 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, go to NakedBiblePodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on New Start Here at NakedBiblePodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 165, our 22nd Q&A. I'm Delayman, Trace Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hey, Mike, how are you doing? Pretty good. Pretty good. Again, staying busy as usual? Yeah, yeah. And I just want to mention that we talked about how we were going to do our voting for the next book that we're going to cover on the podcast on July 1st. And we've added another interview. So Mike, we're actually going to start the voting on July 15th and run it through August 7th. And that's when the voting is going to begin on what the next book we're going to cover. So that's good. So in other words, I have a little more time to contact the Russians, you know, have them influence the outcome of our vote, correct? No comment on that. No comment on that. Or the Russians or the Vatican, I don't know who you want to reach out to, the aliens, I don't know. The Rosicrucians. Yeah, the Templars. So many people. There you go. So many people you could reach out to influence that. So again, that's going to start July 15th and run three weeks. And that way it'll give Mike a week to prepare for the first of our new book. I'm excited to see what people choose. Yeah, maybe I could like contact the people at CERN, you know, and like, you know, penetrate the fabric of the cosmos there and look in the future then, and I'll know. Oh my gosh, you're opening 10 of worms. I've had to listen to that. I had a rough email week, so what can I say? Yeah. I don't know. I don't hear that. All right, Mike. Well, how about we just get into this questions here? You got some answers up your sleeve? Sure. You got some? Yep. All right. Well, our first one is from Mike and he has an issue. Pretty much all literature about Christ was written by Roman scholars and others of a Roman nature with the exception of later writers that may have taken literature from the Roman authors writing about Christ. If Rome, a.k.a. up until now, the Vatican, might be the false prophet, then what other source of material is out there that shows there was a Messiah? I need something to grab on to that shows me Jesus really existed. Well, I mean, I guess I sort of understand the thrust of the question. I think you're being too affected by this notion that Rome is the false prophet, that sort of thing, that that's coloring your perception of history. Romans could very well and did thousands and thousands of times record things about people that they didn't like or agree with. So I don't know that there's any reason not to like a Roman historian because we get lots of information from them. So I don't buy into the sort of the conspiratorial tack of the question. I think it's probably coming from stuff like Hislop's to Babylon's or whatever, or maybe some, I don't know, kind of off the wall approach to biblical prophecy. But anyway, if we just go with the sources, there's their number of good books that you can get in a secondary literature that will take you into the primary literature of the period and, you know, not just Roman stuff, if that matters. I'll just recommend a few things and just talk about them here. Bart Ehrman has a good book, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. And I think that's a good book because Bart is basically an atheist, you know, but he's not he's not going to say something stupid like Jesus didn't exist because he knows better. So it's actually a really good book. It actually got Bart into into some hot water with his own constituency, you know, because he has people in that constituency that are going to be Jesus' mythors, you know, they want to argue that Jesus never existed. And, you know, Bart certainly is no friend to evangelical Christianity. But Bart's book basically said this idea that Jesus never existed is nonsense. So I think it's a book you could really benefit from. Schaefer's book, that's S-C-H-A-F-E-R, Peter Schaefer. Jesus in the Talmud, this certainly isn't Roman. Again, I'm not saying that matters, but for the sake of the question, the references to Jesus in the Talmud are interesting, because on the one hand, they they don't say very nice things about Jesus. They say really insulting things about Jesus. They refer to him as a sorcerer and what not, you know, a conjurer, a cultist, you know, again, because of the miraculous stuff that Jesus does. And that's interesting in and of itself, because here you have a, you know, an audience, a writer, your writers, you know, when it comes to Jewish material in the rabbinic period, you know, living century or so, you know, after Jesus or in late antiquity, just generally. And it would have been really easy for them to say, what's all this Jesus talk? You know, the guy never existed. So, you know, look, who cares? You don't don't don't pay any attention to this. This is nonsense, but they don't do that again, because they're not idiots. What they do do is they say, we don't want you following Jesus because he's all these bad things, you know, to the Jewish community. And when they reference him as a sorcerer or what not, again, it tells you that they took the stories about what Jesus did pretty seriously because they have to attribute them to a source and a bad one, of course, because they don't want people following Jesus. So Jesus in the Talmud, I think, is worth having Petrae's book, P-I-T-R-E, the case for Jesus, the biblical and historical evidence for Christ is a good one. Petrae, we've mentioned his work before here on the podcast. He's a New Testament scholar and a good one. He's a Catholic, you know, so I don't agree with his theological, you know, predilections on certain things. But he's a really good scholar, you know, has done really important work in the Gospels, so he has a very readable short book on, again, the evidence for Jesus. Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy have a book that's a little older than some of these other ones, The Jesus Legend, A Case for the Historical Reliability, the Synoptic Jesus Tradition. I think that's an important book because both of them interact with Jesus' myth or stuff pretty extensively. Again, the idea that Jesus didn't exist or the zeitgeist nonsense, you know, they interact with that a good bit on a scholarly academic level. And in the same vein, Maurice Casey, who again is, I don't know, I don't work. He might be an atheist, too, or an agnostic or something. He's certainly not an evangelical Christian. Casey's book, Jesus, Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths. OK. He, again, is kind of like a Bart Erminge guy, but he doesn't. I think he's a little more blunt than Bart. He has some really unfavorable things to say about sources out there on the Internet. He's actually spent a good deal of time, you know, doing doing research on Internet writers like Akaria S and the people who peddle this Jesus mythicist idea and Casey is a New Testament scholar of, you know, high repute, an Aramaic specialist, even more specific. But his book is very useful again for making a point that the idea that Jesus didn't exist is pretty much nonsense. There are there are good reasons, good sources, good reasons to think that basically what the world has thought up until, you know, quite recently, maybe maybe in 19th century and you get a few people that sort of, you know, go out on a limb and try to make these these really odd you know, sort of arguments and frankly abuse primary sources to do that task. But these are all good scholars that are going to, you know, respond to that. That kind of thing. If you wanted something more fun, you could go to my website, you know, drmsh.com and go up to the resources tab where I have the link for recommended reading. If you get if you land on that page, click on the part of the sources about Jesus myth or Jesus mythists, that sort of thing, those sort of resources. I have links there to some some interaction with the Bayes theorem argument. Again, this is it's an argument for math, basically. Statistics about, you know, Jesus' existence or non-existence. And it's it's something that gets discussed on the Internet. You know, we applied the Bayes theorem to Jesus and we found out that, you know, statistical likelihood that it didn't exist. Well, what's fun about some of the references I have here is there are people who apply Bayes theorem to the people who write the other the other posts asking if the authors who wrote the other internet stuff actually exist according to the Bayes theorem, you know, in other words, they turn the whole thing on its head. It's it's actually quite funny. But again, you know, just just showing how the Bayes theorem approach really isn't that helpful because you have to presume certain things along the way and plug certain assumptions, you know, basically come up with numbers to plug into the equation at certain points and you can more or less manipulate it to find discover low and behold that the person who wrote this post over here in the Internet about Jesus not existing, he doesn't exist either, according to the Bayes theorem. So again, it's kind of kind of fun. But I would say, you know, your academic sources there, I just gave you a short list. There's no they don't have a particular bias. Boyd and Eddie are the only evangelicals in the bunch. Everybody else is something else. Jewish, agnostic, atheist, and they're all saying the same thing. You know, Jesus certainly existed. All right. Our next question is from Larry and his Bible study group. Shout out. But also, Mark and a few others kind of have sent me some emails, track it on the same question. So we're going to kill a bunch of birds with some stone, one stone here. And Larry and his Bible study group have spent a couple of hours discussing God's spirit. We all agree that God's spirit is within us and that it is unique to each one of us individually. So when do each of us receive God's spirit? Some of us feel that you only have God's spirit from repentance forward while some of us feel it is from baptism forward and others feel that the spirit is with us from conception and throughout life. Yeah, I'm going to assume that repentance here means conversion, salvation for the sake of the discussion here. The baptism thing, I think, is probably I'm not saying I'm not applying any intention here to anybody in the Bible study group. But I think that largely derived from a misreading of the book of Acts. You know, when you get certain people groups, they get baptized and they receive the spirit. You know, the best thing I can tell you is go listen to the series on on the book of Acts and you'll find out why that pattern exists. The pattern exists for a very specific reason. And it's not, you know, something that, you know, beyond a certain point, you know, would have, you know, beyond the period of incarnation, beyond the period of the early church when the reason for the pattern no longer exists. You know, it's not the way to think about either baptism or the reception of the spirit. But anyway, the spirits in dwelling, you know, ultimately is linked to regeneration, new life again. So I'm going to link it, you know, to someone being placed in Christ because, frankly, that's where Scripture puts it. And so I'm going to be, that's why I said I'm going to define repentance as or this conversion or repentance as conversion or coming to Christ, that sort of thing. So there's a link between, you know, the indwelling reception of the spirit and the new life. You get this from passages like 2 Corinthians 517. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. You've got to be in Christ to be a new creation. They're part of the reason why you're a new creation. This is, again, Old Testament, new covenant language, again, which is associated with the Holy Spirit. So there's going to be a connection there. John chapter 3, Jesus, you know, when he's having the conversation with Nicodemus that we're all familiar with, he says, that which is born of the flesh is flesh. And that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I say to you, you must be born anew or born from above. So again, it links conversion, links alignment, you know, with Christ as Messiah, you know, conversion with the enlivening, the reception of the spirit. And ultimately, you can see where the spirit, this language about being born of the spirit, being born from above is connected to belief, to faith in John chapter 3. So the very same chapter, if you go to verse 9, for instance, Nicodemus said to him, you know, he's talking to Jesus, how can these things be, you know, this whole thing about, you know, new birth, born from above, all this kind of stuff. Jesus answered him, are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I had told you earthly things, and you do not believe, how can you believe, if I tell you, heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven, except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent of the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. The point here is that when Jesus says back in verses 6 and 7, hey, don't marvel that I said to you, you must be born anew. Okay, you know, this whole thing about being born of the Spirit, being born anew, Nicodemus gets a little confused, and then Jesus goes into this discussion that I just read, and this being born anew, Jesus says, well, the whole point of this is that the Son of Man is going to be lifted up, and you need to believe in him, so that you have eternal life. This is what God so loved the world, this is why all this is happening. So it's a conceptual link, again, between belief and conversion in that sense, having a change of heart about Jesus, about the Messiah, again, aligning yourself with him as opposed to rejecting him, or aligning yourself with something else or nothing at all. So again, the change of heart idea there. 1 Corinthians 12 is sort of the linchpin passage to this discussion. Paul writes, this is verse 12 of 1 Corinthians 12, for just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one spirit, or you could translate that for by one spirit, either way, we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves are free, and all are made to drink of one spirit. So here's the question, would we be placed into the body of Christ and not have the spirit? Well, not according to 1 Corinthians 12, 12 and 13. If you're in Christ, you were put there by the spirit. Would we have the spirit and be alienated from Christ, not part of his body? No. So these two things are linked. Just think of it that way. How could you be in the body of Christ and not have the Holy Spirit dwelling in you? And then conversely, if you had the spirit, how could you not be in the body of Christ? These two things are related, and so this is why Scripture creates this link between having the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has taken up residence, has sealed under the day of redemption, all the stuff that's said by the spirit. When that happens, again, it's linked to belief. You're put into the body of Christ, and just explore the metaphor a little bit. The body of Christ is linked to the person of Christ, and Jesus is but isn't the spirit. According, again, if you go back to Unseen Realm and read that little section on how Paul, in four or five places, parallels the spirit of God but the spirit of Jesus, and twice he says the Lord who is the spirit. The point is not to deny Trinitarianism. Oh, there's no Holy Spirit now. It's all just Jesus and God. No. The point is, just as Jesus is but isn't the Father, so the spirit is but isn't Jesus, and Jesus is but isn't the spirit. They're linked and related, and there's three characters there, God, Jesus, and the spirit. That's actually where Trinitarianism comes from, but the three are inseparable as the point. If you're in Christ, you are by definition united with the spirit as well, and the spirit is in you as well. There's no chronology of this kind of thing. Being put into the body of Christ is union with Christ, and union with Christ is salvation. Baptism of the spirit into the body of Christ is closely related to salvation. They're really inseparable. I'll just read another little passage here about the interchangeability of Christ and the spirit. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the spirit if, in fact, the spirit of God dwells in you. In other words, if the spirit of God dwells in you, you're not in the flesh, you're in the spirit, and you're also in the body of Christ, the Lord who is the spirit. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of righteousness, if the spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His spirit who dwells in you. Again, to be resurrected, you have to be in Christ. And if you're in Christ, you have the spirit. So all these ideas are interconnected, and that's how I would answer the question that you get the spirit, you're united to Christ, you're part of the body of Christ in its union with Christ, and the spirit of the spirit is in you. The spirit is unified with Christ. They're not separate. He doesn't show up later and leave at some other time. I mean, it's all one package. And that is linked again by Jesus to believing in the one that God has sent and being born from above, which again, in our parlance would be that conversion. Our next one is from Fern S. I think that's Fernando, not Fern and Audrey. So from Fern S, what does Mike think of Balon's error, especially the geographical context? Yeah, I'm not quite sure of what either Fern or Fernando means by the geographical context, but I'll say a few things. I don't know if I'll hit the mark here or not. Just generally, Balon's error. On one hand, we, of course, presume that Balon, again, if we read the biblical account of the story that he, it sounds like he kind of didn't intend to curse Israel or there might be a little ambiguity there. From what person, certain passages say he at least tried to curse Israel. Maybe that's a better way to put it. He's asked by Balak to go out and curse the Israelites, and Balak hires this prophet, Balam, and he comes out, he comes over and says, hey, I'm only going to speak with the Lord, tells me to speak, and then he goes out and he tries to utter a curse, but of course, God doesn't let him do that. He winds up speaking in endorsement and blessing, and we know the story. You read the story though, and you wonder, well, what was Balon's error then? Because the outcome of his attempts to curse Israel, he's never allowed to do that. So how does he become a bad guy? Well, in terms of deuteronomy, let's just go to deuteronomy and pick up some of these thoughts here. You have an explicit charge that Balam did set out to curse Israel. So deuteronomy 236, the Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you, for the Lord your God loves you, again speaking about Balam in context there. So apparently Balam tried, and God reversed it. The opinion of Balam, what did he actually do? It's really the sin that he gets blamed for, isn't really part of the Numbers 22 through 24 story, where he's trying to curse Israel, but is prevented from doing so. It actually comes from Numbers 31, 15, and 16, and it's pretty self-explanatory. I'll just read the two verses. Balam, after he wasn't able to curse Israel, he advised Balak on what to do in the absence of the cursing in context. So verses 15 and 16 here from Numbers 31, Moses said to them, Have you let all the women live? Okay, this is part of the Baal of Pior incident. He told, These on Balam's advice caused the people of Israel to act treacherously against the Lord in the incident of Pior. And so the plague came among the congregation of the Lord. So Moses in this passage is Numbers 31. This isn't Numbers 22 through 24, when Balam's trying to curse the people, and he's not allowed to do that by God. So at some point after that, he advised and the enemies of Israel to come up with a different way to get Israel going to act treacherously against the Lord. And if you read Numbers 31, it involves the women from Moab, and again, the intermarriage. And one of them brings one of the women that they're not supposed to marry. And of course, that means you have sexual relations with it brings them right to the to the either the door of the tabernacle or in some would argue that that you actually, they actually cross sort of the threshold there. And apparently starts to do it with this woman in the presence of everybody there, just to flaunt it. Then Phineas comes over and he impales both of them with a spear which suggests that one was on top of the other. So this is the incident. And when Moses is commenting on it, all of this happened, this treachery, because of a piece of advice that Balam gave. So that's what Balam gets blamed for. So you don't really pick it up in the in the Balam story primary, you have to read a little bit further in the book of Numbers to get it. It's kind of interesting, though, that Balam, the view of Balam in the Old Testament isn't entirely negative. Micah 6.5, you read this verse, my people remember what Balak King of Moab plotted against you and how Balam's son of Beor responded to him. So, you know, it's kind of a little nod to the fact that, well, you know, Balam was true to his word, you know, God gave him a message of blessing and he didn't, he didn't chicken out. I mean, he, he blessed the people of Israel right, right there when Balak was there. And, you know, he took some risk there. Balak could have just, you know, took his head off or something. You know, so it's acknowledging that Balam did speak what God gave him to speak even though he tried, you know, to do what he was hired to do in Curse Israel and couldn't. But obviously, he gets blamed, you know, for what happens in Numbers 31. Now beyond that, you know, I'd need to know what the question really means by the geography. This is connected with Moab. So maybe that's, that's the issue. And again, we get the Moabite women in Numbers 31. Moab, of course, was on the other side of the Jordan, the trans-Jordan. So is the questioner referring to the, to where it happened, the connection with Moab generally, the order of events? I don't know. I can't tell from the question. I could throw this in. The Israelites, when, when this stuff happens, are camped on the borders of Moab. And if the reconstructed Da'ir Allah inscription, it's a famous inscription. It dates to roughly 900 to 600 BC. It was found in the Jordan Valley. If that's reliable, there was L worship in Moab. Okay, and L is one of the words for the God of Israel. So do we have aberrant L worship going on in Moab? Is that a possibility? Well, maybe. If you actually read the Da'ir Allah inscription, there is mention of L by name. There's mention of the Divine Council, the Council of El. There's also mention of the Shaddai'in, who are called Elohim. This is, again, probably an Aramaic dialect. That would be the word for Elohim in Aramaic. So you have a group of gods in the Council, the Shaddai'in, who appear, again, as part of the Council of El, and they decide to set a drought on the land in this inscription there. They do things that are going to hurt the people here. So that term Shaddai'in occurs only in this inscription at this site. It might be related to the Divine Name found in Genesis, El Shaddai. Nobody really knows if that's the case or not. So the picture here, if we want to take this inscription with the biblical material, and Balaam didn't write this inscription, but Balaam is actually mentioned in this inscription, the son of B.R. Maybe there was aberrant L worship going on in Moab in the Transjordan. The inscription and Balaam himself, according to the biblical text, is familiar with El. Balaam actually uses the Divine Name, Yahweh. He refers to God as Elohim, and he refers to God as El four or five times in Numbers 23 and 24. So he also uses the word Shaddai'in that section. So maybe Balaam, he was either a sort of a prophet of God that goes astray, and it becomes a prophet for hire. According to this inscription, maybe his theology wasn't quite what you would consider the Orthodox theology of one of the biblical writers. I mean, who knows? It's all guesswork at this point. But Balaam apparently knows of Israel's God that that much is sure. He might even have worshipped him. Did he worship him correctly or not? Who knows? Even people in Canaan proper didn't do that well all the time or even most of the time. It's hard to tell either way, but his sin against Israel, again, would seem to indicate he might have had divided loyalty. Was he wholehearted with the Lord? Or did he just say, hey, I'm going to speak what the Lord tells me, and then when the Lord showed up, it's like, okay, I better say what this deity says to me or else I'm going to be in big trouble. Is that it? Or was Balaam sort of a faithful but theologically aberrant Yahweh worshiper? We just don't know. We don't really know exactly what the context is. So if that's what's lurking behind the question, again, that gives you a little bit of an introduction to that particular inscription, which is known because it does mention Balaam by name. But beyond that, I can't be more specific because I'd have to know exactly what the trajectory of the question was. All right, Aaron's got a couple of questions. And his first one is, I've been doing a study on the archangels, and I've found Jewish studies that claim that there was 70 archangels. Which would correspond to the 70 sons of God? What do you think of this? Well, again, I'd have to know what the studies are. Is this rabbinic material? Was it something else? Because there's a chronological issue there. Was it written after the biblical material or contemporaneous with it or before? What exactly are we talking about? There's no biblical teaching on there being 70 archangels. The number is quite a bit less. So without knowing what text he's thinking of, I can't really be that helpful other than to say it's certainly not a biblical idea. Aaron also wants to know what your thoughts on theosis is. Theosis. Yeah, I mean, I would refer to listeners too, and maybe even Aaron here, to the podcast episode we did on, you know, even the recent one we got into this with the relationship of Genesis 15 with the stars. Again, David Burnett's previous podcast about the way Paul works with Genesis 15 about the seat of Abraham being as the stars in the sky. Since stars were conceived of as divinities or divine beings, there was some connection there. Again, the opinion actually varied. There was a spectrum of opinion, in other words. But since that's the case, it suggests that part of the covenantal promise was to have the seat of Abraham made divine. And that's theosis. Evangelicals typically use the word glorification instead of theosis. Theosis tends to be a term that's associated with Eastern Orthodoxy. But generally, the subject matter is about the same thing. It's about the believer's destiny to be made like Christ, what that actually means. It's not like we're going to become little Yahwes, but we're going to become, you know, as much like Jesus as we can and still be human, still be contingent beings. So what does that all involve? So we did an episode about the resurrection body with David Burnett. There was a five or six, right, might have been six part series on my blog, where David basically condensed his thesis material into a series of blog posts for the naked Bible blog. And it's specifically about theosis, about the deification tradition. So I would invite Aaron to read that as well. But generally, theosis is a biblical idea being made divine. We're already, according to Peter, partakers of the divine nature. So that's a process of sanctification that will result, again, in glorification or deification or theosis. Again, it doesn't really matter what term you use. So it's a biblical idea. And I think the discussion of it needs to be biblically rooted, as opposed to being rooted in other texts. But it's certainly true that other texts help us to understand the concepts and some of the biblical language in a pretty transparent way. All right. Our next one is from Evan. And his question is, I'm on board with Genesis 1 through 11 being polemic. I have heard you talk about how the creation account does not need to be a literal six day event because it is polemic. However, you discussed the Genesis 6 Watcher's account as a literal event. How do you parse which polemic stories in Genesis 1 through 11 are literal, literal events and which ones are not? Well, I wouldn't say that we don't, I wouldn't say that I don't believe Genesis 1 and 2 are teaching science because of polemic. I think polemic is one reason for that. Basically, when the Old Testament or the New Testament makes non-scientific statements in other places, that tells me immediately that God didn't intend to give us science in these texts because God, if that was his intention, that's what he would have accomplished because God does know science pretty well. So if God wanted a writer to give us that information, science that would satisfy a 21st century person and beyond, he could have certainly picked somebody to do that, dropped it in their heads and it would have come out on paper, as it were. That is not what we get. So that tells me that that isn't what God was up to. So it's a lot simpler than polemic for me. But polemic is part of the picture. I've actually answered this question many times. I've added it to my FAQ page. So for listeners, if you go up to drmsh.com, you look at a back, go to Frequently Asked Questions, it's on the bottom I think because it was recently added. That will give you more detail than what I'll summarize here. So briefly, I would say in this whole thing about creation, what about these stories about watchers, supernatural beings and whatnot? One issue falls under the province of what is discoverable by human experience and human interaction, basically with our five senses and our experience of the natural world. So one of these things, namely the creation stuff, is testable and knowable and experienceable, if that's even a word, by virtue of our knowledge of the natural world, which we acquire through our five senses and our own discovery, because it's the world we live in. It's the natural world. The other issue, what goes on in the supernatural world does not fall in that category. It can't, by definition. It's a different world. So you can have divine actions that occur in our world. And we get stories to that effect. But when it comes to knowing, I should say, when it comes to parsing or working with, judging, assessing, information about the divine world, we have no way to judge that. The tools of science, by definition, do not apply. They don't work. They're no good. When it comes to claims about creation, well, they're very good, because that's what science is. We discover how the natural world ticks. Now, I'm going to leave that part of the discussion right there. I would just add this for the sake of the podcast. Again, people can go up to the FAQ and get a much longer answer with a lot more detail. I would say a non-literal view of how to read Genesis 1 and 2, that account of creation, is not a non-literal view of creation. Let me say that again. A non-literal reading of Genesis 1 and 2 is not a non-literal view of creation. God created, period. Punctuate the sentence. How he did it is the issue of disagreement. His creative acts are, therefore, literal. They happened in real time. They occurred. The Genesis 1 and 2 description of those acts, again, is something different. That's describing God's creative act in a certain way or in lots of different ways. Do we realize, for instance, that the Old Testament creation accounts aren't just in Genesis? You get one in Psalm 74 and it doesn't look a whole lot like Genesis 1. It looks a little bit like it, but there are other things about slaying a dragon, bringing order out of chaos. It's quite different. Creation texts with an S on the end exist in the Bible. It's not just Genesis 1 and 2. We have to come to grips with that. We have to recognize it and understand it. Creation, how God did something and the thing that he did create occurred in real time to me. It's a literal event. We're here. The world's here. Everything's here. That's not non-literal, but how it's described in the Bible, again, is a different thing. We have to look at the way things are described and, again, ask ourselves, well, if God was trying to communicate science, why did God mess up here and there and other places, that kind of thing? How do we deal with that? People, again, try to reconcile the findings of science that satisfy a 21st century audience with the language of Genesis. I think that effort, though admirable, is pointless. I think if God wanted to give us that information, we wouldn't have had to guess and make passages stand on their head to get there. I think it would have been much clearer. But, frankly, this is the wisdom of God. I would argue that God prompted the writer to inform readers that he was the Creator, which is a literal truth. The means to that end, how the writer conveyed the reality of God's creative work, shouldn't be conflated with the end itself, the fact of creation. God let the writers write according to their knowledge, using whatever literary devices or techniques their readers would understand. Why did he do that? Well, because God wanted the original readers to grasp the truth of who the Creator was. We undermine that. We, in modern people, undermine that and we make the Bible vulnerable to criticism when we impose modern questions and modern science on Genesis 1 and 2. We set the Bible up for a fall to be blunt about it. We make the text contain thoughts that the writer, the original writer, and the original readers would never have had in their heads. We change the enterprise because we think we have to protect Genesis 1 and 2 from science. You know, why is it wise for God to not prompt the biblical writers to try to make scientific statements in Genesis 1 and 2? Because if God prompted someone today to write Genesis 1 and 2, a thousand years from now, people would be looking at what the person today wrote, and they'd snicker at it. They'd say, can you believe that they believed this stuff back a thousand years ago? Boy, this is really bad science. We know so much more now, and this just isn't accurate. If the enterprise is not to produce science content from the beginning, if it's just designed to teach us about who we are, who created us, who created everything. If that's the goal, you don't need to be talking science, and it's very wise, because when you don't talk science in Genesis 1 and 2, you produce something that transcends science. You produce something that is not subject to criticism today or a thousand years from now, because to defeat that enterprise, you would have to prove that there is no creator, that creation never happened. That's the only way you can overturn and undermine, do away with Genesis 1 and 2. You have to show that it really was spontaneous generation of matter. There really was no big bang. There really was no beginning. It just always was here. There is no need for a creator. You have to dispense with the need for a creator, and you have to dispense with a creation event. That's the only way you can actually undermine Genesis 1 and 2. But if you want to argue that, well, it actually teaches us science, you set it up for criticism. You make it vulnerable. If you divorce it from science talk, it is not subject to those criticisms. It transcends science. That's why I think God was very wise to just essentially prompt the original writers, look, here's what we want to do. We want to make sure that anybody who reads this knows who the true God is, who the creator God is. It's me. It's not some flunky. It's not one of these gods of Egypt. It's not one of these gods from the Sumerians or the Mesopotamia. We want to know who the true God is. We want credit for the existence of humanity, the existence of everything, and that means that God is Lord over those things, which means those things are accountable to their creator, and God has a specific reason for creating them. He has a destiny in mind. We want those thoughts communicated. You, poor, piddly person living in the 2nd millennium BC, you are perfectly capable of communicating those ideas. Now, go get that done and use whatever language you have at your disposal. Whatever knowledge that's rattling around in your point of little head, however you're able to communicate those ideas so that your readers understand them, go get it done. He doesn't say, now, hold still because I'm going to dump Einstein's theory of relativity and add some quantum stuff in there that make Einstein uncomfortable. Then we're going to add this, that, and the other things so that people reading this 10,000 years from now will think it's good science. That's just ridiculous. It's not what we see in the text. It just isn't. I think God was very wise to do it the way he did it. Creation is literal for me. How it gets communicated is a different story, and how the writers tell the story, they want to accomplish certain things, and one of them is polemic. There are other reasons, but one of them is polemic. All right, Mike. Our last question is from Slash, and he wants to know if Adam and Eve produced urine or fecal matter while in the Garden of Eden. Now, he asked this because in church a few weeks ago, they were teaching that out of every transaction of energy there is waste, and we have to articulate that waste, understand it and deal with it. What that means is that in the Garden, when Adam originally was living in the presence of God before he sinned, he could eat anything in the Garden, and 100% of what he ate would be translated to energy with no waste. Since the fall, there is waste, and we have a world full of it. We have to constantly account for it. To sum up, Mike, did Adam and Eve poop? This now has risen to the top. Maybe I should say the bottom of the strangest questions I've ever gotten. Oh, boy, does this take my mind in some other places. I don't know if I should mention it or not. I'm going to do that. I'm going to entertain the audience here for a little bit. Please do. I remember when I was, I'm not going to name the place. I remember teaching at a Bible college one time, and we had a music professor at this place, and he actually taught people. Now, this is a fundamentalist context. I taught at a fundamentalist school one time, and I was hired because they were trying to take the school more mainstream and get accredited and just honestly be more reasonable. But we had a guy in the music faculty that taught his class because he wanted to teach against rock and roll, you know, anything with a beat in it, that there are the tones of, I don't even know anything about music, so I'm probably going to get this wrong, but that the vibrations that go with the tones of rock and roll were the same set of vibrations that happen when people have sex, and that's why we should avoid rock and roll. So somebody came into my Bible class and told me that and asked me what I thought, and I looked at him and I said, I just have one question. I want to know who held the microphone for that study. You know, and of course, everybody cracks up, like people are following, you know, you know, holding microphones around when people are having sex to establish this relation. It's just, it's ridiculous. Okay, so now this question has probably moved into the stratosphere of, of ridiculous things I've heard. Did Adam and Eve poop? Of course they pooped. Okay, their bodies would have worked the way they were created to work. Everything functioned the way it should have functioned. You know, this, I don't want you to read it again. Try to expunge it from my head, but this sounds, what you read sounds to me, like something I'd hear in new age circles or theosophy. You know, there's this whole thing about, you know, energy and, you know, perfect energy at the beginning, and you could eat anything, and there was no, that's just ridiculous. I don't know, I don't know how you could ever get that from the biblical text. So whoever, wherever this comes from, I'd say the source for that is he's sucking it out of his thumb. You know, if it's something to do with death, you know, because of waste, death, maybe it, maybe it's linked to Romans five or something, and maybe he's equating death of plants, because they're only eating plants in the beginning, is he equating death of plants with waste? Well, why would you do that? You know, what, why would you equate death of plants with, with, with waste and say it's bad? What else are they supposed to eat? Okay. And how would you get from Romans five, this idea that you don't need to expel anything? Isn't that the way the body is supposed to work? I, you know, I, let me, let me go to this way. Here's, here's why I'm on this trajectory. It is new age theosophical occult mythology to think that Adam was more than human. He's human. If Adam's in the garden and him and Eve are making breakfast, and an elephant, you know, starts trotting through the camp. Okay. And he trips and he falls on Adam. When he rolls over, Adam isn't going to get up and say, well, boy, I'm glad that's over. That tickled. No, he's crushed. Okay. He's a normal human being. The fact that he hasn't fallen yet is not going to prevent him from being crushed by an elephant that falls on him. If he cuts himself, guess what's going to happen? He'll bleed. If he cuts himself badly enough, guess what's going to happen? He'll lose enough blood that he'll die. Okay. Adam is not a more than, he's not an ubermensch. Okay. He's not this Superman that, you know, he's impervious to pain or harm or anything like that. And we know that didn't happen because of the circumstances of the garden. But the point is that we turn Adam into some sort of alien, you know, some sort of non-human or more than human thing. He's just human. And this is the way occultists talk about biblical characters. I mean, honestly, they do. And, you know, if this comes from, you know, some quote, unquote, you know, famous or reliable source, whatever, that is, I mean, that's exactly the way that Adam gets talked about. These bizarre theories about Adam and Eve and whatnot that they were human, but they really weren't human. No, I'm sorry. They were human. That's what they were. Adam was no more transcendent of humanity than Jesus was. Jesus was 100% man, not what 100% man and another 50% of something else added onto it plus God. You know, he's human. He's the second Adam. He could die. He could bleed. Okay, Adam was not superior to Christ in his humanity. I'm sorry, but he wasn't. And it's this kind of talk that I think really potentially, you know, can mislead people into sort of mixing these kinds of, and I'll use the word again, occult ideas in their theology. So that's what I think of it. Just all the time. Well, I think it's nonsense. Mike, the real question is, did Adam use toilet paper? I mean, let's get serious here. We need to know the details if you don't mind what went on in the back. Oh, I'm sure he, I'm sure he didn't need it. Right. I'm sure he never, he never made him, he never had to clean himself. Just, there's so many jokes in there. Very hard for me to reframe it right now. He probably never, never perspired. You know, and even if he did, he wouldn't have needed deodorant because that would, he would have smelled, you know, like roses. This is the kind of, this is the kind of stupidity that passes for deep thinking in these areas. And I just see it all the time, again, in this new age, theosophical, occult kind of literature. It just doesn't have any place in biblical thinking. Adam and Eve were human beings. Their bodies functioned optimally the way they were supposed to function. It's not a complicated thing. They could have died. They didn't. God prevented them from having any kind of circumstance, you know, that they, that they would have died. They, they're not eternal. They have contingent immortality. Their immortality depends on two things. They don't sin so that they do not cast out of the garden and they'll begin to age and die. They'll be divorced from the tree of life and the presence of God and, you know, all this stuff. Okay. It's contingent on that and be doing anything dumb. Okay. Like getting in the way of an elephant or cutting themselves, you know, cutting their wrists with a knife, you know, or, you know, falling into a creek and the head hits a rock. You know, Adam doesn't wake up, you know, an hour later and say, well, that, that was refreshing. No, he's dead because he needs oxygen. See, there's another one. Well, if, if Adam and Eve didn't poop, maybe they didn't need oxygen either. Isn't that energy? Isn't the act of breathing, you know, using energy? It's just ridiculous. It's just, it's utter nonsense. But it's the kind of thing, again, it's the kind of stupidity that passes for deep thinking in these sorts of circles. And it just doesn't have any place in biblical theology. Still not going to stop me from creating a naked Bible poop spray. So be looking forward to that soon to order online. But, you know, I don't, I don't really look forward to any of your ideas. What? That is a lie, folks. That is a lie. Oh, come on. All right, Mike. Well, we're done just like that. Any of your public ideas. Please. Behind closed doors. He loves it. He loves. Oh, yeah. You know, you're going to get you a 12 pack of poop spray. I'm signing up for that one. Yeah, I'm signing up for that one. Yeah, exactly. Let's, let's make that, put the label on and send it, you know, to the, to whatever the source of that material was. Let's do that. Yeah. All right, Mike. Well, the good thing is, I don't need any poop spray because I'm just like Adam. So take that for what you will. And Mike, I just did. Yeah, I hear you. There's lots of jokes in there. I hear you. That's perfect. Not too many poop questions. So we got to take it when we can get it, right? I guess so. All right, Mike. Listen, next week, we're, we're, let's get to the next week. Melchizedek. We've got a three part series of Melchizedek coming up. I'll bet Melchizedek never pooped because he had beat no beginning or end. There you go. There you go. So, see how he did that? Yeah, I see. That's a nice transition. So tell us what we're going to be talking about over the next three weeks. Yeah, we're going to break Melchizedek up into three, three episodes. One's going to be Old Testament. Then we're going to have Second Temple Period material. And then lastly, New Testament. Again, this is like one of the gnarliest topics that you get in biblical studies. There will be parts, there will be things about the topic that you can say with a high degree of certainty as far as this or that passage. And there will be other things that you just can't. But this is the easiest way to break up the topic. And rather than sort of cheat in any one of these three areas and really not give it the level of detail it deserves, we're just going to, we're going to go full bore here and do three episodes. Yeah, really looking forward to that series. That's going to be fun. Well, all right, Mike, don't forget that the voting begins July 15th for the next book that we're going to cover on the podcast. And if you haven't done so, please go rate us and leave us a review of wherever you consume our show, if you can, if it allows you. And I guess, Mike, with that, I just want to thank everybody for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. 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.