Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giants-killers—giant-killers—boy, it’s easy for me to say—giant-killers, dragon-slayers! I said “giants-killers”; I think that becomes a football thing, then. [Laughter] You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. We are recording live, but we’re actually not going to be taking phone calls tonight. That said, if you leave a question on our Facebook or Ancient Faith YouTube streams and we spot it, there is a chance that we could take it and respond.

So tonight we’re talking about textual authority. I know that sounds like a hoot, but stick with me here. As Christians, whether it’s the Bible, the Apocrypha, the writings of the Church Fathers, texts related to the Ecumenical Councils or the divine services, we have a lot of texts. So how are we supposed to understand these various texts? In what sense are they authoritative? That’s what we’re talking about tonight.

As we are wont to do, we’re going to begin looking at this question in the ancient world, thousands of years ago, beginning even before the writings that make up the holy Scriptures. So what’s up first tonight, Fr. Stephen? Are we going to look at that Sumerian clay tablet where someone complains about how kids don’t obey their parents any more; things just aren’t what they used to be?

Fr. Stephen De Young: No.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. Oh, well.

Fr. Stephen: Not quite that far back. [Laughter] So I have to comment. People may hear the difference, but I have this new technology set-up thing happening now.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! You sound so much better!

Fr. Stephen: And with the headphones and the way my mic is set up on my desk, I sort of feel like I’m guest-hosting the Delicious Dish—but I’m not. [Laughter] So I will not even attempt an NPR voice any further. But yeah, we’re not starting quite that far back, with the first piece of writing ever, because as far as we can tell, that piece of writing was just a grumpy old man like me and is not actually authoritative in any way for anyone.

Fr. Andrew: I do love that that is the earliest known piece of writing; it’s someone complaining that things are going downhill and they’re not what they used to be.

Fr. Stephen: And they haven’t gone back up, really, I mean, if you look at it. [Laughter] But—well, that’s not true. Sumerian renaissance was definitely a slight uptick. But yeah, we’re talking about texts that play a particular kind of role in a community tonight. So complaint notes like that or hate-mail or grocery lists, trade receipts—we’re going to leave those aside and talk about, first, things that aren’t the Bible that even precede anything in the Bible but that had a function in their respective communities in the Ancient Near East that were something like the function that the Bible would come to have. So, specifically, we’re talking about these texts that form out of a preceding oral recitation or oral tradition, an oral use of storytelling or narrative or ritual performance that then eventually gets written down. I’m sure that guy complained about “kids these days” all the time before it was written down, but that’s still not quite what we were talking about. [Laughter]

So these texts, as I mentioned, whether it’s a narrative story, whether it’s a story that we would now call myth or mythology, whether it’s direct sort of ritual instructions, these aren’t things that are invented when somebody comes and sits down to write them down. Like, you can’t just think up—well, I mean, L. Ron Hubbard did, but most people can’t just think up rituals and get people to go along with them. Usually these are things that form semi-organically. We talked about that back when we talked about sacrifices and encounters with spiritual beings.

So a couple of early examples that are kind of helpful in terms of what we’re talking about: people, at least people who listen to this show, have probably heard of the Enuma Elish, which is the sort of Babylonian creation account. And we’ve talked before on the show on the difference between myth and mythology, that a myth is a story that has this sort of ritual component that sort of keeps that story alive and makes it real in the experience of people; when all of that drops out, it becomes mythology. So most folks, I would wager, who have read the Enuma Elish have approached it as mythology.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it’s just a story that doesn’t actually play a part in their life in any way except maybe as a piece of entertainment.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or, from a very sort of Protestant perspective, we say, “This is what the ancient Babylonians believed about how the world was created,” so it’s about thoughts or beliefs. And this isn’t just picking on our Protestant friends; everyone does this. We all tend to think of other religions in terms of our own religion, because our own religion is the religious experience that we have, so it was sort of natural for Protestant scholars, when they started studying ancient religions, to look at it in terms of beliefs and what people held to. And then, going forward, as there were sort of wars that we talked about in our “How (and How Not) to Read the Bible” episode, there were sort of wars over how to read the creation account in Genesis. Then when people turn to the Babylonian creation account, they tended to read it the same way, so either they said, “Well, this is just sort of poetic, interesting stuff,” or they said, “No, this is exactly how they believed it happened.”

But the Enuma Elish, actually in Babylon, was actually re-enacted every year. There were a series of processions to a sacred ziggurat, and the processions were considered to be processions of the gods, so the idol that was the body of Marduk was picked up and carried down there, and the idols of the other gods from the other cities were carried there in procession, and then there was this re-enactment with the king embodying Marduk in the story.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it wasn’t understood just as a kind of play, like “Look, we’re putting on a story,” but: “This thing is happening again, and we’re part of it.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, “We’re participating in it.” And the reason it kept being done is, of course, this is how the world was created, and as we’ve pointed out, for ancient people this isn’t about being versus nothingness, because especially when you look at the Enuma Elish, there’s nothing created out of nothing; everything’s created out of something else. But it’s things being put in order, and so this repeated and participated in as a way of maintaining that order. This is a pretty constant factor in all kinds of pagan religions. You look at Mesoamerican human sacrifices: that was to maintain the ordering of the world and keep it from ending.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, if you don’t do this ritual, then really bad, bad things will happen.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so this was the same kind of thing; this was maintenance of the order, by re-enacting. It was actually doing something. But of course, that annual festival, all of those ritual elements are now gone, and so it just sort of gets read as mythology.

Another example—and this one’s a pretty obvious example; this isn’t a narrative text per se, though there are narrative elements of it—is the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Fr. Andrew: Which is basically a manual for doing funerals in the Egyptian religious tradition.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s all the funerary and burial rites, so that includes some sort of narrative elements of Osiris and Anubis and the gods, but those narrative elements are then actually sort of played out in the rituals.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that you—by doing the ritual, then you are participating in Osiris’s story of him dying and that sort of thing.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So what’s happening when these things are written down… So these stories are still being told orally; they’re being passed on orally, and they’re being enacted in this ritual. What happens when they finally get written down is that, once they’re written down, that becomes the normative form. Now this is the written form. We talked before about how expensive and difficult writing something down was, so “it is written” is this big statement. It’s like a literary monument. And you still find this in oral cultures to this day. In oral cultures, you can have two people, two storytellers, from that culture tell the same story, and their tellings of it can be radically different. One could be an hour long and one could be 20 minutes long, and yet if you ask one of the storytellers who listened to the other, “Did they tell it correctly?” they’d say, “Yes,” even though it was totally different from their own telling.

But in those same cultures, once a version of that story gets written down, then “correct” becomes “conforming to the written text.” And then any telling that doesn’t conform to that, or any ritual enactment that doesn’t follow the text once it’s written down, is now “wrong,” is now “incorrect.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, do it by the book, essentially.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is a way of establishing something like that permanently, of reducing variation, and of locking in a true version. And this is why, part of— We’ve talked about before several times on this show, a number of narratives and non-narratives—poetry and the psalms—elements in the Old Testament especially will take elements of Ancient Near Eastern religion and other cultures and invert them or change them or correct them. Like: here’s the true version of what happened with Baal’s insurrection against the Most High God. And the Old Testament doing that is not like a weird thing. The fact that it’s written down already carries with it culturally this idea of “this is now going to be the correct version.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think that’s a really important point about the way—actually the whole Bible, in a lot of ways, functions. It’s not that it was written down to create a whole system of religious belief and structures and rituals and so forth, but rather that it came about within an existing social reality, and it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s not a founding document; it’s not a constitution—although, I mean, if you think about the US Constitution, it is very self-consciously a response to other kinds of government. So it’s a response. The Scripture, one of the ways to look at it is that it’s a response to other things that are already happening on the ground, and it’s an attempt to correct that, to fix it, to create new norms or to set norms for a particular group of people.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’ve lost that sense of something written as a monument, because I could go and self-publish something on the internet.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s super easy to publish.

Fr. Stephen: And if millions of people cared, they could read it tomorrow. [Laughter] The printed word has gotten kind of cheap; it wasn’t cheap in the ancient world.

But so this also means—and we see this throughout Ancient Near Eastern, and even into late antiquity, to a certain extent, in paganism, where you have a class of priests whose job is essentially to be able to read.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to read the stories as part of these ritual experiences that people have.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they’re supposed to maintain the documents, copy the documents, be able to read the documents, know how to perform the rituals. So this starts as knowledge that’s just handed down orally, but then once it goes into written form, then you get lector-priests in Egypt, you get the priests who were in charge of the Sibylline Books in Rome, where their job is to be able to consult the books, to consult the things written, to know how to do these things. But again, it’s not about “here’s a set of truths that are to be believed.” It’s not about even “here’s some hidden knowledge about the universe and salvation.” It’s that: “here’s the correct procedure; here’s the correct way to do this.”

Fr. Andrew: It’s a how-to.

Fr. Stephen: “Here’s the correct way to tell the story, the correct way to do the ritual, the correct application of these things.” And the Sibylline Books are a really good example of that, because that’s literally what it was. They would go— Something would happen—there’s a comet: “Uh-oh, that’s a bad omen. What do we do?” “Well, we went and consulted the books, and the books said we should bury three slaves alive.” This is an actual example that happened. And so they go and they do that, and then they’re like: “Well, okay.” It was this very procedural kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, notice it’s never: “Bury three senators alive.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No. No. And if it was, they probably would have named a slave as a senator and then buried him alive. [Laughter] Or a horse, if we’re Caligula.

Fr. Andrew: Right!? [Laughter] Caligula’s horse!

Fr. Stephen: And we’re not used to, now, thinking of the Torah this way, but if you read the Torah for itself and you read it in that ancient context, the Torah really is sort of the same thing. And there’s countless examples of this, but sort of Exhibit A of this is Passover, where it’s even given— It’s laid out first: “Here’s how you are to celebrate the Passover” in Exodus, and it gives all of the ritual instructions for celebrating the Passover every year. “This is to be your first of months,” so it even starts constructing a ritual calendar. All of that information comes first. And then the actual event of the Passover happens afterwards.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s why the Bible doesn’t make a really good screenplay, as written. You’re like, “Wait, let’s take a moment here.” Like: “Yes, yes, certainly there’s death and destruction about to come, but we’re going to first describe this ritual to you and how you’re going to do it for the future.” Because it’s not a play-by-play of what happened; it’s a text within a ritual context, so of course those ritual instructions are there and are primary.

Fr. Stephen: “You’re going to do these ritual acts, and then you’re going to tell the story to your family, and you’re going to participate in the story in this way. Oh, by the way, here’s the story, after the fact.” And we’ve mentioned before on the show I know, that you see that same pattern with the Mystical Supper, that the Eucharist is actually instituted ritually before Christ dies and rises again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Do this as my remembrance. This is my body and my blood…” Again, if you take it as just a screenplay, it doesn’t make much sense. “You’re not dead, Lord. What are you talking about?”

Fr. Stephen: “Your body has not been broken yet; your blood has not been shed yet.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, even though he puts it in the present tense, or past tense, really: “This is body, broken; this is my blood, shed.”

Fr. Stephen: This is true over and over again in the Torah. This is even true, chapter one and the beginning of chapter two: creation is put into this seven-day structure, and the story of the creation of the world culminates with: Therefore, the sabbath day, the seventh day of the week, is holy and you don’t do any work.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and “sabbath” is not just a name for the day of the week; it’s a specific set of practices that you engage in.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s there explicitly. [Laughter] So it’s not… If you take that at face value, it’s not saying, “Here’s what you have to believe precisely in terms of the exact order of events when God created the world.” It’s saying—the thrust of it is: “Therefore you should rest on the seventh day of the week as a way of participating in God’s enthronement over his creation and his rule.” And there’s the actual event of the giving of the covenant at Sinai, and at Pentecost the annual observance, so that even these narrative portions are directly connected, then, to the ritual which involves the telling of the story and the participation in the story. And of course, like I said, there’s countless examples, and it’s not just the Torah: the book of Esther is all aimed at the celebration of Purim; arguably 1 Maccabees is all aimed at the Feast of Lights, Hanukkah.

So that’s sort of one type, so that’s sort of parallel to the way that the Enuma Elish functioned, that there was this ritual, this annual ritual; there was a regular ritual observance in which this story was enacted and participated in. More like the Egyptian Book of the Dead in the actual rites instructions, you get a book like Leviticus.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is clearly a liturgical book, which is about: This is how you do these rituals.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s brought out by the title. The Greek title, Levitikos, is literally the Levitical thing, the Levites thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the stuff that the Levites… The book of the Levites.

Fr. Stephen: “The thing” being a book. Now, that’s not the Hebrew title. The Hebrew title is Vayikra, but that’s one of those titles that’s sort of like the things we don’t translate in our Orthodox liturgical books, like “the kathismata.” That sounds fancy: “things you can sit during.” So we leave it there.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, “the sitting things.”

Fr. Stephen: Vayikra: that sounds really interesting. That means “and he called.” It’s just the first word of the book of Leviticus.

Fr. Andrew: I think that’s true of all the Torah books. The Hebrew names are just the first word that you’d see on the scroll.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so the Greek name tells you the actual context, like what this is. And what it is—what the book of Leviticus is—is a manual for priests, basically. And some of that’s obvious. A big chunk of Leviticus is this detailed stuff of: “Here’s how you divvy up the entrails of this type of sacrifice. Here are the things that you offer for that type of sacrifice. Here’s what you offer on this feast, that feast.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and a lot is super repetitive. “Here’s what you do with the fatty lobe that is next to the liver”: that kind of detail.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that very much reads like a priest manual. That reads like rubrics, like instructions. Now, there’s other parts of it that don’t necessarily read that way to us, especially since we’re used to having what in our modern English is called the Law. So there’s a lot of it, like in the holiness code that runs from Leviticus 17 to somewhere around 23 or 24, depending on whom you ask, where it looks to us like it’s just a bunch of moral rules, like Leviticus 18 is all rules about sexual morality and immorality. And so that seems to us to be less directed towards a priest; we think, “Well, no, that’s like so people could read it and know what they should and shouldn’t do, morally.”

So the problem with that is nobody could read. And they didn’t have access to the texts even if they could, because there were so few copies, and they were treasured, and the priests had possession of them. So the way people had access to what was in those texts was through the priests. They would come and participate in the rituals and in the feasts and in the sacrifices, and when they came and participated, this would sort of be mediated to them through the text and through the priests; they found out about it.

So those commandments—and they were not just in there for the priests to just sort of advise people, though, obviously, or it should be obvious, and hopefully priests were doing that, though we know from reading the Old Testament that that was not necessarily the case most of the time… [Laughter] That they should have been teaching people what to avoid and what not to do. But for the most part, those sins are in there because the priest has to know what to do about them when they happen, because, remember, the priest’s job, the job that this is a manual for—the priests there, whether it’s in the camp in the wilderness, whether it’s in the Temple later in Judah—their job is to maintain purity through the sacrificial system to manage the sin, in the camp or in the nation, so that God can safely remain living among them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s not just a list of, like: “Here’s things you’re supposed to do and not do.” It’s: “Okay, this bad thing happened, so here’s what we do about that.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Here’s how we restore justice, here’s what the sacrifice is that we need to offer, here’s the kind of repentance that needs to be seen. If there’s not repentance, here’s what you have to do in terms of stoning somebody or moving a mountain…”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and even the narrative bits of Leviticus, in my mind, the classic example being the institution of the Day of Atonement ritual [which] is given in response to one of the narrative parts of Leviticus, in which Nadab and Abihu really mess up and God kills them. Fire comes out from the Lord and kills them there in the tabernacle. So that’s given… And this is why we do the Day of Atonement stuff: in response to that, so that that kind of thing doesn’t happen again.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we don’t want that to recur. Like there’s a little sign with a number they hang up: “So many days since death by holiness.” [Laughter] We want to get that number high; we want to keep that rolling. And so, therefore, those parts are also sort of a priest’s manual, but they’re a priest’s manual for managing the sins of the people and dealing with that, because that’s sort of part of their job. And of course we have sort of direct parallels to that in manuals of confession in the Orthodox Church, where these aren’t, like, commandments: you don’t hand one of these manuals of confession—you shouldn’t. If you are a layperson in the Orthodox Church, do not buy or read a Byzantine manual of confession. It is not for you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that is a… Yeah. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s like spiritual WebMD, man.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly!

Fr. Stephen: You will excommunicate yourself.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, we’re not forbidding people from reading books, just saying, “You don’t need that book. It’s not for…” It’s not supposed to be applied by laymen to themselves. That’s not what it’s for.

Fr. Stephen: You’re not going to have a good time.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what I’m saying. It seems like fun and games, but it’s not. It’s like WebMD: convinces everyone they have cancer and they’re going to die. This is the same kind of thing, but spiritually. So don’t read it.

But the purpose of that is for especially someone who’s new to hearing confessions from people to give advice on—here’s how to counsel someone dealing with this or that or the other, and here are the more serious forms of this and here are the less serious forms of this, not that you disregard them but you have to be more strict with the more severe ones, with someone committing those, than with someone who’s committing the less serious forms. So it’s practical advice for priests who are hearing confessions; it’s not for someone to sit and try and hear their own confession, just like WebMD. You go to your doctor and let your doctor diagnose you.

So that’s the idea there. Again, that’s not used to how we’re thinking about the Torah functioning, but that is really how it functioned and how it was received by people in the Ancient Near East who were used to texts functioning that way within communities.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it continues on. I mean, we’re going to kind of make our way chronologically down, as we so often do. But something that’s much more recent: if you pick up the Liturgikon that is published by the Antiochian Archdiocese that you and I serve in, right up at the front is the list of commandments of St. Basil the Great to priests. Now the book is mostly a book of how to do vespers and orthros and the Divine Liturgy and all these services. As they say, “Say the black, do the red,” because the spoken parts are in black ink and the actions are in red ink, which is where the word “rubric” comes from: it has to do with red.

Fr. Stephen: We’re working from a script, people. It’s not improv.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, sorry. Actually, the rubric being about red is improv.

Fr. Stephen: Oh.

Fr. Andrew: “Oh.” [Laughter] Sorry. Very meta there. But there’s these commandments from St. Basil. For instance: Never stand at the synaxis (that’s the gathering together for the church service)—never stand at the synaxis having hatred for anyone, so as not to banish the Comforter. And so this is a commandment to priests: Don’t go to… Don’t serve angry, basically, because that’s bad for this. It comes off as a moral commandment; it’s a moral commandment in service to ritual. This is… even till today we have the same kind of use of texts.

Fr. Stephen: All right. And, as we switch into or move into Deuteronomy—so, Deuteronomy, there’s this shift because Deuteronomy is presented here: this is Moses giving his sort of final instructions to Israel before they enter the land. And so as things are repeated here, as the name “Deuteronomy” implies, there’s a little bit of a shift in that now this is aimed at: “Here’s how we’re going to implement these things, now that we’re not in a camp in the wilderness any more. Now we’re going to be in the land.” So people have fits—and by “people” I mean Old Testament scholars, who are still people, 19th-century German ones…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Old Testament scholars are people, too?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. —that the instructions are different in Leviticus than they are in Deuteronomy, for Passover—or Exodus and Deuteronomy for Passover. It’s like: Yeah, because one’s out in the desert and one is in a city.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, liturgical change, adapting to the particular needs of the context. It’s okay, everybody! It’s okay.

Fr. Stephen: But so one major element is that, in the same way that we see these things functioning with the priesthood, like in Leviticus, we start to see in Deuteronomy more talk of the elders, the presbyters of the people, because, as we talked about back in the priesthood episode, these get separated. Priesthood and sort of elderhood, that the—I don’t want to use “civil” and “religious,” because that’s—

Fr. Andrew: Not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: —modern categories, right. Those two things get separated. The king and the high priest are two different people: Moses and Aaron. And the Levites and the elders of the people: we talked about this in the priesthood episode. They’re still separate. But then the elders and the king get talked about in the same terms by Deuteronomy, where, as it’s presented in Deuteronomy, the Torah as sort of a tool or instrument, the king has to make a copy of the Torah and study it for them to use to guide the people to establish justice, to deal with disputes, to deal with sins when they happen and reconciliation and repentance.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, very practical, not just a theoretical “here’s some things we belief and have to agree with.” This is what needs to be done.

Fr. Stephen: That word, “law,” again that we’ve gotten hammered with—thanks a lot, St. Jerome—no, I actually have his icon here, so I actually like St. Jerome, because, you know, you don’t have a lion as a pet; you’re not as cool as [he is]. Deal with it.

Fr. Andrew: It is true, I do not have a lion as a pet.

Fr. Stephen: We’re used to looking at the Torah as if it’s a law code, and you’ll even see this in some of these “Intro to the Old Testament” books, where they go: “Well, this is the law, this is the Jewish law; we’re going to compare it to Hammurabi’s Code.” Hammurabi, our Amorite friend.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, he was a giant? I just realized.

Fr. Stephen: He was an Amorite.

Fr. Andrew: He was an Amorite, so he was in one of those clans? Wow.

Fr. Stephen: And he had this great affection for sandals imported from Crete.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! I remember that!

Fr. Stephen: Those Greek sandals.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Ha!

Fr. Stephen: He was a little bit of a clotheshorse.

Fr. Andrew: I never made the connection that he was one of the Amorites.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he was one of the Amurru. But a law code functions differently, and this is even—this, shall we say, misunderstanding, is even built into some theological systems, where the Torah gets turned into law and God is the king and he gives this law that must be obeyed or he will punish. And in actuality, this use of the text, this function of the text that we’ve been describing, that’s apparent in the Torah, is not really a law code; it’s actually more like what’s sometimes called in English household law, and they call it “household law” because they’re working off of the Greek term, oikonomia. “Economics” means something else in English. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, literally if you’re going to translate that word, it’s sort of “the laws of the house.”

Fr. Stephen: Or the customs of the house, the ways of the house.

Fr. Andrew: Household management, is probably a better way…

Fr. Stephen: This is how we do things in this household, and this is how we resolved disputes, and this is how it is governed.

Fr. Andrew: Right! “As long as you live under my roof…” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and if we don’t understand that, there’s big chunks of St. Paul’s epistles that we’re going to radically misinterpret, because he uses this concept of the household of God over and over again, and he especially uses it when he’s talking about the presbyters in the Church and what they do, and the episkopoi, the bishops, as we would say: the leaders of the Church, that they are managers of the household of God. He’s directly appealing to this language. And we hear that in English, and because we’re so used to law—this law code thinking—we think that’s something other than and different from what was going on in the Torah, when really what St. Paul is saying is thoroughly consistent. He’s saying that the presbyters of the new covenant in the Church have pretty much the same job that the presbyters, the elders of the people in the old covenant; that they also were really managing that household.

So we talked just now about priests and how sort of the Torah worked in terms of them as an instrument, and we talked about the king and the elders of the people. There’s somebody from a couple weeks ago whom we haven’t talked about yet…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how about the prophets? How do they fit into all of this? I mean, they’re not walking around with texts in their hands and applying them to people. Or are they? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we don’t see St. Elias, the Prophet Elijah, going in front of King Ahab and unrolling a Torah scroll and reading him the section on what is to be done about false prophets. That’s not what we see. We don’t even see— I mean, Ezekiel was from a priestly family, and therefore presumably can read and write. We don’t even see him doing that; we see him wandering around naked and stuff, listening to these prophetic—doing these bizarre prophetic actions, having visions. [Laughter]

And so they’re not using the Torah instrumentally, at least we don’t see them doing that, in the same way that priest and king or priest and presbyter do in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they’re not really quoting it usually even, are they?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, no, so what they’re saying is consonant with it.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s consistent.

Fr. Stephen: But they’re not showing up and quoting it. Now, our 19th-century German friends would say it’s because it hasn’t been written yet, but we’re not going to get into all that right now. [Laughter] But they don’t.

And so the idea here is related to where the Torah came from and what it is. So Moses goes to the top of Mount Sinai, and, as we’ve talked about before, enters into the divine council: the law is given through angels. He speaks to God face to face; we’ve talked about how this is Christ. And so he has this direct experience and direct encounter with God, as we talked about in the last episode about prophets. And then he brings the Torah, which means “teaching” in Hebrew—he brings this teaching, and the teaching, therefore, serves as this sort of mediation of Moses’s experience for the people, because, remember, the people are terrified when they see that God is on the mountain; they’re not going to go near it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, when they see Moses’s face is all shining, they’re like: “Cover up, Moses!” It’s really a traumatic thing for them; they’re not interested in that direct encounter with God.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the Torah comes in this mediatorial role between this direct experience, which they can’t handle—and this is not just some kind of psychological weakness; death by holiness is a real thing. This is something they can’t abide, because they haven’t been purified for it. And therefore, there is this teaching that functions mediatorially. This is, by the way, why, when we read in Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Joel about the coming of the Holy Spirit in the new covenant—this is why we get this element of “a man will not have to teach his brother to do this and not to do that, because the law will be written on their heart.”

Fr. Andrew: So it’s this direct experience that they will be having now.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so once a person has been purified by the blood of Christ, they are able to experience God directly. That takes the form of the filling of the Holy Spirit. So now they don’t need the Torah in this instrumental role any more. That doesn’t mean that the Torah is no longer valid, because the Torah is still the description of that experience. So nobody who has this direct experience with God is going to be a law-breaker, or if they are they’re going to end up like Ananias and Sapphira. [Laughter] So that’s still real.

But that’s why that mediation is no longer necessary, because now we can all approach. But so, for that same reason, the prophets in the Old Testament didn’t need the Torah in that mediatorial or instrumental role.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they didn’t need it… It was not second-hand… I mean, “second-hand” sounds negative, but it was direct for them, so they were like: “Yeah, I don’t need you to tell me what God said, because I know him.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, so St. Elias, Prophet Elijah, can come to Ahab, and because of his direct encounters with God, he can come to Ahab and denounce his wickedness and pronounce the judgment of God against him without needing to cite or prooftext. [Laughter] Because he knows who God is. And remember, at the core is: this is Christ.

But the important element to carry forward is that, even when the Torah is serving this instrumental role, the authority is never in the text itself.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because if it were, then prophets having direct experiences would not sort of trump—it’s not “trump,” but they would have to be citing the Bible; they could not just say, “Look. Thus saith the Lord…, because he said this to me”; it would always have to make some reference to the text, because if that’s where the authority is… But, rather, that the text points to an experience, and if you’re having that experience, then you’re also accessing the actual authority, which is God himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is… God himself maintains the authority; Christ maintains the authority. The text is mediation to allow a person to draw close and have the direct experience of God in Christ. And this is, when we talk about the formation of Rabbinic Judaism, that what makes it very different [from] the religion of Ancient Israel and of Second Temple Israel, this is the big shift: the authority goes to the text itself, so you no longer have a succession of prophets; you have a succession of scribes, who read and interpret and apply the text.

And—I don’t want to be mean to our Protestant friends, but honestly a lot of forms of Protestantism are following that model, as opposed to—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Show me where it is in the Bible.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, we’re going to be biblical scribes; we’re going to interpret the text.

Fr. Andrew: Which, I mean, we should say, by no means are we suggesting a kind of denigration of the Scripture. We’ve been talking about this stuff for almost two years now, and mainly talking about the Bible. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, clearly I don’t care about the Bible or think it’s important. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: I will show you my student loan balance, sir! [Laughter] Could’ve had a house…

Fr. Andrew: Right, but we’re talking about a different mode of how it’s received and used and that sort of thing.

Fr. Stephen: That it is—the text of Scripture points to Someone greater than itself, and that is Christ. And so the authority is never in the text itself; it’s always Christ, who is mediated through the text. And Christ is not mediated through every text, so this is why it’s not denigrating the Scriptures. Christ is not mediated through Moby Dick. He’s not mediated through Wuthering Heights.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, not even when Patrick Stewart recites passages from it? I mean, some people…

Fr. Stephen: Especially when Patrick Stewart recites passages from it. [Laughter] Now, if William Shatner, or when Ricardo Montalbán recites passages from it, then we’re talking. [Laughter] So, Wuthering Heights—pick your text. The direct experience of God in Christ is not mediated through any of those texts. And, again I don’t want to be mean, but this is my problem with those “the gospel according to… fill in the pop-culture thing here” books. This is how old I am: I remember The Gospel According to the Simpsons, back in the day.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I remember that!

Fr. Stephen: And there were a bunch of those in the ‘90s: The Gospel According to the X-Files, The Gospel According to Star Trek: The Next Generation. [Laughter] None of those pop-culture titles—they’re all fine to enjoy as entertainment, but they do not mediate Christ to people the way the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: They’re not preaching the Gospel.

Fr. Stephen: To be fair, most of the people, at least, who write those books—some of them are probably writing it as a crass cash-in, but I think most of the good people who write those books aren’t intending to put them in parallel with the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: No, but…

Fr. Stephen: But it almost conveys that, the idea that you can just sort of get the Gospel anywhere, mediated through trees, it’s mediated through Marvel movies… And that does serve to lower the level of Scripture, because, you know, guess what, there’s a lot of people who find that pop-culture stuff more entertaining than reading the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Well… That’s because it’s entertainment.

Fr. Stephen: And you kind of give them an excuse. [Laughter] “No, no, see, this is good! This has good Christian moral lessons in it!” No. And, yeah, you know, if you’re a kid and you’re trying to get your parents to let you watch stuff, okay, you know. Game recognize game. But that’s not the highest mode of discourse, shall we say.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly. Okay, well, all of that in hand, at some point this stuff starts getting written down.

Fr. Stephen: It does. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: When exactly does that occur, because it’s clear that you have— the community of Israel exists before these texts exist. So at some point it gets written down. Where is that all coming from?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this writing starts at a certain point in human history, which, regardless of how old—and again, not interested in discussing it—how old you think the earth is, it’s still— a long time passes before any of this starts getting written down. Obviously the first thing, traditionally, that starts getting written down is the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the five books of Moses.

Fr. Stephen: The Pentateuch. But, you know, again, we’re going to have to have a talk here, people.

Fr. Andrew: Gather around, children. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I know people have been taught the traditional shorthand—and it is a traditional shorthand—that Moses wrote the Torah, or Moses wrote the Pentateuch. But we have to take it a little more nuanced— We have to look at reality and take a little more nuanced look at this. So the earliest form of the Torah we have available to us, which is the Dead Sea Scrolls, is written in a language—in an alphabet in a language—that didn’t exist when Moses lived. It didn’t exist in his era.

Fr. Andrew: And even if— I can imagine that there’s someone out there who would say, “Yes, it did! That’s just what academics say!” But there’s internal indications about this, too. A good example, for instance, is that the Torah includes the death and then the funeral of Moses.

Fr. Stephen: Unless you can pull out the: “He’s a prophet! He prophesied his own death.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, but it’s not presented that way in the text. [Laughter] It doesn’t say, “And this is the manner in which I will die, and this is the manner in which I will be buried.” It’s not… It’s just there.

Fr. Stephen: And this is not to deny that Moses engaged in scribal activity. There are portions of the Torah—I’m specifically thinking of Exodus 15 and the Song of the Sea and Deuteronomy 32—that, in their current form, go back to the Mosaic era, meaning, they haven’t been updated, really. That’s why they’re so hard to read and translate! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And because these are the only samples we have of that sort of Paleo-Hebrew…

Fr. Stephen: And it’s transliterated but not really translated, and you get— There are parts of Deuteronomy 32 where, if you compare English translations, they are wildly different.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because even the best scholars are looking at it and kind of going: “Well, I think that’s what this is…”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So it is more appropriate, in terms of being accurate to reality, to talk about the Mosaic origin of the Pentateuch, that the first layer of what becomes the Pentateuch as we have it now, that’s where that ur-layer is. And then over time that gets translated, it gets edited, it gets moved into a different alphabet, it gets translated into Greek, and a Greek translation that is no less authoritative than the Hebrew.

Fr. Andrew: And sometimes you can actually see, by looking at the text, not just stuff like Moses’s death and funeral, but you can see the editing process become apparent in the text. There’s stuff that’s anachronistic.

Fr. Stephen: Right, like the story that we read at vespers in the Orthodox Church before most of the feast days of the holy Fathers, about Abram going and rescuing his nephew, Lot, in the original war of the five kings.

Fr. Andrew: The battle of five armies? Oh, sorry. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Abram pursues them as far as Dan. Well, that city was not called “Dan” in Abram’s time.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because Dan is the name of one of the twelve tribes of Israel!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it wasn’t even called Dan when Moses lived. We find out how it gets the name Dan at the end of the book of Joshua, when the tribe of Dan goes and conquers it, even though they weren’t supposed to, and renames it. Before that it was called Laish. So somebody, through the centuries, came and updated that place name, because they were like: “Nobody knows where Laish is any more. We’ve been calling it Dan for a while now. So let’s just update that for Dan, so people will know where we’re talking about when we tell the story.” So in the same way that, if you look at—if you read a story about pre-Columbian American history, as I know everyone here does, everyone listening, they’ll say, “This tribe traveled up the Missouri River and settled near St. Louis,” they’re not implying that the tribe called it the Missouri River and that St. Louis was there and was like a Native American city.

Fr. Andrew: Right, they’re just saying, “This is the modern location that we all know.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, but if they used the native names for those places, then all of us modern people reading it would be like: “Where?”

Fr. Andrew: They’d have no idea. For instance, if you were to translate Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars to make this kind of reference, you would begin with: “All of France is divided into four parts,” or whatever it is.

Fr. Stephen: Three.

Fr. Andrew: Rather than “All Gaul…” Sorry, yeah: three. I’ve read enough Astérix and Obelixcomics that I should remember that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, just remember what Aristotle told us: “Everything that comes in threes is perfect.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Are you saying France is…? No.

Fr. Stephen: It didn’t come in three; it was split in three.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There we go.

Fr. Stephen: He was trying to perfect it.

Fr. Andrew: We love you, French listeners! We do.

Fr. Stephen: And there’s places where that’s even more transparent, where it’ll give a name of a place and say, “Which used to be called… something else.” And there are places in the Torah that say something, and then it will say, “Until this very day.” So if Moses is writing this, like, a year and a half after it happened, “until this very day” doesn’t make…

Fr. Andrew: Right, not that big of a deal.

Fr. Stephen: “That stone that we set up last week is still there to this very day!” [Laughter] So that implies that that’s like an editorial note from later, when they were copying it, and they’re like: “Oh, yeah! That stone’s still there, to this very day!” And so they noted it: “Hey, reader, you can go and see this stone from this story I just told you.”

So the question: When was the Torah written? The answer is: Several centuries, starting somewhere in the mid second millennium BC—and, again, I’m not going to argue about the date of the Exodus—and then going through until after the exile, when… sometime around the time of Ezra it probably received its current form—the Hebrew received pretty much its current form. And then, of course, the Greek translation was made after that; other translations were made after that.

There are… When we take a look at the other books of the Old Testament, we see similar things. These aren’t books that someone sat down one day and they wrote in toto, and they definitely weren’t books that were written as the things were happening. Like, the book of Joshua is not his journal from during the conquest.

Fr. Andrew: “Today we marched around Jericho, dear diary!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s not how any of this works. But you can especially see this in some of the books because of the themes. So Judges and Ruth originally circulated on the same scroll. The book of Judges, when you read it closely and you’re looking for the arc, the arc of the book, what the arc of the book is you have the repeated refrain in that: in those there was no king…

Fr. Andrew: “There was no king in Israel”: hint, hint.

Fr. Stephen: “Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” [Laughter] It’s about the tribes descending into chaos. The last four chapters that nobody reads, there’s this huge civil war between the tribes where they’re killing each other. And so it’s saying, “This is why we need a king: to stop stuff like this from happening.” And then if you read those last four chapters closely, again, suspiciously the tribe of Benjamin are the bad guys and the tribe of Judah are the good guys. What do we mean by “good guys” and “bad guys”? Well, as we’ve said before, this isn’t doing modern history; this isn’t trying to be objective. It’s not like: “Here’s a list of complaints of this tribe over against this other tribe. And really, the blame was shared by everybody…” None of that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No both sides going on there.

Fr. Stephen: “Here are the many factors that led to this civil war, economic and otherwise…” [Laughter] So it’s giving a clear perspective, Benjamin being Saul’s tribe, Judah being David’s tribe. And then, on the scroll is appended this story about David’s great-grandma.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Ruth.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what the scroll ends with. So it’s very clear what’s going on here in Judges and Ruth. It’s talking about the importance of the Davidic monarchy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is how we got to the point that we needed a king. Let’s support the kingship, because we don’t want things to be like that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and why David’s kingship is the right one.

Fr. Andrew: Not Saul.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And we also hold that the Davidic monarchy is very important, of course, because it produces the Messiah; it produces Christ.

Fr. Andrew: As we have said many times before.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we see the same thing when you look at what are in the Greek the four books of Kingdoms, what are 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings in other translations: you see this as one overarching narrative, explaining from the perspective of the exile, how Israel ended up getting destroyed and how Judah ended up being taken into exile and why. So things start out good with the Davidic monarchy, and then they go very bad. And they follow what was basically prophesied in Deuteronomy through Moses: “Yeah, once you get into the land, this is what’s going to happen, and you’re going to end up in exile.” [Laughter] So it’s showing that unfold.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s not just a historical… It’s not a chronicle. There are chronicles, the books of chronicles, but it’s not just a chronicle saying, “This happened and then this happened and then this happened.” There is, like you said, an arc to it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they keep referring you to the annals. “As for everything else this king did, consult the annals of the kings of Israel and Judah.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Is it not written in the chronicles of the books of the kings of Judah?” That’s over and over again in the books!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so you’ve got that. “If you want to go read the official record, we’re here making a point.” Not that those official records were objective either; those were from the king’s point of view. [Laughter]

So then that’s two of our parts of the Old Testament, the other part being the writings, and the writings is just this giant catch-all. The writings is just sort of all the other stuff that’s in the Old Testament. So you have things from Ezra and Nehemiah that are from right after the return from exile, all the way up to the book of Wisdom. This is going to make people mad, too. The Church Fathers were fully aware that the book of Wisdom was not written by Solomon, even though it’s sometimes called the Wisdom of Solomon.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because aren’t the earliest sort of references to it as being canonical, don’t they include it in the New Testament?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, the earliest references we have to it being included in the canon have it as part of the New Testament, because they knew it was written in Greek and they knew it was written in the first century AD. It was probably written in the early 30s of the first century AD.

Fr. Andrew: If we’re going to be modern about it, it’s the wisdom inspired by Solomon.

Fr. Stephen: Right, sort of all the wisdom literature gets associated with Solomon.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because he’s so wise.

Fr. Stephen: Because I know there’s people out there who, if I said, “Was Proverbs written by Solomon?” you’d probably off the cuff really quickly say, “Yes,” and then I’d go through really quickly: “Oh, really, because this chapter says it’s the wisdom of this other guy!” [Laughter] But we still ascribe Proverbs to Solomon, just like the Psalms get ascribed to David, even though, again, the psalms don’t say they’re all written by David; some of them say they’re written by other people, like the sons of Korah or the sons of Asaph or Moses or other people. So, yeah, that I think is pretty clearly the latest one. That’s the only one that was written AD, of the Old Testament books, arguably the only one that was originally written in Greek. There’s argument about some of the books of the Maccabees, depending on which ones we’re including. [Laughter] Like, 4 [Maccabees] was probably originally written in Greek, but I’m not Russian. But you get the point.

So those are written across this vast swath of time. There’s not these sort of… In all of these discussions, people tend to take what they know about the New Testament and then generalize it and then act like it’s true of the Old Testament, but it really isn’t. We can narrow down New Testament books.

Fr. Andrew: Right, most of them there is a clear author that there’s every good reason to believe that it came pretty direct from that author, and especially because the New Testament books, they’re writing and then they’re—I mean, we’ll get to this. They’re writing, and their collection happens really fast compared to the Old Testament, where in the Old Testament you’re talking about centuries upon centuries; the New Testament pretty much wrapped up, almost in a bow, with about 70 or 80 or so years.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we can nail down pretty… I mean, we’re pretty sure Galatians was written about 45, we’re pretty sure—like, we can nail down pretty solid dates. You can’t do that with the Old Testament books.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and a lot of it is—some of it, of course, is because there’s indications within the texts that point to things that we have other corroborating evidence for particular historical events or where someone was at a particular time. And that’s just because records from that period are much, much better. We have a lot more to work with than if you’re looking at 1500 years of Ancient Near Eastern history.

Fr. Stephen: Well, and there’s less process. So we don’t end up five centuries after Jeremiah lived with two pretty radically different versions of the book of Jeremiah. We have that for Jeremiah, but we don’t have that with any of the New Testament books.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s pretty much the same text, just about, almost every copy.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s a couple of exceptions in, like, Luke and Acts, but even those, you’re talking about the biggest difference we have is about 10%. We don’t have radically different versions of books, or the different versions we have of the book of Daniel, the different versions we have of the book of Esther. So what happens is that the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, which are technically different things, just sort of emerge out of ancient history, and they emerge from a process. They aren’t a series of books that are written down by different people at these specific points in time and then all get wrapped up together in a book.

Fr. Andrew: And, notably, the Church Fathers don’t ever treat them that way.

Fr. Stephen: No, they knew all this stuff. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Because that’s how religious texts worked!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so we talked in the episode about how to and how not to read the Bible about the whole modernist-fundamentalist controversy and all these things. And we have folks who are now especially in sort of the Anglophone, English-speaking Orthodox world who come from those backgrounds. And so there’s still a little bit of that reactionary idea, and so there’s some people who seem to feel like they need to be more conservative than the Church Fathers. So you get people wanting to argue against all reality that Moses wrote every word of the Torah as we have it today. And if you actually read what the Church Fathers say about it, a good portion of them—a good portion of them, because they had read 4 Ezra, they’d read the Epistle of Barnabas, they’d read other texts that contained this tradition—a good portion of them thought that ancient Israel lost the Torah and that Ezra miraculously recreated it so that it comes from Ezra. And they’ll make off-hand comments about it; St. Jerome does that at one point.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which—we’re not. Don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying that that’s how it happened, but we’re pointing out that some of the Fathers say that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so they didn’t have to sit there and say, “No. Every word of the Torah as we have it now in Greek or Latin…” or even as the Hebrew that was floating around at the time, because there were people in the ancient Church who could read Hebrew—St. Jerome was one of them; maybe not so well, but he could—and they don’t feel the need to say that. St. Jerome literally says, “Whether you think what we have is what Moses wrote or whether you think Ezra restored it, this is what it says.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. “This is our text.” [Laughter] So then the question is—

Fr. Stephen: And he actually said that; he said that in reference to—let me make this very pointed. He said that in reference to the phrase “until this very day,” as it appears in the Torah, so he was saying that it was a common opinion at the time that “until this very day” was Ezra’s editorial comment.

Fr. Andrew: Ha, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And meant until the day of Ezra.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So he was saying: This could be until the day of Moses; this could be until the day of Ezra.

Fr. Andrew: So this kind of raises the question, then: Do we know who wrote any of the Old Testament? Who actually was the person who wrote it down? Do we know that for any of these books?

Fr. Stephen: A particular word that we have now? No. [Laughter] No, I mean, there’s some cases where we have no idea. We have no idea who wrote 1-4 Kingdoms.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, you know, again, if you say that the Prophet Samuel wrote the first two of those books, you have to deal with the fact that he dies in the first one.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, and if… Good listener, if anyone comes to you and says, “Traditionally, Samuel wrote 1 and 2 Samuel,” I want you to respond to them, “By ‘traditionally,’ you mean the Talmud?” because that’s where it comes from. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Which is not Orthodox Christian Tradition.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that makes sense, because everybody reading it in Greek: it wasn’t called Samuel.

Fr. Andrew: Right, those were the Kingdoms, 1 and 2 Kingdoms.

Fr. Stephen: But we have no idea. We have no idea who wrote 1 and 2 Chronicles; we don’t have a hint. Moses, as we said, is the origin of the Torah, but, especially if you get outside of Exodus 15 and Deuteronomy 32, is this the exact word Moses would have written? Well, no, it’s not the exact word, because it’s in a different language. At the very least, it would have been spelled differently and written in a different alphabet.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. [Laughter] It literally does not matter. It has no bearing on the authority of the Bible in the Church who wrote it and when. It could have been all written—

Fr. Andrew: That’s not how this works.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it could have all been written by me last week; it wouldn’t make a lick of difference.

Fr. Andrew: Which, you know, would be consistent with how much you sleep, so…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, fair enough. [Laughter] And we’ll explain why in our second half!

Fr. Andrew: Exactly! Well, all of that said, we’re going to take a little bit of a break, and we’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody! Like I said, we’re not actually taking calls tonight, despite what you just heard the Voice of Steve say.

Fr. Stephen: But maybe, maybe if they call in, and they’re watching on the stream, that will cause the room where the phone is to slowly fade into view, and they’ll see the ringing phone by itself. We’d get a whole David Lynch thing happening.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I was going to say, a whole Twilight Zone sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, it was funny: I remember last time that the streams started out with the camera inside the studio there in Chesterton, where there wasn’t anybody! Like, it was automated over there. It was kind of funny.

Fr. Stephen: Did Fr. Joseph Lucas give you that background music, by the way? It’s very kind of Miami. Beach guitar, a little conga drum.

Fr. Andrew: No, I picked that out. I picked that out actually myself. But, yes, he is there in Miami. They’ve got alligators and stuff, and very good Cuban coffee.

Fr. Stephen: Everything I know about in Miami I learned from the Will Smith song.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So I don’t know a lot about Miami, is what I’m saying.

Fr. Andrew: Worth going. The food is excellent, among other things. All right, well, welcome back. It is the second half. We just wrapped up by saying it doesn’t matter who wrote the books particularly of the Old Testament or when, in terms of—

Fr. Stephen: You could do it like The Rock. “It doesn’t matter what your name is.”

Fr. Andrew: No, I… Although Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson actually went to high school not too far from where I’m sitting.

Fr. Stephen: That’s true, in Allentown.

Fr. Andrew: Bethlehem, actually. Bethlehem. I think he went to either Liberty or Freedom High School. You know, the way they name their high schools over there in Bethlehem, it’s very confusing, but he went to one of those two.

Fr. Stephen: His father, Rocky Johnson, was also a wrestler, as was his grandfather, the High Chief, Peter Maivia.

Fr. Andrew: I did not know that!

Fr. Stephen: And the whole Allentown area was like a whole hub of wrestling back in the old circuits.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: Regional promotions.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That’s amazing… When I have to say, “Thank you for that,” you have to say, “What can I say except ‘You’re welcome.’ ” I don’t know if you’re up on your modern kids’ films.

Fr. Stephen: Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] There you go, bringing it back to the ‘80s.

Fr. Stephen: So I’ll give the quick answer to why it doesn’t matter. People, still stay tuned, because we’re going to talk about a bunch of other stuff. The quick answer as to why it doesn’t matter is it only matters if you think the text itself has authority, and so then you have to come up with qualities of the text that give it authority, like the author or when it was written.

So anyway, we’re going to keep going.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly. I should point out, by the way, so that we have at least one Star Trek reference this half, The Rock actually appeared on an episode of, I think it was—was it Voyager?

Fr. Stephen: It was Voyager. He battled Seven of Nine in a soon-cut scene.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he was sort of a gladiator way out there in the Delta Quadrant.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they had a sword that was sort of a falchion.

Fr. Andrew: Nice!

Fr. Stephen: That was used in “Tsunkatse.” I doubled down on that reference!

Fr. Andrew: No, that’s good! He does the eyebrow thing in that, too.

Fr. Stephen: He does. Voyager was sort of the flagship show of UPN in the long-ago time, children. There was a United Paramount Network that was an over— They used to broadcast television over the air, not through a cable. Anyway. Or through the interwebs. So Voyager was like the flagship show. At the time WWF SmackDown, also on UPN, so they did a lot of cross-promotion: put wrestlers on Star Trek, have Star Trek persons show up at wrestling event…

Fr. Andrew: It was kind of a golden age in some ways. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: UPN was mostly lame. Anyway!

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, but they had Voyager, which is why everyone got it.

Fr. Stephen: So the whole reason I gave that quick answer was I was trying to help out our listeners who hate it when we go on rambling digressions like that.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know.

Fr. Stephen: I said: Here; here’s a nugget!

Fr. Andrew: I feel like I need to pop-culture even harder when people are a little impatient about that. But, yes, okay, we talked about the way that religious texts, especially the Scriptures, functioned in the ancient world, and then how they arise and all that kind of stuff. Let’s now move on the other side of the BC/AD, and we start—we’re going to now start talking about canons: canons of Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: The idea of a canon.

Fr. Andrew: It’s an actual list of books, and what does that do? What do you do with that? What is a canon?

Fr. Stephen: What does it even mean? Why does that word come into play here? Right. So the word “canon”—to help us define it, we’re going to talk about first a couple of examples not related to Scripture, and then we’ll come to Scripture because it’ll become a little more clear what it means.

So we have this idea, especially the classical education folks, of the Western canon.

Fr. Andrew: The books you should read as an English major.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that these are the texts that helped shape our culture. And by that, I mean Anglophone culture. The whole “Western civilization” thing is kind of weird. It’s like drawing a weird, wavy line. It’s like that tool in Paint where it doesn’t make a circle; it makes the weird blobby shape. You kind of have to do that with history to make Western civilization, that there’s this idea that once you’ve made that blobby shape, you say, “Well, here are the books… Plato’s Republic, Shakespeare…”

Fr. Andrew: “The Bible…” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: These are the only ones I can think of. Freud… Thomas Aquinas…

Fr. Andrew: No, Freud, I don’t think he’s in the Western canon.

Fr. Stephen: He is in the great books of the Western world, my friend. Mortimer Adler would dare to disagree with you.

Fr. Andrew: [Sigh] I’m fine with that. I can live my life without reading Sigmund Freud or telling anyone else to read Sigmund Freud.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] There’s some interesting stuff there.

Fr. Andrew: I’m sure, I’m sure.

Fr. Stephen: If you’re a nerd. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: So the Western literary canon, the Great Books—although “great books” is probably a broader concept, but it’s a similar concept.

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s really more a shortening of Adler’s set, The Great Books of the Western World, so when people refer to a Great Books program, that’s usually what they’re referring to.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, all right.

Fr. Stephen: But that kind of idea. Or we use the term “canon” in lots of nerd/geek contexts.

Fr. Andrew: Yep!

Fr. Stephen: So there’s this idea of Star Trek fans or Star Wars fans or Doctor Who fans—well, Doctor Who fans don’t argue about it, because, I mean, the idea of Doctor Who canon is laughable on its face—will argue about what is canonical and what isn’t.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s interesting in Tolkien studies mostly the conversation comes up just to point out that there really is no such thing, that it’s a useless category in Tolkien studies. It’s more argued against than even used by anybody in the fandom, honestly.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a bizarre idea, because you’re essentially arguing about what events are real in an imaginary reality, and which are unreal even in the imaginary reality.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and the funny thing is—this is related— And I mean this is not just a nerd/geek thing that we’re talking about. This is related to religious texts, because, for instance, one of the studies I’m making right now is I’m reading Norse mythic texts—which actually there’s not a huge number of them, by the way; the sources themselves, not a large amount of texts—but there’s variations between them, and even inasmuch as these might have been used in Norse religion in some way—we don’t know, in most cases—you’re going to say that this version is the true Odin? Or what about the fact that Loki seems to be relatively late? I’m sorry, Marvel fans: Loki is a relatively late addition probably to the Norse mythical source texts. Like, there’s variations, so how do you say that this is the canon, the canonical version of the creation of the world according to Norse mythology?

Fr. Stephen: Loki’s in Avengers number one, so clearly that’s the canonical one.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] True, true.

Fr. Stephen: Can’t argue with that. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, man. Right, and so what we mean is texts that are considered in some way authoritative within that community, texts that bear some weight—even if we’re talking about an imaginary reality. There are stories like Star Trek V, where Sybok is ridiculous, where just—we all acknowledge that’s not a thing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “I need my pain.”

Fr. Stephen: And we ignore it.

Fr. Andrew: That’s what William Shatner says.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And there are others that we exult in and discuss. But so even in that case, there’s some kind of authority, there’s some kind of weight, there’s some kind of import to them that other texts lack. These texts have shaped… With the Western canon, the idea is that whether you care for Shakespeare, whether you are able to read and understand Shakespeare—Shakespeare, the turns of phrase in Shakespeare, the dramatic pivots in Shakespeare—these are things that have influenced the broader culture.

Fr. Andrew: Right, big time.

Fr. Stephen: So you go and see The Northman, and you realize, “Hey, man. This is Viking Hamlet. What’s going on?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it is.

Fr. Stephen: But they have sort of been influential. And so the important thing to draw out of this when we’re talking about the canon of Scripture—obviously, at the first layer, yes, these are texts out of all the texts that have been handed down and copied and that we’re aware of and that we might read: these are the ones that have particular authority within our community, whether that’s like a Second Temple Jewish community or whether that’s a Christian community. There are certain texts that have authority in our community. The slightly deeper level of that and the important thing to emphasize here is that this is always descriptive and not prescriptive.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we’re basically saying this is how these texts have been used. We’re saying this is what occurred, not this is how they ought to be used, but this is how they’re used.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this text—if we’re talking about Scripture, this text is read during the Liturgy, this text has been preached on and taught and quoted in theological discussions for centuries. That has concretely happened in reality. And so this is why sometimes, because occasionally we’ll talk about, say, the book of Enoch or the book of Jubilees on this show, we get asked, “Okay, so are you saying that that book is canonical?” And that’s literally a nonsensical question.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because it does not function as canon within the Church, unless you’re within the Ethiopian tradition. That’s the only place where it does.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so it’s literally not prescriptive. You can’t prescribe it. If someone comes out, like VH1 used to, in the good old days when VH1 showed music, they would come out with a list of: here’s the hundred greatest rock songs of all time, or the hundred most influential bands of all time. And if their top ten bands were bands you’d never heard of, that wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t be like, “Oh, well, I’ve never heard of those bands, but those must be the greatest and most influential bands of all time…”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, you’d call shenanigans.

Fr. Stephen: Right, you’d be like: “Dude, this is bogus! What are you talking about? How could you put this person under that person?”

Fr. Andrew: The right way to do that would be how often it gets played or albums sales or this kind of stuff that shows it has been used by this kind of community in this way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but you would react to it not as… You wouldn’t even react to it as if it was a prescription. You wouldn’t say, “Hey, man, you can’t shove this lousy music down my throat!” You would react to it by saying, “Hey, this is a bad description. Why did you rank this band above that band? Clearly that band is better than the other one. That’s a description; you’re not describing reality correctly.” So this kind of canon is a description of reality, so you can’t just edict…

But this also means—this also means—that there has never been in the Orthodox Church—any council, any emperor, any Illuminati group—

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: —episcopal cabal—

Fr. Stephen: —cabal of monks—who went out and decreed: “These are the canonical books!” and then went on a rampage burning all the other ones.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because, I mean, even when you do get canonical lists, they are, as you said, descriptive: “These are the books of the Old Testament.”

Fr. Stephen: “These are the books that we read.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. “These are the ones that we’ve been reading.”

Fr. Stephen: And sometimes, “We’re aware of these other ones. They’re okay… but they’re not on the level of this first list.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, but more on that later.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It’s not just like: “These are the only books we’ve ever heard of in our lives.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] So what are some examples of really early canons in the history of Christianity?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll actually start before Christianity.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Because this is really something that emerges in Second Temple Judaism. Before that, when you get into ancient Israel, this is when this stuff is coming together and getting edited and forming. So as these texts sort of emerge, fully formed, in Second Temple Judaism, then… And you have a variety of Jewish communities at that point. You have Jewish communities that are still in Mesopotamia, you have Jewish communities in Egypt, you have Jewish communities in Palestine, and then, as the Greek and Roman periods go on, they get scattered all over the known world: Jewish communities all over the place. And those individual communities are all functioning as communities. They all have synagogues. In those synagogues, texts are being read in a ritual way, and so there are certain texts that are being read and other texts that are not being read. There are texts that are functioning in this way and others that aren’t. And this differs from community to community as they’re spread out.

So we can look at one example. One good example is the community at Qumran, at Wadi Qumran, which is from whence we get the Dead Sea Scrolls, and they’re a good example because we basically found their whole library. They hid their library because the Romans were coming. The Romans came; they didn’t ever go back and retrieve it.

Fr. Andrew: Convenient for us.

Fr. Stephen: So we’ve now found it. So we have a good idea of sort of all the texts they had, all the texts they were copying, all the texts they had preserved; and we can even get an idea of sort of the relative influence and authority of those texts in the community based on how many copies there were.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so you’ve got lots of copies: that’s way… A lot of people can be reading it at once.

Fr. Stephen: If you’ve got one old ratty copy, probably not the most influential text in your community, because you haven’t ever bothered to recopy it and preserve it.

Fr. Andrew: Just like in my house, the book we have the most copies of is the Bible, but the second after that, of course, is The Hobbit. Just putting that out there. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And the third, oddly enough, is John Grisham’s The Firm. I’ve never understood that, Fr. Andrew. [Laughter] I mean, why multiple copies? It doesn’t even make sense.

So if you go in order of copies at Qumran in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the number one book is the book of Genesis; number two is the book of Enoch; number three is Exodus; number four is the book of Jubilees. And in fact if you add the copies of Enoch and Jubilees together, there are more copies of the two of them together than there are of Genesis, so that is to say Genesis isn’t way ahead of the book of Enoch; it’s a little ahead in terms of number of copies.

As we were saying, these texts—it’s not just these are texts and scribes are copying them and interpreting them and debating their interpretation, but these are functioning ritually. This is why Enoch and Jubilees are so important. So the whole reason this community at Qumran existed out in the desert by itself, separate from the other communities, was over a dispute about the ritual calendar.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, wait, wait, religious people argue about calendars?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, they do!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’ve heard that…

Fr. Stephen: And in this case, the founders of the community at Qumran looked at the Sadducees and said, “How dare you use that Julian calendar. It is pagan!”

Fr. Andrew: Literally! I mean, it’s named after a pagan emperor.

Fr. Stephen: “It’s a dirty, pagan Roman calendar, that Julian calendar. We want nothing to do with you.” And for them even the Pharisees’ calendar—the Pharisees were too liberal for them, because the Pharisees’ calendar was using the old Israelite lunar calendar, but a lunar calendar, you have, like, twelve 30-day months, so every couple of years you have to add a whole month to line things back up.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because the moon doesn’t move like that, essentially.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the moon and the sun don’t match well enough.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s what it comes down to.

Fr. Stephen: So you have feast days bouncing around in the year, and you have these things happening. And the community at Qumran looked at that and said, “Clearly this is a man-made calendar. This calendar doesn’t come from God; it comes from humans, because look how imperfect it is. Look at what a mess it is. You Pharisees and your traditions of men!” [Laughter] So for them, the whole basis of forming this community was to observe, and they observed sort of a stripped-down version, because they didn’t have the actual Temple, of the ritual life of ancient Israel, sort of out in the desert, but they observed it according to the Enochic calendar.

Fr. Andrew: So why that one?

Fr. Stephen: Well, this is officially the most boring part of the book of Enoch. This is where people wash out. If you try to read straight through the book of Enoch—that Watcher stuff, everybody’s into that—then you roll into the second part, the book of Similitudes and stuff, and you get to the calendar stuff and it’s like aauughh, right? And people just stop reading. [Laughter] But so the Enochic calendar that’s laid out in great detail there— And the way it’s laid out is Enoch is taken by the angels and sees sort of all the movements of the heavenly hosts and all of this.

Fr. Andrew: It’s sort of a big planetarium kind of experience, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And the calendar is revealed to him by God, that this is the true divine calendar. It’s 364 days long. So in their minds, though, that 364-day year, it’s mathematically perfect, because you have three 30-day months; then you have an interstitial day, three more 30-day months, interstitial day… And when you do it that way, the feasts are on the same day every year. It all lines up.

Fr. Andrew: It’s very regular.

Fr. Stephen: It’s very regular and perfect.

Fr. Andrew: I have to also point out this is basically the Shire calendar. It’s 30-day months with an occasional extra day in between. So, I don’t know, there’s a paper to be written about the relationship between the Enochic calendar and the calendar of Hobbits. Just putting that out there!

Fr. Stephen: Bilbo and Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, totally!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so, but this is a very common idea in the ancient world, that mathematical perfection is somehow divine. See Pythagoras, Plato, and all.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, the Pythagorean theorem is a cultic theorem.

Fr. Stephen: So, again, the reason this book is so important to them is not just that they got excited when people talked about giants, though they may well have, because they also had the Book of the Giants, but because this is the whole basis of their ritual life, is this calendar from this text. So it’s also worth noting that, in addition to—a lot of attention is paid to the biblical texts that were found at Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but there’s also a whole bunch of sectarian texts, meaning texts that are only found there and texts that are specific to them, like this is how… And it’s their oikonomia for the community; it’s their community rules and things. “Here’s how we govern ourselves. Here’s how we resolve disputes. Here’s who’s in charge; here’s how they get to be in charge.”

Fr. Andrew: Sort of the by-laws.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or a monastic rule, that kind of idea. But, again, it’s that sort of oikonomia idea that we already saw functioning in Scripture. So their canon is this set of texts that’s clearly at great variance, for instance, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and deliberately so to some level.

So what we see when we look at all these different communities, Second Temple Jewish communities, spread out all over the world, we can say certain things in terms of trends, sort of generalizations. Everybody has the Torah somewhere in there.

Fr. Andrew: And we should mention these communities would all regard each other as Judeans, as Jews.

Fr. Stephen: Well… Sort of.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, roughly.

Fr. Stephen: But Qumran didn’t consider the Sadducees to be. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Okay, that’s true. That’s true, all right. But, nonetheless, they are all saying—they all believe themselves to be truly Jews.

Fr. Stephen: Right, in their community.

Fr. Andrew: And in some cases there’s some level of mutual recognition, even if there’s arguments. And yet they don’t all share the same canon of Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: Remotely. So everybody’s got the Torah somewhere in there. Now, somewhat surprisingly to people, there are significant Second Temple Jewish communities that are not really considered to be forms of Torah-based Judaism. The idea of non-Torah–based Judaism confuses some people because of how it’s been drilled into our head and because we’re thinking of Rabbinic Judaism. And it’s true that, for most Second Temple Jewish communities the Torah was the most important text, but not all of them. But even those where it was not at the top, where it was the base of the canon, it was still in there; they didn’t reject the Torah. Even the Samaritans had their own version of the Pentateuch; it was tinkered with, but the Samaritan Pentateuch was a thing.

Then when you get into the Nevi’im, the Prophets, those are mostly the same. You’re going to find most. If you include Daniel with the Prophets instead of the Writings, and if you include Jeremiah—you’ve got different versions of the book of Jeremiah—but for the most part, those books are going to be the same.

But then as we mentioned with the Writings, the Ketuvim, this big catch-all in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament, that’s where you’ve got stuff all over the map. So Ethiopian Jewish communities have Jubilees and Enoch and a whole bunch of stuff that most Palestinian Jewish communities don’t have, that aren’t functioning that way there. And then you’ve got Jewish communities in what’s now Spain, in Rome, and so which of the writings are good— Even in Palestine where, obviously, Judea is, where you’d think they’d have this more nailed down, there were arguments about the Writings—whether Ecclesiastes was or wasn’t authoritative, whether Esther was or wasn’t authoritative, whether Ben Sirach was or wasn’t authoritative. So there were these disagreements even there, sort of in the hub.

And then, making it even more confusing, there isn’t like— because, again, they don’t have a Bible; they don’t have one book with all these texts in it.

Fr. Andrew: Scrolls. Bunch of scrolls.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s scrolls, different functions, and a given synagogue might fully acknowledge the authority of Samuel and Kings but just not have a scroll, and so not ever actually read it.

Fr. Andrew: So they can’t use it, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: In their public worship. They’re not rejecting it; they just don’t have it. And you’ve also got these sort of dotted lines at the borders, where you’ll have someone like—and we’re going to talk more about Josephus in a little bit, but Josephus, who’s a Pharisee: does not accept Jubilees as being canonical, as being an authoritative work, but when you read his Jewish Antiquities, and he’s going through the history, especially the early history of the world up through the time of Moses, he cribs all this stuff from the book of Jubilees!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so thus kind of proving—or demonstrating, I should say, that just because you treat a book in some level as authoritative doesn’t mean you’re saying it’s part of the canon of Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because whether it’s authoritative in his community as a Pharisee is an objective thing. So he may like the book of Jubilees—he may find it fascinating; he may think it gives lots of important traditions; he may think it’s reliable—but there’s no question whether it’s canonical or not. It wasn’t, because he was a Pharisee. It’s descriptive.

So each of these communities has its own functional canon. They’re listed descriptively. There’s no committee deciding, voting on books in any of these communities. And when the Gospel comes to these various Jewish communities, they just inherit whatever that canon is as their Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they just keep using it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is how the canon of the Ethiopian Jews becomes the canon of the Ethiopian Church. This is how the canon of Alexandrian Judaism becomes the Old Testament of the Church in Alexandria. And so this— And this is why, as we talked about in our episode about how to read the Bible, to this day Eastern churches have different Old Testament canons, functionally, because we just inherited them. Again, there was no vote; there was no weeding through them.

Fr. Andrew: And it’s okay. [Laughter] It’s okay, everybody. We don’t need to…

Fr. Stephen: Okay. This is your Jewish Bible? This is our Old Testament. That was it. And then added to it.

This brings up the question of what would become the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic canon. There’s a little bit of an urban legend here. You will hear people talk about the Council of Jamnia.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is not a thing.

Fr. Stephen: Whenever you hear somebody talk about non-Christians having a Church council, your eyebrows should go up, as the aforementioned Rock “The Dwayne” Johnson.

Fr. Andrew: Rock “The Dwayne”! I like that; that’s better than Dwayne “The Rock.” Rock “The Dwayne” Johnson.

Fr. Stephen: You should get a little suspicious that maybe somebody, like we said before, they’re a Christian, so they’re looking at Judaism from a Christian perspective… What that’s about: Jamnia is where the major Rabbinical school of the Pharisees was, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, what does it actually have to do with this question? Does it?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it became sort of the teaching hub for nascent Rabbinical Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So in a sense—in a sense, everything about Rabbinic Judaism sort of has its origins from Jamnia. [Laughter] But that doesn’t mean that the rabbis got together and voted on what books would be in the Hebrew Bible, is the key thing here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s just: These are the books that were functioning as canonical within that community.

Fr. Stephen: For the Pharisees. It’s the Pharisaic canon, and that was the canon of the Pharisees before any of this. This is what Josephus says is the canon: these are the books that were authoritative for Josephus, because Josephus was a Pharisee. So this is the 39 books that are now the Old Testament in most Protestant Bibles. When you see the Church Fathers and Rabbinical sources refer to them, ancient ones, they usually refer to them as “the 22 books.” That’s because a bunch of them were combined on the same scroll, so what we call the Minor Prophets, the twelve of them were on one scroll: the Book of the Twelve. So that weeds out eleven books. And then, as we said Judges and Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel are one scroll, etc., etc.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, the funny thing is even if we talk about 66 books or whatever of the Bible, we tend to call it “the Bible” which simply means the Book, and that’s because we’ve combined them into a single codex, which just means you can have them all together in a single book.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a library, really.

Part of the reason why the Jamnia stuff gets started, part of the reason why people want to say, “Well, no. That Hebrew Bible canon that emerges in Rabbinic Judaism, that was the Pharisaic canon, that was just everybody in the first century accepted that those were the canonical books.” We sometimes hear this from our Protestant friends when arguments break out over, for example, the longer Latin canon or the longer Greek canon, any of these, in terms of specific Old Testament books. [They] say, “No, everybody knew at the time.” And when they say that, they’re essentially taking a quote from Josephus, the aforementioned Josephus, at face value.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, who stands in for “everybody.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, Josephus makes a modest claim—“modest” in the Jonathan Swift sense of the term—about canonicity.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, okay, so we’re going to read this to you, and I’ll just note at the outset that there’s a few ellipses in here, so we’re skipping some bits.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because it would go on very long. But it escalates quickly. So here we go.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Here we go.

Therefore, it naturally, even necessarily follows, that we do not possess a myriad of divergent books which conflict with each other. Our books, those which are rightly recognized, are only 22, and contain the record of all time. Of these, five are the books of Moses, made up of the laws and traditional history from the beginning of humanity to the death of the Law-giver. From the death of Moses to Artaxerxes, who succeeded Xerxes as king of Persia, the prophets who followed Moses wrote the history of their own events of their own times in 13 books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God and rules for the conduct of human life. From Artaxerxes to our own day, the complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with earlier records because of the failure of the succession of the prophets. Although long ages have now passed, no one has dared to add, to remove, or to alter a syllable. It is instinctual for every Judean, from the day of his birth, to recognize them as the proclamation of God, to obey them, and if need be willingly to die for them.

And that’s from the Contra Apion 1:37-44. It’s pretty amazing that he’s saying Judean babies are born—born!—recognizing his canon.

Fr. Stephen: Well, first of all, I have to ask, “Why did you not name any of your sons ‘Arta-andrew’?”

Fr. Andrew: It’s an interesting question. I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Missed opportunity!

Fr. Andrew: I know. “Anderson” would be the equivalent. I could just call him “Anderson.” No, that’s especially not…

Fr. Stephen: Well, everybody could just call him “Artie.” I mean, that’s a fine nickname! [Laughter]

So we have several claims here at the end. A lot of this seems fairly reasonable, and you can see why someone would follow this: “Those other books—those other books you’re talking about, you Roman Catholics and you Orthodox folks, yeah, they’re there, but they’re not on the same level, because the succession of prophets failed. So you’ve got something there.” But here’s the problem. This argument is all leading up to where it goes, which is Josephus making the following claims. First of all: “Long ages have passed since these books were written, but no one has dared to add, remove, or alter a syllable.” Just… That’s not reality!

Fr. Andrew: Not true. Just not true, right.

Fr. Stephen: So that’s not true. Then: “It’s instinctual for every Judean…” It’s like built-in to someone by virtue of being Jewish.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is the best.

Fr. Stephen: You’re born coded.

Fr. Andrew: You’re born with the canon.

Fr. Stephen: “From the day of your birth.” So the baby comes out from his mother’s womb, recognizing the authority of these 22 books and no others, recognizing them specifically as the proclamation of God. They all—every Judean—obeys every word of them their entire life! Like, Josephus, have you read them? [Laughter] And not only do they obey them, every single one of them is willing to die for them, every single one.

Fr. Andrew: A slight exaggeration.

Fr. Stephen: There might be some hyperbole there. This might be a Pharisee talking to Romans and presenting his form and his understanding of Judaism as the real Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because what do Romans know about the differences in canonical collections between Jewish communities?

Fr. Stephen: Right, over against these other sects. So that might be going on there. So I think basing arguments about the Old Testament canon on taking this kind of hyperbole from somebody like Josephus—who, remember, is not a Christian—taking this very literally, giving Josephus this authority, which is authority that most people using this quote authoritatively would not give to any of the Church Fathers who were actually Christians, for example, who were outside the Bible. That doesn’t seem to me to be a good platform to stand on to make an argument. So we’ve seen and we’ve talked about all these people out there who very much disagreed with Josephus on this, because they were aware of reality.

So what we see when we turn to the New Testament canon— So the Old Testament canon, the idea of these books being authoritative, is inherited from the Second Temple Jewish communities from which the Christian communities emerge. The New Testament canon forms organically in the same way that the Old Testament canon did, meaning nobody ever sat down and picked. They didn’t. No one ever—ever, Dan Brown—ever—not Constantine, not Theodosius, not anybody, no tribunals, no nobody—sat down and said, “Okay, well, we’ve got these twelve gospels. Let’s vote on each one. Okay, these four pass; these other eight: burn ‘em!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! I mean, you can even hear Orthodox people will sometimes say, “Well, the canon was decided at Nicaea,” and I’m like: “Uhh… Show me. Where do we have that?”

Fr. Stephen: We have multiple accounts of the proceedings at Nicaea; none of them say anything about the canon. The closest you could get—I’m going to try and be as generous as I can. The closest you get to that is that we have from one source that afterwards St. Constantine commissioned 50 Bibles containing the Old and New Testaments to be written. We have no idea the contents.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re just… Bibles.

Fr. Stephen: We have no idea the contents. Hypothetically, you could say, “Well, that was the canonical one,” I guess. We don’t know what’s in it… [Laughter] So, yeah. The dog don’t hunt.

And also, maybe more surprisingly to people, they didn’t sit around arguing about it much, because, again, it was descriptive, not prescriptive.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so it would just be questions of fact, not questions of authoritative opinion about stuff. Like you read the early Church Fathers… I don’t remember—I mean, I’ve read most of the texts of the first three centuries. I don’t remember coming across any debates like that. Maybe I missed something.

Fr. Stephen: Nobody was like: “Man, you people need to start reading 2 Peter!” [Laughter] Or trying to talk them into it.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not being pushed. Right, exactly. It’s just like: “Well, this is what’s used in our church.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So there’s not these big debates. In fact, most of these things are settled very early. By the time you get to AD 150, all across the world—the churches at least in the major cities, they’re using the four gospels that we’re using today.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they’re in one collection together, like a single scroll? Or I don’t remember when codices—

Fr. Stephen: Well, Christians start using codices. Christians start using codices. It’s literally a Christian format.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I was going to say I don’t remember when codices start being used. Pretty early on.

Fr. Stephen: It’s the Christians who start doing it, really en masse. And it’s the four gospels together. It’s not like one community is using Matthew and one community is using Luke, and it’s like peanut butter and chocolate: “We get together and now we’re going to use both! Now we met this other guy who has this Gospel of St. John; we’re going to use that, too.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this sense that these four books go together, and everyone… That we’re all using them together.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s despite the fact that they differ in some details. And people noticed—because they were reading them—it didn’t bother them. But we’ll leave that for now.

But those four, and pretty much only those four. And the earliest of the gospels that modern people want to act like maybe had a chance of being in the Bible, which would be like the Gospel of Thomas, pretty much the earliest one, that was being written around that time. So by the time that was being written, it was already settled. So St. Irenaeus could say, “Hey, man, you got this gospel and that Gnostic gospel.” He’s like: “Every church in the world uses these four and only these four. You know that; I know that. Where are you coming from with this stuff?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So this idea that there was this weird conspiracy to weed out all these other gospels is just, again, as you say: It is a dog that does not hunt.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And so St. Paul’s epistles were collected together even earlier. By AD 100 they were circulating together as a group. 2 Peter refers to them as a group.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean this is just within a few years of the death of the Apostle John.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and every manuscript that’s come down to us is a copy of the collection. We do not have a single copy of an individual letter of St. Paul. They’re circulating together, and this includes Hebrews. The earliest one we have, from the early second century, that’s called P46—“P” is for papyrus, because that’s what it’s on, and “46” because it’s the 46th one we found—that includes Hebrews, and Hebrews is right after Romans, because they’re arranged in order of length.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we should point out, by the way, that just because we have… When we use… The dating, it’s by this date. And when we say, “By AD 100,” we mean that’s the earliest known example of that, not: “And this is the date of publication.”

Fr. Stephen: “In that exact year they collected them”; by that date.

Fr. Andrew: That’s the oldest point that we can give that we know of.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that’s why, for the record, even though we have Church Fathers saying, “You know, I read Hebrews. I’m not sure St. Paul wrote Hebrews. It kind of doesn’t look like the others”—even though we have that, it’s always “St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews.” Why? Because it’s in the collection of St. Paul’s epistles. And that’s why it’s always, when it comes down to it, it’s St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, regardless of whatever conjecture there is or thought there is.

So then in terms of the “other stuff,” the other stuff of the New Testament, which is generally the general epistles and Revelation, and Revelation is a special case that we’ll get to in a minute—the general epistles we know are circulating as a collection at least by 180 AD, AD 180.

Fr. Andrew: And this is what is known in most Bibles these days as James through Jude.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And we know that they were circulating as a collection by then because Clement of Alexandria writes a commentary on them as a collection around that time. So that’s why we know that some time before that they were collected together. And those texts are the ones where we see the big variations in different Christian communities. So there are some communities that very clearly only had—only knew about—1 Peter, and weren’t aware of 2 Peter; and there were other communities that had both. There were a lot of communities that didn’t have Jude. There are—

Jude is actually kind of interesting, because this weird thing happens during the centuries before the Council of Nicaea where at first there are all these communities that had never seen the epistle of Jude, so we see people who are aware of the epistle of Jude saying, “No, this is a really good, canonical letter (even though it’s really short). It’s a good canonical letter, because, see, it quotes the book of Enoch.”

Fr. Andrew: Ha!

Fr. Stephen: Right? And so then, as things shift in terms of people’s impression of the book of Enoch and the authority it comes to hold or not hold in most Christian communities, then all of a sudden the people who still kind of like the book of Enoch are like, “Yeah, but St. Jude quotes it.” [Laughter] St. Jude by that time becomes more firmly established in terms of all the churches, and so they start using it to argue for the book of Enoch instead of vice-versa.

So that’s where you get the most distinctions, but even in those cases, it’s not that people were rejecting those books; it’s not like: “We’re fully aware of the epistle of St. James and we don’t cotton to it!” We’ve got to wait for Martin Luther for that. It’s just: communities didn’t know about it. So the way this sort of organically happens, the way there sort of comes to be one canon, across Christian communities, is that Christian communities, as they live their communal life and they develop, they encounter other Christian communities, or at least other communities who identify themselves as Christian communities. When they do, there’s sort of this process of mutual recognition that goes on.

For all the Martin Buber fans out there, he talks about the other and the other self—the idea being other… When you identify something as other, you’re saying, “This is not me and not like me,” whereas when you identify someone as an other self, you’re saying, “This is an other person, but they are a person like me.” So there’s sort of this: “Is this community another community like ours, or is this community something different; is this a different type of community?”

So one of the things that goes into that… There are all manner of things that go into that: there’s liturgical life—the way they worship, the way they practice, the way they do that: all these things are factored into it—but one of those is what texts they read from authoritatively. And what we find is that when these communities come into contact with each other, if they’re using the same four gospels and they’re using St. Paul’s epistles, and they’re like: “Well, these guys have two epistles of St. Peter, they say, and we only have this one.” They don’t say, “Begone, heretic!” [Laughter] “Filthy apostates! Get out!” They say, “No, this is another community like us. They just have this other epistle of St. Peter that we don’t have, and, hey, let’s take a look at it; it’s kind of interesting.” Whereas when they encounter another group, and they’re doing the Eucharist differently and they’re celebrating different feasts and they’re talking about the Ogdoad and they’re reading the Gospel of Truth and not the four gospels, they go: “Yeah… Uh, sir, this is a Wendy’s.” [Laughter] “This is something… This is a church the way chicken is a Church’s Chicken is a church; this is not one of us.”

So over time— And this is still, really, how the Orthodox Church is structured to this day; the Orthodox Church is a communion of local churches who recognize each other and are in communion with each other as Orthodox. So that develops, and, as that develops, this 26-book canon of the New Testament developed, emerges. You may have noticed I said 26 and not— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: 26, yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Because that brings us to the Revelation of St. John.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is a special case, really.

Fr. Stephen: And has a fascinating history. And if you want to know all about it, let me tell you: Ancient Faith Ministries’ own Dr. Jeannie Constantinou—her doctoral dissertation was published under the title Guiding to a Blessed End, and is about the reception history of the book of Revelation in the East, especially centering on St. Andrew of Caesarea’s commentary on the book of Revelation. And her doctoral dissertation is literally magisterial on this topic, so if you can find it… Not the A-Team, the dissertation—if you can find it…

Fr. Andrew: It’s about $75 for hardcover on Amazon right now; I just checked!

Fr. Stephen: If you can get it through inter-library loan…

Fr. Andrew: There you go, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: If you can track it down, it is the place to go on this, but we’re going to give sort of a brief summary, which I’m sure, if she ever listens to this, she will thoroughly critique, because it’s going to lack nuance, because we’re going to do it in brief, and I might even get some details wrong. So in the broad strokes, the reception history of Revelation is really interesting because the Revelation of St. John has this very early attestation to it being this authoritative text. So St. Justin the Philosopher (or St. Justin Martyr), St. Irenaeus of Lyons—these early Fathers who studied in the area around Ephesus, who studied in the areas around Pontus, where St. John had his ministry—St. Irenaeus is a spiritual grandson of St. John—they all attest— I mean, St. Irenaeus gives us the exact date that St. John had his vision: AD 95.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Like, we don’t have that kind of information about any other book of the New Testament! This is super early attestation as to who wrote it, when, where—the whole thing. So you would think, “Well, hey, this should be right in there with the four gospels and St. Paul’s epistles, right?” Well, no. [Laughter] Because what happens is the teaching of chiliasm emerges.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, just to summarize, in case you haven’t heard that word before, is the idea that there is going to be a literal thousand-year age of the Church… I don’t know, there’s variations on the beginning and end of that, but that’s the main—

Fr. Stephen: Kingdom of Christ on earth in the future.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the kingdom of Christ on earth is going to be exactly a thousand years long. It might be in the future, it might be now, but—

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s in the future. Chiliasm, it’s in the future.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And what separates chiliasm from modern forms of pre-millennialism, dispensational and otherwise—because they’re not the same thing—chiliasm wasn’t based on, in the way dispensational pre-millennialism is—it wasn’t based on any covenantal theory, like in terms of old covenant and new covenant. It wasn’t particularly based on and there’s no connection to ethnic Judaism. It was— And that thousand-year period, that messianic age in the future—meaning that messianic age isn’t now—was one of earthly delights: everybody has all the food; everybody has all the folks and all the fun. So, yeah. That was chiliasm, and while sort of forms of that were tolerated— There were even a handful of Church Fathers—I think St. Irenaeus is more debatable on this than some folks do—may have held to some version of this. It wasn’t— It was sort of tolerated; versions of this were sort of tolerated with people who were otherwise Orthodox, but it was picked up as an element of certain other heresies.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it gets associated with Montanism in particular.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so for people who don’t know a lot about Montanism, Montanus was this fellow who proclaimed himself to be the Paraclete promised by Jesus.

Fr. Andrew: So the Comforter.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so he said that he was the one whom Jesus said was coming, that he was a prophet. He traveled around with two prophetesses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: They—I’m sure it was platonic.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Must have been.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And they also were prophetesses, and they did a lot of glossolalia and stuff. So all of that is really problematic, and they were also chiliasts. And so not only were they chiliasts, but Montanism was often referred to as the Pontic heresy, because it emerged from that same region. And a lot of the chiliasts would cite Revelation to support their view, the Revelation of St. John.

Fr. Andrew: So it kind of gets a bad rap because of its association with this very live heresy. I mean, it wasn’t just one guy, some wacko wandering the countryside; it was a fairly big movement. I mean, it pulled in Tertullian.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this was a major heresy. And, remember, this is not that: Well, all these churches had been using the book of Revelation, and then they found out, “Oh, wait. The Montanists quote this? Well, burn it!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no. No.

Fr. Stephen: Because lots of heretics quoted lots of books of the Bible! That didn’t cause you to get rid of the books of the Bible because a heretic quoted them. But it’s that it wasn’t in widespread use.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it was mostly a local—to Asia Minor, aka Pontus.

Fr. Stephen: Certain areas, yeah, and people who were from there. So when this is a book that your community is unfamiliar with, and in your early encounters with it a heretic is quoting it, you’re going to be… It’s a little sus, right? [Laughter] So it kind of got tarred with that same brush. So it takes a few centuries for the book of Revelation to really get rehabilitated and sort of re-accepted. And that happens through the work of a couple of saints.

So St. Jerome in the West in the fifth century, Andrew of Caesarea in the sixth century both do the same thing, separately. They both take—and each of them takes a different one, because Jerome’s is in Latin and St. Andrew’s is in Greek—they take a commentary on Revelation written by a chiliast, and they revise it. They didn’t have plagiarism rules back then; there were no intellectual property laws. They took it and they revised it and they took the chiliasm out. They looked at it and said, “You know, this is a pretty solid commentary on this text if it weren’t for all this chiliasm nonsense.” So they took it out and they published it under their own name! [Laughter] And so now in the West—“Oh! St. Jerome’s commentary on the Revelation of St. John. Let’s read this.” And so, through the commentary: “Oh, there’s another way of reading this text that doesn’t lead to all these heretical, wacky ideas.” And the same thing happens in the East with St. Andrew of Caesarea’s commentary.

And it becomes so influential, if you get— You can buy now Archbishop Averky’s commentary on Revelation, and if you get it and read it, it’s a commentary on St. Andrew’s commentary on Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: Ha. So it’s that foundational.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he literally writes, “Here’s what St. Andrew says, and here’s how I would apply that.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So if I remember correctly, what Dr. Jeannie demonstrates is that for the East, Revelation becomes canonical not just by means of this commentary put forth by St. Andrew of Caesarea, but it becomes canonical almost accompanied by that commentary, in the sense that…

Fr. Stephen: His reading of that becomes the authoritative reading.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly! Right. It comes with an interpretation, essentially, which is one of several ways in which this particular story is different from the other books of Scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not Revelation as read by the chiliasts; it’s Revelation as read by Andrew of Caesarea.

Fr. Andrew: And if I remember correctly, then, the timing— So St. Jerome is doing this about a century before St. Andrew of Caesarea, and so it kind of happens early enough in the West that it becomes part of the lectionary…

Fr. Stephen: It happened quicker in the West, too; it happened more quickly in the West.

Fr. Andrew: And late enough in the East that it doesn’t really get into the lectionary.

Fr. Stephen: And I know, folks—folks—save the emails so Fr. Andrew doesn’t have to read them; I won’t, anyway—we know that there are individual instances—there are places: at the monastery at Patmos, in Alexandria, and in certain monastic services—where someone, physically in a church is reading the book of Revelation. We mean it’s not part of the regular cycle of readings. If you go pick up an epistle book, in most Orthodox churches, there are not readings from the book of Revelation in the cycle. It’s all the other books except for the gospels and Revelation. And the gospel book also, logically, does not contain Revelation. That’s what we’re talking about, and it’s not because the book of Revelation is not canonical in the Orthodox Church; it’s just because of the historical road it took to coming to hold this authority. And even—and we’re going to talk more about St. Nikephoros in our third half—but even in the ninth century, St. Nikephoros tells us that there are still some churches who didn’t recognize, at that late date, the book of Revelation yet.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So this did take a long time, but it did happen, after all that time.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. All right! Well, all that said, we’re going to go to our second and final break, and we will be right back in a moment.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! There’s that crunchy metal theme! Thanks again for that one, Rob; we appreciate it. I know everybody likes that one. It’s great.

Fr. Stephen: So people should buy that book of Fr. Jeremy’s.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Have I mentioned that?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Like, if you have money such that you can purchase a book, that would be the book to purchase.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. There you go. Everybody get that book, in between reading our books. All right, well, welcome back—

Fr. Stephen: I would go so far as to say, just go ahead and get that book.

Fr. Andrew: Instead of?

Fr. Stephen: Don’t worry about order. Don’t worry about the stack of books that you already have that you haven’t read.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it will stand up and testify against you at the judgment, but still.

Fr. Andrew: Pop it to the top! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Go and get this book.

Fr. Andrew: Nice. Yeah, there you go. We endorse it. All right, well, welcome back. It’s the third half of The Lord of Spirits. We’re talking about texts and how they function canonically, what exactly that means, how they’re used authoritatively within the Orthodox Church. And we just wrapped up talking about especially the New Testament, particularly the Revelation of St. John. And now, in the third half, we’re going to talk about some other books that occasionally people say wacky things, like, “Why do you guys act like the book of Enoch is canonical?” and we have to roll our eyebrows and say, “We have never actually acted like that.”

Fr. Stephen: How would one roll an eyebrow? Are you still stuck on Dwayne? You’re still thinking about Dwayne in your head!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true! Well, you said Rock “The Dwayne” Johnson earlier, so I think we’re both a little punchy tonight.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! That’s his name!

Fr. Andrew: Rock “The Dwayne”: it’s Dwayne “The Rock.” Roll the eyebrow, raise an eyebrow—it’s when you roll your eyes and raise an eyebrow at the same time. That’s what that action is.

Fr. Stephen: Like, what other Dwayne is there, such that you would say he is not the Dwayne?

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Uh, well…

Fr. Stephen: I mean, Dwyane Wade? No. Come on.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So, yes, there are other texts that we read as Orthodox Christians that we treat as authoritative but that we don’t treat as canonical. This is a thing. It’s okay, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: That aren’t read aloud in the church, that don’t form the liturgical, ritual function.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that the traditional word for these books, especially the first set of those is: Apocrypha. That’s the word.

Fr. Stephen: You don’t say.

Fr. Andrew: And we’ll talk about what that means.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and again—there’s a caveat to carry over here—we’re being descriptive of reality. So even when we talk about these other texts, when we’re trying to figure this out, we’re not working off of some preconceived theological notion and then working that out; this is: we’re describing what has, in reality, historically happened and happen today: how these texts function today and how they have functioned in the past. It’s descriptive.

We’ve talked before about—and I know we have— See, I say the same things, and I say them over and over again, so sometimes I forget what I’ve said on this show and what I’ve said somewhere else.

Fr. Andrew: It’s all right.

Fr. Stephen: Like to myself in the bathroom or whatever.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] The bathroom commentaries! The Bathroom Commentaries by Fr. Stephen De Young.

Fr. Stephen: What’s amazing is when I walk around talking to myself—my wife will tell you this—I will make hand gestures; I engage in self-rhetoric, which is probably sinful in some way. But I know for sure, because we’ve gotten questions from listeners, that we’ve talked on this show about—that there are, in the East, in the understanding of canonicity and authority, that there are these three categories, that it’s not just a binary thing of one or zero: “This text is completely authoritative and inerrant and infallible, and this other text is not that, and so throw it away!” So it’s the same level as Moby Dick; it’s irrelevant. I don’t know why I keep going to Moby Dick either. Gulliver’s Travels!

Fr. Andrew: Les Misérables!

Fr. Stephen: And now I’m back to Jonathan Swift! Man, I’m in these loops, recursive loops.

Fr. Andrew: The Count of Monte Cristo! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Okay, yeah, we haven’t had Dumas yet. So there are those texts that are read in the church, those that are read in the home, and those that are not to be read. And so you’ll get the folks, right—we all went to high school with these people. They had to write a paper on something. They said, “Write a paper on world peace,” and they’d get up and start with, “Webster’s Dictionary defines world peace as…” [Laughter] So when it comes to talking about Apocrypha, someone will come up and say, “The word apocrypha means ‘hidden’ or ‘secret.’ ”

Fr. Andrew: Right. “These are the dark, esoteric books of the ancient Church.”

Fr. Stephen: Dan Brown again rears his ugly head.

Fr. Andrew: Renowned author Dan Brown.

Fr. Stephen: So the idea that these are somehow mysterious or that they were banned from the Bible and someone hid them somewhere, that’s not really what it means. Yes, that’s what the word can mean, “hidden” or “secret,” but it can also just mean private as opposed to public.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in private.

Fr. Stephen: Meaning you don’t read it in the church; you read it at home: private reading, not public reading.

Fr. Andrew: It’s just like, for instance, there’s lines in the Liturgy where the rubric, if you’re reading it in Greek, it says that the priest reads a certain prayer “mystikos, mystically,” but that just means relatively quietly.

Fr. Stephen: See, I was making the gestures again. Now I’ve been messing up.

Fr. Andrew: Mystic gestures.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Going all Doctor Strange. [Laughter] And so if you want an Exhibit A of the type of thing in this middle category, of books read in private or books read in the home, Exhibit A of that is the Shepherd of Hermas, which you usually find collected with the Apostolic Fathers, even though it’s kind of a weird genre; it’s kind of a prophetic book from the second century AD.

But so the Muratorian canon was called the Muratorian canon because it’s the earliest list we have of which books of the Bible were authoritative in someone’s community, we’re not sure exactly who, whoever wrote it—refers to the Shepherd of Hermas, and it says that the Shepherd of Hermas ought to be read but not in the church because the number of the prophets is complete and it is after the apostles. So he says, “You ought to read this, but we don’t read this in the church. We don’t read it in the gathering, publicly, because the Old Testament is complete, and this was written after the time of the apostles, so it’s sort of not eligible to be New Testament”—in our terminology; they weren’t calling it “Old Testament” and “New Testament” at the time.

Fr. Andrew: It’s notable that it doesn’t say, “It’s not read in church and no one should read it ever, anyway.” Actually, he says it ought to be read.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it positively should be read by people, but we don’t read it in the church because it doesn’t belong to either of these two categories of books that we do read in the church. So there’s an example of one of those books, and there’s an example of someone in the third quarter of the second century, in the middle part of the second century, who is thinking of texts in that way, that there are texts in this middle category.

And part of what engenders this is the fact that— So, historically we see, when we talk about Second Temple Judaism and Second Temple Jewish literature, during that post-exilic period, there’s this explosion of writing activity in all of these Jewish communities. So you end up with these communities producing their own sectarian texts and having different from different places, and different texts being compiled in different ways, so you get different versions of the same books.

So there’s all this literary activity, and then in the second century—not at the Council of Jamnia [Laughter]—nascent Rabbinic Judaism is being formed. Part of what they think went wrong— So they’re looking at Christianity, and they’re like, from their perspective, in nascent Rabbinic Judaism, they’re like: “Wow. This all went really badly.” Because from their perspective, Christians are a heretical Jewish sect at this point, who’s just been expelled from the synagogue. So they say, “One of the places where we went wrong was all of this literature.” There was just this sort of uncontrolled production of literature and thoughts and ideas and religious ritual practice and all of this; it all got out of hand and look what happened.

There’s actually a ban on writing, and what that concretely means, because, again, it’s not like rabbis were riding around on horses burning books either. [Laughter] What that concretely meant was that at the big rabbinical schools, like Jamnia, the major rabbinical schools, they didn’t do any writing; they didn’t write down—they didn’t preserve traditions in writing; they did it orally. All of the teaching was done orally, the learning was done orally. Traditions were handed down generation to generation just orally, and it’s not until you get into the fifth century that the tractates of the Talmud start being formed. This ban on writing sort of gets lifted, and that’s why it’s in the Talmud that you get sayings attributed to first-century-AD rabbis written down for the first time.

So that happens within the non-Christian Jewish communities that survive, which is mainly Pharisaic Judaism that becomes Rabbinic Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, because the rest kind of don’t continue.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, for various reasons. I mean, the Sadducees, their whole power base was the Temple. No Temple, no Sadducees. They become unimportant. But Christians keep writing. This activity continues in Christianity, and so it’s not just the New Testament documents; there’s other books alongside the New Testament documents, and they keep writing in the same genres. So you look at 1 Clement, the epistle of St. Clement; you look at the epistles of St. Ignatius, as my co-host is wont to do.

Fr. Andrew: I am!

Fr. Stephen: And they’re the same genres, pretty much, as the epistles you find in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, if you read St. Ignatius—and a lot of scholars will say this; it’s not me—it reads a lot like a merger of Paul and John. The tone is similar, the content—the content is definitely Johannine, but he seems to make reference to St. Paul’s works. It’s interesting, actually, that he doesn’t ever quote John, but his theology is very Johannine, which kind of suggests that he simply got the theology from the apostle directly and it wasn’t being mediated to him by a book. But, yeah, it reads like the New Testament; St. Ignatius reads like his works could be part of the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: And Shepherd of Hermas is a prophetic book. Epistle of Barnabas looks a lot like Hebrews; in fact, you find people arguing that Barnabas wrote Hebrews—like Church Fathers! And their argument is: “Well, look how much it looks like the Epistle of St. Barnabas, so it must have been written by St. Barnabas!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: You have stuff like the Apocalypse of St. Peter; you have gospels… They’re writing in the same genres; they just keep writing and pursuing this literary activity. And there’s a big swath of this stuff that’s not heretical.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, there’s lots!

Fr. Stephen: Obviously including the Apostolic Fathers, obviously including the other early Church Fathers, but also including some of these other books, like the Gospel of Nicodemus that Fr. Andrew read from back at Pascha. These Christian texts—the Visio Pauli goes on into the Middle Ages.

And so no one was reading these other texts and arguing they should be tacked onto the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because, again, that’s not how canon works.

Fr. Stephen: And none of them even were bothered by the fact that they knew that Peter didn’t write the Apocalypse of St. Peter. And they knew St. Nicodemus didn’t write the Gospel of Nicodemus. They didn’t react to it as: “This is a lie!” They looked at the contents. “This has edifying contents.”

Fr. Andrew: And this is the way that some people have labeled this idea of Apocrypha, that it’s deceptive in some way, that it’s attempting to deceive, to pull a fast one.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so you have, just as you’ve had in every era, you have texts that are canonical, that have this ritual life and the life of authority and the public life of the community, and then you just also have a lot of popular Christian texts: Christian texts that are edifying, stories and traditions that are passed down, acts of different apostles—the Acts of St. Paul, the Acts of St. Peter—there’s tons of these, tons and tons of these.

Fr. Andrew: Which—not unlike our own era, in which there are books being written that are not heretical. There are saints’ lives collected! There’s all kinds of texts that… you know. No one will ever say that some of my books should be part of the Bible. No will ever say that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, now, you can’t—you never know.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, some crazy nut might say something like that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yes. You may have your own L. Ron Hubbard some day who comes along and starts a cult.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They start being a bad science fiction writer…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. After nuclear World War III and the ravages, someone might find a copy of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, found a whole new civilization on it.

Fr. Andrew: God help them if it’s just the last chapters! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Like the Kohms and the Yangs. Anyway. I had to get another Star Trek reference in. That’s what it’s all about.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: And we see that this isn’t just sort of an early Church phenomenon, like: “Oh, well, they hadn’t sorted it all out yet, and eventually when this stuff gets sorted out, they sort of get rid of all this other stuff.” That’s not true. And one of the big places we see that is in the work of George Synkellos and St. Nikephorus the Confessor of Constantinople. George Synkellos did most of the writing on what’s called the Chronography, which was sort of the history of the world; it was a universal history; it was the history of the world up to that time. He lived at the end of the eighth century, the very end. So the history of the world up to that time, making use of all kinds of extra-biblical literature, including the book of Enoch. And sort of appended to the end of that by St. Nikephorus of Constantinople, who was… So George Synkellos is called “Synkellos” because he was the cell-mate—monastic cell—of St. Tarasios of Constantinople, who was the patriarch before St. Nikephorus.

So St. Nikephorus becomes patriarch after St. Tarasios. He publishes George Synkellos’s Chronography; he appended to it a listing of texts, and on it he lists for the Old Testament and the New Testament he lists—so this is the beginning of the ninth century; St. Nikephorus lists: Here’s the books that everybody acknowledges in the Old Testament; here’s the books that some people acknowledge and not others; and here are the Old Testament Apocrypha, the private books. Then he lists: Here are the New Testament books that everyone accepts; here are the New Testament books that some people use and not others—and that’s not just Revelation, but it includes Revelation; it includes the Apocalypse of St. Peter, believe it or not, and the Gospel of the Hebrews—and then he lists the New Testament Apocrypha, which includes things like the epistles of St. Ignatius and the Shepherd of Hermas and a bunch of—1 Clement, these things; actually, a lot of Clementine literature.

So that idea, that there are these two categories of books to be read—one in public in the churches—which he defines descriptively. Here’s the one that all the churches are using; here’s the one that some are and some aren’t. He defines that descriptively, and then he says: Here are the other books that are to be used in the home. And we find that it’s those books that he lists as apocrypha, those privately read books, those are the ones we find preserved at monastic settlements. So Jewish communities don’t preserve the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs or the Story of Joseph and Asenath. They don’t preserve even 1 Enoch. These aren’t preserved by Jewish groups because Rabbinic Judaism repudiates all these books. These books were preserved in Orthodox monasteries.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s why we have them.

Fr. Stephen: Mount Athos… That’s where we get the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs is Mt. Athos, Mar Saba, these major ancient monastery foundations. They preserve the Second Temple Jewish texts and these early Christian texts, which they do not think are part of the Scriptures, which they are not reading publicly in church, but that they think are important and should be read.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, they’re not just copying them as just kind weird antiquarians: “Look, here’s this ancient text that we have. Let’s make sure that we have copies of it, because someday scholars are going to want to look at this.” It’s for spiritual edification! That’s why they keep them around.

Fr. Stephen: And there’s a lot more books that they didn’t copy than that they did. So the ones they did they did because they thought they were really important.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because it’s not just: “Oh, here’s a cool thing to put in my library.” You copy a book—that’s a lot of time and effort and expense.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it is that understanding of this middle category—this third category, the books to be privately read, that are not read publicly as Scripture—that provides the paradigm for understanding the role of the writings of the later Church Fathers—so some of those are Apostolic Fathers, but the later Church Fathers, the people whom we call the Church Fathers, and their writings: the role of their authority in the life of the Church is within that same kind of category. Yes, we read St. John Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily at Pascha, but we aren’t reading it as Scripture. I’m reading that homily instead of me trying to give one, because I can’t do better than he did.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s worth noting that not everything that is read out loud in church equals canonical Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The synaxarion is not canonical Scripture! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And the homily you’re going to preach on Sunday is not the Scripture.

Fr. Stephen: There is a liturgical ritual act that takes place in an Orthodox church before you read Scripture, before and after.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s marked out.

Fr. Stephen: There’s blessings that are given… We literally pray that we would be made worthy to hear the Gospel before it’s read to us. So, yeah, it is part of this liturgical ritual act. Remember, that’s what we’re talking about with these texts. It’s not just authority in some banal sense, it’s not authority in the sense that the text itself has authority and commands us to do things and we must obey the text; but it serves this ritual function, and that function is to give us access to the experience of God in Christ. And we don’t do that with even the Paschal Homily of St. John Chrysostom, or the synaxarion, or any other text—but we do read them.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and get a lot out of them.

Fr. Stephen: And they are preserved. And so this is sort of what I think of…  Every once in a while, somebody will critique Fr. Andrew and/or [me] for talking about these extra-canonical texts. They’ll say, “Why are you talking about these extra-canonical texts?” Either “You shouldn’t be talking about them at all,” or, more mildly, “Hey, there’s a lot of folks out there who haven’t even read the Bible, so why are you talking to them about and potentially getting them to read these other things that aren’t in the Bible?” And what I think is, well, you know, St. John Chrysostom isn’t in the Bible. St. Gregory the Theologian isn’t in the Bible. St. Gregory Palamas isn’t in the Bible. St. Maximus the Confessor isn’t in the Bible. St. Irenaeus of Lyons isn’t in the Bible. I would certainly encourage people to read those.

Now, if you ask me should you read the whole Bible first, I’d probably say, yeah, that’d be good, because it’ll help you understand what the Fathers are saying, because they read the Bible a lot. But I wouldn’t say, “No, you are not allowed to read anything but the Bible until you have read the whole Bible.” That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. So these other things are outside the Bible, too, but they have this role, and the reason they have that role is why? Well, because in another way, in a derivative way, they’re providing the same function: they’re helping connect us to the experience of God in Jesus Christ, but in a different way, in a subsidiary way.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Enoch and Jubilees only make the most possible sense in light of Genesis, and they help us to understand Genesis is a lot of what’s really going on there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the interpretation of other parts of the Bible. That calendar section really—as a nerd, it’s interesting, but… it doesn’t really help you understand much of a Bible, let me put it that way.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s worth—I mean, I think it’s worth pointing out that the way that the Church Fathers talk about these kinds of texts, the way that they cite them and the way that they treat them, is basically the way that we cite and treat the Church Fathers, meaning that the Church Fathers, their writings function essentially in the same way that the earliest Apocrypha function. They’re alongside. They’re part of the tradition; they’re alongside the Scriptures, but they’re not the Scriptures, and they’re not held in the same way or cited in the same way or regarded as reliable in the same way.

Fr. Stephen: Or at least they shouldn’t be.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. By the Church they’re not, I should say; maybe by individual people who kind of get off-kilter, but the Church’s tradition…

Fr. Stephen: Well, but this is part of the problem of what happens in the West, when you take a binary view of authority and you apply it to the Church Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, either true or false, absolutely true or absolutely false.

Fr. Stephen: One one side you get some of the extreme positions within Roman Catholicism. Yes, there are a number of positions within Roman Catholicism, but there are some sort of extreme positions in Roman Catholicism which hold that anybody who’s considered a Church Father, especially anybody who’s been named a Doctor of the Church, in the Roman Catholic Church, is essentially infallible. You’re at least not allowed to say, “Yeah, this guy was just wrong. St. Augustine was just wrong about that.” [Laughter] If there are contradictions, you have to try to reconcile them. If it seems like St. Augustine is saying something wrong, see how Thomas Aquinas reads St. Augustine. [Laughter] “Well, it seems like St. Augustine is saying this, but he can’t really be saying that, because that’s wrong, so he must actually be saying this other thing.”

So that’s one extreme, and the other extreme would be—and, again, there are a variety of positions within Protestantism, but the other extreme would be some of the really extreme forms of sola scriptura, where it’s like: anything that’s not in the Bible—“If it’s not in the Bible, it’s a pack of lies, so don’t come to me with your Church Fathers, don’t come at me with your… Don’t come to me and say that St. Peter was crucified in Rome, because that ain’t in the Bible, so that’s not true! It’s false, because it’s not in the Bible!” [Laughter] Again, that’s not all Protestants; that’s an extreme. So I’m pointing out the two extremes in the West, but both of those extremes result from that binary view of authority, where it’s not like a continuum.

Fr. Andrew: But what we see is that there is this middle category, not considered infallible but shouldn’t be disregarded either.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so what this all ultimately comes down to is the Orthodox understanding of holy Tradition, that tradition is not the transmission of data. This is the way—sometimes you hear tradition talked about as oral tradition, which is: “Yeah, there’s the stuff that we didn’t write down, that the bishops just told each other when they got consecrated.” [Laughter] “And it’s been passed down to today…”

Fr. Andrew: The secret handshake! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: “And nobody ever wrote it down any place…” That’s not what we’re talking about. That’s not what we’re talking about in the Orthodox Church; when we talk about holy Tradition, we’re talking about the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which is an ongoing thing. So it’s not a problem for us that we don’t know who wrote a book of the Old Testament, or we don’t know exactly when it was written, or it was compiled and edited over centuries. That’s not a problem for us because we believe the Holy Spirit was involved in that whole process, from beginning to end, and in the transmission of that “final text,” what is done down to us to day: the Holy Spirit was involved in that, too. The Holy Spirit’s involved in the whole thing, so we don’t have to argue about a specific act, a specific point in time.

So what we look at, the place where we see the life of the Holy Spirit unfolding in the Church is essentially in reception history, in the way in which things were received, because things aren’t always clear at the time that they’re happening.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s “the fog of war” in some sense, with heretical controversies, with all kinds of stuff like that.

Fr. Stephen: The Scripture tells us: “The Holy Spirit blows where he will.” And so we don’t always know at the time, but we can see after the fact. We can see after the fact.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a sort of digesting that happens.

Fr. Stephen: So this is the core of why it’s not important who wrote the books of the Bible, when they were written, how early or how late it was, what language it was written in—none of that really matters, because what holds authority in my church community is what holds authority in my church community, which is a particular form of certain texts that we have today. It doesn’t matter when that form came to be, doesn’t matter how, doesn’t matter who—it’s descriptive. This is just the case.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it should be noted that it’s also not to say that all authority for these things resides in the group of people who happen to be gathering together. You could not— Even your bishop could not get together with the rest of his synod and say, “Okay, we’re going to take a vote and replace the canon.” That’s just not how— So it’s not a matter of authoritative offices either.

Fr. Stephen: Well, they physically could, but here’s what would happen: After the next century, we’d find out if they were right or not.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Right. As the other churches respond…

Fr. Stephen: Whether that was rejected by the rest of the Church, and they were no longer bishops, and they were cast out of the Church—we would say, “Ah. The Holy Spirit found against that one.”

Fr. Andrew: So it’s not just a matter of saying, “Here’s the office that’s allowed to make these determinations.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. There is no office; there are no determinations made. [Laughter] Except maybe by the Holy Spirit, and if you want to figure out how the mind of God works, good luck. You don’t even know what it’s like to be a bat. You can’t translate hours into Jeremy Bearimies. You don’t know how this all works.

Fr. Andrew: Nice. That’s a nice reference. And then this also transmits to how we understand Church councils. There are some people, for instance—

Fr. Stephen: Well, it transmits to how we understand everything, but yeah, also Church councils.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not only Church councils, but, for instance, there are people that want to tinker, or critique or whatever, particular Church councils because they have an interest in overturning their decisions or editing them or this kind of thing, saying, “Well, you know, this council… That’s not really went down there, because it was changed later on, and kind of fraud was perpetuated on the Church later on.” And it’s like, well, that’s—again, that’s not how this works. Let’s look at how the Church has received that council, has confirmed it, has repeated it, has sung it. You either believe that the Holy Spirit works in that process or you don’t, and if you don’t believe that the Holy Spirit worked in that process of reception, then what are we doing here!?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, then it’s irrelevant.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Then who cares what a bunch of bishops decided a thousand years ago? If the Holy Spirit wasn’t involved, I don’t care.

Fr. Andrew: Right, you can’t say that they pulled a fast one, or even some emperor pulled a fast one, and that the Church—“Well, the Church has been getting this wrong for centuries upon centuries!” No, that is not a thing within the Orthodox Church.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because the Orthodox Church would have to cease to exist. [Laughter] Because you’d have to say that the Holy Spirit is not alive, guiding the life of the Church. And we see this with Ecumenical Councils. The Council of Florence looked like an Ecumenical Council: the emperor signed off on it, bishops there signed off on it—wasn’t an Ecumenical Council. I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re not in communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

Fr. Andrew: I have noticed this! [Laughter] One bishop is the hold-out, but at the time it looked like, okay, we’ve got this one dissident, but all the rest of these wise and holy men are all saying yes. Now we look back on that and say, “Thank you, Mark of Ephesus, for holding out!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that happens all the time. So I’ll just go ahead and address the elephant in the room. Sorry, Origenists and universalists, et al., it doesn’t matter what you construct as having really happened at the Fifth Ecumenical Council.

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Fr. Stephen: It was received as a condemnation of particular elements of Origen’s theology and of universalism, so it doesn’t matter. You can do all the history work in the world. No reconstruction. You can try to “reconstruct” the original texts of a biblical book—you can do that all day; it can be fun—but your reconstruction at the end of the day has no authority in the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Because that’s not how it works.

Fr. Stephen: It just doesn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Because your reconstruction has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you know, we kind of alluded to this earlier, what do you do if you’re living in the midst of some Church controversy, as seems to always be the case throughout the whole history of the Church?

Fr. Stephen: You don’t say!

Fr. Andrew: There’s always something going on. [Laughter] It’s: Be as faithful as you can in the midst of it, and you kind of have to muddle through on some level. It’s just how it is! I mean, what else can you do? If you’re looking for utter certainty… we don’t get that in this life. It’s just not…

Fr. Stephen: Well, and certainty of what?

Fr. Andrew: Right. Which party to pick, which thing to sign off on… Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. My salvation does not hinge, in any way, on anything ecclesiastical or geopolitical going on in Ukraine right now.

Fr. Andrew: Right. You don’t have to take a side in order to be a saint.

Fr. Stephen: If I lived in Ukraine, it might, so I’m not belittling that, but for the amount that people, say, in the United States are all worked up about that, all those related issues, you don’t need any certainty about that in terms of your salvation. We all know what we’re supposed to be doing for our salvation.

Fr. Andrew: And, also thinking about Church councils, we can’t look back at them and say, “Ah, here are the marks of ecumenicity,” because for any collection of those marks of ecumenicity, you might set up, you’re going to find some council that qualifies and yet isn’t received as ecumenical, or you’re going to find a council that doesn’t quite qualify and yet is received as ecumenical, because that’s just the way that the Church sort of received it. That’s the way that it goes!

Fr. Stephen: It’s this whole post-talk thing. It’s not just councils. You’ll get this with—when people start talking about the canon. They’re like: “Well, here are the criteria for canonical books: It was written by an apostle…” Then you’re like: “What about the Old Testament?” [Laughter] “It was written in this period… It was this…”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and again, that presupposes that there was some committee that sat down and came up…

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Here’s the criteria that we will use.” It’s all post-talk. It’s all looking back on it and saying, “Well, these are the things I’ve received as canonical. I don’t want to just say I received these by tradition, for whatever reason, that I’ve received these handed down to me, and so I’m going to try and make some argument after the fact.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, some sort of formal criteria that makes tradition what it is. An external…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which is, you know, a waste of time. I mean, if that’s how you get your kicks, go ahead, but it’s kind of a waste of time. I waste a lot of time, so I can’t criticize too much. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s true. I mean, the same is true of liturgical practice, because liturgical change is a thing. There is even liturgical reform. Now, in the history of the Orthodox Church, we’re never talking about liturgical reform on the level of, say, for instance, what happens after the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church, but there are liturgical reforms. There’s of course the Nikonian Reforms in the 17th century in Russia, which were hugely problematic at the time, for sure, but largely are what is received as modern Russian Orthodox liturgical practice, but also in the Greek-speaking world there was St. Philotheos Kokkinos: he was a liturgical reformed and kind of streamliner; he was the guy who canonized St. Gregory Palamas! And I should mention, since I’m, God willing, going there in not too long, he’s the guy who canonized the three holy martyrs of Vilnius, so there you go! Liturgical reform is a thing. How do we know that it was good—a particular reform was good or a particular change or introduction of something new is good? By how it is received.

Fr. Stephen: Seeing how history, reality played out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in the moment it may not be clear; you may not know how to evaluate it. But it’s okay. Again, you don’t have to take sides in these things for your salvation.

Fr. Stephen: And this is true in terms of the Church Fathers. Who’s a Father and who’s not? Who’s a saint and who’s not? How prominent is a given Church Father and his works compared to another Church Father and his works? Or Mother of the Church and her…? Which works were preserved and which ones weren’t? The Church Fathers wrote a lot of stuff that didn’t get handed down to us, and then some stuff that did. What works by people who aren’t saints—people like Origen and Tertullian, etc.—did get handed down to us and why and in what context? All of those things are guided by the Holy Spirit, and so we take our cues from that. Descriptive, not prescriptive.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which means that reconstructions or attempts to “correct” the record are not the way that Orthodox Christianity works.

Fr. Stephen: You’re trying to correct reality. [Laughter] Good luck with that.

Fr. Andrew: One might therefore ask, then, since a lot of what we—a big piece of what we try to do on this podcast is to direct people’s attention to things that often it’s not being directed to: Are we trying to revise the Church?

Fr. Stephen: How dare you?

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know, but it’s good to ask these questions. [Laughter] Is that what we’re trying to do, is we’re trying to say, “Oh, let’s dig up this stuff that no one’s talking about and bring it back out in the open. Even though the Church hasn’t received this, we’re going to make everybody receive it now,” like is that what we’re actually trying to do? No. I don’t know, I don’t have the timbre in my voice to do that the way that you do. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The issue is, if we were doing this show in Greek in Greece, or in Russian in Russia, we sort of wouldn’t be doing this show; we’d be doing a different show, because it would be a wholly different context. So the reality is that you and I are both in the United States, but even if we broadened that to Anglophone Orthodoxy, to include some former British imperial holdings, Anglophone Orthodoxy isn’t just in its childhood or infancy; it’s like a fetus. [Laughter] It’s still being born, some kind of real sense of Anglophone Orthodoxy. And it’s kind of a mess? We have random bits and bobs of all kinds of things in English. A lot of them aren’t even translated by Orthodox people, and in some cases that affects the translations. I’m not just talking about Church Fathers: I’m talking about liturgical stuff, I’m talking about liturgical hymns…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes, some of the earliest liturgical translations in English were done by Isabel Hapgood, who was an Episcopalian! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I mean, you have to pull together two or three different projects to even get a complete new translation of the Bible made by Orthodox Christians into English. This stuff just doesn’t exist in English. And so I see what we’re doing here as us going and finding all this stuff in the tradition—some of it not in English—and trying to bring it to the attention of Orthodox Christians here in the US who don’t have access to it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s sort of a translation project, on some level.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Like, monks on Mount Athos have, if they wanted it—had access, potentially, to the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. Most American Orthodox Christians don’t know what I’m talking about. So is that me trying to change the American Orthodox Church? Well, I don’t think so! [Laughter] I think it’s me saying, “Hey! Here’s something Orthodox you don’t know about!” I’m trying to get some more of this— And I’m only qualified to do a certain little piece of it. I can’t do nothin’ with music, man. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. I can’t help you with liturgical music; I can’t help anybody with that. And I’m not an expert on everything. I’m an expert on a tiny little sliver of things, and I kind of know some stuff about the broader things related to the Scriptures, and so I can try to help fill in some of that stuff, but we actually need a whole lot of other people doing this, but doing it with other areas: with liturgical music, with Church Fathers of different eras, with canons in the sense of the structures of the Church, with Church history… We need all of this, and we need it for years and years and years so that we can maybe in a few centuries have an American Orthodox Church that’s a real and vital Orthodox Church—not that America will be here by then, but an English-speaking Orthodox Church somewhere in whatever is left.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow. Now that you have pronounced our doom…

Fr. Stephen: Oh, we’re in mid-collapse, man. Deal with it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I know, I know. It’s true. All right, well, just some final thoughts now here for our episode on textual authority. Along the way we critiqued a number of ways of looking at texts. For instance, the desire to find… Or especially in our episode about how to read the Bible, this desire to find what’s sort of behind the text or what was in the mind of the author, this kind of thing. We didn’t talk about that as much tonight, but that’s related also to this question of attempting to reconstruct a basis for why certain books of the Bible are canonical, reconstruct a basis for how Ecumenical Councils are ecumenical, who’s a Church Father—the list goes on and on and on.

And what I believe—now, I certainly believe that a lot of these attempts are well-intended, but there is nonetheless, even if they’re well-intended, if the person has in their mind to do something good—there is still a very problematic spiritual motion going on with that, and it’s that a desire to get a handle on something that you can’t get a handle on… I mean, I understand wanting to get a handle on stuff. I’m an inherently curious person; I want to understand things. I want to take complex systems and figure out how to talk about them with people. I get it; I get it, and I think it’s important to try to get a handle on trying to understand what’s going on in Orthodox tradition, but when we attempt to create a kind of system that is the basis for how authority is assigned, then that’s a kind of trying to get a handle on things that is actually stepping away from the way that the Orthodox tradition actually works. And the beginning, really, of understanding how it works is, step number one, accepting what it is as it is. As it is: even if you don’t agree with it or don’t like it or are uncomfortable with it or even offended by it. We receive the whole Tradition.

And the task then is to try to understand the tradition, not to come up with a system for figuring out how it gains its authority and all this kind of stuff. There’s not— There is no system; there is no criteria. There is no… It just doesn’t work that way. That’s why that I say there’s a different spiritual motion involved, the spiritual motion of trying to create a system for all of it is ultimately about trying to assert some kind of control over it, and I think that’s why so many people who attempt to do this end up in a lot of arguments and debates over it, which is not how the tradition actually works. Certainly you have debate and argument within the Orthodox tradition, but largely it has a pastoral purpose of rescuing people from being drawn away from Christ. It’s not just about being right about certain things, and it’s done by the people who have been given the task to shepherd people and to care for them.

We mentioned, for instance, the feasts of the Ecumenical Councils, the feasts of the Fathers, and we’ve talked about this on the show before, when there’s that reading, that Old Testament reading from Genesis that’s given in vespers, about how Abram, along with his 318 guys, goes and rescues his nephew, Lot. And it’s not coincidence that the traditional number of Fathers at the First Ecumenical Council is 318. Whether that was literally the actual headcount there is not the point; the point is that they were engaged in a rescue mission for the Church. They were rescuing the people from error, because that’s their task; that’s their job as the shepherds of the Church. They weren’t trying to create a system of authority to impose so that they would be obeyed; they were reaching out in love to bring people back towards Christ.

And that’s the spiritual motion that we need to engage in. It’s the spiritual motion of accepting the tradition. I mean, you notice that the Ecumenical Councils begin with, “Following the holy Fathers…” Not: “We have come up with a system…,” but “Following the holy— We’re followers of the Fathers; we’re followers of the apostles. We’ve received the Tradition, and now we’re reiterating it at this time and place to deal with whatever is in front of us.” It ultimately comes down to pride and humility. It comes down to pride and humility, and you can see— I know when I’m filled with pride, I want to show everybody how right I am and to defeat them. When someone has humility, then it works in a very, very different way.

And then, actually the beautiful thing is, when you approach the Orthodox Tradition with humility, then it opens up in front of you as this beautiful, beautiful tapestry of endless possibility of exploration and diving deeper into its depths—I know I’m mixing my metaphors, but you get what I mean, I think. And so that’s my encouragement: is to enter into it with a sense of wonder. And wonder is based on humility. That’s how we receive the Orthodox Tradition, and that’s how we’re able to see and to describe how it is that texts function authoritatively within the Church’s Tradition. So, Fr. Stephen, what are your final comments?

Fr. Stephen: I think maybe some folks have gotten a wrong impression in terms of what we’re about—not through any fault of their own. [Laughter] We, right from the beginning, like from the beginning of each episode and from the beginning of doing this podcast, have been highly critical of materialism, meaning scientific materialism, the idea that the material is that all that exists, the material is the real and that’s the limit of it. And the reason I think some folks may have gotten a misinterpretation is recently when I’ve taken to, as has been my wont for some time, to bashing Plato, I think people have gotten confused, because I think the easiest place for people to try to take refuge when they reject materialism is to try to go to the other end and become idealists and try and deal with things in the realm of ideas, as if that’s spiritual reality.

And so what I think we’re actually doing is neither materialism nor idealism, but realism: dealing with reality. I think you see that in our approach like tonight. We’re dealing with: Well, how did these texts actually become canonical in history? How did it really happen in the real world? As opposed to the kind of idealist approach, which would be: “What does canonicity mean? What are the marks? What is my theological system in terms of how the Scriptures work, and then therefore what does that require the Scriptures to be, and then what do I need to say about canonicity based on that, to fit with the rest of these ideas?”

It’s very easy and maybe even comforting as an escape, because reality is not so great, to go into that realm of ideas and act like: Hey, if we could just get these ideas hammered out, if we could just get people to have the right ideas and the right understandings in people’s heads, if we could just get people to look at things in the right way and hold the right opinions, that will cause a change in the world and reality, and the material will sort of fix itself. And the problem is that doesn’t work. What you end up producing is a fantasy, and it’s very easy for theology—even good theology, even technically correct theology—to just become fantasy. It’s really easy for it to become the same thing as, you know, Star Trek canon is in my head, or Marvel or DC Comic canon is in my head.

Theology can come to be essentially the same thing. It’s very easy in theological debates for theology to become something like math. “I use the right words, the right technical terms; I put them in the right order and use the right conjunctions: therefore I am Orthodox and have correct theology, and you, sir, are not Orthodox; therefore you have bad theology, and I’m going to argue that my conjunctions are correct and yours are wrong.” And then if I feel like, or if people tell me, I won the argument, then I will have won a great victory for Orthodoxy, and maybe that’ll help my salvation or something? But none of that is connected to reality in any way. St. James told us a long time ago: True religion is care for widows and orphans and keeping yourself pure from the world.

Religion is about what you do, not because the material is all that there is, but because the spiritual things that we talk about on this show—whether it’s angels and demons, whether it’s the Holy Spirit living through the Church, directing the Church—these are not ideas; these are things that are real. They’re real in addition to the material being real. We’re talking about more reality that includes but is not limited to the material. That’s where we find our salvation as Orthodox Christians: in our materials bodies, in this world, in communities with other people, who often smell bad and don’t look pretty to us all the time and don’t dress the way we think they should and don’t say things to us that we always like and don’t go along with our great ideas and disagree with us about our brilliant ideas. That’s the arena where all of salvation is worked out.

So we start with, rather than ideas and a theology that exists in the realm of imagination—we start with an understanding of God that’s based in reality: the reality of the Church as it exists, the reality of what the Holy Spirit has done through history, the reality of the lives of the saints lived before us—all of that reality is our basis, and then we take that reality and we apply it in reality: to caring for others, to helping others, to loving others. And it’s when we do that that our salvation is furthered, that things fall into place.

You will never have assurance of your salvation or standing before God based on ideas, because you can’t trick yourself that well. You can’t get out of having doubts about things through ideas. You can’t deceive yourself that way. The only way to get past doubts and the only way to get past fears and the only way to have any kind of assurance of your relationship with Christ is to actually experience it in reality, and the way you do that is concretely by loving others, by participating in worship, by being part of a community, by loving people and being loved, and by participating. That’s where you’re going to find salvation; that’s where Christ is going to become real to you. And all of the ideas in the world are ultimately irrelevant in the face of what we actually live and do and practice and experience and become. So those are my final thoughts for this evening.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. If you weren’t able to get through to us live, as we were monitoring our social media channels tonight, we’d still love to hear from you. You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And in a general sense, you should join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific, but the one in two weeks is pre-recorded, so if not that one, then the next one.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed, and if you are on Facebook, you can like our page or join our discussion group; you can leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend—tell someone about it!

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air, and come back in a month when we’ll have a very special guest.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night, and God bless you.