As Fleming Rutledge has said about the resurrection, she says the best argument for the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is that you have heard of him.
5:22
SPEAKER_05: There's no reason why we should be talking about Jesus, the unique Son of God, and our ability to become sons and daughters of God, and all that kind of stuff.
5:29
SPEAKER_05: The fact that we are thinking about the death and resurrection of this historical individual is a miracle, and it's really worth reflecting on.
5:37
SPEAKER_05: This is where Joe Rogan's mind goes when he thinks who is Jesus.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: Just the fact that there's this concept of this person that died for our sins as a son of God, but you have to buy a bunch you have to believe in a bunch of stuff to go that way.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: Like just the concept of that is interesting to people because what it can do to people is offer them a very unique way to change the way they feel about the world itself.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: And if you do follow that, I know a lot of Christians are hardcore Christians, they're some of the nicest people you'll ever meet in your life.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: So it does work.
6:18
SPEAKER_05: So this is interesting.
6:19
SPEAKER_05: Having seen the historical impact of Jesus and his movement, he is noticing that those who join the movement gain a sanity and a groundedness and a wisdom for life that is undeniable.
6:31
SPEAKER_05: And it works.
6:32
SPEAKER_05: So it is true to the degree that it works.
6:35
SPEAKER_05: The Jesus revolution has brought about a flourishing kind of life that is undeniable.
6:40
SPEAKER_05: And those who walk in the way of Jesus find sanity and groundedness and wisdom for life, and that seems to recommend to Joe, anyway, it's something about the truth of that story.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Right?
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Like if you do live like a Christian and you do follow the principles of Christ, you will have a richer, more love-filled life.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: So it is true, right?
7:02
SPEAKER_00: But you have to submit to this concept that this guy was the child of God who came down to earth, let himself be crucified, came back from the dead, explained a bunch of stuff for people, and then said, Alright, see you when I come back.
7:17
SPEAKER_05: So Joe is noticing a lot of people who are living their way into Christian truths, and he's wondering whether we can believe the metaphysics behind the morals.
7:26
SPEAKER_05: There is a morality that seems to make sense.
7:28
SPEAKER_05: Is that grounded in a metaphysics that you and I can buy nowadays?
7:32
SPEAKER_05: Christianity is sociologically true.
7:35
SPEAKER_05: Is it also supernaturally true?
7:37
SPEAKER_05: Is that something that Joe Rogan can get on board with?
7:40
SPEAKER_05: The jury's out for Joe right now.
7:42
SPEAKER_05: But that's one way of answering the question: who is Jesus?
7:45
SPEAKER_05: We go back to history and we see the sociological phenomenon of Christianity, which is very difficult to explain on purely naturalistic terms.
7:53
SPEAKER_05: And then we might live ourselves into the truths of Christ and try and walk in the way of Christ, and maybe we'll discover that Jesus is true, not just in terms of morality, but in terms of metaphysics.
8:05
SPEAKER_05: That's the Joe Rogan approach to who is Jesus.
8:08
SPEAKER_05: Let's have a look at somebody else's approach to who is Jesus, and that is Jordan Peterson.
8:12
SPEAKER_05: He was on the diary of a CEO podcast, and that's Stephen Bartlett.
8:16
SPEAKER_05: Stephen Bartlett wants to nail him on the question of what do you believe really, Jordan Peterson, and do you really believe that Jesus is God?
8:23
SPEAKER_05: Let's have a look.
8:24
SPEAKER_03: This is an interesting question, it's a very direct one, but I would love just an answer that I because I haven't got clarity on this.
8:30
SPEAKER_03: What is it you bel what what God is it that you believe in?
8:34
SPEAKER_05: So here's how Jordan Peterson will answer the question, what do you believe?
8:37
SPEAKER_05: He's gonna talk about Jesus as divine, and he's gonna talk about Jesus as divine in terms of the story of Christ.
8:43
SPEAKER_05: So where Joe Rogan talks about history and about the Jesus movement embodying itself and when you join that community pragmatically, it seems to work.
8:52
SPEAKER_05: He's gonna talk about history and pragmatics.
8:54
SPEAKER_05: Jordan Peterson is gonna talk about narrative, he's gonna talk about story, and the Christ story is the maximally great story.
9:01
SPEAKER_05: That's the way Jordan Peterson answers the question: is Jesus God?
9:05
SPEAKER_02: Postmodernists figured out that we live in a story, but then they leapt to a faulty conclusion of two forms.
9:12
SPEAKER_02: Well, three.
9:13
SPEAKER_02: There's no uniting story.
9:16
SPEAKER_02: That was one of their conclusions.
9:17
SPEAKER_02: In fact, the definition of postmodernism is skepticism of meta-narratives.
9:22
SPEAKER_02: There's no uniting story.
9:24
SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, that's a stupid theory because it there's no union.
9:30
SPEAKER_02: So what?
9:30
SPEAKER_02: There's just diversity.
9:32
SPEAKER_02: Well, we worship diversity now in this utterly foolish manner.
9:36
SPEAKER_02: There's no difference between diversity and war.
9:40
SPEAKER_02: Without a uniting narrative, there's nothing but war.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: So no, that's not gonna work.
9:47
SPEAKER_02: It's wrong.
9:49
SPEAKER_02: Hedonistic self-gratification.
9:51
SPEAKER_02: There's Michel Foucault for you to do a T.
9:54
SPEAKER_02: It's like, why is that wrong?
9:55
SPEAKER_02: Why can't people just do what they want with whoever they want all the time?
9:59
SPEAKER_02: Because it defeats itself and quickly.
10:02
SPEAKER_02: It's not a sustainable game.
10:03
SPEAKER_02: If it's all about you and your whims, I don't want to be anywhere near you.
10:08
SPEAKER_02: And that won't be so good for you.
10:11
SPEAKER_02: That's not gonna work.
10:13
SPEAKER_02: Power.
10:14
SPEAKER_02: That's really where the postmodernists landed with their what would you say?
10:19
SPEAKER_02: Temptation to turn towards Mars.
10:22
SPEAKER_02: It's all about power.
10:24
SPEAKER_02: It's like, first of all, that's probably a confession, if that's what you believe.
10:28
SPEAKER_02: And second, no, it's not.
10:31
SPEAKER_02: Try tyrannizing your wife and see how well that works for you.
10:35
SPEAKER_02: Try tyrannizing yourself and see how successful you are.
10:39
SPEAKER_02: Power's not the game.
10:41
SPEAKER_02: Okay, what's the game?
10:43
SPEAKER_02: What's the story?
10:44
SPEAKER_05: So, what's the story?
10:45
SPEAKER_05: That is Jordan Peterson's way into answering the question: who is Jesus?
10:48
SPEAKER_05: What is the story?
10:49
SPEAKER_05: And the postmodernist story, well, um, some of them don't believe that you can have a united narrative.
10:54
SPEAKER_05: Some of them think that the narrative is pleasure and that just falls apart.
10:57
SPEAKER_05: Some of them think that it's power and that is equivalent to war.
11:00
SPEAKER_05: Um, we need a story that actually unites humanity, a story in which we truly flourish and thrive as humans.
11:08
SPEAKER_05: What is that story?
11:09
SPEAKER_05: Well, the maximally great story is the story of voluntary sacrifice, Christ descending from the highest heights to the deepest depths to make a sacrifice for the world forever.
11:20
SPEAKER_05: It's a maximally great story.
11:22
SPEAKER_05: The dimensions of this are unimprovable, and for that reason, Jordan Peterson identifies that Christ story as the most divine thing we've ever seen.
11:31
SPEAKER_05: This is the way he argues.
11:33
SPEAKER_02: What's the story?
11:34
SPEAKER_02: I mentioned earlier.
11:36
SPEAKER_02: It's voluntary self-sacrifice.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: Right.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: You offer yourself up in the service of something higher.
11:47
SPEAKER_02: That's the basis of society.
11:48
SPEAKER_02: That's the basis of psychological stability.
11:51
SPEAKER_02: The Christian insistence is that that's the basis of the world.
11:55
SPEAKER_05: The basis of the world is the self-sacrifice of the highest figure descending to the deepest steps for the greatest effect on the most number of people for the longest duration.
12:04
SPEAKER_05: This is the maximally great story that is at the foundation of the world.
12:07
SPEAKER_05: The lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, says Revelation 13, verse 8.
12:11
SPEAKER_05: And Jordan Peterson looks at the Christ story and he says, Yep, that's the unimprovable orienting story.
12:16
SPEAKER_05: That is transcendent.
12:18
SPEAKER_05: Um, that is maximally great.
12:20
SPEAKER_05: Let's just call that God.
12:22
SPEAKER_05: Um Stephen Bartlett is is trying to wrestle through with that, as I'm sure lots of us are.
12:26
SPEAKER_05: Here's what Stephen asks.
12:28
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna ask you again, because I I want to be I want to be clear, is what what is what is you bel what is the God you believe in?
12:36
SPEAKER_02: I think that the claim that Christ is the embodiment of the prophet and the laws, I think that's true.
12:41
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
12:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
12:43
SPEAKER_02: That that's complicated.
12:45
SPEAKER_02: It's very, very complicated, but I think it's true.
12:48
SPEAKER_03: So you believe that Jesus was God?
12:51
SPEAKER_03: God.
12:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
12:54
SPEAKER_05: I actually really love that answer.
12:56
SPEAKER_05: The just the kind of, do you think Jesus is God?
13:00
SPEAKER_05: Um that that's my Christian instinct too.
13:03
SPEAKER_05: Like, what else is going to be God?
13:05
SPEAKER_05: Like, if you're going to if we're going to be talking about anybody who is worthy of the name of God, um, who else are we going to be talking about other than Jesus?
13:13
SPEAKER_05: It reminds me of uh there was a woman I spoke to at uh Exeter University.
13:18
SPEAKER_05: I was giving some talks at Exeter University, and uh throughout the week there was this one woman who kept on coming, sitting in the front row, and she was taking copious notes of everything that I was saying from the scriptures.
13:27
SPEAKER_05: And uh I got to talk to her afterwards, and she was from Iran and she was studying at Exeter, doing uh a like a law degree, like a master's in law, but really what she wanted to do was come to the West and study the Bible, because um as a teenager, her uncle had sidled up to her during a wedding, and he'd he'd become a Christian, uh, and but secretly.
13:50
SPEAKER_05: And so he said to her, Um, here, read these gospels.
13:54
SPEAKER_05: And uh so the the Injil in in the Quran, the f the the four gospels, Injil is the is the name for the the Arabic name for the word gospel.
14:02
SPEAKER_05: And you're meant to read the Injil, and you're meant to know all about Isa, um, as the Quran calls Jesus.
14:08
SPEAKER_05: And and so he just smuggled her a copy of the Injil and he said, Read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
14:14
SPEAKER_05: And it was the most rebellious thing she could do as a teenager, and so that is indeed what she did.
14:19
SPEAKER_05: And uh, you know, under cover of night, she would read through Matthew, Mark, and she got halfway through Luke's gospel, and she said, I realized that God could not be the God of the Ayatollahs, that is the religious authorities, he must be the Jesus God.
14:31
SPEAKER_05: And I've been using that phrase ever since, the Jesus God.
14:34
SPEAKER_05: Um, whoever she had thought of as being worthy of the name of God, she read about Jesus and he blew that concept out of the water.
14:44
SPEAKER_05: And so when Stephen Butler asks Jordan Peterson, do you think Christ is God?
14:50
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
14:51
SPEAKER_05: It's like what Lord Byron said, you know, the poet, he said, if God is not like Jesus Christ, he ought to be.
14:56
SPEAKER_05: Okay?
14:57
SPEAKER_05: He ought to get his act together and be more Christ-like.
15:01
SPEAKER_05: The Christian doctrine of God is that Jesus is the one word, the one image, the one wisdom, the Son of God, in that unique sense, the exact representation of the Father's being.
15:14
SPEAKER_05: That's who Jesus is.
15:15
SPEAKER_05: Is Jesus is Jesus God?
15:17
SPEAKER_05: For a Christian, it's like, well, yeah, well, who else is God?
15:22
SPEAKER_05: Like the question is not, is Jesus God?
15:25
SPEAKER_05: The the question is what else measures up to his standards as this maximally great figure who descended from the highest heights to the deepest depths to have the greatest impact on the most number of people for the longest duration.
15:39
SPEAKER_05: Um, if Jesus isn't God, I don't know who is.
15:43
SPEAKER_05: I love that answer um from Jordan Peterson.
15:46
SPEAKER_05: Is Christ God?
15:47
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, like almost definitionally so.
15:49
SPEAKER_05: Let's let's have a look at the answer again.
15:50
SPEAKER_03: So you believe that Jesus was God?
15:53
SPEAKER_03: God Yeah.
15:57
SPEAKER_02: I I think I think if you understand what that means, then it it's indisputable.
16:04
SPEAKER_02: I'll give you I'll give you a brief explanation of why.
16:40
SPEAKER_02: And there's no difference between that which best addresses the problems of mankind and the divine, those are the same thing.
16:52
SPEAKER_02: And I can't see how that can be otherwise, because the contrary hypothesis would be that you would adapt best to your life by avoiding things that are difficult and terrifying, and no one believes that.
17:04
SPEAKER_02: And so the pattern of the passion this is the voluntary self-sacrifice issue taken to its extreme.
17:11
SPEAKER_02: The pattern of the passion is the decision to voluntarily confront and welcome anything that happens to you, no matter what it is.
17:21
SPEAKER_02: And that's a terrible thing to ask or endeavor to undertake, but well, the alternative is to shrink away.
17:35
SPEAKER_05: Now, interestingly, here Jordan kind of mixes up between um Christ as the archetype that we are to follow and Christ as the answer to the human problem.
17:44
SPEAKER_05: And I think that that that would be an interesting tension in his own theology.
17:48
SPEAKER_05: Um he begins by answering to say that whatever it is that answers the human problem is God, and and so Christ comes as savior in that sense.
17:58
SPEAKER_05: Um but then he sort of shades here into seeing Christ as as merely an archetype for human behavior, and and then he is just the exemplar that we are meant to follow.
18:08
SPEAKER_05: That that is a tension that's right at the heart of uh Jordan Peterson's theology.
18:11
SPEAKER_05: Now, we are to imitate Christ.
18:13
SPEAKER_05: It's just that on the far side of seeing him as the answer and as the savior, then we are raised up on our feet as forgiven sinners who are then to live out Christ's pattern of sacrifice in the world.
18:25
SPEAKER_05: So we are to imitate Christ, but we are to not put the cart before the horse.
18:29
SPEAKER_05: We are we are to um understand Christ first and foremost as gift, as answer to the way of Adam, and then as the copy that we sort of emulate.
18:40
SPEAKER_05: Martin Luther says that in this really brilliant uh pamphlet that he writes in the 1520s, a brief exhortation in what to look for and expect in the Gospels.
18:48
SPEAKER_05: Um the whole pamphlet is about the same length as that title.
18:51
SPEAKER_05: Um it's a very short book with a very long title, a brief exhortation in what to look for and expect in the Gospels.
18:57
SPEAKER_05: And uh and in that book, which is just fantastic, he says the chief article and foundation of the gospel is that before you take Christ as an example, you accept and recognize him as a gift, as a present that God has given you, and that is your own.
19:12
SPEAKER_05: Once you receive him as the gift, as the savior, um, then he sets you on your feet, and then you can go and uh obey the 12 rules for life and 12 more rules for life and all that kind of stuff, and copy him in the way of self-sacrifice.
19:24
SPEAKER_05: But first of all, it is his self-sacrifice that is the answer to the human problem, which he then gifts to us as our kind of life of walking in the footsteps of Christ.
19:34
SPEAKER_05: But first, first we receive him as the answer.
19:37
SPEAKER_05: Second, we copy him as the example.
19:39
SPEAKER_05: But that is the way that Jordan Peterson answers the question, who is Jesus?
19:43
SPEAKER_05: He is the embodiment of the law and the prophets, he is God.
19:47
SPEAKER_05: He is he is the hero in the hero's journey.
19:51
SPEAKER_05: Uh, and and therefore there could not be a more godlike figure than Jesus of Nazareth.
19:56
SPEAKER_05: So we've seen how Joe Rogan answers the question, who is Jesus?
19:59
SPEAKER_05: We've seen the way Jordan Peterson answers the question, who is Jesus?
20:02
SPEAKER_05: Let's have a look at how Alex O'Connor, aka Cosmic Skeptic, answers that question.
20:06
SPEAKER_05: Uh, he was very recently on the Jubilee channel doing one of those one versus 25 uh videos, which is just pure YouTube.
20:15
SPEAKER_05: It's probably not very revealing about the topic under discussion.
20:19
SPEAKER_05: Um, as we'll see as we uh have a look at this segment, um, pretty much all the 25 Christians are kind of working against each other, which really helps Alex out.
20:30
SPEAKER_05: Like a couple of times, the other Christians vote off their fellow Christian right when that fellow Christian has Alex where he wants him.
20:37
SPEAKER_05: But never mind.
20:38
SPEAKER_05: One of the motions that Alex wants debated uh in the 1 vs 25 surrounded video is Jesus never claimed to be God.
20:47
SPEAKER_05: Um so whereas Joe Rogan wants to talk about history, whereas Jordan Peterson wants to talk about story, um, Alex O'Connor wants to focus in on New Testament documents and he wants to think scripturally about whether the Jesus of the Gospels, and in particular the Jesus of John's Gospel, ever claimed to be God himself.
21:09
SPEAKER_05: That is his angle on the question of the divinity of Christ, and we'll see the way he tries to defend his claim that Jesus never claimed to be God.
21:18
SPEAKER_08: My next assertion is that Jesus never claimed to be God.
21:28
SPEAKER_08: So talk to me.
21:29
SPEAKER_08: Where does Jesus claim to be God?
21:30
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so I'm curious when you say that, are you including the book of John?
21:35
SPEAKER_08: So I think that the book of John is probably the least historically reliable in this case.
21:38
SPEAKER_08: So I'm talking about the historical Jesus.
21:40
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
21:41
SPEAKER_08: I do think that there are a number of instances where Jesus appears to claim to be God in John's gospel.
21:45
SPEAKER_08: Okay.
21:45
SPEAKER_08: But even if we think that he actually said that, I still think that there's reason to believe that he wasn't claiming to be God in the sense of being identical with Yahweh.
21:52
SPEAKER_05: Jesus never claimed to be God, is the claim that Alex wants to make.
21:56
SPEAKER_05: Um, and then when he's pressed on John's gospel, he's gonna say that yes, Jesus sort.
22:00
SPEAKER_05: Claims to be God, but he doesn't claim to be identical with Yahweh.
22:03
SPEAKER_05: Now, if Jesus did claim to be identical with Yahweh in that very strict sense, um, I guess Alex is basically expecting Jesus to claim to be a modalist.
22:15
SPEAKER_05: You know about Trinitarian heresies, like uh like Unitarians believe that there is just one person called Yahweh.
22:22
SPEAKER_05: And I guess Jesus, if Jesus has to relate somehow to Yahweh, he either has to be less than Yahweh, in which case that would be a subordinationist, that would be the kind of heresy, like an Aryan, like what Jehovah's Witnesses believe today.
22:36
SPEAKER_05: Or perhaps Jesus sort of dissolves into the one person who is God, and that heresy would be known as uh modalism or Sabalianism.
22:47
SPEAKER_05: Um so is Alex basically saying Jesus never claimed to be a heretic, um, in which case uh all Christians would would say, Yea, and Amen.
22:56
SPEAKER_05: But that that's very interesting.
22:58
SPEAKER_05: He he wants Jesus to claim to be Yahweh.
23:01
SPEAKER_05: Now, interestingly, Mark's gospel, which Alex thinks is the first that was written down, Mark's gospel begins by identifying Jesus as Yahweh.
23:11
SPEAKER_05: Um just have a look at Mark chapter 1, verse 1.
23:13
SPEAKER_05: The beginning of the good news about Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.
23:17
SPEAKER_05: Now, this is all about Jesus' divine identity, because according to the Bible, God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
23:24
SPEAKER_05: Jesus is the Messiah, that is the anointed one filled with the Holy Spirit, and he's the Son of the Father.
23:29
SPEAKER_05: Mark is claiming in verse 1 that he is the second person of the Trinity, but get this.
23:34
SPEAKER_05: As it is written in Isaiah the Prophet, way back in Isaiah chapter 40, about seven centuries earlier, I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way.
23:46
SPEAKER_05: A voice of one calling in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord, for Yahweh.
23:52
SPEAKER_05: If you were to read this back in Isaiah chapter 40, you would see Capital L, Capital O, Capital R, Capital D.
23:57
SPEAKER_05: This is the Lord, this is Yahweh, this is Jehovah, prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.
24:03
SPEAKER_05: And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
24:08
SPEAKER_05: So John the Baptist is the voice preparing the way for Jesus.
24:12
SPEAKER_05: Okay, so if John is the voice, who is Jesus?
24:16
SPEAKER_05: Jesus is Yahweh.
24:17
SPEAKER_05: This is the way that the very first gospel presents Jesus to the world.
24:22
SPEAKER_05: Now I understand that these aren't the words of Christ himself, but this is the way that Mark understands Jesus to be.
24:27
SPEAKER_05: And first of all, he puts everything in a Trinitarian frame.
24:31
SPEAKER_05: Here is the Spirit-filled Son of the Father, right?
24:34
SPEAKER_05: The second person of God.
24:36
SPEAKER_05: But he can take the name Lord, not that he is identical with the Father, but just as the Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, and the Spirit is Lord, there are not three Lords, but one Lord.
24:47
SPEAKER_05: But the Father's Son is also given the name and nature of Yahweh.
24:52
SPEAKER_05: Um and this is right there in the earliest gospel.
24:56
SPEAKER_05: The earliest ways we know to speak of Jesus are divine ways.
25:00
SPEAKER_05: Um, and obviously the gospels aren't the first things written down.
25:04
SPEAKER_05: Paul's letters speak of Christ as the eternal Son of the Father, the one through whom heaven and earth was created.
25:10
SPEAKER_05: Just have a look at Colossians chapter one or have a look at Philippians chapter two, this preservation of a hymn that was being sung in the early church, being in very nature God.
25:19
SPEAKER_05: Jesus did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made himself nothing.
25:23
SPEAKER_05: Jesus is in very nature God.
25:25
SPEAKER_05: Okay?
25:26
SPEAKER_05: So the very earliest ways of handling Jesus, of explaining Jesus to the world are utterly divine ways.
25:34
SPEAKER_05: And they include identifying Jesus as Yahweh.
25:37
SPEAKER_05: But listen to what Alex says.
25:39
SPEAKER_08: I do think that there are a number of instances where Jesus appears to claim to be God in John's Gospel.
25:43
SPEAKER_08: Okay.
25:43
SPEAKER_08: But even if we think that he actually said that, I still think that there's reason to believe that he wasn't claiming to be God in the sense of being identical with Yahweh.
25:50
SPEAKER_04: When you talk about the historical Jesus, what else do you pull from other than the Gospels of things that he might have said?
25:56
SPEAKER_08: The things that he might have said, we only really have the Gospels.
25:58
SPEAKER_08: There are multiple sources within the Gospels.
26:00
SPEAKER_04: What do you date at?
26:01
SPEAKER_08: Uh around 70 AD, I sort of go with the scholarly consensus.
26:04
SPEAKER_08: And so you have also a bunch of sources, the unique sources to Matthew and Luke, you also have this potential source called Q from the German for well, right?
26:14
SPEAKER_08: All of this kind of stuff.
26:15
SPEAKER_08: John comes in the latest.
26:16
SPEAKER_08: And so when we're trying to figure out what the historical Jesus actually said, if we've got multiple sources all claiming that he said the same thing, then I think we have good reason to think that he actually said that.
26:24
SPEAKER_08: Claims like before Abraham was, I am, I and the Father are one, anyone who's seen me has seen the Father, only appear in the Gospel of John, not in any of our other sources, which I think makes them less historically reliable.
26:34
SPEAKER_05: So he just rattles off three divine statements from the lips of Jesus, from John's Gospel, and then he says, But those aren't in the rest of the Gospels.
26:40
SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, what about Matthew chapter 11?
26:42
SPEAKER_05: It sounds completely like something that would be found in John's Gospel.
26:45
SPEAKER_05: At that time, Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children.
26:51
SPEAKER_05: Yes, Father, for this is what you are pleased to do.
26:53
SPEAKER_05: All things have been committed to me by my Father.
26:56
SPEAKER_05: No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
27:01
SPEAKER_05: Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
27:05
SPEAKER_05: Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
27:11
SPEAKER_05: Extraordinary self-understanding of Jesus, as in on the divine Father-Son's secret from, you know, from the beginning.
27:18
SPEAKER_05: All things in heaven and earth have been committed to him by his father, and he is the one way to know God, and then he calls the entire world to find its salvation in him and in him alone.
27:29
SPEAKER_05: Sometimes people call this bit from Matthew chapter 11 the Johannine Thunderbolt, as though somehow teaching from John's Gospel had found its way into this particular manuscript.
27:39
SPEAKER_05: Maybe that's true, or maybe Jesus just sounds like he sounds in John because it's the same Jesus.
27:45
SPEAKER_05: Here is an incredible identity that Jesus is owning for himself.
27:48
SPEAKER_05: And Jesus certainly walks around all the Synoptic Gospels like he owns the place.
27:52
SPEAKER_05: He he walks on water claiming himself to be the great I am.
27:55
SPEAKER_05: He forgives sins, which only God can do, he receives worship, which only God can do, and he does that in the Synoptic Gospels just as he does it in John's Gospel.
28:04
SPEAKER_05: So I'm not really sure where Alex is getting his arguments from.
28:08
SPEAKER_04: Well, I like the claim.
28:08
SPEAKER_04: I gotta come out at a little bit different approach because I think that the Gospel writers are claiming that Jesus is God.
28:14
SPEAKER_04: Sure.
28:15
SPEAKER_04: Let's just go with Mark.
28:16
SPEAKER_04: As Mark starts, he talks about John the Baptist preparing the way for the Lord.
28:20
SPEAKER_04: Right?
28:20
SPEAKER_04: What is your response for that?
28:21
SPEAKER_04: Because ensuing Jesus comes.
28:23
SPEAKER_04: I have no problem.
28:24
SPEAKER_08: I've no problem saying that Mark is intending to portray Jesus as God.
28:27
SPEAKER_08: It's not entirely clear, but I have no problem just granting that for the sake of this conversation.
28:30
SPEAKER_08: I think that the belief that Jesus is God is something that develops in early Christianity after Jesus died.
28:35
SPEAKER_08: I think there's nothing that Jesus said himself that can make us confidently say that he was walking around claiming to be God.
28:39
SPEAKER_05: But why would they claim that for him if he was not claiming that for himself?
28:43
SPEAKER_05: And certainly he is, he's killed on a blasphemy charge, which is the ch which is a charge of claiming to be God.
28:49
SPEAKER_05: The idea that there's a more primitive form of the words of Jesus that that never claimed divinity just goes completely against the evidence.
28:56
SPEAKER_05: The earliest stuff we have from Mark or from Philippians or from Colossians, the earliest stuff we have about Jesus is of Jesus with this exalted divine identity.
29:05
SPEAKER_05: Alex might want to tell a just-so story about how Jesus claimed very little for himself and then the story snowballs, but that falls foul of the evidence.
29:13
SPEAKER_05: The evidence that we have is that Jesus was claiming to be God from the earliest time.
29:18
SPEAKER_04: What do you need in order to believe that Jesus is God?
29:21
SPEAKER_04: Because even if we take kind of this development in the Gospels, we can go before that.
29:25
SPEAKER_04: So would you say Paul's letters like Philippians and Colossians, would you say they were written before the Gospels?
29:32
SPEAKER_04: Yes, yeah, yeah, they were written before the Gospels.
29:34
SPEAKER_04: If we're going before the Gospels, we have Paul claiming that Jesus is God in Philippians 2, where he's saying he's was in the form of God, or maybe like a better translation would even be the essence or the nature of God.
29:45
SPEAKER_08: The problem, I think, with sort of quote mining in this respect is that there are quotes that point us in either direction, even in the Gospel of John.
29:50
SPEAKER_08: So Paul, for example, says uh that there is one God, uh, one God, which is the Father, and one Lord Jesus Christ, seeming to separate them.
29:58
SPEAKER_05: The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 8 says there is one God the Father from whom all things have come and for whom we live, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things have come, and through whom we live.
30:09
SPEAKER_05: So the Apostle Paul is giving the most exalted status and dignity to Jesus, through whom the whole creation exists and through whom we live.
30:17
SPEAKER_05: And he even calls him Lord, Greek word curios, which translates which Hebrew word?
30:21
SPEAKER_05: That's right, Yahweh.
30:22
SPEAKER_05: He calls him Yahweh.
30:24
SPEAKER_05: The earliest stuff we have about Jesus is exalted and divine, and it even calls him Yahweh.
30:30
SPEAKER_05: The Father and Son are distinct.
30:32
SPEAKER_05: And yes, some of the biblical data emphasizes the union of Father and Son, and some of it emphasizes the distinction between Father and Son, but that is precisely what the Trinitarian doctrine of God is all about.
30:42
SPEAKER_05: Doing justice to the unity and the distinction of Father and Son.
30:46
SPEAKER_05: But none of this data undermines the Christian understanding of Jesus as the second person of the Trinity who can take the name Yahweh.
30:53
SPEAKER_08: Jesus says things like, My Father is greater than I am.
30:56
SPEAKER_08: He says things like, Nobody knows the hour, not even the Son knows the hour, but only my Father in heaven.
31:00
SPEAKER_08: He says when he's crucified in the first two Gospels, uh, Eli Eli, Lama Salaqtani, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
31:06
SPEAKER_08: I could point to these and say, These are Jesus claiming that he's separate from God.
31:09
SPEAKER_04: Well, there is a distinction from the Father and the Son.
31:11
SPEAKER_04: So we're not, but instead of quote mining, I could just quote the whole thing.
31:15
SPEAKER_04: That though he was in the form of God, didn't count a quality with God, a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
31:22
SPEAKER_08: So I also have no problem saying that Paul thought that Jesus was God.
31:25
SPEAKER_08: Okay.
31:27
SPEAKER_04: That's actually super clarifying for me.
31:28
SPEAKER_04: Because then my question is what piece of evidence do you now need in order to believe that Jesus claimed to be God?
31:36
SPEAKER_05: This guy, Coley, is doing brilliantly.
31:38
SPEAKER_05: Why on earth are they voting him off?
31:41
SPEAKER_05: Like everyone else who did this surrounded.
31:43
SPEAKER_05: If you've got your flag in the air, hang your head in shame.
31:47
SPEAKER_05: Coley is doing the most brilliant job.
31:50
SPEAKER_05: But part of the problem with this format is that basically the Christians are against each other, and because they want to get Coley off so that somebody else can sit down, they're actually letting Alex off the hook.
32:00
SPEAKER_05: You should just let Coley there.
32:02
SPEAKER_05: Coley is doing a fantastic job.
32:04
SPEAKER_05: Well done, Coley.
32:05
SPEAKER_04: Like, what do you what is it for you that you would be like, you know what?
32:07
SPEAKER_04: That convinces me.
32:08
SPEAKER_04: Jesus, in his own words, saying that I am God.
32:10
SPEAKER_04: Right, but he does that in John.
32:11
SPEAKER_08: Where?
32:13
SPEAKER_04: Before Abraham was, I am.
32:14
SPEAKER_04: He's just doing brilliantly.
32:16
SPEAKER_04: He's just doing brilliantly.
32:16
SPEAKER_08: Sure.
32:17
SPEAKER_08: So beho before Abraham was I am.
32:18
SPEAKER_08: First, as I've said, it only appears in the Gospel of John.
32:20
SPEAKER_08: We don't know if the history of the case.
32:21
SPEAKER_05: But he at least said it once, and the claim is that he never did.
32:23
SPEAKER_05: So he said it once, and the claim, Alex, is that Jesus never claimed to be God.
32:27
SPEAKER_05: False.
32:27
SPEAKER_05: Okay?
32:28
SPEAKER_05: Like like Coley has won this.
32:29
SPEAKER_08: If he actually said that, if he was going around claiming to be God in explicit terms.
32:33
SPEAKER_08: That's a great why is it that none of the other gospel writers thought it was a relevant detail to mention?
32:38
SPEAKER_05: But you said to us that the other gospel writers, including the other synoptics, are presenting Jesus as God.
32:43
SPEAKER_05: You've already said that.
32:44
SPEAKER_05: It's difficult to now deal with it because you acknowledge.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: I'm so sorry.
32:48
SPEAKER_00: I've been voted out by the majority.
32:50
SPEAKER_08: Great to meet you too.
32:50
SPEAKER_05: I can't believe they voted Coley off.
32:53
SPEAKER_05: I mean, like, like he he won that hands down.
32:55
SPEAKER_05: He absolutely won that hands down.
33:01
SPEAKER_06: Hey, how's it going?
33:02
SPEAKER_06: Alex, it is great to meet you.
33:03
SPEAKER_06: I've been a fan of yours for a long time, even though I'm a believer.
33:06
SPEAKER_06: Thank you so much.
33:06
SPEAKER_06: So that means all the more.
33:07
SPEAKER_06: You claim that this was a later tradition that developed.
33:10
SPEAKER_06: Is that correct?
33:11
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I think so.
33:12
SPEAKER_06: Okay, when would you say that that tradition developed?
33:14
SPEAKER_06: Probably fairly early on.
33:15
SPEAKER_06: I mean, the writings of Paul are decades after Jesus' death.
33:17
SPEAKER_06: Okay, so do we have a better source for knowing what Jesus actually claimed than the Gospels?
33:22
SPEAKER_08: No, we don't.
33:23
SPEAKER_06: Okay, so if the Gospels are indeed the best source for understanding who Jesus was, do those Gospels portray him as a divine person?
33:34
SPEAKER_08: Well, like I say, I think that there's only one gospel that unambiguously portrays Jesus as himself claiming to be divine, and that's the Gospel of John, which is the latest and most theologically motivated.
33:42
SPEAKER_05: No, all the gospel writers are portraying Jesus as the divine Son of the Father filled with the Spirit.
33:47
SPEAKER_05: They all are doing that.
33:48
SPEAKER_08: Even then, the claims that we're talking about, things like before Abraham was I am, the Greek term there is ego Amy.
33:53
SPEAKER_08: One chapter later in John chapter 9, Jesus heals a blind man, and the blind man goes back, and people say, Were you not the man who was born blind?
34:00
SPEAKER_08: And what does he say?
34:01
SPEAKER_08: Ego Amy, I am.
34:02
SPEAKER_08: It's also just a way of identifying yourself and saying, It's me.
34:05
SPEAKER_05: Except that in John chapter 8, Jesus is claiming to be over 2,000 years old because he is claimed to have met Abraham.
34:11
SPEAKER_05: Before Abraham was I am, he's basically claiming not only to have met Abraham, he's also claiming to have met Moses, and this provokes the Jews to pick up stones to stone him.
34:21
SPEAKER_05: No one is taking in in John chapter 9 the blind man as making a divine claim there.
34:26
SPEAKER_05: No one is taking that at all.
34:27
SPEAKER_05: But Ago and me, in the context of John chapter 8, is absolutely a divine claim, which is why they pick up stones to stone him.
34:33
SPEAKER_06: I would want to know then, in the Synoptic Gospels, are they claiming that Jesus is just a mere man?
34:39
SPEAKER_08: I think that it's debatable what the Synoptic authors are doing, but I'm happy to grant that the Synoptic authors were trying to portray Jesus as God and thought that Jesus was God.
34:47
SPEAKER_06: So that means all four Gospel writers were intending to portray Jesus as God.
34:52
SPEAKER_06: That may be the case, yeah.
34:53
SPEAKER_06: Okay.
34:53
SPEAKER_06: Now, in the first century Hebrew culture, do you worship anyone other than God?
34:58
SPEAKER_08: Depends what you mean by worship.
34:59
SPEAKER_08: So the Greek word for worship used in the New Testament is I don't know how to pronounce it, proskynine or proskinine, something like that, which typically in the Hebrew is translated in the Septuagint to that word, proskynine.
35:09
SPEAKER_08: In the Hebrew is a word which tend which just means something like bow down before.
35:13
SPEAKER_08: So for example, the same word is used when Jacob bows down before Esau, the same word is used when Joseph's brothers bow down before him when he's the governor of Egypt, the same word is used for King David, for example, in multiple books of the Bible.
35:26
SPEAKER_06: But in the Synoptic Gospels, is Jesus portrayed as being worshipped?
35:29
SPEAKER_08: I think at some points, yes.
35:30
SPEAKER_08: So for example, at the end of John's Gospel with doubting Thomas, the beginning in the birth narratives.
35:34
SPEAKER_08: Of course, I think the birth narratives were forged in the later editions of the New Testament.
35:38
SPEAKER_05: And in Matthew chapter 14, for instance, when he walks on water, they worship Jesus and he allows them to worship him, which is an extraordinary thing for a Jewish man to allow.
35:46
SPEAKER_06: I want to focus entirely on the Synoptic Gospels, because those seem to be the one that you think are the most shaky on this.
35:50
SPEAKER_06: In the Synoptic Gospels, is Jesus is the charge of blasphemy given against Jesus?
35:55
SPEAKER_06: Yes.
35:55
SPEAKER_06: Absolutely, right?
35:56
SPEAKER_06: Yes, yes.
35:57
SPEAKER_06: Can you be given the charge of blasphemy merely for claiming to be the Messiah?
36:00
SPEAKER_08: Well, let's find out.
36:01
SPEAKER_08: In the book of Acts, Saint Stephen has a vision before the Pharisees.
36:05
SPEAKER_08: What vision does he have?
36:06
SPEAKER_08: He looks up before the Pharisees and he says, I can see God, and I can see Jesus sat at the right hand of God.
36:11
SPEAKER_08: Separating Jesus and God, what do the Pharisees do?
36:14
SPEAKER_08: They stone him to death for blasphemy.
36:16
SPEAKER_08: So we know that you didn't have to claim that Jesus was identical to God in order to be stoned for blasphemy.
36:20
SPEAKER_05: They don't stone him for the blasphemy of claiming that he's at the right hand of the father.
36:24
SPEAKER_05: He's claiming to see the son at the right hand of the father.
36:27
SPEAKER_05: They don't have a problem with the father-son relationship in general.
36:30
SPEAKER_05: What they've got a problem with is Stephen claiming that you guys have killed the son of the father.
36:34
SPEAKER_05: They don't stone Stephen because he's claiming to be the son of the father, but they do crucify Jesus because Jesus is claiming to be the son of the father, right?
36:44
SPEAKER_05: These are wildly different scenarios.
36:46
SPEAKER_05: And both Stephen and Jesus are assuming that what you would see if you got to look into heaven is a son at the right hand of a father, right?
36:54
SPEAKER_05: Because they are not Unitarians.
36:56
SPEAKER_05: And a biblical doctrine of God is not a Unitarian doctrine of God.
37:00
SPEAKER_05: But they don't stone Stephen because he sees a father-son relationship at the heart of heaven.
37:05
SPEAKER_05: And they don't think that Stephen is claiming to be the son of the father, but they do understand that Jesus is claiming to be the Son of Man with all authority at the right hand of the Father.
37:16
SPEAKER_05: And that is why they crucify him, because that is a claim to divinity.
37:18
SPEAKER_05: Caiaphas is tearing his robes and claiming blasphemy because Jesus is claiming to be the glorious Son of Man from Daniel chapter 7.
37:26
SPEAKER_05: Just have a look at Daniel chapter 7.
37:28
SPEAKER_05: Here is this glorious figure being brought to the ancient of days, God the Father.
37:31
SPEAKER_05: In my vision at light, I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven.
37:36
SPEAKER_05: He approached the ancient of days and was led into his presence.
37:38
SPEAKER_05: This is such exalted language about the Son of Man.
37:41
SPEAKER_05: He is given all authority, glory, sovereign power.
37:44
SPEAKER_05: All nations, peoples of every language worship him.
37:46
SPEAKER_05: His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away.
37:48
SPEAKER_05: His kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
37:51
SPEAKER_05: These are divine honors being given to the Son of Man.
37:54
SPEAKER_05: Now you can't read this as a Unitarian, but that's okay, because the Old Testament was never meant to be read unitarianly.
38:00
SPEAKER_05: You cannot read vast swathes of the Old Testament unitarianly.
38:05
SPEAKER_05: You simply can't.
38:06
SPEAKER_05: The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet, says Psalm 110.
38:13
SPEAKER_05: Or Psalm 2 has the glorious Christ in whom all the nations are to take refuge.
38:19
SPEAKER_05: Or Psalm 45, speaking about the Messiah, the most excellent of men, it calls him God, and it says, Therefore, God your God has exalted you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy, by Christing you, by making you the Messiah.
38:31
SPEAKER_05: So the Old Testament is not Unitarian and cannot be read unitarianly.
38:34
SPEAKER_05: And it's so interesting that Daniel 7, when we sing it in church, there's a famous song that's called Ancient of Days.
38:42
SPEAKER_05: And yet the chorus is all about what the Son of Man is.
38:46
SPEAKER_05: Every tongue in heaven and earth shall declare your glory, every knee shall bow at your throne in worship, you will be exalted, O God, and your kingdom shall not pass away.
38:54
SPEAKER_05: And then the chorus says, O Ancient of Days, when actually all those divine honors are actually given to the Son of Man.
39:01
SPEAKER_05: The Son of Man is equal in authority, glory, and sovereign power to the ancient of days, and he is worshipped just as the Father is worshipped.
39:10
SPEAKER_05: This is an Old Testament doctrine of God.
39:12
SPEAKER_05: This is a biblical doctrine of God.
39:13
SPEAKER_05: And when Jesus claims to be the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, he is claiming to be this figure, this divine figure.
39:21
SPEAKER_05: This debater is doing well.
39:22
SPEAKER_05: He's asking Alex, uh, is Jesus worshipped?
39:25
SPEAKER_05: Yes, Jesus is worshipped.
39:26
SPEAKER_05: Does Jesus claim to be the judge of the world?
39:28
SPEAKER_05: That's the next question he asks.
39:29
SPEAKER_06: How about judging the entire world?
39:32
SPEAKER_06: Is that something that a an a human would do?
39:34
SPEAKER_08: I suppose it'd have to be a very special kind of human.
39:36
SPEAKER_08: I understand that you think that only God can judge, sure.
39:38
SPEAKER_06: So do the synoptic gospels do the synoptic gospels portray Jesus as the one who is going to judge the world?
39:44
SPEAKER_08: I think that may be true.
39:44
SPEAKER_08: The Synoptic Gospels may portray him as being that.
39:47
SPEAKER_05: Yes, Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels claims to be the judge of all the world, the Sermon on the Mount or Matthew chapter 25, or pretty much every parable where Jesus speaks of the kingdom.
39:55
SPEAKER_05: Who is the king of the kingdom?
39:57
SPEAKER_05: And who is going to, like in Matthew chapter 13, distinguish between the wheat and the tares, between the the the different kinds of fish.
40:04
SPEAKER_05: Furthermore, it is the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels who claims to be the judge of all.
40:09
SPEAKER_05: He is the king of the kingdom.
40:10
SPEAKER_05: And surely Alex thinks that whatever is um original to the teaching of Jesus in the in the Synoptic Gospels, certainly his teaching on the kingdom of God, is gotta be um original to Jesus.
40:21
SPEAKER_05: And he is presenting himself continually as the king of the kingdom, as the one who is going to bring in the righteous rule of the Lord in into the world.
40:29
SPEAKER_05: He is definitely the judge of all the worlds, and so this is a really fruitful line of inquiry here.
40:35
SPEAKER_08: What I'm asking for is in Jesus' own words, or indeed in his own actions, claiming to be God.
40:39
SPEAKER_08: For example, a moment ago you said that he was stoned for blasphemy.
40:41
SPEAKER_08: Can he be stoned for blasphemy for doing something other than claiming to be God?
40:44
SPEAKER_08: In the Book of Acts, since Stephen is stoned for exactly that.
40:46
SPEAKER_08: So do you agree that that at least isn't an indication that Jesus is claiming to be God?
40:50
SPEAKER_06: I don't know that they necessarily were stoning him for that exact thing.
40:52
SPEAKER_06: I don't know the exact context of that.
40:54
SPEAKER_05: Exactly.
40:54
SPEAKER_05: He was not being stoned for that.
40:56
SPEAKER_06: With that in mind, the divine birth of Jesus is another factor that's in all the Synoptic Gospels.
41:01
SPEAKER_06: In those Gospels, Jesus is born of a Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit.
41:06
SPEAKER_08: It's only in two of the Synoptic Gospels, and in Luke's at least, is probably a later edition.
41:11
SPEAKER_08: It wasn't in the original version of Luke.
41:13
SPEAKER_06: Regardless, is Jesus' birth portrayed as a normal human birth?
41:16
SPEAKER_08: No, no, not at all.
41:17
SPEAKER_06: In all of the Synoptics.
41:19
SPEAKER_06: So if he's not a man.
41:20
SPEAKER_06: Only two of them.
41:21
SPEAKER_06: Well, that's fine.
41:22
SPEAKER_06: If he's not a man in these gospels, then what is he?
41:25
SPEAKER_08: Well, again, I'm happy to say that the Synoptic authors were portraying Jesus as God, especially whoever added the birth narrative to Luke after the fact.
41:32
SPEAKER_08: I've got no problem with you.
41:33
SPEAKER_08: You just don't trust those gospels.
41:34
SPEAKER_08: No, in the same way that I don't trust the legendary accounts surrounding the birth of Alexander the Great.
41:37
SPEAKER_08: Okay.
41:37
SPEAKER_08: I don't think that he was God either.
41:39
SPEAKER_06: Is there a better, more reliable source for the historical Jesus than the Gospels?
41:42
SPEAKER_08: No.
41:43
SPEAKER_08: But within the Gospels, there are more and less historically reliable points.
41:46
SPEAKER_08: So as I've already said, there are seemingly sources.
41:49
SPEAKER_08: So for example, when Jesus says something in Aramaic on the cross when he says Eli, Eli.
41:54
SPEAKER_08: Okay, pause.
41:54
SPEAKER_08: Sorry, you've been voted out by the majority.
41:56
SPEAKER_08: Please return to your seat.
41:57
SPEAKER_08: Cheers.
41:58
SPEAKER_08: Good fun.
41:58
SPEAKER_08: Nice to meet you.
41:59
SPEAKER_05: Again, they voted out somebody who's doing a very, very, very good job.
42:02
SPEAKER_05: Um we're gonna skip over the next couple of people who are questioning Alex and go to the final person questioning Alex, a guy called Van.
42:11
SPEAKER_07: Alright.
42:11
SPEAKER_07: Two things.
42:12
SPEAKER_07: Have you heard of the cloud rider motif?
42:14
SPEAKER_07: No, I don't think so.
42:14
SPEAKER_07: Okay.
42:15
SPEAKER_07: Oh, the cloud rider motif.
42:16
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, yeah.
42:16
SPEAKER_07: Okay.
42:17
SPEAKER_07: Then I'm assuming you've heard of like the two powers in heaven motif.
42:20
SPEAKER_08: No.
42:20
SPEAKER_07: Okay.
42:21
SPEAKER_07: There's a Jewish historian named Alan Sagal.
42:24
SPEAKER_07: He wrote a book called The Two Powers in Heaven.
42:26
SPEAKER_07: And what he talks about is there's this weird thing happening in the Hebrew Bible where there's almost like two Yahweh figures that they point to.
42:33
SPEAKER_07: So some verses, for instance, will say like Yahweh rained down fire from Yahweh.
42:37
SPEAKER_05: That's Genesis 19, verse 24.
42:39
SPEAKER_05: If you remember the scene, uh Abraham is interceding with the Lord, who is kind of face to face.
42:44
SPEAKER_05: He's just had a meal with the Lord in in Genesis chapter 18.
42:48
SPEAKER_05: And uh there's about to be the judgment visited upon uh Sodom, and Abraham is interceding on behalf of Lot and his family, but on behalf of the city itself, with the Lord who is standing with him.
43:00
SPEAKER_05: And then when judgment actually does fall on Sodom, uh Genesis 19, verse 24 says, Then the Lord reigned down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord out of the heavens.
43:11
SPEAKER_05: Now it's not a reflexive verb in the Hebrew, so grammatically, this couldn't be the same person.
43:15
SPEAKER_05: So that there are two persons called Lord.
43:17
SPEAKER_05: There's the Lord who Abram has been interceding with, I'd say that's Christ the Son, and then there's the Lord out of the heavens, who is reigning down from the Father through the Son, comes the judgment of Sodom.
43:28
SPEAKER_05: And people like Justin Martyr made a big deal of this in the second century AD, saying that the Old Testament is not Unitarian, and that it is describing two powers in heaven at least, that there is the Lord Most High, and then there is this mediating Lord through whom the judgment and the salvation of God comes, and that this is not a New Testament novelty.
43:47
SPEAKER_05: This is something that the Hebrew Bible has been proclaiming the whole time.
43:50
SPEAKER_05: Now, Alan Siegel, a Jewish scholar, is just laying bare what is already present in the Old Testament, which is that you've got these two powers, um, both of whom are Are able to take the name Lord or Yahweh.
44:02
SPEAKER_05: Philo of Alexandria would be another example of somebody writing in the first century BC, and he is very clear that through the Logos, who is this divine person, he is the high priest of all creation, and in all that God makes and in all that God reconciles and reveals, he is doing so through this, and he calls him sometimes the Deuteros Theos in Greek, the second God.
44:26
SPEAKER_05: Philo is very much picking up on this language from Genesis, this language from Daniel, that there is the ancient of days who rules through his son of man.
44:33
SPEAKER_05: The language of Psalm 110, the Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand.
44:38
SPEAKER_05: Or the language of the Melchizedek scroll, which was uncovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
44:42
SPEAKER_05: And again, here is a document that's inter-testamental, written in the first century BC, and yet it refers to this Messiah figure as a divine Messiah who is judging the world.
44:52
SPEAKER_05: And Alan Siegel, who's now dead, but there are many others who are scholars of the Old Testament who are very clear that an Old Testament doctrine of God is not Unitarian.
45:01
SPEAKER_05: And I think this is a very fruitful line of inquiry which uh this Christian Thun is uh engaging in.
45:07
SPEAKER_07: And so Philo of Alexandria in the Second Temple period talks about this two powers in heaven motif, and he says, like, there's two Yahweh's.
45:14
SPEAKER_07: There's the first power and the second power, but they're both Yahweh.
45:17
SPEAKER_07: It's almost like a sort of proto-Trinitarian view.
45:19
SPEAKER_05: A more careful way to say it would be that there are two persons who can take the name Yahweh rather than two lords, uh, because the Athanasian creed sort of kicks in at that point.
45:27
SPEAKER_05: There are not three lords, there are not three gods, but there are three persons who can take the name God.
45:32
SPEAKER_05: And uh that that's what this teaching is trying to uncover.
45:35
SPEAKER_07: That's one thing that I'll just kind of put there for now.
45:37
SPEAKER_07: Another puzzle piece here is you've heard about the cloud rider motif.
45:40
SPEAKER_07: So in the Ugaritic texts, um in the Baal cycle, we see Baal referenced as the one who rides the clouds, and I think you can see that actually adopted by the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible as well.
45:51
SPEAKER_07: So Psalm 104 is like an exaltation psalm and actually talks about Yahweh being the one that rides the clouds in heaven.
45:57
SPEAKER_07: He is the king.
45:58
SPEAKER_07: I see that as kind of a polemic of calling Yahweh the king over Baal.
46:02
SPEAKER_07: Are we on the same page there?
46:03
SPEAKER_07: Sure.
46:03
SPEAKER_07: Okay.
46:03
SPEAKER_07: Into Daniel 7, you'll see a messianic passage there about how God will come down, and you'll see the Son of Man come riding in the clouds of heaven, and his kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom.
46:14
SPEAKER_07: Do you think Daniel thought that the Son of Man was going to be God, since he says that he's riding on a cloud?
46:17
SPEAKER_07: This is a really interesting point.
46:19
SPEAKER_05: We know precisely what Daniel thought.
46:20
SPEAKER_05: Daniel thought that this figure is given all authority, glory, and sovereign power, that all nations and peoples of every language worshipped him, that his dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
46:33
SPEAKER_05: Okay?
46:33
SPEAKER_05: That we we know for certain that is what Daniel thinks about this second figure.
46:39
SPEAKER_05: This this son of man, this glorious son of man who was at the right hand of the ancient of days.
46:43
SPEAKER_05: Those are the sorts of terms that Daniel is happy speaking of when he speaks of this glorious son of man.
46:50
SPEAKER_05: To call him divine seems to be underplaying what this divine figure is.
46:54
SPEAKER_08: I don't think that he did, because he was he was a Jewish writer.
46:56
SPEAKER_05: He was a Jewish writer.
46:57
SPEAKER_05: That doesn't mean he's Unitarian, because every piece of scriptural evidence that I've tried to give, and the intertestamental uh writings of the Melchizedek scroll, of Philo, Alan Siegel's scholarship, is all saying that simply because he's Jewish doesn't make him Unitarian.
47:10
SPEAKER_08: The prophet Daniel was expecting the Messiah to be God.
47:13
SPEAKER_08: I think so.
47:14
SPEAKER_08: Sorry, the Son of Man to be God.
47:15
SPEAKER_05: Yes, and and even Isaiah, you know, the the Messiah in in chapter 9, uh, to us a child is born, to us the Son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulders, and his name shall be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
47:30
SPEAKER_05: Now, in the Intertestamental period, um, Jewish scholars were expecting this person is the Messiah, and this person can be given the name the Mighty God.
47:38
SPEAKER_05: Okay?
47:39
SPEAKER_05: The idea of a divine Messiah is not antithetical to Jewish thought at all.
47:43
SPEAKER_05: It became so in the second, third, fourth centuries A.D.
47:48
SPEAKER_05: as the Jewish community hardened against the Christians who are saying we know who the Messiah is, his name is Jesus, and he is the living God.
47:56
SPEAKER_05: He is the Son of the Father filled with the Spirit.
47:58
SPEAKER_05: Anti-divine Messiah sentiments grew up in opposition to the Christian understanding of Jesus as the divine Messiah.
48:06
SPEAKER_05: Um, but people talking about the divine messiah way back in Isaiah's day, let alone in Daniel's day, let alone in the book of Enoch's day, let alone in the book of Melchizedek, the Melchizedek scroll, let alone in Philo of Alexandria, these people were all very comfortable with talking about this second person who has divine honors.
48:26
SPEAKER_05: I think Alex might be interested to press into this quite a bit more.
48:29
SPEAKER_05: If he's got time and space for Gnostic Gospels, he should definitely have time and space for this intertestamental understanding of the divine Messiah.
48:36
SPEAKER_08: So you have this cloud or energy of the.
48:38
SPEAKER_08: So by the way, I do think that there are multiple things which people, even in Jesus' time, thought only God could do.
48:44
SPEAKER_08: Things like forgiving sins.
48:45
SPEAKER_08: And when Jesus does these things, he's not doing so in order to prove that he's God, but in order to prove that the Son of Man has the authority to do that.
48:50
SPEAKER_08: I completely agree.
48:51
SPEAKER_08: I completely agree.
48:52
SPEAKER_08: This isn't that kind of an argument.
48:53
SPEAKER_05: Yes, but the Son of Man is such an exalted figure that all nations will worship him.
48:57
SPEAKER_05: He he is this divine figure.
48:58
SPEAKER_05: Yes, only God can forgive sins, and Jesus forgives sins, that means he's God.
49:03
SPEAKER_05: It also means he's the Son of Man.
49:04
SPEAKER_05: And and the way to reconcile all those pieces of data is to say that Jesus is indeed the second person of the Trinity with all divine power to forgive sins.
49:12
SPEAKER_05: And and there's a way of actually putting all that data together satisfyingly.
49:17
SPEAKER_05: One way you can't put it together is to say that Jesus never claimed to be God.
49:21
SPEAKER_05: Jesus did not intend to leave us with the option of thinking that he was not God.
49:25
SPEAKER_07: This is an identification thing.
49:26
SPEAKER_07: So where's Jesus claiming to be God?
49:27
SPEAKER_07: That's where I'm going.
49:28
SPEAKER_07: So we have these puzzle pieces in in place.
49:30
SPEAKER_07: Sure.
49:30
SPEAKER_07: If you fast forward to Mark's gospel, and I'm gonna use Mark.
49:33
SPEAKER_07: Let's do Mark.
49:34
SPEAKER_07: Jesus before Caiaphas in Mark's gospel, Caiaphas asks him, Who are you?
49:39
SPEAKER_07: And instead of just explicitly saying, I am God, Jesus quotes Daniel 7, saying he is the Son of Man, the human one, who will write on the clouds, and calls himself the second power.
49:51
SPEAKER_07: So you have this two powers in heaven, Motif, the two powers that are both God, and the cloud rider motif and the son of man, he's quoting Daniel 7 to identify himself.
49:59
SPEAKER_07: After that, Caiaphas tears his robe and cries blasphemy.
50:03
SPEAKER_08: I do think that that Jesus is making some pretty extraordinary claims of himself, such as being the son of man, but I still don't see why he's claiming to be God.
50:08
SPEAKER_08: If this were the way that he was trying to reveal his divinity to people, it'd be a strange and convoluted way to do it.
50:13
SPEAKER_05: There's nothing strange or convoluted about this.
50:14
SPEAKER_05: The only strange or convoluted thing is to actually steamroll the Old Testament um scriptures, to steamroll the all intertestamental hope for what the Messiah will be like, to try and fit that into a modern Unitarian understanding of what the Messiah or the Son of Man is, and then to say Jesus is going about things in a strange way.
50:32
SPEAKER_05: No, treating the scriptures the way that Alex wants to treat them is the strange thing.
50:36
SPEAKER_05: Jesus fits right into that first century world of Jewish scholarship in in which these are the understandings of what the Son of Man is like, what the divine Messiah is like, how God operates, that the Lord judges and saves through his mediator, through his great high priest, to the through the Juteros Theos, through the through the great high priest of all creation.
50:56
SPEAKER_05: This is who Jesus claims to be.
50:58
SPEAKER_05: And if he claimed to be anything other than that, he would be the heretical one, but he's not the heretical one.
51:02
SPEAKER_05: He is fitting right into a very Jewish way of understanding, which also happens to be totally consonant with Trinitarian theology.
51:08
SPEAKER_05: The weird thing is pressing this into a Unitarian framework.
51:12
SPEAKER_05: And that that's what doesn't work.
51:13
SPEAKER_05: This is what's breaking apart between Alex's fingers as he tries to turn these scriptures into Unitarian scriptures, which they aren't and which they can't be.
51:27
SPEAKER_08: And Jesus quotes that Psalm when he's referring to his relationship with the Father in the Gospel of John.
51:32
SPEAKER_08: So even if in the Old Testament you have these lesser gods, Jesus is only claiming to be that.
51:40
SPEAKER_07: And I get what you're saying, where you're coming from.
51:42
SPEAKER_07: But to the ancient author, how obvious would this be?
51:44
SPEAKER_07: So the best we have here is Jesus claiming to be the Son of Man, and that might indicate that he might be God.
51:48
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, but we don't predicate our hypotheses on the evidence we wish we did have.
51:52
SPEAKER_07: We we go off the evidence that we do have.
51:53
SPEAKER_05: Yes, and the evidence that we do have is evidence of Christ claiming to be this divine son of man, and he was understood as claiming to be the divine son of man such that Caiaphas tears his robes and they execute him on a charge of blasphemy.
52:07
SPEAKER_05: Now, the the Jews are constantly doing this.
52:10
SPEAKER_05: In John chapter 5, Jesus claims to be the son of the Father, and they pick up stones to stone him in John chapter 5, because he is claiming to be equal to God by claiming to be the son of the Father.
52:18
SPEAKER_05: What is their doctrine of God?
52:19
SPEAKER_05: Their doctrine of God is not Unitarian.
52:21
SPEAKER_05: It's a doctrine of God of Father and Son as equals, and Jesus is claiming to be that son, and they understand him to be claiming to be that son, and that is worthy of the charge of blasphemy, because to be the son of the father is to be equal to God.
52:35
SPEAKER_05: That is what the Jews think.
52:36
SPEAKER_05: So I don't know what doctrine of God Alex is assuming that first century Jews had, but I don't think it fits the evidence.
52:43
SPEAKER_08: That's right.
52:43
SPEAKER_08: And I don't think that there's any point at which Jesus says.
52:45
SPEAKER_08: So you're saying that this is not a right, guys?
52:47
SPEAKER_06: That's time.
52:48
SPEAKER_08: Evidence, but not good enough.
52:50
SPEAKER_08: So nice of you.
52:51
SPEAKER_08: Sorry we haven't got more time.
52:52
SPEAKER_08: I wish we could.
52:54
SPEAKER_05: Uh uh, and he's kind of saved by the bell there.
52:56
SPEAKER_05: I think that was Alex's worst round.
52:57
SPEAKER_05: I think he did a lot better on all the other rounds.
53:00
SPEAKER_05: Um, I think this format of 25 versus 1, um, it it often works against the 25 because the 25 are competing um to get into that hot seat and uh they're voting one another off no matter how good their fellow Christians uh are doing.
53:15
SPEAKER_05: Um, Alex did fantastically well on every other round.
53:18
SPEAKER_05: I I don't think he did particularly well on this round.
53:20
SPEAKER_05: And here's where I want to get to.
53:22
SPEAKER_05: Um, we've had three different people on the issue of who is Jesus.
53:26
SPEAKER_05: We've had Joe Rogan take the historical route and think to himself, well, how did Jesus have such an impact on the world?
53:34
SPEAKER_05: And I think that's a really fruitful way that you can encounter Jesus.
53:37
SPEAKER_05: Then we had Jordan Peterson taking the story route and figuring out that the Jesus story is the unimprovably maximal story that we can tell of the answer to the human problem.
53:48
SPEAKER_05: And I guess if he is the savior like that, um, then then he is God.
53:52
SPEAKER_05: Of course he's God.
53:53
SPEAKER_05: That's that's another way of coming at the question of who is Jesus.
53:56
SPEAKER_05: Another really good way of figuring out who is Jesus is to go the scriptural route.
54:01
SPEAKER_05: And I'm a big believer in the scriptures, and I'm a big believer in going back to the scriptures and seeing what they say.
54:05
SPEAKER_05: I'm not convinced that Alex himself allowed the scriptures to say what they were saying in their own context, in their own New Testament context and in their own Old Testament context.
54:15
SPEAKER_05: So that's really interesting to me that you can come to the question of who is Jesus and you can come to more fruitful answers via the Joe Rogan history route or via the Jordan Peterson story route than by the Alex O'Connor Scripture route if you won't let the scriptures say what they are indeed saying.
54:31
SPEAKER_05: Ordinarily, I'd say scripture is the best way of figuring out who Jesus is, but you've got to let the scriptures speak to you on their own terms, and I don't think that Alex did that in this debate anyway.
54:42
SPEAKER_05: I don't know what you think about those three different routes to knowledge of God.
54:45
SPEAKER_05: I don't know how you think Alex did in this 25 V1 surrounded debate.
54:50
SPEAKER_05: Uh, why don't you let me know in the comments?
54:52
SPEAKER_05: And if you want to find out who Jesus is for yourself, then why don't you go and do 321?
54:56
SPEAKER_05: It's our attempt to get back to basics and figure out who is Jesus and in the face of Jesus to figure out who is God, what is the world like, what are we like.
55:03
SPEAKER_05: Go to 321course.com, start an account, it's completely free.
55:06
SPEAKER_05: You can binge it in a couple of hours, or you can do the sessions over eight different videos.
55:10
SPEAKER_05: But we'd love to see you at 321course.com.
55:12
SPEAKER_05: Thanks so much.
55:13
SPEAKER_05: Bye bye.