 Dr. Askov, welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm very well. Thank you for having me. Today we're going to be returning to the world of Greco-Roman associations and their intersection with early Christ believer groups. Thanks to the work of scholars such as yourself, John Kloppenberg, Philip Harland, and others, we have a fresh mode of comparison. These Greco-Roman associations and the nascent Jesus movement are now looked at through more dynamic ways of understanding the world of time. I didn't know if you could just explore and go over the different types of Greco-Roman associations, whether that be philosophical, religious, or voluntary. Yeah, this has occupied a lot of my time from early on in terms of the taxonomy of associations. So, you start with the broad categories. Philosophical schools, for example, the Epicurean Garden or the Academy or the Stoa for the Stoics. These used to be talked about in terms of one kind of school focused on what they called philosophy, pursuit of wisdom, and human flourishing. And then the earlier scholars would also talk about the mystery of religions as a separate kind of taxonomy where we could put things. And then, of course, voluntary associations, which were these unofficial groups in the Greek and then in the Roman world that we know existed mostly from inscriptions and some papyri. So, early on you had these big categories. I should mention also synagogues, who were kind of separated out. And in some areas, scholars then used these categories to try and understand Christ groups. I think we're now at a point where we sort of see the pot is both bigger and has a lot more smaller pieces in it. So, there were associations of a lot of different kinds in the Greek and Roman world. And some focused on cult, so worship of a deity. So, this would be religious kind of association. And some were based on occupation. Others might have been grouped by neighborhood. Others by ethnicity. So, Udioi or the Jewish groups would be one example of that. So, he sort of titrated it down now to even a lot more different kinds of groups, but with a bigger pot that would include philosophical schools within there. And the first essay, I believe, of your collection, you'd kind of go over those schools and I'm like, oh, I didn't even think of it that way. But yeah, they would be considered an association, wouldn't they? But are the main sources of evidence for Greco-Roman associations? The primary evidence we have is inscriptions from antiquity, Greek or Latin inscriptions, sometimes bilingual ones as well. And a lot of the evidence we have available to us is based on archaeological finds, like where they find an inscription, how many they find, graveyards are a good place for that, sometimes reuse of inscriptions in more modern houses. We're lucky that they did like what once called the epigraphic habit, at least in the Roman world. I mean, the Greek world as well, but we wish it went back a little earlier. If there's one thing ancient Greeks and Romans like to do was to chisel their name on things. So, that's across the Greek and Roman world, we find inscriptions from all those areas. We have some evidence from papyri, but of course that only really survived in Egypt. So, that gives a good sense of Egyptian associations in often Greek, Latin, and demonic, but it's more localized. But when we match it up with the inscriptions from other places, we can see some pattern. And then we have some literary texts, not a lot, but texts where the writers mention associations explicitly, either in some kind of legal dispute or describing, you know, Cicero will describe the way associations were used by his opponent, for example, when they were electioneering. So, we have three kinds of evidence, but the predominant evidence is from inscriptions. The legal status of these groups was sometimes in question, wasn't it? I like to use the example of driving. So, early on in the Hellenistic period, no problem, these associations existed. In the Republican period, they were banned. And under Julius Caesar and Augustus, they kind of opened it up with some limitations. But, you know, if you're driving down the highway, you know, the speed limit might be 60 miles an hour, but you might go 70, and you might pass a police car and, you know, traffic is flowing at 70 miles an hour. They'll probably let you go. But if they have another reason to stop you, they have a law on the books to stop you. And so, with associations, there's this flourishing of them, even while technically they're banned, but they just get tolerated. And in fact, men, like, write to emperors and mention them. And so, over time, then you start getting, seeing some of them get more than just tolerated. They get woven into the civic fabric a bit more in their urban centers. And so, they start to be used, if you like, by the state and even become an arm of the state into sort of second, into third century. So, it's this oddity. But yeah, in theory that they're illegal. Except for a few that Augustus and Caesar said, yeah, these are the conditions under which they could be legal. And Dr. Kloppenberg and his work, Christ's associations really drove home the points that the association in a world in flux in terms of stability, associations often take the place of the traditional family structure. This is a world where people are often displaced by necessities of making a living and trade, among other things. How does the association take that place and give people who otherwise would not have a place in the civic world of this cosmopolitan empire of voice or at least a sense of belonging? I think that last turn of phrase is key, a sense of belonging. Where do they fit in society? And whether it's by migration, either voluntary or forced migration. So, you have to move from your home city to somewhere else because of work. Or it might just be a disruption within the city itself. People seem to be looking for connection. I mean, I think in some ways we could talk more broadly about what it means to be human. And so, these associations both mimic a little bit of the civic structure and a little bit of the household structure. So, we find some where they might call each other brothers. And you see this in Christ groups, but not just there. Or they might have a mother or father title for a leader. And so, they're giving people a sense of being connected as a kinship group. We call it a fictive kinship group. It's not blood relatives, but they feel like they're friends or even more than that, brothers and sisters. And then, there's also ways in which the names they use for themselves or their leadership structure that sounds like the civic structure that they find themselves in. And so, we think that these groups then were places where people went. They socialized. They didn't really have a lot of economic power the way modern unions would. So, if they went on strike, the Romans would cut them down pretty quickly and say, no, back to work. But one of the things they did a lot was eat meals together. So, they socialized over that. And it's a common salary that comes with that. Another thing that a lot of them did was take care of burial. So, if somebody in the group passed away, if you're away from home, you don't have family to take care of your burial, but you've been paying your dues, then they'll ensure that your body is taken care of, buried or cremated. You just mentioned something there. I feel it's important to point out. And you mentioned this in your articles. You note that professional associations often organize themselves by modeling the civic structures. This is also reflected in the multitude of titles, like you said, used to designate these groups. The important distinction is we look at these texts in a theological way of looking back. But if you're in the 1st or 2nd century and you're hearing the term ecclesia synagogue, that just means, for lack of a better term, an assembly. Why is it important to understand these communities? And I'm going to actually talk about specifically the community at Thessaloniki in Macedonia. Why is it important to understand the community that Paul is writing to you as a trade organization, as opposed to, say, the way that these groups are portrayed and say something like the Book of Acts? This is a huge question. I think it's the critical question. So, let me start with the terminology because you're right. There's a way in which we hear the word ecclesia or synagogue as having sort of been puted in them certain kind of theological, ideological, ethnographical kind of things. But they were just terms that were used for, as you say, different and different terms were used for assemblies and they chose some. So, you get a synagogue of barbers and parenthos, which is not Jewish at all, right? It's very clear from the text. And so, it's important there. They're saying we're a synagogue of a particular kind. And I think this is why you also see in Jewish inscriptions a synagogue of Judeans as opposed to a different kind. And so, it's a differentiation. But the bigger question then, like why is this important, is historically, mostly because of the way European history developed, the church has dominated the narrative from the way it's presented in Acts, the church's triumphant. It's special, it's designated by God, and it basically replaces Israel and then kind of wins out over the so-called pagan groups. And so, a lot of textbooks even today will talk about Christians, Jews, and others as if there are three separate groups in the ancient world, Christian groups, Jewish groups, and this amorphous other. And we're trying to push back against that and say, no, all there is is others. There's associations. And in there, there's Christ groups, there's Judean groups, and they overlap. So, sometimes, you know, Christ's believers were Jewish, sometimes not. But there's also Zeus groups, Dionysus groups, Mithras groups. And if you're walking down the street in the ancient world and said, do you belong to a Christian group, a Jewish group, or another? They'd say, what's an other? Like, I'm a part of a Zeus group. Like, there's no group, you know, that they will put that themselves into. So, we're trying to dismantle that, if you like weirdly, that specialness of Christianity, specialness of Judaism, not because it's not important to know about them, but because we want to put them within their broader context. And so, it's more interesting to say, how is a Jewish group similar to and different from a Dionysus group? Because clearly, they're going to be different, likewise Christ groups, but a Dionysus group would be different than an ISIS group or a Zeus group. Yeah, the taxonomy of difference is really important. It's like Jonathan Z Smith said all those years ago, the importance is in the differences. It's not interesting if everything's the same. And that's why I feel it's so important to shine a light on this. I really feel like using these exempla from Greco-Roman associations is hard and parcel of what I'm actually trying to do with my channel as well with the ancient world in particular, just in general. We need to understand them in their context and not put one thing over the other or favor one thing over the other, because there's some ideological reason why. It's because we have to understand them all in their context and also not only what makes them the same, but what makes them different and why that's important just as people living together, right? I'll just say my personal favorite kind of association are the tree cutters, the wool die, so I can imagine being a member of a tree cutter Dionysus cult or something. You live and die as a Dionysus tree cutting a civic or one of those specialty associations like Thessaloniki associations. You go to a normal person on the street, you're like, oh, you're a Jesus follower? Or are you the cult of Hipsistos with the specialization and herding goats or whatever? I mean, if you think about, I like modern parallels. They don't always work. They break down at a certain point, but if you're at a party with people you don't know, after the perfunctory kinds of introductions, people say, so what do you do? So what's your job? And so that's where we might start with an identity for ourselves. And so this is how their primary identity might be. Yeah, I'm a tree cutter. Oh, my neighbor's a tree cutter. Do you know him? Yes, we're in the same group. We have a meal together once a month. And this is sort of a way of situating yourself within the civic state. And so this is sort of part of normal conversation. And we're trying to say that Judean groups and Christian groups are both part of that normality and also not like in the same way you might say, oh, you're one of those tree cutters. Yeah, they cleared my land last year. I don't like them very much. And it gets this awkward moment. Again, the analogies break down at a certain point. But it shows just how we do these things normally. If you play a sport, you might be part of a sports group. If you like to drink, you might be part of a whiskey tasting club. If you quilt, you might be part of a quilting group. And so these things, we look at them in the modern world and say, well, there's a certain demographic that plays sports, a certain demographic that quilts, a certain demographic that likes to drink whiskey. And we look at their gender, we look at their economics, Danny, we look at this, we look at that and look for patterns. And absolutely, the whiskey club is not the same as the quilting group. And yet so, but we start with similarities. We can compare them because they're both groups that are in the city. And then, and you're right with Jonathan Smith, I think my favorite article title is What a Difference Difference Makes. And the similarities are the least interesting thing, but they invite the comparison. Going through your articles and going through your introduction to the epistles to the Thessalonians. For those unfamiliar, first Thessalonians is dated as probably the most early of the Pauline epistles. So it's really important in that sense. But I think the thing we tend to lose sight of is we tend to look at these things romanticized as like, oh, Paul's going around and he's creating these things. Paul Kwa, by himself, they didn't exist prior to Paul coming into town. If you could give us a sketch of what's going on in first Thessalonians. We have the two pieces of evidence. We have Paul's letters, and then we have acts. And we have to figure out, can we reconcile them? And if so, how, or if they're not, and what ones are primary sorts by the guy that founded this community, the other secondary, but you know, sometimes we're blinded by our own closeness. But I was like, it's good to start with the primary. And so with first Thessalonians, most people would date that as the earliest of his letters. And when you start going through it and mirror reading what he's saying to the group and about the group, one of the most clear things is he says in the first chapter, you've turned to God from idols. Now, that's not a way a Jewish person would talk about other Jews, right? They're already turned to God, but they might have found a Messiah in Jesus. That sounds like non-Jews have found the Judean God. Then in the second chapter, he says, don't you remember how when I was with you, I worked night and day with my hands while I spoke to you about the gospel. And so again, that doesn't sound like he's standing on a corner preaching, trying to attract people. It sounds like he's in a workshop. So I was the first to argue that he's in a workshop, but I kind of ran with it and said, well, what if we imagine that instead of him working during the day and then in the evenings going and doing street preaching or going to the synagogue that we take about his word that he's spending this time in the workshop, we know they work long days. And of course he's going to talk to them. And so I imagine that at a certain point he says, you know, there's this God that, you know, he tells them about the God of the Hebrew Bible and the apocalyptic stuff comes in at the end of the world. He mentions the wrath of God in chapter one, like they're familiar with it. And they say, jeez, we got to get this God on our side. And Paul's like, great, here's how you do it. And they say, well, just give us a little idol of this God and we'll put him up on the shelf with the other gods. Paul says, yeah, there's the thing. This God doesn't like to share space. There's no idol of him and he's not going to go. And I think this is what's behind the you turn to God from idols is not individual, you and you and you, but all y'all. So the sort of the group as a whole decided, we will adopt it a different patron deity than the one or ones that we've had in the past. There's a lot more in the text that I think points to him using language that artisans, hand workers would be familiar with. But that's the key piece right there. And then he also mentioned in the Corinthian letters that he's, he's works with his hands. And this is something that actually is cooperated in acts as well, that talks about him being a tent maker, worker with leather. So we get it from two different sides that your primary and secondary sources that, that he, he's an artist that he works with his hands. Leatherworking is transportable with your tools. And you use a network when you go from town to town, you probably would have gone maybe to a Jewish neighborhood and then tried to find work in that area. If not, then the leather worker somewhere else. And that's an important point too, not just like the language that he's using and the fact that it's, I'm convinced, you know, just the concept that this is a pre-existent trade association more or less who had other idols and Paul's just like, Hey, we got a new one. And, you know, it's like he works a little bit different, but you know, don't worry, it'll work out in the end. But also what's important in this, just kind of dispelling the uniqueness as well, an important thing to point out, but I was really fascinated by in your introduction to the first and second Thessalonian epistles. You mentioned the process of writing a letter in general was very different from what we conceive of in our mind. So like, just like how we kind of think of like Paul romantically walking in, you know, one day like, Hey, I'm creating this new community and, you know, y'all are now followers of Jesus and isn't this great. We also tend to think of Paul as like a loan in a room, writing a letter by himself, sending it off, you know, but these things more often than not, like you mentioned are more often than not written by committee. So I didn't know if you could just kind of touch up on that. This is the interesting piece. I mean, we've all seen the Renaissance art and others that have him sort of in a room like what I have behind me, packed with books and he's sitting in a desk with the candle and, you know, that's not at all what it was like. And so what I tried to do in my little book on first and second Thessalonians and other places is take seriously the collaborative nature of letter writing. So when he says Paul and Silas and Timothy to the Thessalonians and then throughout uses the word we, then this is not just him writing it. I imagine he's checking with them. Hey, what about saying this? What about that? There's a few places where he breaks in. I, Paul, right? So this, I think even more so draws attention to that he does differentiate between when he himself is speaking and when he's speaking for the committee. And so this means that they collaborated both in the sort of foundational stage. So in the case of a preexisting group, probably help them rethink not their structure. I think, why would you change something that works, but their orientation towards a different God? What does that mean now? And they didn't cover all the basis. So things have come up like people have died. They've asked Paul, I guess, what do we do about them? You made it sound like, you know, Jesus would return before that happened. So he has to figure it out, but he's working on this with other people. So everything from the papyrus that he's probably having it written on to the person who's writing it, who's probably a highly trained slave, right? Paul himself, it's arguable, he probably had a hype idea, but arguably the person who's, who's writing it all down from this committee has the hype idea and he's putting it together in ways that he thinks his audience will understand. So it's important to realize that this is not done just by like one great man who's just going around changing the world one community at a time. The older paradigm of the Holy Spirit whispering into Paul's ear what to write and then Paul writes it down himself. No, it's not even just Paul writing himself dictating. I imagine there are times when Paul says some stuff and describes frantically writing it and Paul says, well, you know how to finish this. You've heard me talk before, right? So the squad can write that down. Paul's like Appalachus. He knows how to start a good story, but he can't finish it. Write down to the sentence level. Absolutely. I want to get to this because this is a really important part of your work and you did mention this before. A couple of things actually, the communal meal, the eschatological language that he's speaking to the Thessalonians about in regards to their concerns. And this is one thing I always found really beautiful and also very weird that the communal meal at the tomb of the hero or the columbarium of the association is a way of reinforcing the dead also as members of the community. As John Kloppenberg has pointed out in my previous interview with him, you're a member for life and then into death. It doesn't just stop at your death. You are still part of it. This is most strikingly pointed out in how they take their meals with their dead. And your essay, I think it's titled Paul's Apocalypticism and the myth-making of the Thessalonian and Corinthian groups. You look at it from the vantage point of this sense. It's not a sense of when we read 1 Thessalonians 4 in that whole section where he's like, the Lord will come back and the dead will rise first and we'll all lead him in the air, things like that. Like I said, we look back on it with theological language. But really, is there question about theology or is it about the people in their community and just the simpler sense of does this person still belong? And are my friends and the people that I ate with and lived with, are they going to be with us? What is he talking about really? I think he's very much talking about who still fits into our community as we imagine it. I think Paul would be a little bit shocked at where that language has gone in Christian history. So in terms of the development of apocalyptic scenarios of Jesus' return of things, I think for him it's more of a, yeah, Jesus is coming back, kind of an off-the-cuff response to a very important question. And I think that question is around belonging. So community members, one or two, let's say, have passed away. And I think they pushed back to Paul. We know those exchanges of emissaries going back and forth. So I think they've said to him, you know, Joe Blogg's passed away. You said this God was bringing this wrath down on earth and we'd all be saved, but I guess Joe Blogg's missed out. So poor Joe. He didn't make it. And Paul's like, no, hold on, hold on. No, that's not the way this works. And he has to tell you that Joe was just waiting for Jesus. When Jesus comes, like the dead in Christ, those like Joe that are actually, and he uses the word sleeping. They're just asleep. They're not dead. They're going to rise up. And then those of us who are still alive and includes himself in that, and also, you know, his fellow writers, we will rise and join them in the air. So we're still all part of a community. In 1 Corinthians 15, he sort of has a similar scenario, but he's developed a little bit. And what's curious to me is by the time he gets to writing Philippians, which is one of his later letters, I think he's tired. And he imagines a scenario now where he's not part of the alive people that get caught up. But he says, you know, I wish I could, you know, I wish I could die and be with Christ. Right? There's no more. I wish Jesus would come back and take me out of this, right? That he might like, it's changed a little bit for him. So I think he's developing at his goes. Which says to me, he hasn't got this preconceived theology of the end times when he writes 1 Corinthians 4. He's answering a very specific question that they've asked him. And it's about what do we do with the dead people? And so I think to be honest, I expect he would say, you honor them on their birthday or on their death day, you have a meal at their graveside, you include them, you maybe read their names out during some kind of ritual activity, all the kinds of things we see in associations. Now, we don't have that evidence for Christ groups. But why wouldn't they? That's what people did. Right? It's just we have a letter not an inscription. I guess an imperfect analogy, but an analogy is like, why I started this channel in the first place, right? I started the channel because there were paradigms already there that I felt like I could add to. If for some reason it wasn't YouTube, but it was say on public access, maybe 20 years ago, maybe I'd have a public access TV show. It's just paradigmatic things in a kind of process of negotiation in the culture. Right? What is really happening here is that, like we've mentioned in this conversation many times, these are not groups just kind of created by the Holy Spirit. Don't get me wrong. I think there's a wonderful inspiration in all kinds of human reactions to ritual cult and more. They're just using the building blocks of their time. And this is no different in the same article you were talking about with the Corinthians and the Thessalonians and the end. You mentioned that scholars previously used to look at it as Paul struggling to explain the Hebrew eschatological way of looking at the end of the world to people who perhaps didn't understand it. But you pointed out that they would have with something like Stoicism, for instance. So there possibly was. So it's not grounded in Jewish apocalyptic, Paul's Jewish. This is where he's got his ideas from, right? But I don't think he's sitting down to teach them Jewish apocalyptic thinking. I think he's trying to connect with ideas they already would have had around things like the transmigration of the soul or an afterlife or things like this. He starts that passage as we don't want you to grieve like those who have no hope. And the usual interpretation of that is everybody who wasn't a Christian or a Jew had no hope. And certainly there are texts that would indicate that way. But the more, even since that article, I spent more time looking at that and more and more finding ways in which in the Roman world people did have hope for life beyond the grave, which is curious then who is Paul addressing there. So Dionysic groups, you know, in the gold tablets of Dionysus, you have this whole this imaginary that is the afterlife that the initiate can kind of navigate their way through. You have it in Egyptian texts and you have this imagination in the philosophical schools of something beyond lasting. So Paul's not unique in that and it's not just Jewish, but it's through his Jewish lens that he's going to draw on the kinds of metaphors of language that he's used to without having to explain the whole system to a non-Jewish audience. Yes, absolutely. Paul is using Hebrew eschatological ideas. That's very important point then. And being Jewish in that world doesn't mean just one thing. There's many ways of doing that depending on where they were. Yeah, you could be a Philo or you could be Philo's nephew, right? You mentioned before that there were certain analogies that you could possibly do with Paul's exhortations to these groups and association languages to begin with. You make this point in the sections that Paul and Enduro Paul talk about the banquets and disciplining people who were rowdy. So I didn't know if you could just kind of touch upon that. And why is it valuable to look at these exhortations through the lens of association language? This part of the similarities and difference kind of conversation that we started with. But if you look at the associations there, when we look at the bylaws and we wish we had more of their bylaws, we don't have them for all the groups, but the way they organize themselves. There's very much a concern about decorum, both at meetings and at meals. So make sure you're sitting in the right seat. Don't take someone else's seat. Don't call someone names. And all the way through to it's not right for you to take a fellow member to court. And then you realize that when Paul talks about the disruptive and second Thessalonians, or in 1 Corinthians talking about he's a Paul, but a brother is taking a brother to court, you realize that in many ways they're just doing what people did. And Paul is trying to stop them in the way that other kinds of group leaders trying to stop their group people from doing what they did. So it's not that Christians were particularly predisposed to be disruptive and had to be reigned in or take each other to court. It's just this is the kind of thing that was happening and the kind of thing that group leadership didn't like. And they exacted kind of fines of punishment. So anything from a small financial fine to a big financial fine to a flogging and sometimes expulsion. And so in 2 Thessalonians, the writer says, you know, if the person is disruptive enough, then they're barred from the communal meme. So it seems that it's Paul not giving rules, but reminding them that the rules exist. So he's not laying down the law. He's saying, this is the rules of engagement that we know from group dynamics. I found it very interesting how you reconstruct Thessalonian trade organization as an all male group. I didn't know if you want to talk about this colloquialism Paul uses that kind of gives it away. I found it very humorous. In the course of writing for Thessalonians, he's addressing various problems that have been brought to attention. So one is of course the dead that we're talking about. And he says, each of you has to control his own skeuos. That's the Greek word. And it means vessel. So maybe something you would pour wine into, but it's clearly a metaphor. So a metaphor for what? So then we look culturally, how has it been used metaphorically? And I'll talk about two that jump out in the literature. One is you control your wife. The other is you control your penis. So, you know, we do it metaphorically today too, you know, control your thingy or your piece or whatever your John Hancock. We have the colloquialism that if 2000 years from now, they're somewhat reasoning was like, what's that? What are they talking about? And so we have to make that decision when we translate that word. You translate it as vessel and leave it up to the English reader to kind of figure out what he means. Or do you pick one of those metaphoric pieces? Because no matter what one you use, it's an interpretation. And so this is the debate. Now where I went with it, and this has run me into a little bit of trouble, but I said, you know, this is not an expectation you put on a mixed gender audience, right? And beyond that in the passage, it talks about, you know, being with prostitutes and some other kinds of, it's all about purity. But it sounded to me a lot around male purity, but this is what, you know, the boys would talk about in terms of keeping yourself pure as opposed to a mixed gender audience. Now this is only one small piece within the broader argument of Paul's talking to a trade group. But we do know that for the most part, the trades were gender segregated. And so one would expect if you're in a leather workshop, and it's a group there, then it's mostly if not exclusively male. And that fits with the associate. So I mean, it's a, it doesn't prove it is an association. It's more once you go down that path, you can interpret it that way. They were probably married and eventually probably talked about their experiences with their families. And maybe this is how there was a gender mixing. But it just seems to me there's not a lot of evidence in the text at that early stage for it being more than an all male group, as we would expect other associations were. What surprised me in my research is how different that is from Philippi. You know, Philippians, he wrote the, led it to the Philippians. It's 110 kilometers, let's just say. So what is that in miles, 70 miles down the road? And there, very explicitly, Paul names women who are leaders in that group. And in fact, I argue that when he starts that letter with greeting those who are bishops and deacons, Presbyterians and deaconesses or elders, he then names women who seem to be arguing in ways, I would say, as a leadership that they might hold those titles. So it's not that Paul's only creating male groups or only creating occupational kinds of groups that I think he's doing. And he just gets to a town and works with what's before him. And at the Saloniki, though, I think it was a trade group that already existed and therefore was male and then find in that language of control your own penis. And I would take it as control your own penis. Then, you know, keep it in your pants kind of thing is part of him trying to bring the decorum to the group. But we find those same kind of purity concerns in other associations as well. Purity concerns are not just part and parcel of a Pauline community. These would be in the bylaws. He's not a particular prude, like other people had these kinds of concerns. My last few questions, I want to focus on something that's extremely important to an association, regardless of what type. And that's commensality, the ritual of eating together, coming together the banquet. As Harlan would say, associations and the accompanying banquets are about claiming a place in society. We've touched upon this before, especially people displaced by the needs of the economy of being displaced from their home in general by maybe things like war or slavery. It's important to find a place in the world. The meals and status that a Greco-Roman association would provide for that is a constant, right? And you find people find status in that. You look at the literature, something as far reaching as Satirakon, the second part, Tramalchios Feast. There's all kinds of vying for positions there. You have all the difference bylaws. And you see who gets to sit where, who gets the honor. Reading something even like the Gospel of John, all the discourses pretty much are taking place over a banquet. And a lot of Plato's dialogues take place at banquets and communal meals. And we have to realize that these are semi-public events as well. This went a long way in claiming the place because you're out in public. People are seeing you eat. It's a performance. I'm thinking a strange analogy, but hear me out. Appalachus is golden ass. Like when the master finds out that Lucius can eat human food, he brings them to the table at the banquet and he gives them this privileged place. Everybody is like the guests of honor. And he feeds them all these human food. I didn't know if you could just talk about what I would call and others have called the politics of common sense. Yeah, this is taking up a lot of my research timing in very good ways in terms of the way that meals helped people navigate these social relations. And again, it is a sort of a scale to think about these things. So a private meal, if you imagine in the sort of a back of a house, and we do have evidence of Pompeo, a villa where it would be more private. There are also the public ones I get to them, but there you're signaling to the in group. So let's say there's nine to 15 people most and the rooms are not bigger than that, to take that many people. Even within those nine or 15, who's the guest of honor? Where who's the one sitting in the least seat? Everyone will remember that. Now, as you shift it and so that it's, you can see the diners as you're walking by the house, you can see into the dining room. That's then now signaling not just to the insiders, but to the people on the street that might see it. If you're meeting not in the house, but in the tavern, then that's other patrons there who aren't invited are going to see who's invited not invited. So it's all performative, no matter not how public or semi private or private. It's still very much performative. And so what they're performing is ways of fitting in, but I would also add to that identity creation. And so this is what they're telling each other how they imagine things could be. In some cases, imagining everybody is equal. In other cases, just reinforcing the kinds of social hierarchies that we see across the Roman world, not just in associations. And so there's different kinds of common salad that people can participate in. And one of that is a secretive, which is sort of says like, we're a special group and you can't be part of it. And one of it's transgressive where, you know, topsy-turvy. So we have, you know, an association that imagines that a slave could be sort of more honored at a meal than his master. Did it ever happen? I doubt it, but at least they imagine it could. What strikes me is even when it does happen and they imagine, let's say, for example, and this is part of I think what Petronius is poking fun at, that we have this lavish banquet and we're just like the elite. Ultimately, when the elite read that, they realize, yeah, this guy's new money. He's not vast there. Or, you know, another analogy would be a bunch of guys go into a bar today and they sit down in a rowdy and they're drawing attention to themselves and they're like, yeah, we're the best hockey team. We just won the championship. Yeah, that's good. But as soon as they leave there and break apart, that whole transgressive stuff dissipates and they're back to being who they were. And so it's a sort of a space where they test out these things, which does find a place in the community. I think that's right. But also kind of as a reminder that they can play with where your place is in the community, but you're always going to kind of go back to it. It's kind of like when your boss serves you at the banquet during Christmas. Yeah. On Monday morning, you know that he's still above and you're not. It's just because you brought up Patronius and I can't help myself. You brought up Trimelkyo's beast. People are like, oh, what is Satyracon? Most people, if they even know it, they know just like that one part of the text, right? And they're like, well, I know who Trimelkyo is kind of, but I don't really know. I mean, everybody knows his story. He's Jay Gatsby, right? He's a nouveau riche point of Satyracon, right? And that beast is that Patronius and his circle are laughing at people like this. They're separated by like a generation or so. But I imagine somebody like plenty of the younger would be exactly that type of audience and go, look at these idiot freed men. Because plenty still refer to freed men as slaves or plenty who's like the Tom Buchanan of this world. I don't care if you're a free man. I'm old blood, oligarchy money, and you are still a slave to me. So it's very interesting. No matter how hard they try, right? And those freed men at that banquet, and they're distressed of all the sophists and the philosophers, they look down just as much on the learned people like Encopius and his friend as Gyltos, as they do vice versa. It's very interesting, you know, the mapping going on, even there, you know, just on the question of common salad. I wanted to ask, why is it important to understand things like the last supper in relation to and looking at it through the lens of a Greco-Rome association meal versus something just created and instituted and looking back on it over 2100 years of theology? Why is it important to understand it in its original context? As a historian, I think it's critical sort of to get get history as right as we can when we construct it from the available evidence. And so that hasn't been done, you know, theologically in a church context, I would imagine they too want to get the history right. But I think it also helps us to revisit the way things have been interpreted and implemented. And in the case of, say, the Lord's Supper, people are at least in the West so used to thinking of it as it's depicted in, you know, the famous medieval photograph, it's not obviously, but of the 13 guys sitting facing outwards at a table. And just saying that that's not how meals were done in antiquity. Associations are not. That's just not how people eat dinner. Changes how we imagine Jesus is situated in that. And then you mentioned the Gospel of John earlier and so many of the scenes they are set in meals. But when it says Peter wants to ask Jesus a question and he has to tap the beloved disciple on the shoulder to say, could you ask this question for me? Because the beloved disciple is resting his head against Jesus. That that's not sitting up in chairs. That's reclining at a banquet. So it's not special. It normalizes that scene. They were having a meal, probably on a triclinium, just like everybody else would be. And so we can imagine there's a lot of other people coming in bringing in the food or maybe not a lot, but some men and women, part of the retinue, maybe even slaves, right, are part of that context in which then he gives a sort of a philosophical or theological, but a philosophical kind of speech. Again, it all is constructed in the mind of the writer there. So again, how did it happen historically is one of the questions. What one of the potentialities, one of the possibilities. Another is how has John constructed it and very much constructed it in that mode of a symposium? Then what does that mean about what John is trying to signal to his audience by constructing it that way, regardless of whether it happened or not, right? And so these sort of questions, I think, sort of run parallel to each other historically, but also in terms of literally what is that. And contextualizing them and for what a bit of a re-describing, there's a group I was involved with and still am and, you know, it's been around for a while and Jonathan C. Smith was part of re-describing Christian origins. Each little piece gets re-described and then so the opposite is it's a whole different picture than the sort of standard grand narrative, which is rather triumphalistic that these groups appeared, you know, after Jesus rose up into heaven, 5,000 people converted, then 3,000 people converted. This is all the narrative in the book of Acts. And this has been chipped away at, chipped away at, chipped away at in ways that suggests that this makes a lot of sense for what the writer's agenda is, but not in terms of what we know about group dynamics and antiquity. And then certainly it was a historian, you take kind of Holy Spirit God out of the picture as well. Say, how do we have human explanations for development growth slowly over a couple of centuries of these Christ groups? One of the things that I think where we are now is we translated a lot of inscriptions. This is a lot of material, a lot of papyrite, there's more coming out, fairly available on our database, Draco-Roman Associations. So Google that, you'll find the database of association inscriptions. There's so much more work to do, so many exciting things to find out and discover. I would just encourage you and your audience to keep probing, keep pushing, keep pushing back on my stuff, stuff I think now that I wish I'd written differently 25 years ago when I was writing papers as a grad student that got published, which is great. But now I'm like, yeah. So I published them in this book just to kind of, it's more of a sort of a, I think of it kind of like a greatest hits album of a rock band. And of that career stage and age where I have my greatest hits album and you can say, yeah, that was great and it's time, but maybe it didn't age as well, but this one maybe aged a bit better. So yeah, I just agree to be able to kind of work with the data and figure things out. I like the way you look at it as like a greatest hits album. It's kind of like your greatest hits, greatest misses. I guess it depends on our creative process. I think of a band that only released like two albums, like Jane's Addiction, you know, has a really great best of, but then you added that third album and then it kind of stinks up the whole joint. Dr. Askov, this has been a wonderful discussion. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Well, thank you very much for having me. I've really enjoyed it.