Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Hey, good evening, giant-killers, dragon-slayers—Christ is risen! He truly is risen. You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast, as you should be doing. This is the only thing you should be doing right now. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania—and we are live! And if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346, and you can talk to us. We're listening. And we're going to get to your calls in the second half of this show, and our very own Matushka Trudi, who assures me that her name is not a nickname, will be taking your calls.

Fr. Stephen De Young: We have to make a quick programming note here. Yeah, so people— I know people will hear this recording later. This isn't directed to you, but to those of you who have been listening to the feed and have just spent the last hour listening to the commercial for Fr. Andrew's new show and now are going to have to listen to—who knows?—upward of three hours more of him.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I know.

Fr. Stephen: Well, here's an opportunity for you to apologize to those people, Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: I'm not even a little bit sorry! [Thump]

Fr. Stephen: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: They can turn their frigging radio off!

Fr. Stephen: I also had a technical question, since I also had to listen to that commercial again—and may yet again before this show is over!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, no, they're not going to play that one again.

Fr. Stephen: You said on this video podcast you're going to read the stories. Like, are you going to have some sort of graphics going on during that, or are they just going to sit there and watch you read?

Fr. Andrew: There will be, in fact, some visual elements. That will not just be us reading, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, because that's a good thing to clarify for people, because if you tell people you're going to sit on YouTube and watch me put on my reading glasses and read for, like, 20 minutes… That's not going to sell it.

Fr. Andrew: That's a fine question, Fr. Stephen. [Laughter] There are people that would watch you do that.

Fr. Stephen: Maybe, because they'd never know what I was going to say or do during.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you put your reading glasses on so dramatically, too.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, you have to put them on and take them off dramatically.

Fr. Andrew: I understand.

Fr. Stephen: That's part of selling the whole thing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Anyway, for years—years! because this show is almost four years old—you, the listener, have been waiting for us to do an episode—or three—on the book of Enoch. Whether it's the 400-foot-tall giants or the vagaries of the solar calendar, we know you get excited pondering it. And who wouldn't?

But that's not what we're talking about tonight. We are going to start a series on the apocrypha. The apocrypha! It's a scary word for some folks, suggesting secret, esoteric, weird tomes from the ancient world. Some say that the apocrypha are dangerous, full of forbidden knowledge. So, Father, that's what they actually are, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yay! That means I can go home tonight.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but actually no.

Fr. Andrew: No?

Fr. Stephen: None of them were actually banned from the Bible, despite what the History Channel would tell you.

Fr. Andrew: Suppressed by the Vatican!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, none of them were taken and burned. Yeah. "Apocrypha"… Well, we have to start by disambiguating. A lot of people, as I found out when I published a certain book, now when they hear the word "Apocrypha," think of the Old Testament books, the six or so Old Testament books—

Fr. Andrew: Right, like Maccabees and Tobit and whatever.

Fr. Stephen: —that are in the Roman Catholic Old Testament and not in most Protestant Old Testaments. And they call those books the Apocrypha. That is completely incorrect. That is a completely incorrect usage of the term.

Fr. Andrew: Amen and share.

Fr. Stephen: So that is not what we're talking about when we use the word "apocrypha." We use it correctly. The word "apocrypha," like the dictionary definition of the Greek word, refers to something— usually you'll see it translated as hidden or secret, because that makes it sound really fascinating and interesting, like someone is hiding this from you; someone is keeping this secret! But in actuality it's used to refer to private, which you can tell is a related idea: something you do in private rather than in public is hidden or secret in a certain sense.

And so apocrypha are works that fall into a certain middle category throughout Church history, particularly in the East—that's why it's still a Greek word. There have been sort of three categories of texts. There are books that are read publicly, or books that are read in the churches.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that's canon.

Fr. Stephen: That's the Bible. Yes, that's Scriptures; that category is Scriptures. And then on the other end of the spectrum there's books not to be read. That's heretical stuff. That's heretical nonsense. And then in between there is this middle category of apocrypha, of books that are to be read in private. That distinction between public reading and private reading is kind of less intuitive now in our modern age, because… because of literacy rates.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, most reading is private reading.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so the difference between reading something at home or hearing it read in church seems less of a difference to us. But until very, very recently, even in the "Western world"—we won't get into all that—literacy rates were ridiculously low. The example I like to give on this is: In World War I, if you were drafted into the US military to fight in World War I, you were considered literate if you could sign your name, rather than making an X, like affixing your mark with a witness. This is why they had to have notaries: people didn't have a signature. They would just make an X, and they would have to have a witness there that saw them do it, in case there was an issue later. So being able to actually sign your name made you literate, and 40% of the US army was literate by that standard. So this is in the 19-teens. This is a little over a hundred years ago. So for the vast majority of human history and still in very many parts of the world, the literate people are the educated class, which is a minority in a given society.

Why this is important in understanding this distinction is: Something that was read publicly was read to everyone. So anyone who was attending worship services in the church would hear the texts from the Old Testament, the gospels, things from St. Paul's epistles, the other New Testament epistles. These things were read publicly, which meant they were made available; they were read to everyone. That doesn't mean everything in them was easy and clear to understand for everyone—that's why there was, you know, preaching, to sort of frame things and explain them—but they were read publicly. They were put out there and made available to everyone.

But then there are other texts which for a variety of reasons other than being purely heretical— Those purely heretical texts, it was like: well, nobody should read that; there's nothing worth reading there. But there were other texts that had valuable things to say, that were related in some way to the Jewish or Christian traditions, which had value to them, but also had other elements. So there might be things that were erroneous in them. There might be things which could be very easily taken in a weird way.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why sometimes, when this subject comes up—because we've talked about this before on this show— When the subject comes up, sometimes people ask thing about a particular book and say, "Is this book safe?" because there's this idea that there's problematic bits. But it's not like if you read some ancient text it's going to cast some kind of weird spell on you. The question is just: Do you have discernment, and if something seems weird to you, are you going to go off and do something weird, or are you just going to kind of go: "I don't know; that's weird," and move on? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And this is… By restricting that category of books to being privately read, you were restricting them to a certain type of person being able to read them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the literate, basically.

Fr. Stephen: The literate, which would be the educated classes, which were usually— like in Christian history, we're usually talking about clergy, churchmen, other people in the educated classes—who would be equipped to read them and sort of weed out the good and the bad and those kind of things. For example, in the East in particular, the book of Revelation still kind of hovers between the publicly and privately read categories. It's been affirmed as canonical, but it's still not publicly read 99.9% of the time in places.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, certain very specific situations and places.

Fr. Stephen: But outside of that, it's not really. And, you know, it's because— I don't know if our listeners will believe this, but some people when they hear stuff from the book of Revelation go off on weird tangents with it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] What!?

Fr. Stephen: I know! Hard to imagine, but true.

Fr. Andrew: My childhood has just been rewritten.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. This, by the way, is also what happened with Origen. Now I'll get everybody worked up again. But when the only people who were reading Origen were people like St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Jerome, no one felt the need to condemn him, because there were problems there but all the people who were equipped to read Origen could weed that out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just the nerds, basically. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They could take the good and drop the bad. But as Origen started being more widely read and quoted, and as people showed up, like Methodius of Olympus, who went all-in with some of the worst parts of Origen and publicly taught them, that's when there arose a need in the Church to condemn Origen, because the stuff was now getting thrown out to people who weren't equipped to deal with it correctly. So the Church responded by saying, "You know what? Don't read this stuff, because people are going off in weird, soul-destroying directions with it." Like thinking we're going to turn into spheres.

Fr. Andrew: You don't want to be spherical but not religious.

Fr. Stephen: They were kind of religious, though. I mean, I see what you're trying to do there, but...

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's when an Origenist doesn't go to church any more.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, all that said—that's sort of background—tonight we're actually going to be talking about one particular piece or one collection of pieces, I guess, of apocryphal texts, apocryphal Jewish texts from the Second Temple Jewish period, and that's the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

Fr. Andrew: Buckle in, everybody! There's twelve of them.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, twelve patriarchs and twelve testaments, one for each! And this is, for a bunch of reasons… The reason why this is the first text that we're devoting an episode to of this show is that this is for a bunch of reasons, I think, the most important Second Temple Jewish or other apocryphal text for Christians to get a handle on.

Fr. Andrew: And we should say that, while the one, the edition that we're going to be referring to probably the most is the Charlesworth collection, which we recommend— We don't get any kickback for this. It's usually the cheapest if you get the Charlesworth two-volume Pseudepigrapha; it's usually cheapest at Christian Book Distributors.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, christianbook.com.

Fr. Andrew: But you can also read these texts, another translation of these texts, on the internet. If you just look up "Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs," you can sit there and read them yourself. This is immediately available to everybody. If you can hear this, you can look it up.

Fr. Stephen: You know, if you buy actual paper books then the man can't steal your knowledge while you sleep.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It's true!

Fr. Stephen: Might as well just to say a few of those reasons. This is a text that gets— It's Jewish text; it's a pre-Christian Jewish text that gets preserved in Orthodox monastic settlements. It's an important link between Jewish wisdom literature and Christian monastic literature. It's an important link in ideas in terms of how the New Testament, maybe especially St. Paul but also St. John, interpret the Old Testament. There's a whole bunch of reasons why this is probably the most important one.

And it's part of— The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs are part of a broader genre of testaments that exists within Second Temple Jewish literature. This is "testament" as in "last will and testament."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it's like a guy's final words before he reposes. He calls all the family together and says, "Now listen up. This is what I have to say to everybody."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. This is not "testament" as in "Old Testament, New Testament," where that English word is being used to mean "covenant." So these are not covenants made by or with the twelve patriarchs; this is their last words to their descendants, to their immediate descendants and then, from there, their future and even distant future descendants.

This genre follows the model of what we see in Genesis 48 and 49, especially 49, but there's a little bit in 48 with Joseph's sons, where Jacob calls together his twelve sons and gives these sort of parting words—in some cases, parting shots—to his various sons. And it's from what happens there in Genesis 49 that the genre really takes form, because what Jacob says to them there in Genesis 49 is not primarily directed to them as an individual historical person; it's directed towards their descendants and, more broadly, to the tribe that will later be named after them, later in the Torah.

So there is this sort of prophetic element to what is said there. That means that this genre, because of that prophetic element, becomes a way for Jewish writers in the Second Temple period to sort of comment on then-present events, but from behind a veil a little bit. Rather than just saying, "Oh, here's my hot take on the current Hasmonean king," it's… You frame it within the context of a biblical figure making a prophecy about the future that's talking about that Hasmonean king. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we should say this is very self-consciously and very obviously pseudepigrapha, meaning that no one is actually claiming that these are from the men whom they're said to be from in the text. This is understood to be basically a kind of fiction of sorts.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: No one's pulling a fast one!

Fr. Stephen: In these in particular, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, there's not even a pretense that the patriarchs themselves are writing it. It's recorded as words that they are speaking before they die. It never says who's writing it down, so there's not even a pretense of someone saying, "Oh, I was there and I wrote this down." So there's not even sort of a fictional writer interposed.

But so, yeah, interestingly— There are a couple places where the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs tap into sort of Enochic traditions that exist during the Second Temple period. The main way—there's another way, but the main way is that it will actually quote 1 Enoch. The book of Enoch is quoted in two of the testaments as what was written by their forefather Enoch. Now, given within the frame of these are the twelve patriarchs. The twelve patriarchs, by the way, just to clarify for anybody who might not have been clear— The twelve patriarchs are the twelve sons of Jacob. In Genesis 49, we had the testament of Jacob where he talked to them. These are presented as each of them, when each of them died, talking to their descendants.

So of course there was no currently existing Scripture in existence at that time. These are people living within the pages of Genesis. The Torah hadn't been written yet and wouldn't be written for centuries. The only thing they could quote, if you accepted that the book of Enoch was written by actual Enoch from Genesis, would be the book of Enoch. That would be the only thing that was around at that time that they could quote from.

Fr. Andrew: Otherwise it would be kind of anachronistic.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So it does tend to— And again, that's not like: "Oh, they're trying to cheat by only quoting from it." It more reflects the fact that it was broadly accepted in the Second Temple period that Enoch wrote the book of Enoch—and for a long time thereafter. We've mentioned on the show before, I know, Tertullian, for example, completely believed that Enoch had written every word of the book of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: But more interestingly, St. Augustine, who rejected the teaching of the book of Enoch, still believed that Enoch had written something. He just thought that the book of Enoch had become corrupted. So even he didn't throw the whole thing out, despite not liking parts of it. He just said that the parts he didn't like were the corrupt parts. But he believed that parts of this text went back to Enoch and had been on the ark, preserved through the flood.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: That's at the beginning of the fifth century. People firmly did believe that the book of Enoch went back to Enoch. That, I think, is more what that reflects than an idea that: "Oh, this is how we'll trick them. We'll make sure not to quote anything…" because there are certainly plenty of allusions with these to things that happened in the Torah and things that happened subsequently in the Hebrew Scriptures, all the way up to the time of writing. They allude to those events all the time. So it's not that they were exclusive of those things; it's just the only quotes are from Enoch.

So there's actually a pile of these. It's not just the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs are, I think, the most important ones, but there's a Testament of Adam, there's a Testament of Abraham, there's a Testament of Isaac.

Fr. Andrew: Right, a genre.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there's piles of these within Second Temple Jewish literature, and they all follow this same frame of presenting the last words of whoever the biblical figure is with this prophetic kind of import. And in the case of some but not all of them but including at least a couple of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, that prophetic element also forms an apocalyptic element, meaning there are apocalyptic journeys taken into the heavens where things are revealed sort of from a divine perspective. "Apocalyptic" does not mean about the end of the world; "apocalyptic" means "revelation," meaning specifically that the spiritual reality underlying historical events is revealed by someone being taken and being given a heavenly perspective. That's going to happen a couple of times in a couple of the testaments.

We keep referring to them in the plural. The Testaments of the [Twelve] Patriarchs, as a document, has kind of a weird nature and history. I said there "as a document," and that's part of what causes the issue with the kind of weird history. It's very clear that at least some of them circulated separately. We've got the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. As we've said, that means we've got a testament of Reuben, a testament of Simeon, a testament of Levi, a testament of Judah, on down the line. As I said, it's very clear that some of those circulated separately. So we've got separate copies of the testament of Levi and the testament of Naphtali that aren't part of the collection.

Fr. Andrew: Is there some kind of stylistic difference between them and the others?

Fr. Stephen: No, not really. So it's entirely possible that all twelve of these circulated separately. On the other hand, some of them, the themes are so closely tied together from one to the next that those particular ones circulating separately would seem weird. It would seem a weird coincidence that they ended up fitting together that well. And we don't have actual evidence, like copies, of those that were separate. So likely— The most likely explanation— I mean, we can't prove this, but the most likely explanation is that probably some of these were composed independently and were separate testaments, because, like we said, there's lots of these. And then at some point, because these were brothers—these were the twelve brothers—someone brought together the ones that already existed and then wrote the other ones.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to make a set.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, to kind of produce a whole set as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. There's also a weird language issue in that there are clear signs in places throughout that they were written in Hebrew originally, but we only have tiny fragments of the Hebrew, mostly from the Dead Sea Scrolls. So we don't have any Hebrew copies, whole copies of a single one. We just have little fragments in Hebrew from different parts, enough to tell us that it existed in Hebrew. And there are things that in the Aramaic and Greek versions—which we do have whole testaments in Aramaic and whole testaments in Greek—even those show signs of being translation from Hebrew in places. So you will get folks who will say, "Well, these were originally written in Hebrew," but you can't really prove that, because we don't have it.

Fr. Andrew: But it seems possible.

Fr. Stephen: But it seems possible, and we know it was in Hebrew. But the other thing is the Aramaic and Greek have this weird relationship with each other, and when we start talking about the particular ones, the particular testaments, we'll flesh this out. So there's Greek version and Aramaic version, and in some cases we have them or at least have detailed notes on both versions. The nature of both versions, it is extremely unclear which one came first. So it's not as simple as, like: "Oh, well, it went from Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek," or even that it went from Aramaic to Greek. There's just as much evidence that it went from Greek to Aramaic as vice-versa. And that being the case, that makes it very difficult to tell where the Hebrew fits in. If it went from Aramaic to Greek, people would probably say, "Okay, it was part— Maybe it was like the book of Daniel that's in the canonical Old Testament that was sort of part-Hebrew and part-Aramaic originally and then got translated into Greek."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but we don't have enough of the Hebrew around to be able to make those comparisons.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and there are other indicators that say parts of it could have originally been written in Greek. So we could have a situation where— It's really nebulous. We could have a situation where, for example, if it's true that some pre-existed and then it was compiled, that the pre-existing pieces were in Aramaic and/or Hebrew, and then it was collected and translated and filled out in Greek, and then the new Greek parts got translated back into Aramaic. There's… We'll probably never know. It would be very difficult for any individual text discovery to prove that one way or another.

So we've got copies from two different places. One place is the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran where they were buried from the first century AD— Now, they aren't texts from the first century AD necessarily; they're mostly from the first and second centuries BC, but they were buried there in the first century AD when the Romans came through, and recovered in the mid-20th century, mid- to late-20th century. And we've got copies from Mount Athos and St. Catherine's monasteries. The earliest copy we have from Mt. Athos is a Greek version from the tenth century, which is from Koutloumousiou Monastery. Interestingly, while that text is all in Greek, when you get to the testament in Levi, he has these copious margin notes about the Aramaic copy. So whoever the monk was who copied it could read Aramaic and had the Aramaic copy there as well, and he sort of notes all the differences in the tenth century, in the 900s AD.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Tenth-century Athonite textual critic.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which means he was probably from Syria since he knew Aramaic. So, yeah, that's from the tenth century. Tenth century is the earliest copy. There are other copies there from later, but that's the earliest one. We also— The earliest copy we have— There are several copies at St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai, but the earliest one is from the 17th century. It's important to note that Christians preserved those texts. Qumran was a Jewish community, but the other places where you have this text are Orthodox Christian monasteries, meaning Rabbinic Judaism did not continue to keep and preserve and copy and hand down the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, but Christians did.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the only reason we have these texts is because— And it wasn't some random, out-of-the-way weird village of Christians that did some strange thing. I mean, Athos, Mt. Sinai: these are the most established, central Orthodox monastic communites.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and St. Nikephoros the Confessor of Constantinople mentions the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in his list of books to be read privately in the ninth century. So it was in the library at Constantinople, too. So it's not just monastics; it's also the imperial church, as it were.

Fr. Andrew: I mean— And this will probably become clear as we go along tonight, but some people will probably be asking themselves right now, "Well, if this stuff was being copied and preserved and used at such central places, like the patriarch of Constantinople and Mt. Athos, why have I never heard of this?" And I would say that probably… Well, number one, there's a huge amount of Orthodox literature that most people have never heard of, or literature that the Orthodox Church has preserved and kept or whatever. But also, as you'll see, a lot of what's really important for us about these texts is just fully absorbed into our Tradition.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is sort of a link in the chain of our Tradition. So even if you never read any of these texts, so much of what's in these texts made its way into the New Testament and then into monastic literature and other forms of Orthodox literature and the Fathers and this kind of thing. You get the content even without having read it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so if you pick up this stuff and read it, and you've been formed in Orthodox Christianity for a while, probably very little will be surprising to you except for maybe the basic details of the story and stuff, but the principles will all be very, very familiar.

Fr. Stephen: Maybe— You might be surprised that these principles are pre-Christian.

Fr. Andrew: Yes! I mean, because they're pre-Christian, boys and girls.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, other than that it's not going to be anything, like, weird. Nothing rewrites Christianity. But it gives you sort of the link in the chain of provenance of the development of these ideas and these ideas being handed down. So the sort of major themes that run through the twelve of them, as I mentioned already, they form an important connector between Old Testament wisdom literature, Hebrew wisdom literature, and monastic literature, which helps explain why they were so important in Christian monastic settlements: lots of meditations on particular virtues, particular passions or vices, particular sins and forms of sinfulness; the kind of thing you're used to seeing in Orthodox monastic literature if you've read any of it, like St. John Cassian's Institutes and Conferences. Specifically the form that takes is that in many—not all, but most of these testaments—the individual patriarch is taken to be sort of an exemplar of some passion or some virtue.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, if you've ever been present for the chanting of the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete in the first week of Lent or in the fifth week of Lent, that form should be very familiar to you. St. Andrew of Crete does exactly that kind of thing. Probably the most memorable one from a particular translation, it's when he's talking about Esau, also called Edom, which means "red." He says, "Because it means a red-hot, sin-loving soul." [Laughter] I was thinking about that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that mode of reading, if you just recently in the last few weeks heard the Great Canon, will be familiar you to in particular. Then, of course, as we mentioned, there are apocalyptic visions of this future generation, of the coming of the Messiah, that are the product of sort of the original context in which this was written. The text was written, by the way—I guess we didn't mention that— The text of the whole, the whole thing put together, the collection, we know existed from the first of the second century BC, so between 200 and 150 BC. But it's important that none of it is sort of exegetical in the sense that it's like reading and interpreting the book of Genesis or even later parts of the Hebrew Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, again, would be weirdly anachronistic.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is why it was sort of left behind by Rabbinic Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism chose to focus on the midrashim, the targumim, a kind of exegetical approach of the Hebrew text, going forward. And this is a very different mode of reading and interpreting those Scriptures that became the basis for a lot of Christian interpretation, but obviously those interpretations went in different directions.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. All right, well, this might be a shock to some of you, only 39 minutes into the show, but we're going to go ahead and take our first break! [Laughter] We'll be right back with the second half of The Lord of Spirits.

***

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everybody. It's The Lord of Spirits podcast. We're talking apocrypha, specifically the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. You know, the thing that I kind of had on my mind as I was listening to that commercial is: Did the Byzantine Empire—? Yes, yes, I know it was the Eastern Roman Empire. Did the Byzantine Empire even have coffee? I think it's anachronistic. I'm just throwing that out there. Look it up, kids. Let me know. A quick Googling suggests that what we now call Greek coffee is maybe only early 19th century. [Mock scream] But that doesn't mean you shouldn't buy anachronistic coffee! I'm okay with anachronistic coffee, because coffee is coffee. So, yes, welcome back.

All right. You have nothing to say about that, Father? I was hoping for some kind of remark… Oh! Maybe not. The question is now: Where has he gone? Has he stepped out for a long, long— Well, he doesn't smoke. Yeah, no smoke breaks. When I was a stagehand we used to refer to it as "checking for an eclipse," but we just had the eclipse, so there's no more eclipses available. Anyway.

Right! That said, it does look like we actually are getting a call coming in. I don't know if Trudi's actually got this one piped through yet. Who could it be? Someone from Washington state? Hello! Do we have Anthony from Washington?

Anthony: Yes, thank you. Fathers, bless.

Fr. Andrew: Hey, Anthony! Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast! I don't know if Fr. Stephen's out, taking a stroll around Lafayette, Louisiana, right now, but you're talking to me at least.

Fr. Stephen: I was solving crime.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Did it get solved?

Anthony: Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Fr. Andrew: You're welcome! Welcome to the podcast.

Anthony: My question is about sabbatical years. I am running a company making Christian video games, and one of the big selling points I'm giving to employees is the idea of the sabbath year from the Torah. And I was having a hard time finding any details about whether or not Christianity still practiced the sabbatical year, and, if so, if it was the same year or a different year or if there were any other differences. I'm sure I'm messing up the Torah time a little bit, but...

Fr. Andrew: I'm trying to figure out if you're planning to make this an employee policy, like: "Okay, you get a year off." But the question is: Does everybody have to take a year off all at once? Is that what you're saying?

Anthony: Yeah. The goal, as far as my reading and my interpretation would be, it would be to give everyone the same year off, all paid holiday for the year.

Fr. Andrew: Wow! I mean, God bless you. If you've got the resources to do that, that's amazing. Now everybody's like: "Wait. What's his company?" Everyone's going to be applying for your company now. Of course, the drawback is, it's, what, once every 25 years or something, right?

Fr. Stephen: Once every seven.

Fr. Andrew: One every seven, oh, okay. I was merging it with a jubilee in my head. I think that's what it was.

Fr. Stephen: That's the 50th year.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, the 50th year. Yes. So if you have any slaves, Anthony—

Anthony: I sure hope not.

Fr. Andrew: —you have to set them free after that many years. [Laughter] I mean, if you don't, then you don't have to worry about it. Is that a thing, Father? A whole year off?

Fr. Stephen: Well, technically, if you're talking about practicing it, Israel never practiced it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that never happened.

Anthony: Yeah, I'm familiar with that. You mentioned that a couple times.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Jeremiah points that out, that they never actually did it. I don't know of a wide-spread Christian practice of doing it every seven.

Fr. Andrew: It would be hard to imagine how that would work. If everybody took a year off, how would a society survive?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the idea was you'd rely on God.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: And you left your field for that year, but the poor could come and glean from the field during that year. So, I mean, I do know there have been various points where there have been sort of various jubilee periods proclaimed by Christians that involve the forgiveness of debts and doing all those things. But I don't know of any widespread practice. Now, that doesn't mean it would be wrong for you to do with your own business. That might be a very good thing to do.

Fr. Andrew: Again, you would never lack for employees, I think.

Fr. Stephen: And those commandments in the Torah are laying out a system of economic justice. Deuteronomy—it's particularly clear in the Greek—says at one point, "There shall be no poor among you." And I get reminded of that every time I read—see, we just read this last week in Holy Week—Christ saying to his disciples, when Judas is trying to filch some more money, "The poor you will always have with you." Now that's really a stinging indictment if you know the Torah. Sort of the "You will never live up to this," in a sense. But it seems to me if you're going to try to fashion some fashion some concept of economic justice, the place where you would go would be the Scriptures, and specifically the Torah. Therefore, aspiring to that, I think, would be a good thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, more power to you, man.

Anthony: Do you have any suggestions about timeline, if I should just follow the Jewish year or it should be seven years of my business, or anything like that?

Fr. Stephen: I would— I mean, because it's sort of not a culture-wide thing, I would just do— Yeah, based on years of your business.

Anthony: Okay.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Anthony: Thank you so much!

Fr. Andrew: Thanks for calling! That's one I've never heard before. It's pretty great, though. I hope that really works. I'm not saying I'm doubting whether it will work. I mean, I really hope he can do that. That would be awesome.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, I can see we've got another call coming in, but I don't know if it's quite all the way through yet. These are emergent calls that are just sort of on their way. [Laughter] This one is actually coming— It looks like it's coming from Florida, or at least the person's phone...

Fr. Stephen: Are they calling by phone or through the astral plane?

Fr. Andrew: I'm getting something… [Laughter] Yeah, I'm not a medium. I don't see spirits.

Fr. Stephen: You're at least a large.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I'm generally an extra-large. All right. Do we have Florida there? Not yet.

Fr. Stephen: Florida still in progress.

Fr. Andrew: We're going to gamble, Trudi. Just let him through! [Laughter] Okay, it's apparently John calling from Florida. So, John, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. We're glad to have you.

John: Hello? Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! We hear you!

John: Awesome. Christ is risen, first of all.

Fr. Andrew: He truly is risen.

John: Yeah, so I had a question. At various points on your show you've discussed the nephilim, and how, when the Israelites would war against them, they were prohibited from taking anything that belonged to them. But there are other contexts in which they were allowed to do so, plundering the Egyptians, for instance. Is there a way to understand that to apply it to our current lives? That's my question. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Well, I mean, number one, probably you're not being asked to go to war for or against the nephilim or hardly anyone, so the literal level would be hard to apply! [Laughter] I mean, I— There is this classic understanding of plundering the Egyptians which is— I mean, this is an old, old idea, which is basically taking everything good from even pagan culture and bringing it into the service of Christ. That's why you get, for instance, Byzantine-era commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey, which, I mean—those texts were written in totally pagan contexts, and if you read them closely are totally pagan. And yet people like St. Basil the Great could look at them and say, "Okay, there's some good stuff we can take away here—not everything, but there's some good stuff that we can take away here." That is one of the classic ways of "plundering the Egyptians." Now, that's a metaphorical sense; we're not being called upon to take anybody's stuff, like literally take their stuff. I mean, you have to remember that the people of Israel were functioning under direct commands from God to do certain things. It wasn't that they were standing there saying, "Now, how do we interpret this?" It was: "Go do this thing now." I don't know, Father. Do you have any comments on any of that?

Fr. Stephen: I think that sort of key to understanding that is that they were called upon to do something that was wrong, like killing other humans is never good. It's never a good thing. It it sometimes a necessary evil. And so they're being called upon to commit this necessary evil, and so not being allowed to take anything was part of God telling them: "You don't do this to enrich yourself. This isn't about you getting rich or you getting slaves or you getting extra wives and concubines. This is this necessary thing that you have to do."

Fr. Andrew: And no more.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and no more. And so you do it solemnly. You do it as a duty. Because, you know, the reason why everyone else in the history of humanity has gone to war has been to enrich themselves, to gain power, to gain wealth. Literally everybody. So God is kind of excluding that as part of a way of teaching: "No, this isn't good. You militarily dominating your neighbors is not a good thing. You seizing their riches and plundering them and making them your slaves is not a good thing. It is something that occasionally, because of the wickedness of that group, becomes necessary."

So the way I would take that into our lives is that there are some times [when] there are things that we have to do that we take no delight in in life. There's some times in life [when] we're called upon to do hard things, make hard choices, do our duty, even though it's objectionable or wrong and we wish it didn't have to be done. The way— When those times come, we should look at those not as opportunities to advance ourselves or enrich ourselves or to get something over on someone else. We should not approach them with our own ego; we should approach them as sort of grim and solemn duties that we have to perform because it's the right thing to do.

Fr. Andrew: Does that answer your question there, John?

John: Yes, that does pretty well. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Thank you very much for calling. I mean, nephilim are always on topic.

John: Absolutely.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right. Thank you! Okay, well, we've got twelve testaments to get through. So where are we going to start?

Fr. Stephen: Well, speaking of nephilim, we're starting with the testament of Reuben, which talks about them.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, indeed.

Fr. Stephen: That's not the main focus, but it comes up because of what Reuben is most known for in Genesis. So Reuben is the oldest brother; that's why we're starting with him. The testaments kind of go in birth order in terms of how they're arranged in the collection. Reuben was the oldest brother. Reuben would have had the firstborn status to inherit from Jacob, probably. Part of the tension in the story of Jacob and his sons is that Reuben is his firstborn son, period, but he's the firstborn son from Leah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not the preferred wife.

Fr. Stephen: Jacob is— Yeah, Rachel is the preferred wife, and Joseph is the firstborn of her, so that's part of the tension that goes on. But he in normal circumstances would have inherited. He gets disinherited because of what happens in Genesis 35:22, which is he commits an act of family usurpation, which I think we've talked about on this show before.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we have. He sleeps with Jacob's concubine, Bilhah.

Fr. Stephen: Bilhah, one of his father's wives. And he does this not only out of lust, obviously, but he does this— The reason why—and this happens several times in Genesis; it happens later in the Hebrew Bible with Absalom and David's wives— The reason for doing this is this is a way that a son would try to take control of the family from his father.

Fr. Andrew: Because if you sort of control the fertility, then you control the future.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and also if you do this publicly, you sort of humiliate your father.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So in this text—now this is not what's in— The Scripture does tell us he does this, but there's some—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, in Genesis.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there's some details in this text that are sort of added, and one of them, for instance, is that he waits until Bilhah is drunk and asleep, and he goes into her, to use the biblical language—he goes into her and leaves before she's even awake. So it's clearly, like: This is rape. This is clearly him having an encounter with her.

Fr. Stephen: In our context, yes, in the sense that she is not a consenting partner. We don't have the idea of consent at this time, but she is not a willing partner.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there's no sense in which she's deliberately involved.

Fr. Stephen: But it's narrated that way because, again, as we've said, each of the brothers will represent sort of a passion and/or a virtue, and Reuben is clearly lust. So he kind of gives a breakdown of the whole incident, which is aimed at very clearly taking responsibility for it himself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is repentant language on his part.

Fr. Stephen: He wants to make it clear. He doesn't present it as: Oh, she seduced him or did this or that, or even was a willing partner. This was all him, in his presentation of it. He talks about having— And there are clear parallels to the story of David and Bathsheba here that are I'm sure deliberate, where he sees her bathing and that puts some thoughts in his head, and then he sort of stalks her and then ends up, as Fr. Andrew said, having sex with her while she's asleep.

In the context of this also, this is why the nephilim come up. The nephilim come up because they're sort of another example— on the surface just another example of lust gone awry. But it's also important that in both of these instances, we can't forget about the family usurpation part, and we can't forget about, with the nephilim, the kings part, in the sense that there's not just sort of lust in the sense of sexuality, but lust for power also; that there's a power dynamic involved here. This isn't— We're going to see in a later testament— It's going to talk about the importance of keeping sexuality and reproduction together. In this sexual act that Reuben commits, there's no aspect of procreation or anything like that; this is purely a power issue, that he's trying to take power from his father, likely in the context of Genesis, because he didn't think he was actually going to get the firstborn status, and so since he wouldn't have inherited that way, he decides to try to take over the family.

But so another— some other added information that we get in this testament of Reuben is that he embarked on an actual period of repentance, after he did this and after he was disinherited.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is really important to note, because repentance— I think this is really, really— We have to say this a lot, because a lot of people don't know how to repent. Repentance is not just him saying, "Hey, guys, I messed up. I'm really sorry." He has to— He does something, and in this case it's fasting for seven years from meat and from wine.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he eats no meat and drinks no wine for seven years, and that's his repentance, because, of course, he was liable to the death penalty for what he had done.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that's what— Now, there's no Torah yet, but that's the principle within the Scriptures, that you could die for that. So you don't have to die! You can also repent. Good news, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that repentance took this concrete form of fasting for seven years, not just "Oops, did a whoopsie! That didn't work out like I'd hoped it would."

Fr. Andrew: And the relationship between fasting from— particularly from meat or from wine or alcoholic drink, these are things that directly feed into lust, if you eat too much of it and drink too much of it. It's long known that these things are connected. So it's not just "Oh, here's this arbitrary thing I'm going to do because I'm sorry and want to prove that I'm sorry." This is about reforming who he is as a human; this changes who he is when he engages in this.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He had been chasing his appetites, and so now he refrains from his appetites.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And within the context of that, that understanding of appetites, there's this interesting breakdown in the testament of Reuben of the seven parts of the human spirit, which doesn't— interestingly does not match anything you really find in Greek philosophy. So this isn't— A lot of times people really want to give these weird Platonic and Greek philosophical readings to Second Temple Jewish literature. Unless we're talking about Philo of Alexandria, it doesn't work out so well most of the time.

So the seven parts of the spirit, as they're laid out in the testament of Reuben— part one, the most basic part, is the soul. He's making a certain kind of distinction here between soul and spirit, the author, whoever the author it, in that for him the soul is part of the spirit. And the soul is here very clearly the Jewish idea: it's the life of the body. That's the first part of the spirit; it's what makes your body alive. And then the next four parts are sight, hearing, smell, and taste, which are four of the five senses, those capacities. But then the sixth is the capacity for speech, which is part of the human spirit, the ability to frame words and communicate. But then the seventh part—you may be waiting for touch, the other sense, but this is the closest you get to it: the seventh part is sex!

Fr. Andrew: It's interesting, especially— Like, there's no Gnostic sense of the spirit here. These are all— These are mostly pretty bodily things.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, it begins with the soul that gives life to the body and ends with sex for procreation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is how the testament of Reuben divines the spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so there is an idea here that gets developed further in the Fathers and in Christian monastic literature: the idea of blameless passions, the idea that there are appetites that are basic to being a human, that are not innately sinful when they're properly directed and indulged within proper limits. And so that's the take on sexuality here, is that sex is this good thing; it's part of the human spirit, which means for the testament of Reuben it's part of the image of God. But that it is good when it functions within the context of marriage and within the context of procreation; when it's divorced from that then it can run into sinfulness very quickly.

So there's one particularly controversial bit about the testament of Reuben, and it's not the bit about the nephilim. It's that in Testament of Reuben 5:1—and this and all of the other numbers we're going to give, the section and verse numbers that we're going to give, are from the Charlesworth edition. A lot of the public domain editions online divvy things up differently, and there's no standard.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the versification is not the same everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: Because the versification isn't in the original. But 5:1, he says, "Women are evil!" [Laughter] Now, I thought that was self-explanatory, but Fr. Andrew said people might get upset if we just leave it at that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Might need to unpack that a little.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, you know… Immediately the first thing we jump to when we hear that is: "Oh, well, this guy is a misogynist; he hates women." But let's press pause. Let's press pause. Let's think back to, like, all the way to three minutes ago when we pointed out how, when he presented his sexual sin, he presented it as completely his fault and not the women's fault at all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so that's the context in which he then says this line, and then also talks about women seducing and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so he says— He already said Bilhah did nothing wrong, but now he's saying this and he's talking about women seducing men and leading men astray and this. So how do those things even fit together? Well, you have to understand: in order to understand speech, you have to understand the context into which speech is spoken. You have to understand the audience. We talked about this when we talked about how and how not to read the Bible, the idea of the ear, recreating the ear of the first hearers. And so when you read this in context, there was, culturally, an impression that women did not have problems with lust.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they were basically passive in this. That's how they were understood to be within this culture.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that men had problems with lust. Even within the text of Scripture— You look at Leviticus 18 and the laws about sexual immorality, the commandments: they're all directed at men.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because, again, culturally in that time and place, men have the power.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and made the choices.

Fr. Andrew: Not saying that that's correct or how it should be!

Fr. Stephen: But that's the way it was.

Fr. Andrew: That's the way that it was, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That's the way that it was, and so the dynamic, the sexual dynamic as it was seen by average Jewish person in the second century BC, was: men wanted to indulge themselves sexually pretty much all the time in any way they could, and women were the sort of gatekeepers of chastity. Women would sort of shut that down and keep it within its limits as best they could, because they didn't particularly want to indulge themselves sexually.

So what is being reflected here in the testament of Reuben, in chapter five, is Reuben is trying to explain to his male descendants: "Hey, guess what? In reality, women have problems with lust, too."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, in a kind of— I don't want to say backwards way: sideways way? It's really saying that women have agency also.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, women are not innately good and pure and innocent, all of them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, men and women both have problems with this.

Fr. Stephen: So that means, since he's trying to talk to them, the whole frame of the testament of Reuben is: "Don't do what I did. Don't give into lust like I did. Don't have yourself over to lust like I did." So what he's saying here is: "You can't just blanket-trust women to help you do that."

Fr. Andrew: Right. You're going to have to conquer this yourself, dude.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There are women out there who will be more than happy to engage in all kinds of sexual immorality with you. You can find them. So you can't count on them to shut this down. He doesn't say women are evil and men are good; he says women are evil also.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that's what it boils down to.

Fr. Stephen: And therefore a man has to exercise self-control; a man has to keep himself to the commandments of God. And the form this takes culturally, then—and you find this all over Proverbs, all over the Hebrew Bible and Jewish wisdom literature, but reflected here, too, in the testament of Reuben is: You find love, you find happiness with the wife of your youth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the woman you married when you were young.

Fr. Stephen: When you were 13 and you were married off to some woman you might have never met before: her.

Fr. Andrew: And now you're however many years old and neither you nor she are in the shape you were in back in the day. That's still the one.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so you find love and you find happiness with her, and you don't go outside looking for sexual gratification. You don't try to use sexuality for power. You don't do any of those things. You find happiness with her, because that's the proper place for sexuality, which is part of who you are as a human being, but this is the place for it. That's the overall theme.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Who's up next?

Fr. Stephen: Just in general, when you're reading ancient literature, you can't be easily triggered.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Indeed.

Fr. Stephen: Read something like "Women are evil," and you go: Aaah! You have to stop.

Fr. Andrew: Or you have to assume— Yeah, you've got to, as much as you can, try to set aside your modern assumptions about stuff. So you can— Even if you're going to evaluate a text from a modern point of view, at least try to understand what it's saying first by setting aside your modern point of view for a few minutes.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And then it may be saying something that's objectionable.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it might!

Fr. Stephen: I mean, you read Aristotle about some people who are just fit by nature to be enslaved and you ultimately say, "No, I think he was wrong on that one." But first you have to understand what he's saying and what he means before you do that. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yep. Okay, we've got eleven more brothers to go, so who's next?

Fr. Stephen: Next is the testament of Simeon.

Fr. Andrew: All right!

Fr. Stephen: Simeon being the second born. Simeon is the first one that goes to a particular place. You may be thinking, if you're tracking with this— You may be like: "Well, yeah, so Reuben did this thing, and there's Judah did some stuff and Levi did some stuff. Joseph, there's lots of stuff." You may be wondering, like: "What about, like, Asher? Or Issachar?" some of these guys whom there's very little about in the actual book of Genesis. Where are they going to go? Most of the time, as we read through these, if there's not an obvious place to go in the book of Genesis about that particular brother, that particular patriarch, they're going to go to the episode where they sold Joseph into slavery. They're sort of all there.

Fr. Andrew: Right. The main function of these guys is: What is their relationship to Joseph?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So where they were— Some of them at least were wanting to kill him. They ended up selling him into slavery. If we've got nowhere else to go with a particular brother, we're mostly going to end up going there. But we're going to see even that one event being looked at from a number of different angles because of that. The sort of particular angle with Simeon in his testament is that he wanted— The reason he wanted to kill Joseph and had this murderous intent toward him was out of envy. So envy or jealousy is sort of the passion that Simeon sort of embodies.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it's envy for the way that Jacob loved Joseph best, but also, frankly, that Joseph is awesome.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, in the testament of Simeon it's even like: Joseph was better looking that Simeon, Joseph was— Everything about him, he's just a full-on hater. Everything about Joseph was superior to him. And then it boils down to—but it's boiled down and very deliberately to, ultimately, that Joseph was good, and that Simeon, as a person who was not always so good, the fact that this person who was so good was around him galled him. And there are deliberate shades of Cain and Abel here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and even of, frankly, the devil and Adam. There's this sense that the evil one afflicts mankind out of envy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that Cain and Abel interpretation, by the way—this is one of the places where some of this surfaces in the Johannine literature in 1 John, when St. John says why Cain killed Abel: ultimately it's because Abel's works were good and Cain's were evil, and Cain couldn't stand it. That just brought this hate out of him.

Another interesting sort of interpretation here is that the whole story when— Well, it's a long— It goes for a couple chapters in Genesis, when the brothers finally come to Egypt during the famine to get food, and they're talking to Joseph and don't realize it's Joseph because he looks like an Egyptian now and they thought he was dead, and he sends them back and forth and he hides the cup and "Oh, you stole it"—all the stuff he does: that can be read in a number of ways. You can read it as just trolling. [Laughter] You can read it as a bunch of other things, but the way it's read in the testament of Simeon is Simeon sees it as sort of a penance.

Simeon sees having gone through all that as sort of a corrective to that jealousy and envy he had, because if you read it closely in Genesis, the way Joseph set it up, the whole thing was set up to see how his brothers looked at, had been treating, viewed Benjamin, because Joseph knew that with him gone Benjamin was going to be the favorite, that Jacob was going to be doting on him, maybe even more so because he's now the only son of Rachel. And he reckoned that that would cause similar problems with the other brothers. So if you read what Joseph does, the reason he hides the cup in Benjamin's stuff and everything, and he says, "Oh, I'm going to keep Benjamin here while you go get your father," and they're freaking out, is he's kind of making them all display what he hoped would happen: their love and concern for Benjamin, their brother, even though they were jealous.

Within the testament of Simeon, Simeon got that message in the sense that him working through his willingness to do whatever he had to do to save and protect Benjamin taught him and showed him and transformed him from the envy that had become murderous in the case of Joseph. So it's kind of an interesting and deep meditation on the Scripture there. That's not what I would call exegesis, but it's an understanding derived from that, again, of repentance, of repentance as transformation and particularly transformation of the passion that was afflicting him, of the sin that had taken control of him.

The testament of Simeon is also where we find our first prophetic piece that seems very clearly messianic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. This is so cool and kind of unexpected, unless you know that you should be looking for this kind of thing. Yeah, so this is from the— Again, this is the Charlesworth versification, chapter six, verses five through seven. It says this:

Then Shem will be glorified, because God the Lord, who is great in Israel, will appear upon earth as a man. By himself he will save Adam. Then all the spirits of error will be handed over to be trampled upon, and men will have command over evil spirits. Then will I arise in gladness, and I will bless the Most High for his wonders, because God has taken a body, to eat with human beings and to save human beings.

Remember, this is BC, folks; this is BC.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Now, of course…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. Some scholars...

Fr. Stephen: Those most influenced by our 19th-century German friends argue just de facto: "Oh, this was added by Christians."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Why? "Uh, because it's too on the nose. It's too on the nose. This has to be sort of a Christian thing." But, you know, given that they have no actual evidence or basis for that, let's pause and think about it a little bit. Look at, say, Baruch, the book of Baruch, which is one of the books that's in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Old Testaments—not in the Protestant Old Testament, but incontrovertibly a pre-Christian Jewish book, Jewish text—which says in it, "God has appeared upon earth and dwelt among men."

Now, of course, Christians take that and interpret it christologically, just as Christians reading this would take it and interpret it christologically. But that doesn't mean it's a Christian interpolation; it doesn't mean it's a post-Christian text, just because it's read that way. And, you know, you don't even get out of the book of Genesis before you see God taking a body and eating with human beings. And it happens again in Exodus. And if this is a Christian interpolation, why the exorcism stuff?

Fr. Andrew: Mm, trampling upon spirits and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: And man will have command over evil spirits. Like, this is big-time Second Temple Jewish stuff, exorcism stuff; but second-, third-century AD Christian literature, how much of that do you see? Answer: not tons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is completely of a piece with pre-Christian literature.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. There's stuff like this all over pre-Christian Jewish literature. This is the stuff the Christians picked up on, absolutely—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, it would make sense, then, how Rabbinic Judaism was kind of, like, not interested in reading this stuff any more.

Fr. Stephen: —but that doesn't mean that it somehow has to be post-Christians. The early Christians, from the apostles on, were reading the Hebrew Scriptures and other Jewish literature. That's where they developed their religious understanding from: they were Jewish. But there were things that they found there that they were applying to Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, that shaped their understanding of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, that were actually there before Jesus was born. That's how that works.

Yeah. So we're going to see— I'm belaboring it now; I'm going to belabor it less. There's going to be more examples of this. I'll belabor it less then—not zero, but less.

Fr. Andrew: And this is a good reason why this is a good intro text, if you're going to start reading some of these apocrypha, because a Christian will see all kinds of linkages.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. If you're going to go around and yank out everything that sounds Christian, you're going to have to get rid of half the Hebrew Bible.

Fr. Andrew: True facts.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It doesn't make sense. Dog don't hunt.

Fr. Andrew: Testament of Simeon. All right. So who's up next?

Fr. Stephen: Thus sufficeth for the testament of Simeon. So the testament of Levi, next up, this is one of the ones that we know circulated independently, because we have, at Qumran, for example, a separate copy of it, by itself without the collection, just: "Here's the testament of Levi." So this is one we know was originally a separate, independent document. Further testimony to that is this is the text that we have at— the copy at Mt. Athos, as we mentioned in the first half, that is in Greek but the copyist had the Aramaic version and annotated the Greek version: put in margin notes all the places where the Aramaic version was different or a little different or could be read differently. So we have an incredibly high level of detail in terms of the text of this one.

It's also important to note, in terms of the whole collection—because we were just talking about stuff that seems on-the-nose Christian—there's also elements of this. One of the main elements of the whole text that really gets brought out, starting with the testament of Levi, that was completely abandoned by Christianity— We'll talk about that in a minute. So it's not that this whole text reads like a Christian text; there's a reason why this is in the apocrypha category. This is a conglomeration of a whole bunch of Second Temple Jewish traditions, some of which are part of the inheritance of Christianity and some of which Christianity left behind.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Stuff gets sifted.

Fr. Stephen: This isn't Scripture. But so Levi, as you might expect, the Levites are, you know, the priesthood. Aaron is a Levite; Moses is a Levite. And the Levites, et al., assist the priests. So you might imagine the testament of Levi might have something to do with the priesthood. There's a problem there, though, in that Levi himself, like, the person Levi, the son of Jacob in Genesis—not really a priest in any special sense. So, I mean, he was a priest in his household, he was a priest in his extended family, sure, all those priestly roles, yeah, but he wasn't a priest in a special sense that his brothers weren't.

Fr. Andrew: Levi was not a Levitical priest.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So all that happens later in the Torah, and we've talked about that on the show, with Aaron and Phinehas and the Levites at the episode of the golden calf where the priesthood is kind of taken away from the other tribes and given to them in a special way. But that hadn't happened with Levi. And so the information we have in Genesis about Levi is sort of recast in the testament of Levi to kind of make him one, to kind of make him the archetypal sort of priest. The way that that's done is— What we have in Genesis about Levi, probably the most notable thing that Levi the person does in Genesis is leading the massacre of all the men of Shechem.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to prevent intermarriage with—

Fr. Stephen: Well, not in Genesis.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, yeah. In this text, that's what it is.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so it gets changed a little.

Fr. Andrew: See, I'm getting it mixed up now.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So in the text of Genesis, the sister of these twelve brothers, Dinah, is sexually attacked by the men of the city of Shechem.

Fr. Andrew: That's right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The village of Shechem, I should say. And the brothers want revenge for what was done to their sister. So Levi leads them in going and talking to them and convincing them all to get circumcised. And while they're recovering from having been circumcised, he leads the brothers; they go through and they massacre all the men of the town while they're trying to recover. And then Jacob, of course, gets very angry, because he's like: "Word of this will get around. People will come after us. You've started this cycle of revenge." This is seen as a bad thing in the text of Genesis.

Okay, but now, testament of Levi, we have a goal: we want to make Levi the archetypal priest. And so this whole incident gets sort of recast in a different way. So we have this massacre at Shechem, and we have an author who is familiar with the rest of the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures who says, "Well, you know what? There's a whole bunch of people later on in the Hebrew Scriptures who receive the priesthood based on killing a lot of people. To stop incidents of idolatry and sexual immorality and that kind of thing, they take this kind of violent action and are rewarded with the priesthood. Let's message this a little. So in the testament of Levi, it is not that Dinah gets sexually assaulted; it's that Jacob is going to marry Dinah to a Canaanite.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which would make her the wife of an idolater. That would be bad.

Fr. Stephen: From this family. Yes, and so Levi and the brothers are right to think that this is horrible and Jacob is in the wrong. And so Levi goes and gets them circumcised and then massacres them all in order to sort of restore justice and correctness and prevent that intermarriage from taking place. So that's an interesting sort of massage that doesn't entirely work. But then in the testament of Levi we kind of quickly move past that to: now Levi's reward, he makes this mystical, apocalyptic ascent into heaven. Once he's been brought up into the heavens, he is vested with the high priest's vestments, even though those aren't going to be made until later in the book of Exodus, long after he's dead. But that is done in that way because this text is attempting to present the Levitical priesthood as eternal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and therefore including Levi as the fountainhead of that priesthood.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Levi is this sort of eternal archetype of the priesthood. And so we've talked before, when we talked about messiahs, that there were a number of Jewish groups looking for more than one messiah. The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs is one of those texts that talks about two: one of them is a priestly messiah, and then we're going to see in the next testament, a kingly, Davidic messiah, the messiah we're more used to talking about and thinking about. But the priestly messiah here is explicitly going to restore the Levitical priesthood, which is seen as eternal. So this is one current in Second Temple Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And this is one of these things we look at as Christians and we say, "Okay, well, that's not quite right." [Laughter] "There's one Messiah who has both these roles. It's not the Levitical priesthood; it's his own…" That's why you sift these things. That's why it's not Scripture; it's apocrypha.

Fr. Stephen: And there are other currents, like we talked about before in the Melchizedek episode, and we'll talk about more as we talk about some of these texts. There's also this current that sees the priesthood of Melchizedek, Psalm 110, as the paradigm for a new priesthood in the new covenant, so it's not a restoration of the Levitical priesthood; it's the Levitical priesthood is superseded by this other priesthood. And Christianity (see the book of Hebrews) picks up this other current.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and says, "This is correct."

Fr. Stephen: But this has this idea of this priestly messiah and the restoration of the Levitical priesthood. What everybody agrees about is that by the first century BC, the first century AD, the Levitical priesthood was a mess and in disrepair, and the Sadducees stunk. Everyone except the Sadducees was on that page, but what the solution was going to be, there were different ideas. So the testament of Levi also directly quotes 1 Enoch for the first time, says, "Enoch our forefather said—da-da-da-da-dah." It's a quote from 1 Enoch.

But another important distinction—and this is going to carry through for the whole rest of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs—is that not only are there these two figures, the priestly messiah and the royal or the kingly messiah as the two figures, but the priestly messiah in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, is the one that's on top, is the most important one. So if what we see in the Hebrew Scriptures is that we see king and high priest more in—this is anachronistic, but more in the Byzantine mold of emperor and patriarch, the idea that there's this kind of symphonia: there's these two spheres. There's sort of a civil sphere over which the king is in charge, and there's a sacrificial sphere of worship over which the high priest is in charge, in terms of what we see in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament. This is arguing that in the restoration of all this, when the messiahs in this case come, that the priesthood is going to be elevated above the kingship, and that relationship is going to change.

Now, again, the Christian tradition picked up the stream that they're going to be merged in the figure of the Messiah—again, see Hebrews—but this is a different kind of anticipation, where the priesthood is going to be elevated over it. So that is likely picking up on sort of the ambivalence about kingship in 1 Samuel and that kind of thing, the idea being that: well, clearly based on Deuteronomy, based on the Torah, there was going to be a king, but maybe the problem was that it should have stayed kind of a theocracy, with the king as a player in it. This is sort of early Jewish political theory in terms of what we would call the relationship between church and state, but reflects— One of the primary things that Second Temple Jewish groups were reflecting on was what went wrong and why did it go wrong, because it's very clear that the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, is the story of things going wrong.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it is not the tale of a glorious civilization and its glorious leaders. [Laughter] This is not a pagan story.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they were anticipating the restoration being permanent. Part of it being a true restoration would be: it's not going to all fall apart again. And so you find a lot of ideas being cast in terms of: well, how is this going to be different than the last time so that this doesn't all repeat itself, this cycle doesn't just repeat? And so the testament of Levi advances one possible answer; it didn't end up being correct. There may be— I don't know—there maybe some groups out there in Rabbinic Judaism who have something similar to this, who think there's going to be a restoration of the priesthood and that it's going to be— it was going to take power over the civil government. I don't know. If you're part of such a group, call in now and let us know!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: No fakes.

So then, next up, fourth brother: testament of Judah. This is— Now we're going to talk about the Messiah we're more familiar with, because Judah is the tribe that David comes from.

Fr. Andrew: That's right. I mean, this is the one where Jacob and his— in the biblical testament of Jacob, he says, "The scepter will not depart from Judah."

Fr. Stephen: Right, talks about him tying up his colt next to a vine and his milky teeth and bloody wine and all that stuff. [Laughter] I mean, we just heard this two weeks ago Saturday. But, yeah, so this is sort of our thing. We have a slight similar issue to what we had with Levi in that Judah himself, the person, the son of Jacob, wasn't really the king of anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so, again, you've got it kind of projected backwards onto him, but which Jacob, you know, kind of gives us the key to do that anyway. He says that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, about the descendants. But also the thing with Judah is you also can't sort of do what you did with Levi in the sense that you can't have him being taken up into heaven and being made the archetypal king, because it doesn't really work the same way. So we've got to come at this in a little different direction, and the way to do that is we just portrayed Judah as the ultimate warrior.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because that's what a king is, back in the day. He's the one who goes out and comes in, as it says in the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so we just get the daring exploits. And a lot of these daring exploits are kind of stolen from other figures in the Hebrew Bible. So he rips a lion in half with his bare hands when he defeats it. He goes and he kills a giant by throwing a rock at it. You're kind of like: "Uhh… I read that somewhere else…" So there's a lot of that kind of thing. We get all these exploits of Judah going out and kicking butt and taking names. But we also have this stuff, though, from Genesis about Judah, like the whole Judah and Tamar thing, and the fact that Judah himself married a foreign wife, which we've just established with the Levi thing is very bad. So we've got to mesh these two things together. How do you mesh that together? Well, we've already portrayed Judah as being hard-living, so now we also just have him be hard-drinking.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Drink hard, play hard.

Fr. Stephen: So the testament of Judah takes the perspective that all that bad stuff that Judah did, he did that while he was drunk. He did too much partying.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which then sets up this question of being ruled by a bad spirit—pun fully intended!

Fr. Stephen: Right. So he takes the passions as being spirits, as being unclean spirits, very literally. And in talking to his descendants, he says, "You can be led by the Spirit of God or you can be led by these other spirits, of the passions." And spirits that come in a bottle, related usage.

And this reflects his descendants in a particular way, because what did— where did David go wrong? Women. He started multiplying wives. Where did Solomon go wrong?

Fr. Andrew: Also women.

Fr. Stephen: Same place. So he's speaking to his descendants, saying, "Look, you know, I'm this awesome dude doing all this awesome stuff, but you've got to still exercise self-control." And alcohol here, drunkenness, becomes sort of the label or heading under which all forms of self-control take place, and it's kind of an appropriate one, because, you know, as you become drunk you lose your inhibitions. They knew that back then; they saw it happen. So even if you are a relatively self-controlled person, drunkenness is going to erode that self-control.

Within the testament of Judah again we get an idea of when everything is restored, when everything is fixed, when the messiahs, the multiple messiahs, come, that the tribes are going to be put back in order. Israel is going to be put back together and put back in order, and when it's put back in order there's going to be an order of the tribes, like an order of inheritance among the sons, but it's not birth order.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's a different precedence, order of precedence.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and as we mentioned in the testament of Levi, Levi becomes number one; Levi becomes the first tribe, becomes the one in charge. Then Judah, where you have the messianic king coming from. Then interestingly Joseph, meaning particularly Ephraim, Ephraim being the tribe from which most of the kings of the northern kingdom came, [where] the capital of Samaria was and all that. You may be thinking—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, just a reminder, everybody, in case you're like: "Tribe of Joseph? There's no tribe of Joseph." That's because there's these, as Scripture calls them, the two half tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh.

Fr. Stephen: And Ephraim is the main one; in Genesis 48, Ephraim is treated as his firstborn and was the largest of the twelve tribes. I was going to say you may be thinking: "Wait a minute. They don't exist any more at the time this is being written." Put a pin in that. Put a pin in that! We'll come back to that in later testaments. And then fourth is Benjamin, the other son of Rachel, but also— Benjamin, remember: What tribes were still around when this was being written?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, basically Judah, Benjamin...

Fr. Stephen: Levi, Judah, Benjamin, because Benjamin stayed loyal to Judah and didn't join the northern kingdom. But then there's Joseph in there… We'll come back to it. Yeah, and so we see that reflected here in the idea that there's these two sides, one priestly and one kingly. So, number five, the testament of Issachar.

Fr. Andrew: Issachar. Coolest name, in my opinion, of the twelve brothers.

Fr. Stephen: But fails to deliver, according to the actual content of the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: I know!

Fr. Stephen: So Issachar, there's not much about in Genesis, but there is actually something about the circumstances of his conception, and so that's where this testament goes. We probably should have put a parental advisory at the beginning of this episode.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah. Oh, well.

Fr. Stephen: Too late now! Yeah, so in Genesis—again a story in Genesis— A lot of the stories in Genesis we've been talking about tonight are not the ones they based your Sunday school lessons on when you were seven, for obvious reasons.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Indeed, no.

Fr. Stephen: So there is this episode in Genesis that's recounted where Leah has a bunch of mandrakes—Leah the wife of Jacob—and Rachel, the other wife of Jacob, her sister, wants some of the mandrakes. Leah agrees to give Rachel some of the mandrakes if Rachel will give up one of her turns sleeping with Jacob.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, it's just a lot of layers there.

Fr. Stephen: So this is an odd story. Now, the mandrakes— The whole issue of the mandrakes is that they believed at the time—I don't know, maybe it's true: if you're a doctor or an herbalist, call in—but they believed at the time that mandrakes aided with female fertility. So the idea here is that Rachel, remember, was having trouble conceiving children; Leah already had a bunch of sons, bunch of kids, with Jacob. Rachel was having trouble conceiving. She wanted to conceive; that's why she wants the mandrakes, to help her get pregnant so she can have babies.

And so Leah, exchanging those to Rachel, in order to sleep extra with Jacob, is interpreted by the testament of Issachar as Leah wanting to sleep with Jacob for pleasure rather than procreation, whereas Rachel was focused on procreation, on having a baby. And within this, Rachel is seen to be the one who is choosing the better path. So the idea here is about marital chastity, what we would now call marital chastity, meaning— which does not mean celibacy within marriage. There is no form of Judaism, past or present and probably future, that saw celibacy within marriage as a good. The New Testament, which was written by a bunch of Jewish people, does not see celibacy within marriage as a good. I will leave it at that, because we have Roman Catholic friends listening.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And some other friends, too.

Fr. Stephen: But chastity within marriage is a different thing. Chastity within marriage has to do with the way in which sexual desire functions between a married couple. Sorry, St. Augustine, as St. Paul said, the marriage-bed is holy and undefiled; not all sexual expression, especially within marriage, between a husband and a wife, is tainted by lust. It simply isn't. But the sin of lust can certainly happen within and between a married couple. And the key, as the testament of Issachar sees it— The key to maintaining chastity within marriage, with the marriage-bed remaining holy and undefiled, is that sexual expression always remained coupled with the idea of procreation, the idea of bringing new life into the world—not that it happens every single time or should happen every single time, etc., etc. There are multiple purposes to sexual expression within marriage, but whenever procreation is excluded from the picture, things go to bad places very quickly, whenever that's removed.

Beyond that— So that all had to do with the circumstances of Issachar's conception, so that's here. Issachar— I find it odd that a dying man wanted to tell his sons about how he was conceived by their grandparents, but hey! That's what happens here. [Laughter]

But then beyond that, about him as a person, he is sort of— He's presented as a farmer; he devoted his life to farmering. And so there's an expression here of sort of agrarianism, the life of the farmer—working the ground, bringing forth food to provide for himself and his family—as virtuous, the sort of virtue of his labor and his work in doing that.

Fr. Andrew: And that is analogously linked to the whole fertility/procreation thing as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right. To present this overall picture of— So this is sort of— We had the negative picture of: here's where things went wrong, find love with the wife of your youth. This is more a picture of what that looks like in a positive sense. You marry, you have kids, you work hard, you support yourself and your family. He sort of, as St. Paul would later put it in terms of what we should aspire to, he lived a quiet and peaceful life in godliness and sanctity. And the text of the testament of Issachar really wants to point out that sort of that life that Issachar led is just as heroic and just as noble as Judah with all his exploits and all the excitement, all the action and adventure going on over there; this quiet life that Issachar leads is just as noble and heroic as that. It's sort of a central concern.

So then, number six, to round out the second half—

Fr. Andrew: Also the name of a town in North Carolina.

Fr. Stephen: Number six?

Fr. Andrew: Yes! Well, not "Number Six," but the context of number six: Zebulon.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. The testament of Zebulun, okay. That would be cool if there was a town called Number Six, like: "I'm from Number Six, North Carolina." Everybody would be like: What?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. No, yeah, Zebulon, it's near Raleigh; it's on the east side of Raleigh, actually.

Fr. Stephen: All right. So Zebulun presents himself, interestingly, right at the beginning, as only having committed sins of thought and sins of ignorance in his whole life, as he's dying and talking to his sons. And that may just sound weird, but the point of it is that he's making two important distinctions here about sin. They're kind of advanced distinctions that, again, will play out in Christian monastic literature and other places. One, of course, is between sins of thought and action, namely that you can sin in thought, even if you don't do something. And this idea is of course one of Christ's major themes in the Sermon on the Mount. You look at a woman lustfully: you've already committed adultery in your heart, even if you haven't gone and taken any action. If you hate your brother in your heart, you've already killed him even if— You've already broken the commandment about murder, even if you don't go and actually harm him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is not something new in the gospels.

Fr. Stephen: And then, secondly, he says he's committed sins of ignorance, and that's the distinction between sins of knowledge and sins of ignorance, that you don't have to sort of be consciously deciding to do something bad in order to have sinned, that you can sin unthinkingly, that your intent is not the only thing that matters.

And the testament of Zebulun is arguing, really, that not only are these things sin—are there sins of thought and ignorance that are truly sin—but it really wants to argue that they're just as bad, that even though he starts out by saying, "These are the only types of sins I've committed," he's not saying that to say, "Therefore I'm better than most of you"; he's saying that to say, "Even though that's true, I'm still a sinner." And again, as we've seen in a couple and we'll see in a couple more, he goes back to the attempted murder of Joseph, his brother. If you go read that story in Genesis, Zebulun isn't mentioned in it, in the sense that, like, he didn't weigh in, he didn't say anything on either side, he didn't say, "We should kill him," he didn't say, "No, we shouldn't": he didn't say anything. And that's what the testament plays off of.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so here there's kind of a sense of: You let it happen, and that means you're responsible as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He's an accomplice. He wasn't the one motivating it, but he didn't do anything to stop it either, and so he participated in it just as much as the brothers who were there and were talking and were making the decisions, because he was there and went along with it and did nothing. So this is a very nuanced and developed view of sin and of participating in the sins of others. You can see how, again, not only does a lot of monastic literature and even examples in the New Testament sort of grow out of these kind of ideas, but you can see how further meditations on sin and the understanding of sin in the Fathers, how this is sort of a link between the Hebrew Scriptures and those kinds of understandings.

In terms of how Zebulun spent his life in a positive sense, he's kind of paired off with Issachar in a certain way in that he's presented as a fisherman. He actually claims to have invented the boat, the sail, and the rudder, which is a little fishy, pardon the pun, given that, you know, Noah's ark had already happened, but—

Fr. Andrew: Which is, you know, no sail and no rudder, but definitely a boat.

Fr. Stephen: Definitely a boat. But he's— This is not for the purposes of travel; this is for the purposes of fishing. And so he's kind of presented parallel to Issachar, like he's a farmer of the sea. Instead of going to the ground and bringing food out of the ground, he's bringing food out of the sea, and using the fish he catches not only to provide for himself and his family, but it makes the point to also provide for the poor and those in need. So that's sort of an emphasis on— So again, if— And that's parallel to the earlier part, so if on one hand we want to make the point that these sort of sins of ignorance, sins of thought, participating in the sins of others is also serious sin, then the contrast to that, the repentance of that, is then that you not only provide for yourself and your family, but you also then go and provide for others in a positive way: you participate in doing good for others. So we see sort of with Issachar and Zebulun a presentation of the kind of life that should be pursued, not just the kinds of sin that should be avoided.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right. Well, we've done half the brothers, so we've got six more to go, and we'll handle those six when we get right back on this episode of The Lord of Spirits.

***

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! It's the third and probably final half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits. We're talking about the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, an apocryphal text from a century or two before Christ. Before we move on with the final six of these testaments, we're going to take a couple calls! We've got our old friend, Samuel from Virginia, who— I don't know, Sam, you might be the most frequent caller we've had. What do you think? Have you counted how many times you've been on the show?

Samuel: A few.

Fr. Andrew: A few. [Laughter] That seems about right.

Samuel: Christ is risen! It feels good to say that.

Fr. Andrew: He truly is.

Fr. Stephen: A sufficient number. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: A certain number. So what is on your mind tonight, Samuel from the holy land of Virginia?

Samuel: I was wondering. It occurred to me last week, actually, that, well, Judah was— One of the things he's famous for is betraying his brother. And in the New Testament there's someone with the same name who's also a famous betrayer. How much did the early Church discuss that coincidence of names?

Fr. Andrew: I don't know, but before I hand it over to Father, I will at least say that there's another Judah/Jude/Judas in the Twelve who didn't betray Christ, which is why it occasionally says, "Judas, not Iscariot, said—" or "Judas, who would betray him, said—" So we have to remember this is a really common name. Is there any comparison made between the two, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, not that I know of. Not that I know of...

Fr. Andrew: We think of Judas, and we have this one idea of Judas: he's the betrayer. But it's a really common name.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, oh, yeah. I mean, it's just Judah, so, I mean...

Fr. Andrew: One of the books of the New Testament is—

Fr. Stephen: One of Christ's brothers is named Judah, yeah. I'm really trying to think if there's any...

Fr. Andrew: I don't think— There's definitely not anything in the New Testament that goes in that direction.

Fr. Stephen: No, but you get— Yeah, most of what you get that's focused on Judah the person is more about the Judah and Tamar episode, especially since Tamar shows up in Christ's genealogy, so you get more about that. And that stuff is usually the typical… Well, when they talk about his foreign wife, you get the typical Gentile stuff. Do you know what I mean by that? One of the go-tos of the Church Fathers in interpretation is any time somebody marries a foreigner, that's typological of Christ being betrothed— betrothing the Gentile Church to himself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I'm going to have to say I don't think there's really much for that dog to hunt, Samuel.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I'm even trying to think in Bridegroom Matins, when we talk about Joseph and talk about— And Joseph is portrayed as sort of like Christ, and the betrayal there. And I can't think of anything that draws that out, that comparison.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, it was an idea. [Laughter] Thanks for calling, Samuel. Always good to speak with you.

Samuel: Okay! Ortanne Laivino!

Fr. Andrew: I don't remember the proper response! Oh, well. [Laughter] Truly he is risen! All right. We're going to take another call. We have, from the other end of the country, Alexander from San Diego. So, Alexander, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. What is on your mind?

Alexander: Christos anesti!

Fr. Andrew: Alithos anesti!

Alexander: So my question is being, with Pascha on my mind, with Passover here, is: what role Passover had in the ancient worship cult of ancient Israel or Judah, because I've heard it's said how it used to be that the elders would be— sort of took that priestly role, but that was taken away from them and given to the priests, but it seems from Passover, my naive understanding is that it was performed by heads of families, was practiced within families. So was that kind of understood as part of that worship cult? Is the Passover lamb considered part of sacrificial worship, and what the understanding of that is and how that carries over? Because obviously in the Christian context it's sort of our central defining act of worship. So if you could answer that, that would be great.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so, Father, what's the liturgical shape of Passover? How would you celebrate that prior to the coming of Christ?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that was done still by the head of the household. There's a question as to in what sense the Paschal lamb actually is a sacrifice, in that the family eats the whole thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there's no part that's burnt up.

Fr. Stephen: There's not a part that's actually offered to God, and so it's a little bit of a different situation. I think it is still sacrificial. I think it is; I would say it is still sacrificial in the ritual sense, that the ritual surrounding it is a type of sacrificial ritual even though there's that big distinction there that separates it from sin-offerings, guilt-offerings, peace-offerings. And that, of course, is why they still do it, Jewish families still do it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, even though they don't have a Temple any more.

Fr. Stephen: So there are elements—that and a certain type of thank-offering—that they will still do because those are not Temple restricted. If somebody were to—I don't know—write a commentary on St. John's gospel, the whole thesis of which was dependent upon the fact that the high priest sacrificed lambs at Passover, it would kind of all fall apart based on, you know, what's in the Torah. Let the listener understand, if you do. [Laughter] But, yeah, so it's a little bit different, and that's why it is still a family and identitarian rite. The Passover functions very much in a way parallel to—the Passover itself—very much in a way similar to circumcision. Circumcision wasn't done at the Temple.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, traditionally wasn't it done by the father and only later do you get the figure of the mohel?

Fr. Stephen: You get a mohel, yeah, who would be one of the elders of the community who just did it for everybody. So it was considered more— It was more that— It remained at that level and was not really part of the Temple cult. Now, they did, for practical reasons— So if you lived in Jerusalem or you were going to Jerusalem in the Passover, they did physically kill a lot of lambs at the Temple complex, but that was for logistical and practical reasons of draining blood and all those kind of things. They were set up to slaughter animals there, whereas if you're living in a city on an average city block, trying to slaughter a lamb and prepare it yourself there would be kind of tough. So for logistical reasons… But it's not like people who didn't go to Jerusalem for the Passover didn't celebrate the Passover, and they didn't have priests functioning.

So, yeah, Passover's a little different, and that's why— So we've talked about this on the show before, but what really generates the debate in Acts 15, what really generates the issue with whether non-Jewish Christians need to be circumcised was the continuity drawn between the Eucharist and the Passover. So there's definitely continuity there. There's continuity there because, of course, Christ institutes the Eucharist at the Passover, not at what comes to be called the seder, but at a meal related to the Passover, at the time of the Passover. It's a participation in Christ's sacrifice: Christ's sacrifice and his self-offering takes place at the Passover. There are all these connections between the Eucharist and the Passover.

Well, there were Jewish Christians who said, "Well, wait a minute. Read the Torah. It's all fine for these Gentiles to come and live among us and worship our God: great, we're cool with that. But if they're going to eat the Passover, if they're going to receive the Eucharist, they need to be circumcised. That's what it says. Read the book."

The other side—St. Paul's side, St. Peter's side—beyond what they had just witnessed with the Holy Spirit and non-Jewish Christians, was there are also discontinuities between the Eucharist and the Passover, like it's not once a year. Hear what I say, Orthodox people! Receiving the Eucharist is not once a year! [Laughter] It started out weekly and became daily. So that's a discontinuity. And it was from very early on called the Eucharist, connecting it to thank-offerings. And the type of thank-offering normally done at the beginning at the sabbath was done weekly; that was one type of weekly thank-offering. So there's a continuity there that represents a discontinuity with the Passover. So that was involved in that argument, too, and the ultimate settlement was: No, the Eucharist is not— eating the Eucharist is not directly comparable to eating the Passover; that it is a separate thing, and a type of thank-offering and a newly-instituted sacrifice by Christ as his memorial.

So all that is to say: I hope that answered your question about the Passover.

Alexander: [Laughter] For what it's worth, Exodus 12:27, both in the King James and Orthodox Study Bible say, "You shall say, 'This is the paschal sacrifice of the Lord.' " It seems like it is referred to as a sacrifice, and maybe it is connected where the firstborn were that weren't under the blood were sacrificed, I don't know. It seems like there's—

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, there's a separate dedication of the firstborn which involved a sacrifice also, where when you had a firstborn child or a firstborn animal you went and offered a sacrifice at the Temple, and that was very clearly a traditional sacrifice: you're taking it to the Temple, it's butchered, parts are offered to God, parts are eaten, etc. So the Passover is just sort of— Like I said, I believe it's a sacrifice, but it's different than— it's distinguished from those others, and that's why it never sort of gets— becomes completely part of the Temple cult—using "cult" in the broad, original sense—of the Temple worship, but remains sort of diffused and at the family and household level.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, Alexander, thank you very much for calling.

Alexander: Thank you! Christ is risen!

Fr. Andrew: He truly is risen! Okay. We have six more brothers to go, and we're going to start with—

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but do we have brides for them?

Fr. Andrew: Actually, that's nice. Thank you very much for that musical theater reference. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I know the way to your heart.

Fr. Andrew: That's true. Okay, so testament of Dan—not short for Daniel, either.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! No, just Dan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the infamous Dan.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So as we've mentioned before, the Scriptures have nothing good to say about Dan or anyone descended from him, which is kind of sad, given, you know, I mean, the actual person, the son of Jacob, might have been fine, but...

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, well.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, his descendants all go south. And, like I said, nothing good to say about anyone descended from him, anyone from that tribe. There's a bunch of people right now on social media going crazy again, like: "Ohh! How dare you!"

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] How dare you, sir?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, cry more; I don't care. Stay mad. Dan is, therefore, rather appropriately taken again to be an example of a passion, and again we go back to when Joseph is sold into slavery. Dan, though, is clearly one of the ones who wants to murder him, but in this case, rather than jealousy or that kind of thing, it's sort of anger and wrath, sort of violent hatred. He's just kind of a bestial dude, and that caused him to want to kill Joseph, just sort of straight evil. And he gives this interesting quote about why he didn't get to murder his brother.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, so he says, "But the God of my fathers did not suffer him to fall into my hands so that I should find him alone and slay him and cause a second tribe to be destroyed in Israel." So "second tribe," this is a reference to his own tribe basically getting wiped out of Israel.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because of course Dan isn't there in the book of Revelation.

Fr. Andrew: Right! He's the one who's not listed. So the "second tribe" in this case, under the subjunctive sense, would be Joseph.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, would have been Joseph's if he had managed to get ahold of him. Notice that "find him alone": so Dan is saying he wanted to go full Cain, but, like, didn't manage to pull it off, darn it: God didn't let him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, didn't even need to make it a conspiracy with the other brothers, was just like: "I'm going to take him out myself."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and because the other brothers were around he didn't get to kill him. This then talks about that he was sort of moved and motivated by the spirit of hatred and violence, which is here described poetically in the testament of Dan as "the right hand of Satan."

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: And he goes on to, then, quote the book of Enoch about his descendants in the tribe of Dan, to say that their prince—their prince in the sense that St. Michael was the prince of the Israel

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, their patron.

Fr. Stephen: —the prince of the tribe of Dan would be Satan! And they would be given to every kind of evil.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no one has anything good to say about the tribe of Dan.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, or anyone from it. So, yes, testament of Dan fits right in with that with evil dude. But notice here, remember— I know we had the break and we had a couple calls, but we're coming off of Issachar and Zebulun, the farmer and the fisherman, that kind of way of life, that quiet, peaceful life, working hard. What's the exact opposite of that? The spirit of hatred and violence and murder.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, devouring your brother.

Fr. Stephen: So then after Dan, Naphtali! The testament of Naphtali, everyone's favorite brother. You've all heard about him, thought so much about him.

Fr. Andrew: It's not a name that gets used too often these days.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So this is another piece of the text, interestingly, that we know circulated independently, because we have a separate copy of just the testament of Naphtali from Qumran. Now, the testament of Levi you might have expected. Levi: major figure, priestly figure, priesthood, lots of things to say about that. You can see why someone would just write a testament of Levi. Apparently someone also just wrote a testament of Naphtali. But Naphtali—there's like nothing about him in Genesis, and not even very much about his descendants in the Torah and stuff.

This one goes in a real different direction. This is another testament that involves apocalyptic— an apocalyptic journey that actually Joseph is going to take, not Naphtali himself, but Joseph, even though Naphtali is in the text, narrating it to his sons. And Naphtali is here taken to be sort of emblematic. His tribe is one of the tribes that made up the northern kingdom of Israel, under Ephraim, the descendants of Joseph where the kings came from. It was part of that, and so his tribe is here taken to sort of be a representative, and this testament is used as a representative statement to talk about those ten northern tribes.

And they do try to incorporate the little tiny bit about Naphtali that is in the Scriptures, specifically in the testament of Jacob in Genesis 49, when he talks about Naphtali he compares him to a deer. So there's sort of this deer motif, stuff about deer, running through the testament of Naphtali, but it's like… That's all they got.

We talked— I know we talked about it before, and I think it was back when we talked about Jewish astrology, that we talked about the fact that in the testament of Jacob you see a lot of animals, like the lion with Judah and the deer here and a serpent with Benjamin. There are these animal motifs that pop up. And we talked about then that those were connected to twelve constellations which were connected to the twelve tribes. The symbols on the twelve stones for the twelve tribes that were on the ephod or the breastplate of the high priest had the constellations on them. That's what was engraved on them. If that makes you super uncomfortable, go back and listen to our Jewish astrology episode. [Laughter] I'm not saying that'll make you more comfortable, just, you should go listen to it for more of this discomfort.

So there's again a quotation from the book of Enoch in the testament of Naphtali that's talking about the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel because within the Hebrew Scriptures there is this tension—because, of course, these tribes are gone, but within the prophetic tradition—you read Ezekiel, you read Isaiah, you read Jeremiah—the promises about the new covenant and about the restoration of Israel are very directly about the restoration of all twelve tribes. It's about Judah and Ephraim being bound back together and being restored.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and Ephraim being the symbol of the ten northern tribes all together.

Fr. Stephen: And so we have to— A lot of Second Temple Jewish literature is struggling with: Okay, what does that look like? How can that be? How would that work? How is that possible? What do we do about that? And so the central part of the testament of Naphtali is really trying to envision that, quite literally. So Naphtali has this vision at the Mount of Olives where he's standing with his brothers. Of course, this is a little anachronistic, too, that he's hanging out at the Mount of Olives, next to Jerusalem, which was in Jerusalem yet—it's this Jebusite city—but that's what happens. So he has this vision at the Mount of Olives, and in it he and his brothers are all represented. Levi becomes the sun; Judah becomes the moon. You can see again this idea of the two messiahs and of the Levitical, the priestly messiah being the greater one of the two. And then the bull of heaven appears!

Fr. Andrew: What?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, a wild bull of heaven appears. It is effective. Which is a giant bull with wings. And this scares all the brothers except for Joseph, who jumps on it and rides it up into the heavens. So, first of all, what? But then after he has ascended into heaven on the back of the bull of heaven, this giant scroll comes down and unrolls for Naphtali to read. And amongst other things, it says—and this is in Testament of Naphtali 5:8—that "thus the Asyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Elamites, the Gelachians, the Chaldeans, and Syrians will gain a share in the twelve tribes of Israel through captivity." It literally says the twelve staves of Israel, but the word for "staff" and "tribe" is the same in Hebrew.

No one knows who the Gelachians are. If you're looking for a dissertation topic, there you go: Who are the Gelachians.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, if you search on that word, G-e-l-a-c-h-i-a-n-s, the only references you will find to it are the testament of Naphtali. That is— There's no other that we know of.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But everyone else, whom we do know of—the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Elamites, the Chaldeans, the Syrians—these are all Mesopotamians or people who ruled Mesopotamia at various points, post-exile. So the Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom, take all of the Israelites, relocate them; they marry in over there, and then the Chaldeans, the Medes, the Persians, the Syrians, that's where Israeli is in exile. And that's why the bull of heaven is used. The bull of heaven is this symbol of Mesopotamia.

So what's being shown in the vision? What is the fate of Joseph, representing here the Ephraimites, representing here the northern kingdom? They are not destroyed by the Chaldeans, by the Mesopotamians; they are actually taken up into heaven, by and with the Chaldeans. And so what the text of the scroll, then, is making plain is that, through them having gone into captivity, what is actually going to happen is that those Gentile nations are going to, through them, find salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there's this integration through the tribes.

Fr. Stephen: By becoming part of those tribes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, integrated.

Fr. Stephen: And this is playing off of, in Genesis 48, when Joseph brings his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, to be blessed by Jacob. Manasseh is actually the older son, but this is Genesis so Jacob crosses his hands and puts his right hand on Ephraim, and Joseph tries to correct him, and he's like: "No." And Ephraim is told how great he's going to be and how many descendants he's going to have and kings and all this. And then he says, "And you will become the fullness of the Gentiles." And there's only one other place in the Bible where that phrase occurs, and that's Romans 11, where St. Paul says that, once the fullness of the Gentiles has come in to be added to Judah, then all of Israel will be saved. So this is a current of thought that we see reflected here in the testament of Naphtali, where in the testament of Naphtali these Gentiles come into union with the head, with Levi and Judah, with the messiah—in this case, the messiahs, but with the messiah—and through that become part of Israel and find salvation. This is a way of thinking about this restoration that is exactly what St. Paul does in Romans and elsewhere.

Fr. Andrew: Again, not making this up.

Fr. Stephen: This is a current of thought—this is pre-Christian—but this is part of the tradition that St. Paul receives and that he keys in on in terms of the particular mission that Christ sends him on to the nations and what it's going to mean and how it's working that, through the Messiah, the Gentiles are becoming part of Israel.

So that was all exciting. Now the testament of Gad.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Good old Gad.

Fr. Stephen: It can't all be hits, guys. Come on. You've got some deep album cuts, too.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Another name that doesn't get used very often these days, Gad.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there's Josh Gad, but that's his last name.

So Gad, another figure we don't have a lot of in the Hebrew Bible or in Genesis or the Torah, or anyplace, really, and so, again, we go to the attempt to kill Joseph. But what's done here—and as I said way back with the testament of Simeon when I said they were going to come back to this episode over and over again—they come at it from different angles. So the particular angle here is wanting to make a contrast between hatred of your brother and love for your brother, and it wants to do that, in this case, not to focus on the hatred or the attempted murder, but to focus on sort of defining the opposite, meaning the opposite of not hating and wanting to murder your brother is not just being meh towards your brother. "Yeah, he's cool. Whatever." The opposite of that is loving your brother.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, actually giving yourself in self-sacrifice to another person, caring for someone else.

Fr. Stephen: And that has an actual, concrete definition. It's not like a feeling or an emotion: "Man, I love that guy! I love you, man!" [Laughter] But it's actually doing things, and in this case it's particularly this contrast between— Well, they wanted to murder Joseph; what's the opposite of wanting to murder someone? Wanting them to have a long and full and rich life. And again, it's not just the feeling of wanting that for them or wishing it to them, but actually doing things for others that help them have a more full, more rich, longer, better life. That's sort of the concrete nature of what love is.

And that sort of concrete love for your brother is taken to the extent even of: Well, what do you do when that's not returned? What do you do when you're doing all this for your brother and your brother hates you and is not being the same toward you? Well, Joseph— Again, Joseph's story is a good place to go with this, and the testament of Gad wants us to remember that vengeance belongs to the Lord. Where vengeance needs to be taken or something is unjust and needs to be sorted out, God is going to sort it out.

Fr. Andrew: Especially when it's about you: you don't take vengeance for yourself. Now, if you can bring justice for someone else—if you can, in a good and righteous way—that's cool; that's good.

Fr. Stephen: That's part of showing love for them.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly! But you don't revenge for yourself, because, number one, it belongs to God, but, number two, you don't even know everything that's going on. That person might repent at some point. There's all kinds of possibilities. You just don't know enough to be competent to do that.

Fr. Stephen: And so this idea of love for your neighbor, love being concrete, loving even your enemies and those who treat you poorly—pre-Christian idea. This is something that's already around, for Christ, then, to refer to when he's preaching and teaching.

So then, number ten, the shortest one of them all, the testament of Asher.

Fr. Andrew: Okay!

Fr. Stephen: Again, not someone we have a ton of material about, probably why this is the shortest one. "Asher" is actually a fairly common Jewish first name lately, especially among millennials. I don't know why, but… Even Jewish communities apparently have these phases where people get certain names.

Fr. Andrew: The brothers of Joseph in the Bible are kind of the dwarves in The Hobbit. You've got a list of names, but there's not really a lot about most of them.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And, I mean, the dwarves in Snow White: how much do we really know about most of them?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Vague personality descriptions.

Fr. Stephen: Like, Bashful, why is he so why?

Fr. Andrew: And Doc: what is up with that? Like, one is called "Doc"? I don't know.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! All the other ones are character traits. What did they call him before he got the degree?

Fr. Andrew: Can't he have a normal name like "Diffidence"? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He must have been called something before he got the degree, that's all I'm saying. Maybe he was Ennui before that.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, what is his doctorate even in?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that's a good question, too. I would assume some kind of geology, because they're miners.

Fr. Andrew: Colorado School of Mines.

Fr. Stephen: I would assume it's something applicable. Could be a medical doctor.

Fr. Andrew: Well, as we all know, medical doctors aren't real doctors, right?

Fr. Stephen: He could be patching up the others, you know.

Fr. Andrew: Unless they teach. Okay, testament of Asher! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Sleepy just needed some caffeine, man.

Fr. Andrew: Clearly.

Fr. Stephen: Testament of Asher, shortest one, and also kind of the most general because of that. It's really picking up on what is commonplace in Jewish wisdom literature, this idea that there are two ways, two roads, two paths that you can follow. You can follow one that leads to good, one that leads to evil. The one that leads to good is hard; the one that leads to evil is easy. But you find this in Proverbs, you find this in other Jewish wisdom literature, you find this in early Christian literature like the Didache: it's all over the place.

The sort of angle of the testament of Asher that's a little bit interesting is that it kind of addresses Thrasymachus from Plato's Republic in that it talks about how, faced with those two ways of living their life, what most people actually want to do and tend to do is they want to pursue evil but they want to look good. They want to look like they're a good person while they're pursuing evil: have their cake and eat it, too.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, hypocrisy.

Fr. Stephen: Of course, big problem with that, as the testament of Asher points out, is that you can trick people with that; you can't trick God with that, because God knows what's in your heart, and so that duplicity isn't going to work. He also talks a little bit about how goodness always has to be, or is always open and genuine, in the sense that someone can lie and hide— people will try to lie and hide evil, so they'll do evil and pretend to be good, but you don't see anyone doing good and pretending to be evil. You shouldn't be looking for— There is nowhere down the evil path where you will find anything good or true. You may, trying to walk the good path, end up falling into error, falling into sin, because of your struggles in following that path, but the opposite isn't true. Therefore there is no reason to ever go down that road. He's advising his sons and his descendants. It's not like going down the path of evil and sin is a mixed bag, that you can maybe find something interesting over there.

And so that's the short little testament of Asher. And then you come to the testament of Joseph.

Fr. Andrew: All right! Now we're getting to something really good.

Fr. Stephen: Joseph is, of course, an interesting figure—we've already alluded to this—because of course a third of the book of Genesis is the story of Joseph.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's probably one of the longest, if not the longest, biographies we get in the Scripture, I think.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Maybe David, but, yeah. So Joseph, right, massive! A third of the book of Genesis! And if you're starting at the beginning of the Bible, or even just the beginning of the Torah and reading through it, you would assume, coming off the last page of Genesis— because you kind of have— The person you're following is the line of the promise: you go from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob. And then you kind of go to Joseph for a third of the book of Genesis. But then as you go forward into the Hebrew— the rest of the Torah and then the Hebrew Bible, like Ephraim, Manasseh—not a lot good going on there, and then they just disappear to the Assyrians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Joseph doesn't end up being… He's not an ancestor of the Messiah.

Fr. Stephen: Judah, Levi, these become the important tribes, but Judah and Levi, the people, are not the focus of a third of the book of Genesis. This, to me, is one of the best arguments—and I have heard no good counter-argument—for the antiquity of the book of Genesis at least within the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because if you're a later writer trying to establish the glory of your line, you don't spend a third of your primary book focusing on a guy that you're not even descended from.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, conversely, if Ephraim was essentially already gone, why would you have and be preserving and presenting as so important these Joseph traditions? So to me that's kind of a good strong argument that I've never heard a good counter-argument to, that Genesis has to be older than the divided kingdom, in something like its current form, which may not sound like a big deal, but trust me: Old Testament studies, that's a wild claim. But again, give me a good counter-argument to that.

But so Joseph obviously, very important in the Torah, the Torah very important to the author of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, but at the same time he's writing at the beginning of the second century BC where Ephraim is long gone. We've seen in the testament of Naphtali—which may not be written by the same person who wrote the testament of Joseph; may very well not be—that he does have a— well, the text as a whole has a destiny in mind for the Ephraimites and the rest of the northern kingdom. It's still— Joseph is not the lead figure in that. Even within that vision in the testament of Naphtali, it's Levi and Judah who are the heads, whom Joseph and the rest of the northern kingdom, their Gentile "descendants" come into fellowship with, that brings about their salvation, not Joseph himself. Joseph isn't the key figure.

Joseph here in the testament is primarily— Well, first of all, there's sort of two pieces to it. The first piece is Joseph is used to represent the virtue of chastity, not just chastity within marriage but chastity in the broader sense, and that's focusing on the episode between him and Potiphar's wife, who attempted to seduce him in the book of Genesis, and he resisted and ended up thrown in prison because of it after she claimed he raped her.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I didn't put it in the notes, but it actually gives a name for her in this text, and of course in Genesis she's not named; she's just called Potiphar's wife.

Fr. Stephen: It's also dramatized here in the testament of Joseph, where she's doing all this stuff—threatening to kill herself and doing all this stuff to try to get him to sleep with her, but [he] won't do it. So there's that element of chastity, preserving chastity. Fr. Andrew referenced the Great Canon of St. Andrew earlier. You can see this emphasis on the episode with Joseph and Potiphar's wife there. You can see it in some of the hymns about Joseph in Bridegroom Matins in Holy Week, still fresh in my brain because we did it so recently: this whole idea of Joseph as this representative of chastity in that case. There's also another reminder about seeking revenge, which Joseph of course famously did not do.

But probably the other and more major, more interesting to a lot of people, part of the testament of Joseph is there's another apocalyptic session. Instead of a vision with him, it's a dream that he has, which is kind of appropriate, because, remember, Joseph is all about interpreting dreams in Genesis.

Fr. Andrew: Right, he's the big dreamer.

Fr. Stephen: So he has this dream, and this is a dream about the Messiah who is going to come. Now, this is one of those interesting textual places because there's an Aramaic version and there's a Greek version that we have. We have both, the whole text, for the testament of Joseph. The dream in particular— So this dream, we're going to see there's a bunch more on-the-nose sounding kind of things about the Messiah that scholars are going to want to say are Christian interpolations. But here's the problem: the Aramaic version, in particular of the dream, is longer than the Greek version; the Greek version is shorter. So when the Greek version is shorter and they're arguing that the Greek version is the Christian version where they added things, your antennae should go up. You should say, "Wait a second! Added things? It's shorter!" And so you might ask, then: Okay, so if your hypothesis is the Greek version is the Christian version, and it's way shorter, then let's look at the stuff that gets left out. Is there a reason why Christians would have left out that stuff that gets left out? Because certainly, if the stuff that got left out was stuff that didn't match up with Christianity, and then the Greek version just kept the stuff that did match up with Christianity, you might have a case. But guess what? It doesn't! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It's not an easy— It just doesn't work out.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. The stuff in the Aramaic version that gets left out in the Greek version not only doesn't have any relationship to Christianity detectable whatsoever but is also stuff that's found in the other testaments, in the Greek versions. It's the same kind of material. So if you're going to say the Greek version is the Christian version, why would they cut it out here and not cut it out in those other places? So it's very clear that the Greek version is not a Christian version per se; it's just a Greek translation. It's just a Greek version.

So that already is a strike against a shorter Greek version, which is a strike against the idea that Christians added things. It's not a particularly Christian version, but we'll get to the particulars here in a minute.

Most of the dream is similar to something in the book of Enoch that we'll talk about at some future point in more detail, but there's a section of the book of Enoch, of 1 Enoch, that has what's called the Animal Apocalypse, which is not what used to happen when I would go to the Popeye's buffet here in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I was going to say, I think it would make a great title for a limited-run comic book series: Animal Apocalypse!

Fr. Stephen: Oh, I was thinking just a buffet: the Animal Apocalypse. Some kind of carnivore diet buffet. But the Animal Apocalypse—again, this is "apocalypse" in the sense of revelation—it's called the Animal Apocalypse because, in the book of Enoch, it sort of retells the history of Israel, but with all of the biblical characters portrayed as different animals. C.S. Lewis, not an original idea in his life! But anyway.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, so? That's not a writer's—

Fr. Stephen: That's just, like, your opinion, man!

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly! It's just, like, your theologoumenon, man!

Fr. Stephen: So you have something like that in this dream that Joseph has, where he gives sort of a brief history with people presented as animals. But this one just runs from the exile to the Hasmoneans, meaning the kings post-Maccabean Revolt to his day. So it's just covering a couple hundred years there. And this is one of the ways we pegged down when it was written, because it kind of goes up to the then-current day.

But the more interesting parts that are included here, which again are thought to be interpretations… The first one, of course, it says that the Messiah is going to be born of a virgin from the tribe of Judah.

Fr. Andrew: What? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So immediately people say, "Ohh, Christians added that! Christians added that; that couldn't be in a pre-Christian text, virgin birth! It's not like that same word was used in Isaiah 7. Oh, wait. It was. It was—never mind! Never mind." [Laughter] But this is what we're dealing with here, people. This is what we're dealing with here, people. This is why, when people come out and say, "Well, Fr. Stephen says this, but Old Testament scholarship says XYZ," as if they can speak for Old Testament scholarship—I laugh them to scorn, because this is the level of thing we're dealing with. This says that the Messiah is going to be born of a virgin; that's a Christian idea: that must have been added, even though it's just using the exact same Greek as Isaiah 7.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Man.

Fr. Stephen: Which they would agree is pre-Christian. This is why, in order to get a PhD, in this country or any other, you should have to take a logic course. Just one. It could be an undergrad level logic course, I don't care. You need to take one.

In sort of the drama of the Messiah coming— So it goes up to the then-present day and then talks about the Messiah coming. The Messiah is presented as a lamb who does battle with and defeats a bunch of reptiles and creeping things. It's important that he doesn't do battle with— He doesn't do battle with the animals that represent the other nations. It's not the Messiah versus the Gentiles; it's the Messiah versus the reptiles and creeping things that represent the evil spirits who are motivating and provoking the nations. And then ultimately those nations, again—once again, in keeping with what we've already seen—find salvation through Levi and Judah.

But now are you ready for the most on-the-nose piece?

Fr. Andrew: I'm ready.

Fr. Stephen: The Greek of Testament of Joseph 19:11 says—refers to the Messiah as—"the lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world."

Fr. Andrew: What!? That's got to be an interpolation!

Fr. Stephen: That's got to be! That's got to be!

Fr. Andrew: But that's straight out of—

Fr. Stephen: St. John's gospel.

Fr. Andrew: —the gospel of John! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Or is it?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that's got to be, right? Unless we think about this for a second, because we had a logic class once in our life. When St. John the Baptist says that in St. John's gospel—he says, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world"—what is he doing? He's identifying Jesus as the Messiah. He points at Jesus, he says that, everyone understands—everyone who hears that understands that he's identifying Jesus as the Messiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and in that line, "the lamb of God," okay, that's Passover stuff, "takes away the sin of the world," that's Day of Atonement stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Right, smooshed together.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, he's just using stuff from the Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But he says that, and they all understand: that means he's the Messiah. Would they have all understood that if he'd just made it up on the spot?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. Yeah, he's making a reference.

Fr. Stephen: Would they? Especially since he's mish-mashing Passover and Day of Atonement stuff?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, these are pretty clear—

Fr. Stephen: He points to this Person, says, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world," and they don't all stand there and say, "Wait, what? He's the Lamb of God in what sense? What does that mean? Something about Passover? He's going to take away the sins of the world? How? What does that mean?" Why do they all immediately know that means the Messiah? Could be—let me just throw this out here: Occam's razor—that was symbolism that had already been applied to the Jewish Messiah in different places, one of them being here in the testament of Joseph.

And if there were already texts like this that were doing things with animal symbolism and that kind of thing— Let's suppose that this was originally there in the pre-Christian document, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. So this was symbolism that people used, this was a way that people had talked about the Messiah before—then as soon as St. John did that, everyone would go: "Oh! He's saying that Person is the Messiah."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it wouldn't be effective rhetoric if no one knew what he meant.

Fr. Stephen: And lo and behold, what we would expect if this was original and pre-Christian is exactly what happens in St. John's gospel. So again, why would you want to argue that this is [not] pre-Christian? It's just proceeding from a presupposition; it's proceeding from this presupposition that Christianity is this whole new set of ideas that came from nowhere, fell out of the sky yet still isn't true, in the first century, with no connection to any pre-existing religion, which makes no sense. If you wanted to argue it literally fell out of the sky in the first century and had no precedence in human religion, and you believed it was true and came directly from God, that would at least make sense. But it both evolved and didn't evolve from pre-existing religious traditions, and is both not supernatural at all but also completely disconnected and… And you find yourself in this bizarre position. You don't have to be. Even if you're an atheist, you don't have to do that much work, man. Just say: Yeah, that was a Jewish way of talking about the Messiah. Yeah, it shows up in the New Testament. And, you know, maybe you don't believe it's true. Is that so hard? Is that really so rough? Do we have to contort history? Do we have to do all this legerdemain about texts and dividing them up and which line is from when? No, you don't! You can say, you know: say you don't believe it! End of that rant.

Okay. Last but not least, the testament of Benjamin, number twelve.

Fr. Andrew: All right, the caboose.

Fr. Stephen: One thing that's unique about the testament of Benjamin is that, as we've seen most of these are sort of directly connecting the person, the son of Jacob, and their descendants in various ways. Dan's descendants are all rotten, so Dan is presented as rotten. The testament of Benjamin, on the other hand, actually wants to disambiguate between the person, Benjamin, the son of Jacob, and his descendants. That's because there's a certain ambivalence about his descendants.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, one of them being Saul.

Fr. Stephen: So there's an ambivalence about his descendants. So it's not as clear-cut as: his descendants are all bad. He's going to be presented as having a bunch of bad descendants but also some other descendants who are good descendants, and those good descendants are going to be seen to be the ones who actually take after Benjamin, their father.

You see this ambivalence in the way Benjamin the person is treated in Genesis, where he's sort of this good kid whom everybody loves, especially his father maybe a little too much at the expense of his brothers, but he is this good kid. But then in Genesis 49 in the testament of Jacob, he's like this ravening wolf. You're like: Oh! Time out! This is weird… And that's describing— The Benjamites are going to cause a civil war in Israel in the book of Judges; Saul is going to be from the tribe of Benjamin, and it's going to be Judah that ends up with the kingship. So you've got this problematic element of the Benjamites, plus they're all left-handed, which is sinister. Then on the other hand, Benjamin as a tribe stays with Judah when the other tribes break away. It sort of remains faithful—and survives: goes into exile with Judah, comes back with Judah. So there's this ambivalence.

Within the text of the testament of Benjamin, there's sort of this analogy made between Benjamin's relationship with Joseph, brothers of the same mother— their relationship and the kingdom being taken from Israel, because it's sort of when Joseph becomes separated from Benjamin, he goes off and becomes a king. In the same way, at the time of the exile, the kingdom was taken away from Judah, but with the hope, then, that just like Benjamin and Joseph were reunited, that there is this restoration and reunion coming.

Like the last couple testaments we talked about, then at the testament of Benjamin there's this sort of final prophecy element. This one, interestingly, the Greek is longer and the Aramaic is shorter, so it's the opposite of the testament of Joseph. This goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. There's not a clear rhyme or reason to the languages. If the Aramaic was across-the-board shorter, everybody would say, "Oh, it came first and then the Greek," or vice-versa, but it's not. It's weirder than that; it's more complicated than that.

But in this prophecy—here we go again—it talks about the Messiah, who's referred to as spotless, about him being seized by lawless men, about him dying for impious men. Even crazier, in the Greek version, they use the phrase "lamb of God" and "savior of the world."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, just as a point, "savior of the world" is not— I mean, it gets used of course in the gospels, but Caesar Augustus uses it to refer to himself. This is not some uniquely Christian or even uniquely biblical title.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and of course we talked about "lamb of God" just now already. And it talks about how the blood of the new covenant is going to save Israel and the nations by purifying them from the works of Belial. We talked about Belial before. The yoke was on the lawless one, the devil. The blood is going to purify, purge away the works of the devil, set them free. Oh, "blood of the new covenant." So again, clearly: "All this is stuff that Christians added in the Greek—and look, the Greek's longer this time!"

Fr. Andrew: Okay. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: [Sigh] So we already had in the previous testament the Messiah depicted as a Passover lamb. What was one of the qualities that the lamb had to have to be the Passover lamb? It had to be spotless. So referring to the Messiah as spotless is just a continuation of that symbolism. "Seized by lawless men," "dying for impious men": this whole testament has been a meditation on the relationship between Benjamin and Joseph. What happened to Joseph? Lawless men seized him, tried to kill him, sold him into slavery. So this is just taking part of the story of Joseph and applying it to the Messiah. Again, nothing weird or particularly Christian about that. "The blood of the new covenant": there's blood of the old covenant, right? Why wouldn't there be blood of the new covenant? Why is that only a Christian idea? The idea of blood purifying things, again, Day of Atonement, Torah idea, not a purely Christian idea per se. And the idea of being purified from the works of Belial, I have bad news for you: that's all over the book of Enoch, and 2 Enoch, and the Apocalypse of Abraham, and about five other Second Temple Jewish texts.

You're not going to be able to argue that all of those are Christian interpolations, because we have copies of those texts from Qumran and such that never touched Christian hands. So, no, none of this stuff is Christian interpolations. And for all the reasons I said in the previous rant, it's ridiculous to try and argue so. Just say: Yes, Christians made use of pre-existing Jewish ideas, and they applied them to Jesus of Nazareth who they believed to be the Messiah because they believed he rose from the dead. You don't believe that, so you disagree. Fine, whatever, move on with your life. [Laughter] Yeah.

So the ultimate kind of message, then, of the testament of Benjamin is— And this kind of sets it up at the antipode to the testament of Simeon, remember, who was envious of all these things about Joseph, and that led to hatred, whereas Benjamin loves everything about his brother Joseph and so is arguing rather than hating someone for those you should seek to emulate those qualities, to be more like Joseph. And this is an important example of holding up a saint and their life as something for emulation and devotion, which of course is going to become a commonplace of Christian literature.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. Well, we made it through all twelve. Good job. Some of my take-aways from this little walk through the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: Obviously, there's a lot more that could be said. There's a lot of other details that are in those texts. It's worth reading them. None of them are really long. I mean, we mentioned some are longer, some are shorter, but none of them are really long. You could read the whole thing within, I don't know, maybe an hour, probably, I think, if you read all of it.

But the details that you picked, Father, I think serve a really important purpose, which is that they show this continuity between the religion of ancient Israel and the religion of the followers of Jesus Christ; and that really they are not two separate religions, even, so maybe "continuity" isn't even really the right word. It's just simply the same religion. It's simply the same one thing, but that certain events happen, namely, that the Messiah comes. He dies and rises from the dead. And so then what was always believed about the messianic age now has been inaugurated, so it's not some other religion with some other theology and whatever. It's simply that: Oh, this has happened now, so now this is what we do.

I think that this is important for a bunch of reasons. One of the reasons is that the only way to really understand the New Testament correctly and Christian theology correctly is within the context of everything that has come before it. We have this idea sometimes that, okay, there was all this Old Testament stuff, and then Jesus came and he liberated us from all of that. I've had people literally say that to me, especially when we talk about the Old Testament at all. People are like: "But didn't Christ come to save us from that?" I'm like: "Wait a minute! Hold on a second! He's the Law-giver! He's the one who gave the Torah. Why would he set that whole thing up and then say, 'Ha ha ha ha, psych! Some new religion now!'?" That's not at all what he came to do, and of course we talked about that in some detail when we talked about this question about fulfilling the Law rather than abolishing it, a few episodes ago. So there's that. A correct understanding of Christianity requires a full understanding of the Torah and of all the Old Testament.

But also, on a very practical level—not that I don't think anything I just said was not practical, but to bring it down to an even finer level—is that I think that the way that we think about the New Testament and its relationship to the Old Testament, and often the way that we disconnect them—and maybe you don't believe that you should do that, but at least English-speaking culture is saturated with that idea: out with the old, in with the new— This creates a habit of thought, a habit of speech, of discussion, in which we look at things in isolation from their pretty obvious context. I mean, we've mentioned that a bunch of times in terms of scholarly mistakes in this episode, like, oh, saying the Messiah would be born of a virgin, that's crazy and must be some kind of Christian interpolation—but it's right there in Isaiah! It's right there! The Bible, have you read it?

The problem there is to look at stuff in isolation, and then with a whole bunch of assumptions, like: These are Christian things to say, these are Jewish things to say, and never the twain shall meet. I'm sorry, that's not how this thing works! But even apart from the question of— from explicitly theological issues like this, this habit of mind that we have, of decontextualizing everything— There are certain cases in which that is— that can be useful, to isolate a thing and to focus only on that one thing, fine. But for most things in life, it's not. It's not! And I don't mean it just in terms of our theological understanding, but I also mean it in terms of practical, day-to-day living.

I'll give you a great example. We just went through Lent and Holy Week and so forth, and there are people that will take on, say, fasting, for instance, in some way, but then don't also increase or alter their private prayer and then their corporate prayer together with the Church. So they do this one thing in fasting and say, "I'm doing Lent." Well, if you can't— If you don't have the ability to increase your prayer for some reason, especially corporate prayer—maybe your parish doesn't have those services or you live a long way away, whatever—fine. But there are people who do it in a kind of a legalistic way, like: "I'm doing it, and this is correct," but they're doing it in isolation from the whole context of what it means to be a Christian. Or let's say they're working on various ministries of taking care of things in the Church, but they're not engaged in any forms of almsgiving; they're not being charitable. These things go together. They form part of a seamless garment.

But also even just interpersonal relationships. Think about how many times you have an argument with someone that you love, I hope— you have an argument where you fixate on what that person said or you didn't say… I read recently if you really want to have a three- or four-hour argument in which nothing good is accomplished and everybody goes to bed really angry at each other, just say these magic words: "That's not what I said," and you're sure to get there. [Laughter] Take you right there.

But what does that habit of thought all about? It's all about isolating what you said or what the other person said in trying to render judgment on its correctness or falsity or whatever, and missing the point of the whole thing, which is that other person and the love that you supposedly have for them. When you seek to justify yourself in isolation from trying to have a justified situation, a justified relationship, then you just destroy it. Just as you look at different parts of Scripture in isolation or elements of Orthodox tradition in isolation, you destroy it. You rip apart the seamless garment. It's got to all go together. Even humans are whole persons. You can't just fixate on this one thing or this one other thing, or "You don't love me if you do XYZ," meanwhile the person is slaving and self-sacrificing in so many other ways, but "You don't X, Y, and Z, therefore you don't love me." Well, hello: you're the one supposed to be loving. Let God take care of that other person and what they're supposed to be doing. You do what you're supposed to be doing.

So when these things are brought together and they're no longer handled in isolation, then there's not just the whole picture that emerges so you can see clearly, but definitely that, but also there is a wholeness of life, and there is the ability to give each other slack. And there is wisdom that we have, like the wisdom that comes from almsgiving helps us to correctly administer the property of our homes and of our churches. If you're not engaged in almsgiving, you're not going to have the wisdom to do that stuff well. A good example is there are parish councils that basically function like building maintenance societies, and they're not engaged in ministry; they just take care of a building. I mean, it's important to take care of a building, but if there's not this almsgiving wisdom that's required, then it's not going to work well. Or if, let's say, people taking care of the building are not really engaged in worship, that they are taking care of a building that they don't even use for its purpose! I mean, you can imagine a hundred different ways that this gets applied.

I think— I'm not going to say that this sort of sola scriptura mentality, and even this "law versus gospel" mentality—however you want to split it apart, people!—that that's the origin of all these habits of thought, but they sure do all go together. And so I think that one of the things that sets up texts like the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs does for us is it makes us set aside a lot of our assumptions and categories that are not really applicable, and see: Wait a minute. Wait a minute! This all connects. It's really one thing. That even though texts like this—we don't treat it as Scripture; we don't regard it as being inspired in the same way that the Torah and the prophets and the apostles and so on and so forth are, nonetheless, it shows that this is what the people of this time and place believed—and, wow, it connects in both directions.

That's my biggest take-away from all of that. Not just to learn this thing and to be amazed at how amazing it is that it all sticks together, although that's cool—that's great, the beginning of that sense of wonder is a great place to start—but to apply it within our own lives, and not to treat things in isolation, to realize that they're all related. I'm related to my family, to my friends, to my community. I'm related to all of them, and they, together, the relationship that we have with each other is what— is who we are. And that we can't dissect, because when you dissect, then you kill. So that's what I have to say about all that.

Fr. Stephen: So Christianity is a religion, not a relationship. It is true that the Church is the bride of Christ. It is true that often the life of the world to come is portrayed in Scripture as the wedding-supper of the Lamb. That does not mean that our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ, is your boyfriend. What that concretely means is that Christianity, as a religion, has a history; it constitutes a tradition. There's a way of living contained within it; there's a way of being in the world contained within it. There are teachings that are contained within it. There are traditions and ways of doing things that are contained within it, and these are not sort of individually up for grabs. And I know we have a lot of listeners who at various points in their life were taught—maybe even taught that it was mandatory—that they build their own Christianity, that what was really important was their relationship, was that they loved Jesus—and it's good. I want everyone to love Jesus; it's good to love Jesus. But that that's what's really important, and that everything else, it is your duty to sort of figure out yourself.

So you look at all these individual issues—what is and isn't a sin, this or that theological point, this or that practice—you read some Bible verses, you listen to some people speaking, you read some books maybe, and you make your decision: "Oh, here's where I stand on this. Here's where I stand on this; this is what I'm going to do." And so you sort of shape your own way of life with some input from some Christian people and some Christian texts and some input from the Scriptures; you choose all these things. You try to keep out of your head the fact that the stakes are kind of high and if you don't do this right you could end up going to hell or something, depending on where you come down on the existence of hell. And you form this thing that you just assert is Christianity.

But here's the thing. That thing you made can't do what Christianity does, because what Christianity does, by existing in this full-orbed way—as a full tradition, as a way of life and a way of being and a way of seeing things—what it does is it changes and it transforms people. And if I mold Christianity around myself, around my own thoughts and feelings and ideas and what I accept and what I am persuaded by—if I mold it around me, then it can't mold me in return, and it is ideally suited to me remaining the same. That's not salvation: remaining the same.

In order to be molded and shaped, we need to be scraped at, bent, even maybe broken and put back together. That's how you get changed and transformed. The most important parts of the Christian tradition, the most important parts of Christianity, are the ones that seem the most wrong to you. The most important Scriptures for you to read and meditate upon are the ones you don't like, are the ones that you find confusing and upsetting, are the ones that tell you that something you don't want to think is a sin is a sin, are the ones that tell you that you need to do something that you don't want to do. Those are the most important ones, and those are the first ones out the door if we don't accept the Christian tradition as it has historically existed, as it has come down to us: the whole body, all the writings, not just the Scriptures, not just the things we want to decide are Scriptures, all of the teachings, all of the ideas, all of the thoughts, the whole Tradition.

And that is expressed, again, not just in this intellectual sense, either. This is an actual living thing of actually living your life and actually living your life publicly and in a community somewhere, because a community, an actual community, an actual parish, an actual church, has a very important role in this, in you being shaped, in you being changed, in you being transformed. And the most important people to that, again, are the people in that parish whom you like the least, whom you get along with the worst, whom you most don't want to spend time with, because they're the ones who are going to scrap at you; they're the ones who are going to make you bend; they're the ones who may break you at a certain point and you have to be put back together; they're the ones who are hardest to love, so they'll teach you what love is; they're the ones who are hardest to be joyful around, so they'll teach you what joy is; they're the ones whom it's hardest to have peace around, so they'll teach you what peace is.

That means not only do you [not] get to pick your Christianity, you really shouldn't even try to pick your parish. You should go to the closest one, even if they do everything in a foreign language, even if the people there aren't welcoming and don't roll out a red carpet for you. I don't see anywhere in the Scriptures or anywhere in our Tradition that says that a Christian is entitled to have everyone in their parish to be nice to them or like them at all. That's certainly not St. Paul's experience when he traveled around going to different Christian communities: everyone just rolled out their red carpet and loved him and thought he was the best. He didn't say, "Well, you guys are lousy Christians. I'm going to go someplace where I'm welcome and where they like me." St. Paul understood that he needed to be transformed, and he understood that all the hardships he went through helped do that.

So all this is to say, when we're talking about texts like this, texts that are part of the Christian Tradition—important parts, in the case of the text we talked about tonight, very important parts to the Christian Tradition—the fact that— not so much the fact that people don't know about them, but there's so many people out there who don't care about them, who would want to argue that they're irrelevant, who want to argue that they're not important, because they've formed for themselves a Christianity in which that's true—shows the danger, the danger that we're in, of a world where you can completely divorce yourself from the Christian Tradition and think and claim and insist that you're a Christian nonetheless—how dangerous that is for people, how easily that can lead you down the road you don't want to go down, not the road that leads to Christ.

So I want to encourage everyone listening, as we approach Christianity, the Christian religion, which is the way in which we approach Christ himself, the Jesus whom we love— It's not a question of what we can or want to or feel like we can't or won't accept about the Christian Tradition; it's a question of: How do I locate myself within it? How do I interface within it? Where do I find it? Where do I plug into it? so that I can be changed in such a way that maybe even some of those parts that I didn't like or hated before I now love, because I have a better understanding of who Christ is, and that allows me to love Jesus even more.

Fr. Andrew: Amen, amen. Well, that's our show for tonight. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn't happen to call into us live, we'd still like to hear from you. You can email us [at] lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can send us a message us on our Facebook page; you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits. If you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or especially you need need help finding a parish, head over to OrthodoxIntro.org.

Fr. Stephen: And 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, except this month when it will be the fifth Thursday instead of the fourth, but there's something coming on the fourth, too. It'll be interesting. "And, you know, life was looking up for me when I left home; it seems like yesterday."

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you. Good night. Christ is risen! God bless you all.