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The Untold Story of Jesus and His Fishermen · Liberty + Leadership

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Roger Reim.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm honored to welcome TFAS Chairman Randall Teague to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast on the occasion of the publication of his latest book, Jesus and His Fisherman: The Untold Story.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is Randy's second book, the first being Families, Where We Each Begin, which was published in 2019.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Randy has had a distinguished career in law and government service, including serving as legislative counsel and chief of staff to Congressman Jack Kemp.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Randy's an avid fisherman, having spent his teenage years along the Florida Gulf Coast.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: He has fished rivers on the East Coast and in the northern Rockies, as well as in both oceans, the Gulf, numerous bays and bayous, and in many of the more than 100 countries he has visited in his life.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Today we will discuss his new book and discover some of the untold stories of Jesus and his fishermen, a timely topic as we approach Easter.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Randy, thank you for joining me today.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Good to be here, Roger.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Looking forward to it.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let me start right off the top and ask you where did the idea for this book originate?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was a slow origination and it came from many different directions.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I can remember as a child, really, hearing uh Jesus walking along the shore and saying, Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: And many years later, I was in Israel and I walked along that shore, which is not a beach, it's a lot of rock.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: And many other things came together.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I have to tell you, the subtitle of the book, The Untold Story, was puzzling to some people because we think we all know this story.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's true we all know the conclusion of that discussion, but we don't know the premises that preceded it.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus was putting together his ministry, and it consisted of a lot of preparation, patience, success, failures, and frustrations, and he said to himself, We think, how do I do this?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: And fishing was the opportunity to bring the two together.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when you get further than that one observation that we all remember from Scripture, we come to the realization that John the Baptist probably knew these first four that were fishermen, and fishermen were key to him.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: The first four of the twelve, they accompanied him, three of them, to the Transfiguration, and they were critical to his ministry, and quite frankly, they did a lot of the work.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's altogether possible they brought in income to support the ministry itself.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in in the book, which is the reflection of extensive research and quite an extensive knowledge base that you have, but you do point out, I think, something important that some people don't think about, and that is we know more about that period and about the historical Jesus than just what we find in the four gospels.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Oh, and more than what we find in the Bible, I think every now and then you run into someone that says, if it's not in the Bible, we don't know anything about the first century A.D., when in fact there's significant Roman writings, Greek writings, and of course writings in Israel itself about that first century A.D.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: And when you put that together with what is in Scripture, and it's beyond the Gospels, because much of what is in the Gospels is amplified by the Acts and the other books in the New Testament, you find it's a much deeper story as to how he brought it together, what he was looking for.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: You and I, Roger, serve on boards, and it's fascinating to me that God incarnate on earth as Jesus elected a board, let's call it that, a twelve, and one was a traitor and four did all the work.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna ask, you know, what are some of those untold stories?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: But you've kind of touched on that already with the fact that there is so much more to that historical record.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: You've done a lot of research for the book, but I think knowing you as I do your whole life, you've been fascinated with these questions and much of what you've learned.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Talk some about how your upbringing kind of influenced your thoughts when it comes to religion.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, my upbringing was really fascinating.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose I was about eight or nine years of age, and my mother was a Baptist, my father was primarily an Episcopalian, and I had figured out by that age that these two Protestant religions were quite different.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: And as I went through much of my life absorbing these differences, I saw it depends in some measure on what your perspective is.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks to the funds work where we brought together the brightest students from the Middle East to a program in Greece that lasted for a number of years, that was my first opportunity to actually visit the Holy Lands.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it turned out as a coincidence of representing clients in my law practice that I went a number of times.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: That gave me the opportunity, and I've been there with you as well, to actually walk the Sea of Galilee's shores, to go to places where the stones that had heard the voice of Jesus, and to put these things together to get a better visual of this.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the Jewish faith at that time was divided really into four groupings, and Jesus and John the Baptist were more associated with one of those than the two dominant ones.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And from that you get a perspective on what he was doing and how he was bringing about this ministry.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: And here we are, you know, two millennia later with some of the same debates going on.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: But the story has been much further told now than it was before.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you noted here that already Jesus early on started selecting his disciples and he picked some fishermen.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think it is about fishing and fishermen that made it so central to Jesus' ministry?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we'll never know, but we get good highlights, I think, that indicate that.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that fishermen were different.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: I said to myself when I was into this six years of deep research into this project, why not builders?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's what his family did.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: But that really didn't fit.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Farming fit to some degree, but it didn't fit.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Fishermen really fit because every time they went out, often at night during the hotter months of the year, it was the same set of issues, preparation for what they were going to do that night, patience, success, failures and frustrations.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that was more applicable to a ministry because as Jesus traveled that land and he traveled it enormously, significantly, lots of different directions, it was that almost on a daily basis rather than over a season of harvest or the building of buildings.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Talk about this phrase being fishers of men.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think you give new meaning, or we give your book offers new understanding of what that means when you tie it so much more closer to getting us to pause and think about what fishing is all about.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's you don't become a fisherman by forcing someone into your faith, just like you have to put the bait out there and wait for the fish to bite.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: That is well stated, Roger.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: When you go to church or I go to church, others go to church, that's what the rector, the minister, whatever the title might be, is doing.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And he's going to have success at it, he's going to have failure at it, great frustrations, and so it actually fit very well.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that he took only three of the apostles with him to the Transfiguration, which is almost certainly the most dramatic moment in his ministry prior to his own crucifixion, is significant in and of itself.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: And yet Peter, the head of the fisherman group that he selected, seemed to give him the most trouble.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Did not understand what he was up to.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Jesus referred to him once as get behind me Satan.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the drama of Jesus selecting Peter to head his church rested upon Peter's awareness of it, it was given to him by God, not by his own observation.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: But Peter was like us.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: He was like us, because up and down, sideways, whatever, that is our life.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: It is our daily life, trying to figure things out, doing things right, doing things wrong.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that it's fascinating that after the crucifixion and the resurrection, Jesus returned to Galilee.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And what did he find Peter and his crew doing?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Fishing, because that's what they knew.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think most Christians think that Paul came into the scene quickly after this, but I think most scholars believe Paul did not come on site for the historic record until six years after this.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Paul, who was a profoundly well-organized person, well educated, self-confident, had this dramatic experience on the road to Damascus.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: But he came in, I think, by the choice of Jesus coming to him to shore up Peter.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it's fascinating that Peter and Paul together really set loose what became the faith of Christianity.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: They both gave their lives for it.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: But even when they were in Rome before their own crucifixions, Paul was giving great strength to Peter.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we find that in organizations where it takes more than one person usually to make something successful.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Running through the book are stories about what it was like to be a fisherman at the time of Jesus.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: You talk about government and the Roman government of Herod, his predecessors and successors, something I never realized with the extent to which fishing was taxed and regulated by the government.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And uh making it as a fisherman was difficult.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: You had to go out every day and catch fish and hope you could sell them and pay the taxes and support your family.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And there are several things remarkable about it, and you're right about this.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: One of which is here's Jesus plucking these people away from this profession where they're supporting their families.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how do they expect the families to live after they join up with Jesus?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And talk some about this the role of the government on the on the fishing industry.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: I will be glad to do that because the first century A.D.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: in Jerusalem, Judea, Galilee seems to be a scene that the mirror image of it is today.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: The Sea of Galilee was the income earning area for not all the tribes of Israel.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was actually started as for two tribes, and then some of that was negotiated away.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: But by the time you take a fish at the bottom of Galilee and you bring that fish to the boat, you take the boat to the processing facility, the largest one was in Magdala, where Mary Magdalene came from, and you followed that fish all the way to the tables in Jerusalem, they had been taxed and tariffed all the way down that supply chain of fish.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: If they were kosher fish, they were headed for tables in Jerusalem in a different way than non-cosure fish.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was amazing to me because at Costco or any other seafood place today, when you on Saturday you select from the seafood counter fish, the guys that run that market will tell you tilapia is the most prevalent fish that is sold from freshwater and salmon from salt water.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it was tilapia that was in fact the fish that was being predominantly caught.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was a fish on the surface.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Herring were also caught on the surface.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: At the bottom of the lake were what we would call catfish.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: It has a tentacle name of barbells, but that could be sold to non kosher.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so when they would capture fish from the bottom of the Sea of Galilee, they could sell that to the Romans and the Greeks.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: It raised theological issues as to whether the earnings from selling non-kosher fish to Gentiles could be used at the temple or not.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you get into all kinds of complications, but they were poor.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: They were poor.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: By the time the fish made it from the lake to the table, most economic scholars believe it was 50% taxation.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: And this was true with farms that were actually put out of business.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: They were acquired by well-connected politically uh wealthy because they could not pay the taxes on the produce that they raised.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it was very, very hard.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: The poor were overtaxed, they were overregulated.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Today, along the north and the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, there are about 25 or 30 places where you can fish from the shore.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: You can't take a boat out there and fish like you can in the United States because it is a border of demarcation uh with Jordan.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: But you can fish from the shore, you gotta have a permit to do that, etc.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: So over 2,000 years of time, very little has changed in the plight of what you have to do to be able to fish someplace.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and reading your book makes one realize that for uh one of the disciples like Peter to answer the call of Jesus to follow him was not just some easy decision, like he's out there fishing with a line in the water and he puts it on his pole and follows.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's earning the money to support his family.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that is very true.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it intrigues members of my fishing club that the nets we use today were exactly the same because there were sane nets let out behind the boat to catch large numbers.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: There were cast nets that you would throw out in a circle to be able to fall over fish.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: There were dip nets to be able to be used to bring uh fish to the boats, exactly the same as we have now.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: We know that rods and lines were used.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's no historic evidence of a reel, but rods and lines were used as well.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: So fishing has really not changed since then.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: I do have to say that fishing was enormously hard work.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's no question about that.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: And these guys were not cut out to be disciples, apostles.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: They were cut out to fish.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so the learning curve to them was very important.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that's why Peter often had issues.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: He couldn't figure out what Jesus was doing because he was a fisherman.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I'm a sinner.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know what sins he did, but one of those might well have been, if it is a sin, to cheat the tax man, trying to figure out how to catch more fish than he had to pay to the tax collector in Capernaum, which happened to be Levi, who's changed the name, of course, to Matthew.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, you can think of all kinds of things that were going on in their lives that might have provoked that.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: I have a feeling, I won't call it a theory, but it's a feeling, and I feel very strongly about it that just because those guys followed him and became fishers of men, that it meant that they totally gave up fishing.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think they did.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: They did give up fishing.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the crews that he had in his small business, which was a business run primarily by his wife, that they may have continued to fish to bring in income specifically to support the ministry.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: As Jesus often traveling, staying under the stars, would have been tired, sore, hungry, and locals would have given them, you know, vegetables, fruits, things of that nature, but the visitors to his ministry were poor themselves.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: They had no coin from the purse to give him.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I do think the family continued to bring in monies to support the ministry.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell You discussed many of the references, many of the stories and the Gospels about fishing, when he takes the bread and fish from a young boy and feeds the multitudes, when he tells the disciples to cast their nets on the other side of the boat and they bring them in full.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm curious, and you probably covered this in your book, but you obviously talk about the widespread references to fish in the New Testament.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Are there a lot in the Old Testament as well?
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell, yes, there are.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: There are indeed.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: As a matter of fact, you know, Judaism has been with us as a faith for 5,800 years.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: 3,800 of those years preceded to 2,000 years in which we have Christianity.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's fascinating, and I feel very, very strongly about this, that antisemitism is an absolute absurdity.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: The Christian Bible is the Old Testament and the New Testament.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: The Old Testament is 75% roughly of the Christian Bible.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Psalms and all of these things that we quote from in church that we know that we memorize are from the Old Testament.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: And let me go immediately to the trial of Jesus because I really work on this as a lawyer.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's really several trials with inside of a trial before Pontius Pilate and of course before the Sanhedrin.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it was not the Jewish people who were opposed to what Christ was teaching.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: As a matter of fact, the political leadership in Jerusalem was terrified of Jesus' following because they were in fact doing exactly that.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: They were following him, they were listening to it.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so the leadership of the Sanhedrin pulled together what I would call a rabble crowd of probably a hundred or so.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Herod the Great had actually killed the entire Sanhedrin because they did not follow him politically.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: But this was a different Sanhedrin a little bit later on.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like a political rally.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: A politician goes out and selects a hundred people that support him.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to tell them what to do to what to say.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: They know when asked the question of who to free rather than Jesus, that they're following their leadership, and it was a corrupted political leadership of the faith.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so therefore, Judaism, Jews themselves should never, ever, ever be held accountable for what went wrong there because it was preordained in addition to the reality that it was a political event masquerading as a judicial event.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: What was the biggest surprise for you in writing this book?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Were there some surprises?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, there were some surprises.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: One of them was that the fish that they most commonly caught was tilapia.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: That to be with the surprise.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was really surprised by that.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Secondly, was the extent to which uh economics played a real role.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I must tell you, you know, we pay federal, state, and local taxes in America today.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: They had to pay a substantial tax uh tribute, actually, to Rome in order to keep their power locally.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: So you had to pay a tax to Rome, you had to pay a tax to Herod, and Herod was totally corrupt.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, there were four generations of Herod.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was not just one Herod, but they were totally corrupt because the taxes they raised were used for their personal extravagances as well as for building palaces and ports and things of that nature.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, you had the temple tax, and the temple tax comes into the fishing argument because you know Jesus tells Peter, go catch a fish that has a shekel in his mouth to be able to pay a temple tax.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: So they had those three levels of taxation.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: And fishing then, fishing now, you know, sometimes you catch them, sometimes you don't.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't, these days you tell your wife you gave them to the Baptist church for the Sunday afternoon barbecue or dinner so that they can earn their money for their church.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: And in those days, if you didn't catch fish, there were other things you could do like repairing your nets, repairing the boats, and so forth.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, if you didn't catch fish, you went without income.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Today there seems to be a diminished commitment to religion in our country, certainly in the Christian churches.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Attendance has been down preceding COVID, but accelerated by COVID and its impact.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: What do you see as some of the root causes of this shift?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it you think that we just aren't as religious a country as we were once?
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Well, there are multiple reasons.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: We obviously have a separation of church and state.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing wrong with that is a theoretical concept, nothing wrong with that is a judicial principle, but the way in which that has been expanded far beyond the original ruling of the Supreme Court addressed to that.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so anywhere the church and state are together at the same time now, the state wins.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: The church is forced back, and judicial opinions do that, but ultimately culture does that, and public education does that.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, culture without faith is on the upswing and has been for some period of time.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I am encouraged myself.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: Something happened two years ago at the Fund for American Studies.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: My wife and I sponsored two scholarships for students, and it was really remarkable the extent to which they share with me the faith community that exists without the fund, or at least me as chairman, even knowing about it at that time, that on Sunday morning they get up, they get the Metro cards that we provide to them, and they go to places where students from all over the United States are gathered on Sunday mornings in religious worship.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was quite taken by that and surprised by that because I really did not know about that.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then the testimonials that I hear from them, and it's not the religious schools like Wheaton and Grand Canyon and so forth, is from schools of virtually any classification of where these students come.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure the percentage of them would differ from the percentage of the population of college students, generally speaking.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I was really encouraged to see that that is happening.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think the charter school movement brings that forward as well.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think homeschooling brings that forward.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Brings that forward as well because it's often a reason that you do homeschooling.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I, like you, think the opportunity to work with students at the Fund for American Studies not only helps keep us younger, but it also does keep us optimistic about the future.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think you're right, so many of these students are young people with strong values, who know the importance of honorable leadership, of good character, who want to make a difference in the world.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: In your book, what you offer is an opportunity to not only dive deeper in your knowledge of the New Testament, of Jesus life, because you're you show it's great scholarship in that regard.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: But it also, in a way, this the way you write this book, I think really can help deepen one's faith.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Your references, I mean, in the back you list many of these references you use for this book, and it's quite remarkable.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's much Judeo-Christian history in its aftermath beside just fishing, but was it hard to end the book after what 220 pages or so?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was not hard to the extent that you took a deep breath.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: I did have experiences along the way of doubt.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: I have to say that.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: I doubted whether or not spending this much of my life, especially at my age, with this research, that the writing of this research was really what I should be doing.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: I had occasions in which I would just shout out in the privacy of my own writing space, you know, am I doing the right thing here?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I would be looking for indications that they were.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, and that's why I completed it.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, I end the book with what is an epilogue, although I don't call it an epilogue, because if you call it an epilogue, nobody will probably ever read it.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I said, you know, if you have read this far in a book, you know, if you are of this particular Christian faith, that's been reinforced.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you're the Judeo-Christian tradition, that has been reinforced.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you're an agnostic, you might be better informed now.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're an atheist, you might be better informed as to what the religious faith is about rather than what you thought it was about.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so I approach it in all four of those directions because my publisher, and I'll be quite frank about this, said, you know, you have to understand that this is not a book that is likely to get out there for 30, 60, 120 or 365 days.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: This book has longevity attached to it, and I think this book is going to be read now, but it's also going to be read for a longer period of time.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: I talked to several rabbis about this book because I did not want to have just a Christian perspective.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: And one of those was a lawyer who actually helped get me through law school when I was not quite sure in that first year that that was going to happen.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it was fascinating because he believed so strongly in Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism that he was president of his synagogue at the same time that he was a cantor in the choir of the Roman Catholic Church in his own community, which I thought was remarkable.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: But he made the point to me that lawyers can figure out the difference between Judaism and Christianity in a very core sense, and maybe we'll never have a transcript.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't it be remarkable to have a transcript of Nicodemus's discussions with Jesus?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what remarkable that might be.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: But we think we told him, hey, you're in real trouble here.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's why you've got to be aware of the consequences of what you are teaching, because in Judaism, essentially, it's bilateral relationships.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: And Christians misunderstand that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is seen as maybe scary, horrifying even, but it's not that at all.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's a limitation.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: If you are plucking out somebody's eye, you better be aware that they can pluck out your eye, but they can't go any further.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: They can't kill you.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: So those are limitations.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: That was important.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, Judaism is essentially bilateral relationships.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you get that in their society and their cultures that come from the law.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: And what Jesus was doing was giving us unilateral forgiveness.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a threat to the bilateral nature, and not just to the bilateral nature of the religion, but to the society, the culture, everything that flowed from the faith, from the religion itself.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Even though forgiveness was very much present and is throughout the faith and is throughout the what we call the old faith, the old testament, they refer to it, of course, as their Jewish Bible.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so these were important things for me to understand and getting a grasp as to what Jesus was bringing and why they felt.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, they derided him as a faker that the miracles were not really real and things of that nature.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: But you can't get all wrapped up in that.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: You just have to say Jesus was here with a certain message, and it's amazing to me, and I find it encouraging that in these fifty, eight hundred years, as I said a few moments ago, you know, Christianity has been 2,000 of that sitting beside of Judaism.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, quite frankly, if you look at the world today, there's no other religious faith of any kind, Western faith or eastern faith that has been around for 5,800 years.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that to me is sort of an attestation, a confirmation of the rightness and the positions of both of those faiths.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: You've been to Israel, I've been there with you.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it was a single trip I've taken, and it was an incredible experience.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think you've been there at least a few times, and you mentioned that your career has taken you there.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, because of the war going on in in that region, probably isn't the time to visit.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: But if someone asks, you know, is it worth visiting Israel, what would you tell them?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would tell them it's not only worth it, you've got to do it.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: To go to Israel is to understand what you hear, what you read much more effectively than any other way.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: You think of critical elements of Easter's coming up, right?
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so on Palm Sunday, Jesus says to his guys, use that phrase, you know, go find me the ass to ride upon the donkey in, and you have no idea that all they had to do was to go out the lion's gate, down the hill, up the other side of the hill, and bring it back to him.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you travel in Israel, a country that is so small, I have had the opportunity by other reasons for me being in Israel to be at the ultimate northeast corner of Israel, where I could have stepped across a fence into Syria on one hand, stepped across a fence into Lebanon on the other, and you turn around and you look and you see all of Israel.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: There's Jordan to the left, the Mediterranean to the right, and you see all the way to the Red Sea, and it's just remarkable to have that vision from that height.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very small country.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: In our program in Greece, where we brought the best and the brightest from uh that entire region together for a program in the summer, the students would talk about this, they would share with us their own views, and we were making, I think, some real progress off book in confidence in one-on-one relations between them.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: We never thought we could change anything in the big picture of the Middle East, but we were bringing people there that might be the minister of X, Y, or Z in Israel, being able to pick up the telephone and call the minister of XYZ in any of the 27 countries and all the configurations of that.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: And but we study conflict.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: We study conflict because there's no region of the world that has probably for a longer period of time accommodated the realities of conflict.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: The oldest form of conflict is annihilation.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: The most advanced form of conflict is resolution.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: In between that you have the Gauls that did not want to be killed by Judas Caesar simply moving to Switzerland.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: Get out of the way, right?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so there are five or six elements of conflict resolution.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right now we have this very visible on the front page of papers, on the evening news, whatever, the radio updates, whatever, this enormous conflict going on.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, each one of us has to sort their way through that, and the conflict is expanding, and that makes it even more frightening.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, decisions have been made that really are a part of our students, our alumni in that program, who are now in their forties and fifties and are quite successful in government and so forth.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: It gives that learning they got from us into their minds as to how to take a look at what is going on.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Final question.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: Why should someone read this book?
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think somebody should read it for maybe a handful.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure that would come out to be five.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think they should read it because it's a different perspective on what's happening in these two faces.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's a different perspective on what's happening in the region right now.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: But beyond that, I think it comes to you as an individual.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this is one of the surprises to me.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: You asked me several minutes ago what the surprises were.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: One of them was the way that I looked at myself in this context.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Jesus didn't come to earth to save saints, they were already saints or would become saints.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: He came to earth to save sinners because we all are.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I can remember, Roger, when you and I were both in college, and I was in college at least 10 years before you were, ISI by that name.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think what that organization was trying to do was to recognize the importance of an individual, an individual.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't mean to make light of this because we don't know how the afterlife works.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: We don't.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: We have hints of that, we have suspicions of that, and a positive use of that word, not a negative use of that word, but we do not know how it works.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: But we know that when we stand before judgment, however that happens, and I say this as a lawyer, when you stand before Peter, if that's it, the pearly gate, if that's it, or if something that we don't even understand, which is possibly the case, we're by ourselves.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Our lawyer isn't with us to plead our case on our behalf.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so we have to answer for ourselves as to our lives.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this book gives you ways in which to appreciate that.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is probably close to the end of this review.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the things that I found absolutely overwhelming was a better understanding of what the book of John is all about.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: And we know that's the most spiritual of the four gospels, radically so in its own way, because he gives us a sense of what Jesus was in the totality of all of eternity.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't want to compete with people in science.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: I started in marine biology, I started as a scientist myself.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, there's this dualism, it's a remarkable dualism in physics, in the creation of the universe and so forth, is gravitational forces, you know, versus centrifugal forces, is light versus darkness, it's water versus land.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: All the duality, some of which comes out of the Old Testament book of Genesis.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is duality.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if there is a truth in that as a totality, it means that everything that is material must have something that offsets that.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: And what offsets materiality is spirituality.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think John captured that.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: The word that came to my mind when I asked you the question was context of providing so much context to the things we read about in the in the Bible, in the Gospels in particular.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think after reading your book, when I read scripture, I'll be better understanding many of the verses there, many of the stories, many of the miracles and parables that are touched on in your book from the aspect not just of fishing, but of what life was like in the region at the time and what you know the government was like.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's, I think, a book I would highly recommend for Christians, Jews, anyone who wants to be more enlightened about a very important topic.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you, Randy, for being the guest on the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for your great leadership of the Fund for American Studies as chairman of the board.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'll look forward to having you return after your next book is published.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: This book, Jesus and His Fisherman the Untold Story, is published by Post Hill Press, which is just wonderful that they're getting it out in time for Easter.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Makes a great gift.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfas.org.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: And be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Roger Reim, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.