 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heiser's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 203, our 24th Q&A. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's a scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser. Hey, Mike, how you doing this week? Pretty good. Pretty good. It's been a good week. Productive, interesting, so... Yep, glad to be here and go through some more questions. All right, Mike. Well, it's been a while since we've done a regular Q&A. I apologize for everybody out there. If I don't respond to your emails, I get so many emails now that I kind of get behind and it's hard to keep up, but please know I do see y'all's emails and I do put your questions in the queue, so keep sending me those questions if you have any. I promise you eventually we'll get to them, hopefully. Some of the longer ones turn into whole episodes. Some of the episodes that are coming have come from questions, so, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, should we just get right into these? We've got five questions today and our first one's going to be from Rick, and he wants to know what changed between the Old Testament giving and the New Testament giving. Yeah, well, that's an important question and also a pretty variegated question. I mean, the short answer is the theocracy went away. I think that's probably the easiest place to start. I mean, on my website, I think for anybody who's listening and interested in the subject of giving and tithing, if you go to drmsh.com and put in the word tithing, that's T-I-T-H-I-N-G, you're going to get to a blog post where I have links to a two-part article series on tithing that I think is really well done. So that would give you the details of what I'm going to say here. Not the two articles aren't things that I've written, but they're written by somebody else. I just think it covers really all the bases and does a good job of it. Once you have the theocracy gone, that affects a lot because the tithing system of the Old Testament was meant to maintain the priesthood of this whole theocratic system that we think of as ancient Israel. You know, when the temple goes out, I was going to say out the window, when the temple burns down, you know, it's gone. And now there's still a priesthood around, but there were certain parts of the tithing system that were linked to certain things you did in the temple. Okay, that's going to naturally change things. You know, when the temple was rebuilt, I mean, it's not quite what it was. In Solomon's day, you don't have political independence. You don't have political autonomy like you did under the days of, you know, David and Solomon. A lot of the Old Testament laws about tithing certain resources, you know, just went with a certain lifestyle, a certain way of life that was geared to having a country, having that country run from a city, having a monarchy, having a temple. All of that gets shuffled and changed, you know, with the loss of a temple and the loss of a theocratic way of life. Now you still have, you know, people in synagogues, like after the temple is destroyed, you have the synagogue system developed. You had people teaching in the synagogues and they, you know, could still expect, I think both culturally and scripturally, that the idea of supporting those kinds of people, especially if they are still in the role of a priest, even though what they do now is somewhat limited, again in the absence of a temple, or the same, you know, kind of system and setup. They still, you know, have the right to be supported and maintained. You know, this is the way it was just generally in the ancient Near East. This is how priests lived. Their livelihood came from contributions, you know, sacrifices, maybe contributions of land, or, you know, physical goods, metals, whatever, you know, this is how they lived. Now in the New Testament era, again, when the whole people of God moves away from having an ethnic identity and a theocratic identity, so to now we're including, you know, Gentiles in the very fabric of the people of God. In the New Testament era, according to what the New Testament says, everybody's a priest, priesthood of the believer. So by definition, that just doesn't conform, you know, to the Old Testament system. And this is in part why you don't have a carryover in the New Testament of the tithing language or the system of the Old Testament. Now Paul, though, taught that he had the right to this kind of support as a servant of God. I mean, he didn't take it. He decided, you know, to do tent making, you know, to support himself. But he does remind, you know, readers, like in the Epistles of the Corinthians, that he, as an apostle, he could have demanded, you know, this sort of thing it would have had, you know, ground to stand on, to speak, but he doesn't do that. Again, that's in place, even though it's not a priestly model so much like the Israelite culture, the Israelite system, what we read in the Hebrew Bible, you know, that there's just this presupposition that servants of God just generally should be supported by the believing community. If you think about the Old Testament, there is this sort of system of support outside the direct, theocratic, monarchical sort of situation. The prophets, for instance. Okay, there's no, like, you're not going to read in the Torah about specific tithes going to prophets. The prophets were something different. You know, people raised up during the days of the monarchy, the United Monarchy, the divided monarchy, again, to, you know, God raising up essentially covenant enforcers. That's what prophets were. They would preach it to people about being loyal to God, loyal to the covenant, and all that sort of thing. Well, those people just culturally, it was assumed that they, you know, somebody's going to support them. You know, Elijah had the situation with the widow and the room and board, you know, and all that kind of stuff. There were people in the community that would contribute to recognized individuals that were considered to speak for God. And that's kind of what Paul's drawing on as well. You had Isaiah who was sort of a prophet of the royal court. You know, that was a little bit different. He's probably getting some support from the monarchy itself, you know, at that point. But what I'm pointing to is there's just this assumption in scripture and by example, the legitimizing of the assumption that servants of God should be supported by the community. So broadly speaking, that's intact even if the theocratic tithing system is not, you know, that doesn't survive from Old and New Testament, the general idea does. This gets muddied a little bit in the New Testament because they're in the New Testament, all the passages that pastors like to use to convince people that they should be tithing. If you actually look at those passages, it's let's just use, you know, what happens in the book of Acts and Paul. Paul is going around collecting money for the saints in Jerusalem. You don't actually have this weekly giving system for individual churches. Paul doesn't go into a church and start preaching tithing for that church. Wherever he goes, apparently, because he brings it up a lot, there's this notion of, hey, you know, you sister churches here that I'm starting and that I started or that I'm in your presence now. You know, all of this, the gospel started back with Jesus and the disciples and there's this Jerusalem church that's notoriously poor. They're under persecution all the time and it's pretty big. So that kind of compounds the problem. You know, he takes up collections for them for an altogether different church. And that's actually what you see described in the New Testament. You don't have a new tithing system for individual local churches laid out. You have this general assumption that the labor is worthy of his hire, but then the actual giving passages are really for this one church back in Jerusalem. So you don't have a whole lot of scriptural structure for this. But what happens is, well, the Old Testament's in our Bible and so we're going to preach tithing, even though that was Israel and the theocracy and the priesthood, even though we don't have that. I mean, I understand that, but I think we're better off and I think this is what the New Testament actually does, is it teaches the principle of giving. It teaches that the labor is worthy of his hire. And you should give cheerfully. You should give sacrificially. It's not about a certain percentage. You should contribute and give what you can. And you know what you can, you know what sacrificial is, you know what, you know, you know, whether you're sort of not doing your part or whether you are. And the New Testament leaves that up to the individual, but it lays down the principle of cheerful giving, sacrificial giving and the labor being worthy of his hire. It doesn't worry about strict percentages like we had in the theocratic system. So there really are no New Testament rules about tithing, but there are very clear principles about the Lord's servants being supported. It's just that we don't have this strict percentage system layout like we do in the Old Testament. Martin and Enid Oklahoma ask, was Yahweh's presence absent from the Second Temple because of the Ark of the Covenant was no longer present? Yeah, I think that is the conclusion we're supposed to draw. I mean Ezekiel has the glory, you know, the presence of God departing before Jerusalem and its temple are destroyed. Again, we covered that in our series on Ezekiel. There's no evidence anybody thereafter in the Second Temple period when they rebuild the temple or they actually build a Second Temple. There's no evidence that anybody thought that the glory had returned. There's no passage that gives that indication. Interestingly enough, though, even though the question presupposes something that's correct, God's presence is gone from the temple. Again, it's not just the Ark, it's because of the apostasy. But the Ark is gone and so on and so forth. The glory departs before Jerusalem, the temple is destroyed. Okay, that's pretty self-evident, but what's really interesting is that the New Testament takes this idea about the return of the glory. It actually takes certain passages that talk about the return of the glory, you know, seeing God in Jerusalem again and applies them to Jesus. I'll just give you a few for instances here. In Ephesians 5.14, we read, For anything that becomes visible is light, therefore it says, Awake, O Sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. You say, what does that have to do with the temple? Well, it's actually a use, a repurposing of Isaiah 60 verses 1 and 2, and I'll listen to that. Arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. This is Isaiah 60. This is set in a post, or an exilic and post-exilic era. So here you have a situation where the future glory, you know, of God is again going to be, you know, shining, upon Jerusalem, upon Israel again, and Paul takes that and applies it to Jesus. Arise, Christ will shine on you. You have John the Baptist. John the Baptist is the herald of the coming of the Messiah, but there's actually glory language connected to the passages that the Gospel uses, or use, to talk about the messenger that comes before the Messiah, Isaiah 40 verse 5. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed. There's a reference to the glory, pretty explicit. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed that all flesh shall see it together for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. If you go out to Isaiah 40, again, this is, you know, the crooked, you know, places will be made straight. This is this messianic language. And Mark and other Gospel writers quote Isaiah 40 verse 5 parts of Isaiah 40 to give context to John the Baptist being the herald from Isaiah 40 who is announcing the coming, the return of the Lord, the return of the glory. And that turns out to be Jesus in the Gospels. You know, you get a passage like Isaiah 66 verses 18 and through 19, you know, that you get, you know, sort of a similar feel to this. Verse 18 says, for I know their works and their thoughts and the time is coming to gather all nations and tongues and they shall come and shall see my glory and I will set a sign among them and from them I will send its survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, to Pol, to Ludd who draw the boat of Tobol and Javon to the coastlands far away that have not heard my fame or seen my glory and they shall declare my glory among the nations. Now think, look at the elements of that. The time is coming to gather all nations and tongues. They shall come and shall see my glory and I'm going to set this sign among them, okay? And then they're going to go from here. They're going to spread all over to these different nations. Tarshish of course ought to draw the interest of this audience. You know, Tobol, Javon, I mean, these are places mentioned in the table of nations so on and so forth to the coastlands that are far away. Why? Why am I sending them out? Because they have not heard my fame or seen my glory and I'm going to make sure that it's declared among the nations. If you look at that and Paul in a few of his epistles draws on Isaiah 66, this passage, to talk about his own ministry and then you look at what happens in Acts chapter 2 with the coming of the Spirit when the nations, you know, people from the nations are gathered and they see, you know, this miracle of Pentecost and then they go back to their nations and start, you know, spreading the word about the Messiah, you can actually make a good argument that the pouring out of the Spirit in Acts chapter 2 is the return of the glory. And, you know, it's not, it's different, but it's the same as Jesus, you know, this whole Jesus is but isn't the Spirit, you know, kind of thing, you know, that these events, let's just speak broadly, the coming of Messiah, you know, God incarnate and then following his resurrection and ascension, the coming of the Spirit in his place, that this is the return of the glory. I mean, it's very easy to draw that conclusion from the New Testament. So, you don't need an ark. You don't even need a temple, because in the New Testament, what's up with that? Well, we're the temple. You know, we've had the full episode we had like on Ezekiel 40 through 48, the part 2, we got into all this New Testament temple language. This is where the glory is now. Okay, you know, all this language about the glory and the temple, it's applied to believers and Jesus. Why, you know, again, why is that consistent? Because we are the body of Christ. I mean, these terms and these metaphors are used to point to these, you know, these spiritual items, these theological items deliberately. Again, this is all theological messaging, you know, repurposing the Old Testament. Dan wants to know if the Third Heaven, also called Paradise a couple of lines later, is what we commonly think of as heaven. What are the first and second heavens? Yeah, it's actually all of the above. You know, we have to remember when we get into this that heaven doesn't have literal geography. There's no latitude and longitude. There's no literal levels or stages, as though when you were in one, you could measure their size or their distance from each other. Okay, so we have to be careful that we don't overly literalize the language when it talks about heaven or these levels of heaven and so on and so forth. I mean, they're all this other place and they're spoken of in these ways to distinguish parts of them. And again, we are forced to use the language of space. We are forced to use spatial language, the language of embodiment and physicality to talk about a spiritual realm that doesn't actually have those things because it's not the world of our experience and our embodiment. The only way we can talk about those other things is to use the language of our experience and of our embodiment. This is just always the way it is in Scripture and in our own discussions. So with that in mind, the level's language is trying to communicate that the presence of God himself, like where the presence is in the spiritual world, that that spot as it were, realize we can't even speak of God in that way correctly because that makes God a spatial being. But God is omnipresent. You see the problem we have of even using this language, but I'm just going to try to wade through it because that's what we have to do. So the level's language is trying to communicate that the presence of God is the holiest place in the spiritual world. God occupies in Paul's language the third level. There are some ancient texts from the Second Temple period that have three levels of heaven. Second Corinthians 12-2 is what the question is really deriving from. Other texts have seven levels. You say, well, why is it different? Well, they're all talking, trying to communicate the same idea that the highest level, the seventh level or the third level, the place where God is at, that's the holiest spot, the holiest place. The language tries to parse out where we are in the spiritual realm, where other objects are in the spiritual realm, and then where God himself is in the spiritual realm. And so it has to use this level language to do that. Again, to make sure that God is given the preeminent place. He is the preeminent being in this plane of reality, the spiritual world. Again, it's just a way of establishing to use a Levitical way of expressing it, gradations of holiness. If you think about the temple, the tabernacle in the temple, the more inward you went, the greater the sanctity. So that you couldn't have non-priests occupy the first level of sacred space. They could bring a sacrifice up to the gate or the door or the tabernacle, and it would be sacrificed, but they couldn't go beyond a certain point. Then priests could go there. There was a subset of those priests who could go into the holy place. And then there's only one priest that could actually go into the most holy place, the holy of holies, once a year. This was designed to teach and to reinforce the idea that the ground gets holier, the closer to God that you are. It's these gradations of holiness. We talked about this in Leviticus about what's done with the blood and all this kind of stuff and who can go where. It's the same idea sort of transferred into the spiritual realm when you get these levels of heaven. There's a lot of speculation in second temple period literature. You get all these heavenly visions of individuals like Enoch and Abraham and Baruch and so on and so forth. There's a number of Old Testament characters that have these journeys, and you get this language. As they're on their trip, so to speak, to see the presence of God, you pass through certain levels, these heavenly levels, and it's designed again to teach the idea that the closer to God you get, the more sanctified the space is, the more holy it is. I personally think the three-level approach is probably modeled after the temple. You have the court, the holy place, and the holy of holies. You've got three levels there. The seven levels, again, my suspicion is that it has something to do with the number seven being perceived or thought about as perfection. And you say, well, how do you get seven in perfection? Well, it's modeled after the creation week that everything is created in six days and on the seventh day God rests in his temple, which is, you know, in Genesis, which is, you know, Eden on Earth, that it completes the activity. This is what God wanted to do. He did it exactly the way he wanted to do it. So you've got this perception, this idea, this numerical tag, as it were, number seven, that speaks of completeness and in that sense, perfection. So I tend to think that that number is used, again, to convey the same idea, and I think that the number three, as we're speaking of levels, is really drawn more from sacred space on the ground, you know, boots on the ground, so to speak, that we read about in the Old Testament. Our next question is from Daniel in Nicholasville, Kentucky. And he asks, does the sethite worldview imply that one can be children of God by natural lineage? If so, is that the same error the Jews fell into when they boasted that they have Abraham as their father? Or as a negative example, Seth being the good seed and Cain being the bad seed, could we liken that to the extreme fundamentalist idea that a certain ethic group having the mark of Cain are unredeemable? Yeah, it's kind of akin to all that. You know, the Jews and the Gospels are basically claiming election by virtue of Abraham. And again, if you believed that Genesis six, you know, was another manifestation of an elect line back to Adam, you know, if you take the sethite, the human view only, and if you believe that this is about an elect line back to Adam, then you'd fall into the same kind of thinking. Of course, nothing says that any line was elect prior to God's creation of Israel by virtue of Abraham and Sarah. That's when you get this election language in the Torah, and it's always about, you know, Abraham and Sarah's descendants, you know, Israel. So that kind of thinking, though, goes back to other passages and, of course, it does. Those who would say that the Jews descended from Cain to track on the negative example for a moment here, people who are going to say that kind of stuff, the Jews are descended from Cain and they're Satan's spawn. You know, those kinds of people who are just, you know, whacked, they're going to be saying things like the line of Cain is unredeemable because, you know, they're linking it to this satanic idea, this sort of, you know, satanic genesis of, in their case, specifically Jews. Now, I don't know any fundamentalism. This isn't to say that there isn't one, but I haven't run into one that would have said blacks were unredeemable. I have certainly run into a few people where the mark of Cain was interpreted as skin color. I mean, that you'll see, and of course, you'll read a lot about that, but even people who thought that, you couldn't say that all of those people thought that like the Negro race or, you know, again, to use our modern terminology, African-Americans, that they were unredeemable. Some did, some did, but it really depended on whether those people thought, and this is actually, you know, 19th century kind of stuff, even earlier. Let's just say 18th, 19th century kind of dialogue, wondering if the black race descended from Adam or from some other co-edamic or pre-edamic human. This kind of, again, biblical nonsense and, of course, biological nonsense arises from this crisis in these centuries of having to explain from the Bible, and that's in air quotes, explain from the Bible where these other races, these other humans that explorers are encountering, where they come from, and the things like skin color get drawn into this conversation. Obviously, you know, people could visually observe differences in skin color and other physiological differences, but all of that gets sort of drawn into the same odd, and in some cases, repugnant, you know, conversation in these centuries, and there were certain who would have said, who would have landed on this idea that, oh, this race bears the mark of Cain, and then they're unredeemable, or, oh, this race bears the mark of Cain, but who cares? We're not going to evangelize them or whatever. Well, they might be redeemable, but we're not going to waste our time. They weren't all like that, though. Some came up with really goofy explanations for race, but they still were viewed ultimately as Adam, you know, in some way, and so it didn't deter evangelistic effort, so it really depended on whether your quote-unquote biblical racial theory, unquote, whether it had you know, these alternate people groups linked to Adam in some way or not. If you thought they were not of the Adamic line, then by definition there would be groups that would say, oh, they're non-elect. They're just going to go to hell. They're unredeemable, or we shouldn't give her up. You had that. You had that kind of thinking. I want to read this question prompts me. I have this in digital here, so it's real convenient. A little part of Adam's ancestors that this question just reminded me of. And I've referenced this book before on the podcast. If any of you are interested in the harm that bad thinking about the Bible can do, this is a must read. I mean, in my library I've collected most of the scholarly books on bad exegesis that led to racial theory, and this is one of the more important books. It's informative, but obviously when you think about the content it can be tragic too. This is from page 65 of Adam's ancestors, and it's on the section of that particular chapter that's labeled or sub-headed human origins and the politics of slavery. So here's a short excerpt. As early as 1680 the church of England, clergyman and missionary, first to Virginia and later Barbados, Morgan Godwin, wrote at length in support of the right of African slaves and Native Americans to be admitted to church membership in a tract for the times addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Rather sanguine about the practice of slavery itself, he vigorously argued their case in his lengthy 1680 plea entitled The Negroes and Indians Advocate, suing for their admission into the church. It's the end of the title. Godwin was fully aware that what he called the quote pre-Adamites whimsy, unquote, was being deployed first to, quote, derive our Negroes from a stock different from Adams, unquote, and then to, quote, unquote brutify them. His intention by contrast was to again quoting from the tract to prove the Negroes humanity, unquote. It was a strategy diametrically opposed to those Spaniards and he seems to have had Sepulveda in mind who had concluded that certain races were not human in order to justify their murdering the Americans, i.e. the Native Americans. For all that, he acknowledged that fantastic and false, these are all in quotes, empty and silly and in other words Godwin's not buying it. He acknowledged that fantastic false, empty and silly, all of that though the foul heresy of pre-Adamism was its original author himself never used it to dehumanize any racial group, but rather had acknowledged the full humanity of the pre-Adamites. Now that's the end of the selection. So here you have Godwin the guy who wrote this who acknowledged there's this view out here of pre-Adamic races and he was determined not to use it to dehumanize any group you know Negroes and in his terms Negroes and the Americans which we by we need the Native Americans the latter reference there. So this is the kind of thinking this is 17th century you're going to get at 18th century it's going to live into the 19th century really you know frankly for those of us who are old enough 20th century but the use of the Bible to classify certain races in a certain way as being less than Adam or peripheral to Adam and one of the strategies for doing that was this retain idea and that does go pretty well hand in hand with the Sethite theory. Now of course people who take the Sethite interpretation of Genesis 6 they're not doing it so that they can go here they can go to these wacky racial theories and even back then they weren't necessarily doing it but you could take the Sethite view and once you took the Sethite view of Genesis you would go backward and then you would quite literally demonize the Canite line and you would insert the Sethite and Canite dichotomy into Genesis 6 again this is part of the Sethite thinking Sethite view thinking and all of that became fodder it was and it became fodder for racial theory you could get there from the Sethite view but let's be clear people who take the Sethite view over against the Supernaturalist view of Genesis 6 they're not doing it 99.9% of the time to justify racism but in the old days centuries ago this is where a lot of that groundwork was laid so I think this is a it's an interesting observation that the questioner has here Daniel and yeah it's a kin to these other things but we don't want to necessarily see a cause and effect link to some of this awful stuff that can really be laid at the feet of bad bible interpretation Neil has a two part question does Mark 16 verse 9 through 20 deserve to be treated as scripture or just a footnote and why is drinking poison and being bitten by snakes elicited with things like healing deliverance and speaking in tongues as evidence of believers yeah well I let's be clear I'm not a textual critic so I'm gonna have to look up some things to just introduce here as far as an answer to this question I'm not a textual critic but I'll say that but I'll also say this I've never seen a good defense of the longer ending of Mark that is verses 9 through 20 and for that reason I'm in the camp which most I don't want to say all but certainly most textual critics I'm in the camp with them that does not think verses 9 through 20 are authentic the only reason it really matters is because of what the question alluded to that you have snake handling preachers living in different parts of the world parts of the country they've made use of this material and they've died or been responsible for somebody else's death you know so it does matter in that respect but again I'm in the camp that really can't find a good defense of the authenticity of verses 9 through 20 when it comes to Mark 16 now by way of textual evidence for the longer ending of Mark again verses 9 to 20 which is pretty weak I'm gonna read a little excerpt from Jason's book this is from Omonson and Bruce Metzger a textual guide to the Greek New Testament and this is an adaptation of Metzger's textual commentary on the Greek New Testament so they write this they have several manuscripts including four Greek unsealed manuscripts of the 7th 8th and 9th centuries AD continue after verse 8 as follows with a few small variations here's the verse but they reported briefly to Peter and those with him and all that had been told and after these things Jesus himself went out through them from east to west the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation amen so you have four manuscripts what this amounts to four manuscripts from the 7th 8th and 9th centuries so this is 700 to 900 years after the days of the apostles that after verse 8 they add that little statement that I just read okay and then that's where in those manuscripts that's where Mark ends it ends with what we have as verse 8 and then this little addendum all of the manuscripts that have this reading okay except for one old Latin manuscript continue with verses 9 through 20 now what that means is that the longer ending of Mark verses 9 through 20 this is the best manuscript support for it 7th 8th 9th century AD stuff that's older is not going to have they're not going to have the verses in it so here you are in the New Testament text critical debate about priority manuscripts the older manuscripts if they're older should they be counted as better and all that kind of stuff we did a whole episode on this but you don't really have very strong evidence for the longer ending of Mark it's centuries 7th century is what you're dealing with here a second source RT France in his commentary on Mark says this is a little bit longer I like France's commentary he's not a couple of them I just like them he's pretty good he writes a number of later minuscule manuscripts these are medieval and beyond give longer ending but mark it off with marginal signs or comments to indicate that its textual status is doubtful so even the scribes themselves in what they're copying they're faithfully copying the longer ending but they're putting these little marks in there the 5th century code XW one of the earliest manuscripts to have the longer ending so now you get in our text stuff now you move back to the 5th century it's one of the few one of the earliest the other ones are going to be 789 has a substantial edition of 89 words at the beginning of verse 15 so it's even different than what we have verses 9 through 20 this is described by Metzger as having an obvious quote obvious and pervasive apocryphal flavor of these 89 extra words which consists of a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples concerning the ending of the period of Satan's power and the truth and righteousness now made available through Christ's death Jerome records the same additional words and said they were found in some Greek manuscripts so that's 5th century France moves on to a little section on literary considerations and he writes most of the content of the longer ending verses 9 through 20 echoes usually in abbreviated form elements in the resurrection stories of Matthew Luke and John and it does that as follows and then he goes on and starts commenting about this with that I'm going to skip to another section of France he writes the parts of the longer ending not accounted for in this this list are those which go beyond the resurrection appearances as such to describe the subsequent preaching and activity of the church thus in verse 16 we have a summary of a basic baptismal soteriology which has the flavor of Johanna and dualism and possibly draws on the baptismal element in Matthew 28 19 and 20 in verses 17 and 18 some of the signs which are related in acts are summarized and verse 20 is virtually a summary of the whole book of acts in a nutshell in the whole of the longer ending verses 9 through 20 the only element which is not easily accounted for on the basis of familiarity with other gospels and the book of acts is the emphasis in verse 18 on handling poisonous snakes and drinking poison the former perhaps reflects the single instance of and it was in voluntary snake handling in acts 28 3 through 6 but the expectation of these two activities as regular signs is the one distinctive contribution which the long ending makes in all other respects verses 9 through 20 have something of a second hand flavor and look like a pastiche of elements drawn from the other gospels and acts that's the end of you know Francis commentary there so basically what he's saying is that in the longer ending act does not have good textual support everything except the snake handling in the poison poison you can find elsewhere in some other gospel or in the book of acts you can find some sort of example and in the only two outliers of the snake handling thing and then the poison and the snake handling thing might be an illusion to the episode in acts 28 again it's not clear because the episode next 28 was certainly in voluntary but it might you know be some illusion of that the poison drinking has no there's nothing you can find elsewhere in the New Testament for that and for that reason that this the material you have in verses 9 through 20 reads like somebody else just sort of put it in there drawing it from all these other places in other words it's a very second hand kind of feel to it that reason plus the weak textual support the weak manuscript support for verses 9 through 20 are the reasons why virtually all New Testament critics textual critics do not consider verses 9 through 20 as authenticated it's not as bad of a situation as something like 1 John 5 7 or you know part of the ending of Revelation like with Erasmus's text and all that but it ain't good it's there's it has weak textual support and I will put a link on the episode page for this to a blog post that I found here from the evangelical textual criticism blog you know you could go up to the evangelical textual criticism blog like I did here and just put in you know Mark 16 and you're going to find you know what that group and they are just what they sound like evangelical textual critics what they say about the longer ending of Mark and you'll find an essay by Peter Gurie we've interviewed here before on this podcast and it's pretty good I recommend it I'm just looking through it here skimming here I have read this before but in this essay this post he quotes Dan Wallace because one of the arguments is that well you know it the ending of Mark must have been original and it was lost because of the way that scrolls were rolled up and the end of a you know the role would have gotten and lost blah blah blah blah well Wallace is somebody who's pretty much spent a career handling these sorts of things and he says it's extremely unlikely that Mark wrote his gospel you know in a particular way where this is going to be you know some sort of explanation now I'll just I'll read the excerpt here this is Wallace now however if Mark's gospel is is earlier than this the end of the first century again which is the controversy in and of itself you know as virtually all scholars acknowledge regardless of their view of this synoptic problem then he would have written his gospel on a roll not a codex and the first generation of copies would also have been on rolls and if the gospel was written on a roll then the most protected section would be the end because when someone rolled the book back up the end would be on the inside not the outside to get tattered and stuff like that to be sure some lazy readers might not rewind the book when finished of course they could get find a denarius at their local blockbuster Wallace says for such an infraction but the reality is this sort of thing was a rare exception not the rule consequently if Mark was originally written on a roll it's hard to imagine how the ending could have gotten lost before copies were made so again Wallace is a guy that has lots of experience with scrolls you know the way they were wound and so on and so forth and you know you have other books as examples too if this if this was a common event then you'd have problems with the endings of other New Testament books too but you don't you know it's just this longer ending of Mark so I'm in the camp just to wrap this up I'm in the camp with the you know the text of critics evangelical and otherwise who just don't really see a good argument for the long ending of Mark being authentic and so for that reason I don't feel like I have to doctrinally defend drinking poison and snake handling because that's the only place you're going to get that stuff and it's it's highly suspect all right Mike well we want to remind everybody to leave us a review we're almost at 200 we got 199 reviews on iTunes I noticed so since we just had our 200th episode maybe we can get one more review to get 200 even but we appreciate everybody that's done so so far and that's important and Mike we appreciate you answering the questions and we want to thank everyone else for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast to support this podcast visit www.nakedbibleblog.com to learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs go to www.ermsh.com