Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Greetings, giant-killers, dragon-slayers, mashers of monsters—Christ is risen! He truly is risen, although when you hear this episode, it'll be the Ascension, actually.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Yeah, you psyched yourself out on that one.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know! But it's "Christ is risen" where we are, here in the past. You are listening—

Fr. Stephen: He'll still be risen on Thursday.

Fr. Andrew: That is true! That is true—and ascended. You are listening—

Fr. Stephen: That is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] True! It's the kind that endears you to all your friends and family, when you're technically correct. Yeah. And that's how you know you're listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, the Very Reverend Dr.—almost-double doctor, multi-master—Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, out there in the swamp, and I'm here from the much drier and much less humid Emmaus, Pennsylvania. My name is Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, and we're not live today! This is a pre-recorded episode, as already referenced, because Fr. Stephen is traveling when this one airs. In fact, this is going to be pre-record month here in 2024, because for the second episode of June I'm going to be traveling. You know, we're not abandoning you. We're preparing for it.

Fr. Stephen: There is an outside chance I will actually be live on YouTube doing something else while this is airing.

Fr. Andrew: That could be fun. That almost feels like cheating.

Fr. Stephen: I am not going to look at the comparative streams, because I refuse to believe that I am better than me.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I feel like there's a William Shatner reference in here somewhere, but it's just not coming to me. Oh! Oh, oh, there it is. Yeah, mirror universe. Audience, work on the joke throughout the episode. All right, so in this episode we're continuing to talk about apocryphal Second Temple Jewish texts, and this time we're talking about the Ascension of Isaiah and the Assumption of Moses—don't mix them up! These texts straddle the time of the birth of Christ and very much blur the conventional distinctions a lot of people have in their heads between Jewish and Christian texts. For those of you who have listened to this podcast for a long time, these texts will include some elements which we have mentioned many times, so it should be a lot of fun. But even if this is your very first episode—because we know for a lot of people, for every episode, some episode is their first episode—this episode should still be fascinating, I think. So you don't have to have listened for a long time in order to get this one.

So this is actually the Enoch episode finally, right?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: Oh. That means we still have to do this show for a while, I guess. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Still forthcoming.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, and even fifth-coming.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it might worry people. When the first Enoch episode actually comes out, people will probably panic thinking it's the last episode.

Fr. Andrew: It'll be a sign of the apocalypse, but this is a sign—

Fr. Stephen: And maybe it will be. It could end up being the last episode.

Fr. Andrew: This is an apocalyptic episode. This is an episode about apocalypse as well, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Not like the Egyptian mutant dude.

Fr. Andrew: No! [Laughter] You know, the movie—

Fr. Stephen: There are podcasts about that.

Fr. Andrew: The movie version was very disappointing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, especially since Oscar Isaac is a good actor, not that you could tell it was him, but, yes, that was the lamest En Sabah Nur. But I have to say he is not the best X-Men villain in the first place.

Fr. Andrew: Ho! Who, Apocalypse? No.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Like, I mean, he has an awesome backstory and stuff and everything—

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: —and he has his four horsemen who are all cool and all—

Fr. Andrew: Very cool.

Fr. Stephen: —but I don't know. I may be the only one who, back in the day, was reading Walt and Weezie Simonson's X-Factor when they were introducing him, and he was like this lurking evil in the background.

Fr. Andrew: I remember that!

Fr. Stephen: His name is Apocalypse, and they've set up all this stuff: this guy's going to be super awesome and everything, and then they finally go to fight him—and he turns his fists into giant blue mallets.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, man, I've blocked that out!

Fr. Stephen: And it's like...

Fr. Andrew: Come on, this is Sandman-level stuff, but Sandman did it better.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes! Like, come on! This is X-Men, dude. We already had Magneto.

Fr. Andrew: Right, who is the greatest X-Men villain of all time, period.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. But one of the greatest villains of all time, and then, oh, here's going to be the new big-bad, and it's, you know, Plastic Man? I don't know.

Fr. Andrew: Man, you're bumming me out here at the beginning of the episode.

Fr. Stephen: Ancient Plastic Man?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes. But this is an apocalyptic episode! Things will be revealed.

Fr. Stephen: But at least he looked better than Mister Sinister, who kind of looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger cosplaying as Robert Smith from The Cure. [Laughter] Anyway. We're slightly off-topic.

Fr. Andrew: I think this is the second episode in a row where we've led off with Marvel comics references.

Fr. Stephen: With X-Men in particular.

Fr. Andrew: With X-Men in particular, yeah. Well, it kind of makes you—

Fr. Stephen: X-Men '97 just came out. Nostalgia craze.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, it kind of makes you wonder whether a lot of these classic X-Men writers were reading Second Temple Jewish literature and that's where they're getting all their ideas from.

Fr. Stephen: Pretty sure Chris Claremont never read any Second Temple Jewish literature.

Fr. Andrew: Mm. Chris Claremont—is he still living?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: If you're listening, Chris, write in!

Fr. Stephen: He's not. [laughter]

Fr. Andrew: We want to hear from you! What do you think about the book of Jubilees? Is that where you got—? I mean, come on, man.

Fr. Stephen: So I have met a ton of classic comic creators. The only one who was ever rude to me in person was Chris Claremont.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: I'm not going to tell the whole story here, because that's way off-topic, but he's the only one who was ever rude to me.

Fr. Andrew: Maybe I'll get you to do that someday when you appear on my YouTube channel.

Fr. Stephen: Maybe.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! We can talk about whatever we want there. Well, here, too, but… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I met him a couple of times. One time he was just kind of abrupt and curt with me, and I'm Dutch so I'm used to that. The other time he was actually rude.

Fr. Andrew: Especially because half the guys who are Dutch are named Kurt anyway. Just putting that there.

Fr. Stephen: There's more Berts than Kurts, I think, in the Netherlands. Dutch listeners, let us know!

Fr. Andrew: Write in!

Fr. Stephen: This is the problem with pre-tapes. We feel no sense of urgency.

Fr. Andrew: I know, I know! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because we're not live.

Fr. Andrew: I guess Trudi's looking somewhere in the background in the studio, like putting on her headphones once in a while: "Oh, they're still going."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we hear a foot tapping or something.

Fr. Andrew: Bobby wanders by. When am I going to get to use that line? [Laughter] So what are we talking about again? Ascensions? Assumptions?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Hints and allegations?

Fr. Stephen: All of the above.

Fr. Andrew: Incidents and accidents.

Fr. Stephen: All of the above. So we want to make some— Here at the beginning we want to make some distinctions in terms of this overall area. What, for example, is the difference between an ascension and an assumption?

Fr. Andrew: You can make an assumption but you can't just make an ascension. It's grammatical, right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, you could make an ascension.

Fr. Andrew: You could do an ascension.

Fr. Stephen: You do that by ascending.

Fr. Andrew: You ascend, but I don't think you make an ascension. That's not the word. You could say, "I'm going to do an ascension"? See, that's a little awkward. I don't know. You have to just say, "I ascend."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but then after you've done that, you can refer to your ascension.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Trying to get me on a technicality here, and it's not working.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Because the best kind of correct is technically correct!

Fr. Stephen: Technically correct, yes! Ascensions and assumptions are two different related things. When we talk about an ascension, we're talking about a bodily ascent, à la, in the Old Testament, Enoch and Elijah.

Fr. Andrew: So these guys are—key distinction—still alive.

Fr. Stephen: Still alive, bodily taken up into heaven. Now, we didn't include Christ in that. We will be talking about Christ's ascension actually at a certain point later on.

Fr. Andrew: Which is good!

Fr. Stephen: A little bit here.

Fr. Andrew: This episode will air on the feast of the Ascension, so.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But that goes sort of way beyond what happens with Enoch and Elijah, and we did a whole episode about it. [Laughter] You can go and look that one up if you want to hear us go on and on about that one in particular, but here we're talking about humans, regular humans. So that's a bodily, still living, ascending into heaven, Enoch and Elijah are examples.

And then there are assumptions. When we talk about an assumption, like the assumption of Moses that we're talking about tonight, we're talking about someone who has died and then their body is taken up into heaven. So, in a way, an assumption is sort of an early resurrection, meaning their body, since it's being taken up, is reunited with their soul, sort of in advance of the general bodily resurrection of everyone. And so, of course, there's a longstanding tradition that we're going to talk about tonight about the assumption of Moses that is sort of recorded in the text that we call the Assumption of Moses. We'll get more into that. And there is of course also that tradition regarding the Theotokos within the Church, that, after her death, her body was assumed into heaven, the Mother of Christ, who is also the Mother of God—don't come at me with your Nestorian nonsense.

Fr. Andrew: Because Christ is God, you guys.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So these are sort of slightly different. One is they're still alive, taken up into heaven; the other is a person dies and then their body is taken up, meaning taken up and reunited with them. So the question— The key distinction is: Has the person died or not? We're not going to spend a ton of time, because it's not totally germane to the two texts that we're talking about tonight, talking about Enoch and Elijah in detail. We have in the past talked in more detail about them and their ascents to heaven, especially in our episodes about saints. And we'll be coming back to, obviously, Enoch, maybe less obviously to folks, Elijah, later on as we continue this series on and off talking about Second Temple texts, because, as you know, Enoch has a whole number of them named after him, and a whole genre of literature named after him. But there's also an Apocalypse of Elijah, for example!

And that sort of leads into what we more want to talk about. If you want to read— I mean, those texts— Genesis 5:21-24 talks about Enoch's being taken up into heaven, and 2 Kings 2 (or 4 Kingdoms 2) 1-14 talks about Elijah. But in terms of how those ascents sort of come to function in terms of later Jewish and Christian tradition and Second Temple Jewish literature, those ascents are seen as occasions for apocalyptic visions.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because, if you think about it, here's a person who's being taken up into heaven, it's a very natural question: "So… What did you see while you were there?" [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and as we've talked about, "apocalyptic" does not mean end of the world, per se.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just unveiling.

Fr. Stephen: It means a revelation, something is revealed, something is unveiled. And so if they're going up into heaven, not only are they seeing what's in heaven in the place where they go and wherever else they go on some kind of cosmic journey, but they're also seeing—and this is kind of important for the texts we're talking about tonight again, as it has been for some of the other ones we talked about—they're also seeing the earth and what's going on on the earth and the history of the earth from that perspective.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, from the perspective of heaven, like you can see this world in a different way from that point of view.

Fr. Stephen: And so all apocalyptic literature, by definition, involves someone taking that kind of journey. When you have these two figures from the Hebrew Scriptures who we're told were taken up into heaven, that then presents this good opportunity for apocalyptic literature to be composed and become attached to those figures. This also sets up, from the perspective of later literature, the idea that, well, since they didn't die—they were just sort of taken up into heaven—this then is seen to present the opportunity that they could come back; they could reappear.

So, for example, with Enoch, eventually when we do that 1 Enoch episode we'll talk about in some of the later sections that aren't in all the versions, but in some of the later sections, for example, Enoch comes back and appears to Methuselah or appears to Noah to communicate things to them. Since he didn't die and was taken up into heaven, he can sort of reappear in bodily form and interact with them, interact with his descendants.

Of course, not only within Scripture, but outside of Scriptures, there's all kinds of Jewish tradition about the return of Elijah, from leaving a chair open for him to Elijah coming first before the Messiah, that he didn't die, he was taken up into heaven, so now he's going to come back.

Fr. Andrew: And there's even Jewish hymns to Elijah, calling upon him. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Isn't that idolatry, though, right?

Fr. Andrew: No! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay!

Fr. Andrew: Oh, by the way, guys, that's not how idolatry works!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, exactly. [Laughter] And then we also see an image here— And this takes off, for example, from some of the details, like the detail that the Prophet Elijah, St. Elias, is taken up into heaven in a chariot. This is connected to the idea of God's chariot-throne. We talked about this more in our episodes about saints. But so these two men from the Hebrew Scriptures come to represent sort of the image of what a redeemed human being looks like, that they were sort of— they experienced salvation to such an extent in this life that they didn't die, and they were taken up into heaven and then, because of the idea of the chariot-throne, they're sort of included in God's divine council immediately, along with the angels.

Even those reappearances, like Enoch's reappearances, are sort of connected to— He's doing the kind of things that God would send an angel to do, to convey information, to convey messages. He's sort of functioning as an angel in the sense of functioning as a messenger of God. You see that connection also with the Elijah traditions, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and around it, where he's coming before the Messiah to bring some message, to announce the coming of the Messiah. Again, that's a kind of angelic mission, which is why you sometimes see St. John the Forerunner with angel wings.

Fr. Andrew: Angel wings, yeah. And also why, when the Lord on the cross says, "Eloi, eloi," there are people who— Now, that means, "My God, my God," and he's referencing Psalm 22— but why there are some people who could think he's calling upon Elijah, because that's a thing that people were doing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] You don't have to keep justifying your idolatry, you know. [Laughter] It's also very interesting that when Christ says that, he says it in Aramaic, since he's quoting a psalm. He doesn't quote it in Hebrew, or Greek. Sorry, Greeks. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Is that our first "Sorry, Greeks" on the show? I can't remember.

Fr. Stephen: I don't know. I feel like I've picked on the Greeks at some point, although that may have just been them taking me picking on Plato personally. I don't know. [Laughter] But then I say nice things about Aristotle sometimes, so they're probably torn. They don't know what to do with me.

So those are people whom we see who ascend. Now, we mentioned, when we were talking about assumptions, where someone dies and their body is taken up, the Old Testament example we referred to was Moses. Moses dies, his body is assumed.

Fr. Andrew: This may not be super obvious to some people that that's what's going on there, so we're going to talk about that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. With Enoch and Elijah— I mean, Enoch, just reading those verses in Genesis, there's a little ambiguity. If you really start parsing the words, it becomes plain pretty quickly what's going on.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it says, "God took him. He walked with God, and God took him," but then you get a nice disambiguation in Hebrews 11, where it says, "By faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death."

Fr. Stephen: Right, and there's also— Well, you get similar things in Ben Sirach and Wisdom also. So, I mean, that's just— Everybody interprets it that way from the earliest interpretations we have. But even then you don't have to rely on that. You can just dig into those verses in Genesis. So the word that's "take" is more like transplant or translate. But anyway.

So there's a little ambiguity there, but, I mean, it's pretty clear what's going on. Not many people would argue with you about either of those cases, that the Bible is saying they were taken up into heaven. There are some weirdos about Elijah, but… And if you're one of those weirdos whom I just called a weirdo: Sorry, man, but you're being a weirdo.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Send us an email! We love the weirdo emails. A lot, actually.

Fr. Stephen: This is just so abundantly clear what's going on. Yeah, there was somebody—even if I remember the name, I won't say it—who was saying that they were trying to warp it around to mean God took Elijah and put him on an island or something.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! There is a thing out there— Yes! [Laughter] You can actually— As I was researching a little bit for this, there is a thing out there that said that basically God sucked him up into heaven and put him somewhere else so that he could minister somewhere else for a while.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which is a kind of quasi-Mormon thing or something?

Fr. Andrew: I guess. I don't know.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Was it the US? Is that where he went? Was it Jackson, Missouri?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It's a very pretty part of Missouri.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And that's just weird. But not even the Jackson, Missouri, part, just the rest of it, because it's so clear what's going on in the texts. It's so clear how everyone, from the original readers on, understood that. You know, got to write journal articles and stuff, though, so hey. They won't publish your article if you say, "Everything you thought was true is actually." [Laughter] But anyway, the case of Moses is much more ambiguous if you're trying to just go by, just strictly by the couple of verses that describe the death of Moses. It's not obvious. It's especially not obvious in English, the way it's usually translated in English. This is in Deuteronomy 34:5-6, where the actual death of Moses is described.

Fr. Andrew: It says this:

So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And he buried him in the valley, in the land of Moab, opposite Beth Peor. But no one knows the place of his burial to this day.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Right off the bat, even before we start asking questions of it, there's some weird things in the text, like it tells you where he was buried and then says no one knows where he was buried.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! [Laughter] Maybe they just mean somewhere in this valley, but we don't have the actual gravesite.

Fr. Stephen: It seems odd. But there's also some— Now one of these you can't see, but I pointed out to Fr. Andrew when he did the good old cut-and-paste on the quote, and that's that in most English Bibles for some reason, the "he" in "he buried him" is not capitalized.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so who is this "he" that buried him?

Fr. Stephen: Well, in the context you can go back to the beginning of chapter 34. There's not a bunch of other humans here. It doesn't talk about Moses and Joshua hanging out and talking or something so that might be Joshua. The verses leading up to this are all the Lord, meaning Yahweh, talking to Moses before he dies. Nobody else mentioned in there. And so when it comes up to "Moses, the servant of Yahweh, dies there in the land of Moab, according to"—which could just be "with"—"the Word of the Lord"—meaning whom he was talking to, the Yahweh who was standing there talking to him—"and he buried him," the "he" can only refer to the Lord, or, specifically, the Word of the Lord, being the One who buried him. So God is the agent here of burying Moses.

Then we have to ask another question, and that is: What does the word "buried" there mean? You might say, "buried," that's obvious: you dig a hole, you put the body in, you cover it with dirt.

Fr. Andrew: That's what you think.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. But the word that is translated as "buried" in Hebrew here means in general to care for a dead body.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— We do that in English, too. I have many times said, "Oh, I buried that guy last year," but I was not the one who dug the grave; I was not the one who put the body in the grave. I led the funeral services.

Fr. Stephen: And when that word is used elsewhere in the Scriptures, "Go bury your dead," that doesn't mean, "Oh, just throw him in a hole. That's it. You're not allowed to do anything—" That means go take care of the bodies of these deceased people.

And then finally, in at least the English translation that Fr. Andrew read, recalls this weird thing: "he buried him in this place, but no one knows the place of his burial." [Laughter] Makes it extra confusing. The second one is a different word. It's: "No one knows the place of his grave to this day."

Fr. Andrew: So you could also read it as: "He (meaning the Lord) did his funeral in the valley of the land of Moab, but no one knows the place of his grave."

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Cared for his body, took care of his dead body in that place, but no one knows where his grave is. So again, from the earliest Jewish interpreters we have, they understood this to mean that when it says God is taking care of his body, it's that God took his body, that God took his body, meaning took it into heaven. While that is never explicitly said in the New Testament—it never straight-out said in the New Testament, "God took Moses' body into heaven"—this tradition is very clearly referred to in the New Testament. The first time is a little oblique, because the first time is on Mount Tabor at Christ's Transfiguration.

Fr. Andrew: We all know that scene. The Lord appears, he goes up there with Peter, James, and John, and then he's transfigured in front of them. And while he's transfigured in front of them, Moses and Elias stand there, talking to him.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We've heard that so much that we miss the point that would have been weird if you didn't know about this tradition, because as we've already said, Elijah coming back? Sure. Didn't die, body's up in heaven: they're expecting him to come back, maybe multiple times. But usually when you get two people showing up, it's Enoch and Elijah. Enoch is the other one who went up into heaven without dying. You can see this if you read the earliest interpretations we have of the book of Revelation, the Revelation of St. John, you'll see that pretty much everybody says that the two witnesses who show up, the two witnesses that Revelation talks about, are Enoch and Elijah. The two guys who left, the two guys come back. And then they interpret that in different ways, whether it's literally Enoch and Elijah, whether that's representative of Christ and St. John the Forerunner. There's different places they go with that after that, but that's the identification they make, because that was— That's sort of the natural identification, even in a lot of Jewish literature.

But anything that's in the orbit about this tradition about Moses, then what happens on the Mount of Transfiguration makes sense, because Moses has also been reunited with his body. The story on the mount of Transfiguration doesn't say Elijah and the ghost of Moses, Elijah and the spirit of Moses, Elijah and the soul of Moses. They're both presented there as being bodily— as being recognizable, so they have this sense of identity about them such that the disciples know who they— Peter, James, and John know who they are, know that that's Moses and Elijah. It's almost like they'd seen pictures of them somewhere before… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Isn't that idolatry, man? Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: But they saw Moses! Moses was visible. It means he had his body. So this is assuming that tradition.

And then, even more clear than that, without even having to dig much, you get Jude 9, the epistle of St. Jude, brother of the Lord.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is one of those ones that if someone is into the weird bits of the Bible, they've probably seen this a lot, but if they're not, they probably may not even remember that this is there. Jude 9. There's just one chapter in Jude, so just Jude 9.

But when the Archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said, "The Lord rebuke you."

So it doesn't tell the story. "You know, when the Archangel Michael and the devil were disputing over the body of Moses? You remember that? Yeah—" He doesn't say, "Oh, and one day, when Moses died…" It doesn't say the whole story; it just sort of assumes the audience knows the whole story.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I think St. Jude's epistle was inspired to be the thorn in the flesh of all those who believe in sola scriptura, because he wants to quote and reference everything except the Bible. He does refer to Sodom and Gomorrah, so not completely, but he just quotes 1 Enoch verbatim, etc. [Laughter] And refers to this. We'll come back to this when we talk about the text, the Assumption of Moses, but we can already go ahead and say here, we don't know for sure that this is a reference or the "Lord rebuke you" is a quote. We don't know for sure that that's a direct reference to the text, the Assumption of Moses. In fact, it probably isn't; it could be, but this is a reference to the traditions we have recorded in the Assumption of Moses.

Notice how— Yeah, as Fr. Andrew said, how St. Jude refers to it. He just refers to it off-hand, like, "Yeah, you all know about this." And he doesn't bother to say, "Oh, I know this isn't in the Bible. It's just a tradition, but..."

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Because that's not the way that it operates!

Fr. Stephen: He can just refer to it as an example. Clearly, this is telling us— Again, this doesn't, as I mentioned, explicitly say God took Moses' body into heaven, but this is very clearly—and we'll see some more about that in a little bit—a reference to this tradition.

Now, why would St. Michael, the Archangel, and the devil be fighting over Moses' body?

Fr. Andrew: Right, and what does it mean for God to take it?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This isn't, as some people, especially those inflected with Plato-brain— St. Michael and the devil contesting over the soul of Moses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's about the body.

Fr. Stephen: This isn't Moses passing through an aerial tollhouse. [Laughter] They're fighting over his body. Over his body, not his soul or his spirit here. That's what the contention, the dispute, is over. So why is this? Well, first of all, because they're fighting about the body, this tradition is assuming the bodily resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because if there is no bodily resurrection, who cares?

Fr. Stephen: Why would you fight over it? You'd just be fighting over his soul, if there needed to be a fight.

Fr. Andrew: "It's just a shell, man."

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So this assumes the bodily resurrection. This assumes that in some sense the body is still Moses and needs to be protected or claimed. It also, though, assumes that the devil, because there has to be a contention— that the devil has some claim to press over the body of Moses.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm.

Fr. Stephen: And this goes back to something we've talked about a few times on the show, regarding the curse that's placed on the devil in Genesis 3. We've talked about how it says, "You're going to crawl on the ground and eat the dust of the earth all the days of your life." Certain very literal-minded people want to read that as: Oh, this is Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Story about how the snake lost its legs. [Laughter] I still remember some weird fundamentalist tracts where they claimed they had evidence that snakes had had legs, trying to prove that this was a true story, scientifically.

Fr. Andrew: Nice.

Fr. Stephen: Like, really, guys? Because, of course, as we've said before, ancient people had seen snakes eat mice and rats. They'd seen this happen. They knew they didn't eat dirt. And the word that's used for the dust that the snake is going to eat is the same word that, just a few verses away, is used when God says, "You are dust, and to dust you will return," to Adam. He's made from dust; he's going to return to dust. So this is talking about the decomposition of his body. This is talking about the devil as the eater of the dead.

Fr. Andrew: Yep, this is dissolution, disintegration, death, corruption, decay, entropy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and expressed as physical corruption, the physical corruption of the body. That this is sort of a punishment. And so the devil is trying to claim Moses' body and corrupt it, but as Moses is a righteous man St. Michael is disputing this claim in this scene that St. Jude refers to.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the idea being that the devil, who has been swallowing up the dead all the time, now Moses dies, he's like: "Great! Here's a tasty morsel." And the archangel is like: "Hold on a second."

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so in this tableau, even though, again we don't have this whole story spelled out here in St. Jude's epistle, it's hard to imagine that St. Michael would have lost this particular engagement. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right.

Fr. Stephen: "And unfortunately that time the devil won"—no. [Laughter] That's not going to happen! So, then, again, we're kind of confining this to St. Jude, but assuming St. Michael wins this particular context and this particular dispute—

Fr. Andrew: Which, I mean, given Tabor, I'm pretty sure that he wins.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right! Like, what happens to Moses' body? That's why this is directly connected to this assumption tradition and to resurrection. This is a mode of reasoning, this that we've just been talking about, that we don't talk about a lot, even in the Orthodox Church, though we have a little more reason that we'll talk about in a minute to talk about it, but is important very early on at least in the Christian proclamation.

And as evidence of that you have what St. Paul says in Acts 13:35-37, where he quotes David in the psalms saying, "You will not allow your holy one to see decay," talking about decaying in the tombs. And David there is very clearly— If you read the whole psalm from which that's quoted, David is talking about trusting in God even though he dies and goes to Sheol, goes into the grave. So it's very much pointing to the bodily resurrection in the psalm. But after quoting it, St. Paul then says David, after he had done everything he did as God's servant, died and decomposed. David had not yet literally experienced the resurrection. Even though he had put his trust and his faith in it, he had not yet experienced it.

And then St. Paul uses that to point to Christ, whose body did not see decay during his entombment because he rose from the dead. So St. Paul is there using this mechanism to talk about Christ's resurrection as the beginning, the firstfruits of the general resurrection, that Christ's resurrection is the resurrection. And that's connected to this idea that his body did not, at any point, decay, because, as Christ says in St. John's gospel, he says, "The ruler of this world is coming for me." He has no claim over him. He finds nothing in him. He has no claim on Jesus.

The things that are pitted against each other are the resurrection versus corruption.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that's what the fight between Michael and the devil is about.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, decay and decomposition. And this is what's going on with— There are certain saints in the Orthodox Church whose relics, whose bodies—I'm pretty sure we talked about this in the relics episode, way back in the long-ago time—don't decay, or at least don't decay normally.

Fr. Andrew: And there's variation on this point. There's levels of this. On the one hand you've got bones that maybe turn golden or scarlet and have a fragrance, a beautiful fragrance. That's kind of the most— the most minimal form of incorruption. And then on the other end you've got the hand of St. Mary Magdalene, which not only has the flesh on it and it's flexible, but it's also warm, which I've probably mentioned on the show before, but I can personally attest to that. I have actually touched it for myself and can attest that that is real.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So these are— Incorrupt relics are a sign of the bodily resurrection, of the reality of the bodily resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: It's incomplete, but it's present on some level.

Fr. Stephen: So, then, we talked about this Moses tradition. We mentioned, back at the beginning, that this is not only something, a tradition that the Church has received about Moses, but this is what we say also happened with the Theotokos.

Fr. Andrew: Right! So if someone says, "Well, why do you believe that the body of the Theotokos was assumed into heaven?" we can say, "Oh, it's just like Moses!"

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and then they get confused usually. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, especially if they've never heard any of the stuff that we discussed, that we just finished talk about.

Fr. Stephen: And we're also going to have to do a little bit of disambiguating vis-à-vis the assumption of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church. I know already—I know—there's going to be a section of you Catholic listeners who are going to insist that we're misrepresenting you, etc., etc. Here's the thing. We love you and we care about you, Roman Catholic listeners to the show, but there seems to be this thing among Roman Catholic people, even Roman Catholic people whom I get along with totally well, that they're unable to acknowledge that any summary of their doctrine and beliefs that is even vaguely critical is accurate.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, I mean, that's a human thing, right?

Fr. Stephen: But it's especially pronounced among a lot of Roman Catholic people.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think that that's true.

Fr. Stephen: Part of humility, intellectual humility, is being willing to admit that there are people out there who fully understand what you believe— Orthodox people need to do this, too, by the way; I'm not just saying this to Roman Catholics—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, totally.

Fr. Stephen: Orthodox people, Protestant people, Buddhists, Republicans: everyone needs to understand this.

Fr. Andrew: Green Party.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Libertarians. Everyone needs to— Anarchocommunists.

Fr. Andrew: Rosacrucians!

Fr. Stephen: You need to all understand this. Zoroastrians… [Laughter] We have to be willing to accept that there are people out there who fully understand what I believe or what you believe—completely understand it just as well as you do—and don't agree with it.

Fr. Andrew: The other two things that I think people need to toss aside that kind of go in the same direction [are] the assumption is that if you don't agree with me, number one, it could be it's that the other person doesn't understand it. So there's that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you don't know.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that could be either that they're ignorant, so they haven't studied enough; or it could be that they're incapable of understanding it, like you're just too stupid. And then the other one is you have an ulterior motive; you're evil and so you don't want to accept this. [Laughter] But the reality is that people can look at all the same evidence, be just as informed, they can be just as smart and just as good-willed—and still disagree. It's a reality.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that's okay. That doesn't mean you're wrong.

Fr. Andrew: It doesn't mean you're wrong. You could still be wrong, but that doesn't mean you're wrong!

Fr. Stephen: But that doesn't automatically mean you're wrong!

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: You could argue about it. You can argue why you're right and they're wrong or whatever, present evidence, whatever you want to do, but you have to accept at some point not everyone who disagrees with you is stupid, not everyone who disagrees with you is uninformed, not everyone who disagrees with you is lying, not everyone who disagrees with you is arguing in bad faith. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: To me, the conversations really only get interesting once you assume none of those things are true. Then you can have an interesting conversation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And that's not to say no one who disagrees with you is ignorant or stupid or acting in bad faith. There are certainly those people out there!

Fr. Andrew: Yes, absolutely.

Fr. Stephen: And when you discern one of those people, it's not worth arguing with them. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, just walk away.

Fr. Stephen: Just let them be. But there are those out there who do have good-faith disagreements with you, and those are the people, as you said, who are interesting to actually talk to about it, and worthwhile to talk to about it.

Fr. Andrew: We said all that to say this.

Fr. Stephen: To set up for the fact that we're going to have to do some "disambiggiatin'" here and point to some areas of disagreement that are legitimate disagreement, because I also— Everyone who knows me knows how much I despise the pan-heresy of ecumenism. [Laughter] We're also not willing to do this paper-over, like: "Ah, we all just really agree. It's all just terminology." No, there are points of disagreement.

Fr. Andrew: We're both very much on record of not thinking that way! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I think there's only, like, five people in the world are real Christians. That's how opposed to the pan-heresy of ecumenism I am.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And I'm not one of them!

Fr. Andrew: That's right! I was going to say… [Laughter] And may we have their prayers! A pious rigorist thing to say! We just lost several listeners there, but that's okay.

Fr. Stephen: That's all right. As long as they're not one of those five. Those five wouldn't listen to this show, that's the thing.

In terms of what the Church—and by that we mean the Orthodox Church—says about the Theotokos vis-à-vis her body being assumed into heaven after the death— So we have to start out, in terms of talking about this, by talking about the fact that our starting point is that it happened. And here's what I mean by that. I don't mean it happened because it happened. What I mean by that is there's this tendency nowadays in conversations— I'll use another example related to the Theotokos, because this is one that has come up a lot at least around me, and that's over the fact that the Theotokos didn't have any other— didn't give birth to any other children besides Jesus, which is something that was believed by everyone in the Church until late 17th century century. All the Protestant Reformers believed it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, and just to throw this out, especially for those of you who do believe in sola scriptura, there is nowhere in the New Testament that it ever describes any other person as being a child of Mary. So if you're going to say she had other kids, you're going to have to go outside the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Let's not litigate that too far, though, as we go about this.

Fr. Andrew: I'm just saying...

Fr. Stephen: I'm just using that as an example. And the example I'm using it for is not the issue itself but the argumentation surrounding it. But it's very common, even though this is a relatively recent thing, to reject that idea and to say that she did give birth to other children—this is the majority view of Evangelical Protestants in the United States now, I would say. And when someone—this is probably— I don't claim to have any kind of great knowledge of conversations between Protestants and Roman Catholics, but I imagine with them and I know for sure in conversations between Orthodox folks and Protestants on this issue—Evangelical Protestants, at least—the way it's often approached from the Evangelical Protestant side is the argument starts with not "Is that factually true or not?"; the argument starts with "Well, why? What does it mean? Why is that important that the Theotokos is ever-virgin?" That's where the conversation begins, and therefore the argumentation, if you track it out over the course of the conversation, like if you took a transcript of the conversation and tracked the course of the argument, the course of the argument from the other side tends to be: You can't give me an adequate or an acceptable-to-me explanation of why or what it means or why it's important, therefore I reject that it's true. Therefore I reject that it's true.

The problem with that is that all of these things, all of these events in and around Scripture which relate to the Christian tradition and our faith, including the very most important ones, the central ones, all happened first. They just happened. And they didn't happen in a way that explained themselves. And then, after the fact, the Church reflected on those things and the whys and the what-it-means and the why-it's-important comes out of that later reflection. So to use a couple of the very most important and central things of the Christian faith as examples, Christ rose from the dead. That's as central as you get. That is the central proclamation of Christianity: Christ is risen.

Christ rose from the dead. That did not come with an explanation in and of itself. At the time Christ rose from the dead, his disciples so didn't get it that they didn't think he was going to rise from the dead! [Laughter] They should've, because he told them in the gospels, but they didn't. They not only didn't have an idea of what it meant, they didn't even know it was going to happen when it happened. They found out about it after it happened, and when they first heard about it after it happened, they didn't believe it.

Then, later, after this has happened and after Christ has appeared and explained a little bit at least what it was about, you get St. Paul writing 1 Corinthians 15 about the resurrection, and reflecting on Christ's resurrection, and other passages all through the New Testament, all through the writings of the Church Fathers, all through the writings of the Church in every era, is reflecting upon— That's what real theology, if we're talking about theological writing is. It's not coming up with new arguments and new stuff; it's reflecting upon who Christ is and what he's done and the experience of Christ.

So you see this pattern: it happens, and they understand it. We can say the same thing about the crucifixion. Christ is crucified. Christ dies on the cross. Pretty central to the whole Christian faith. But at the time, no one understands why it's happening. Pretty much everyone misunderstands what has happened there, at the time. After the fact, again, huge portion of the New Testament is reflecting on the meaning of Christ's crucifixion and death, and then, again, all through the history of the Church, all this reflecting upon it.

Those explanations and understandings come afterward. So when I say that the beginning of what we're saying about the Theotokos and her body being assumed into heaven is that it happened, we're saying that we have had handed down to us from the eyewitnesses who saw it the fact that, after the Theotokos died, after she was buried, they returned to the tomb to care for her body, and her body was gone. When they returned to the tomb and her body was gone, it was not like when Jesus rose from the dead in the sense that she was not walking around, eating with them, that she was resurrected in the same sense Jesus was; but her body was gone in the same sense that Moses' was, that she had already experienced resurrection but she's not walking on this earth.

Now that does and has historically opened up the possibility that she can make return appearances.

Fr. Andrew: Just like Moses on Mount Tabor.

Fr. Stephen: Like Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor. [Laughter] So this happened. They found: "Hey, her body isn't here." And I'll also point out that with all the claims of relics, the most interesting thing to me that John Calvin ever wrote—at least the most entertaining, we'll put it that way—is at one point John Calvin wrote an inventory of all the relics in western Europe as best he could ascertain it. And it's him doing his best Jonathan Swift before Jonathan Swift, because he's kind of making it obvious: Did St. John the Forerunner have eight legs and three heads? to point out that these all can't be legitimate. There were people—there were rackets—in various parts of the Christian world at various times, selling fake relics.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Or trying to set up fake pilgrimage sites with fake relics.

Fr. Andrew: It shows up in Chaucer.

Fr. Stephen: It's endemic throughout Christendom, from St. Constantine on. It becomes just endemic. It pops up all over the place. There's no record anywhere of anyone ever claiming to have a body part of the Theotokos.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which— There'd be very strong reasons to do that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. There is never a claim. And I mean, never a claim! We don't even have: "Oh, this bishop had to send a letter saying, 'Hey, this is phony because her body was taken up into heaven.' " No one even ever claimed in the first place and had to be corrected.

Fr. Andrew: Which shows how incredibly deep-seated this belief has been.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, how early and how deep-seated and how universal this understanding was throughout the Christian Church, from a very early phase.

But, so, yes, it happened. And then after the fact that they happen, it gets interpreted, and it gets interpreted in light of these Moses traditions, that: Oh, what happened with Moses happened with her, that God took her body so that it would not see corruption, because she was a righteous servant of God like Moses was, and is, of course, the Mother of the Lord.

Now, here's where our Roman Catholic friends will again get irritated with me. Some of them will even call this an attack, but there's nothing I can do about it, so here we go.

Fr. Andrew: How dare you, sir.

Fr. Stephen: It is very obvious, even though we celebrate the Dormition, the Falling-Asleep, meaning the physical death—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, she died.

Fr. Stephen: —of the Theotokos on August 15, that's the same day the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the Assumption of Mary. It's on the same day. It was proclaimed a dogma in the 19th century by the Roman Catholic Church, the Assumption of Mary. And when it was declared a dogma—

Fr. Andrew: Actually— I'm going to have to "Um, actually" you.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, is it the 20th?

Fr. Andrew: Yes, officially— You're thinking of the Immaculate Conception. That's 19th century.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, the Immaculate Conception was after that.

Fr. Andrew: It's 1950.

Fr. Stephen: So 20th century, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, see!

Fr. Stephen: Pre-Vatican II.

Fr. Andrew: I'm going to revel in this for just a second, because I almost never get to "Um, actually" you. Okay, I'm done.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So, 20th century. Later than that even, it's declared a dogma. Yes, I flipped my Marian dogmas. Well, see, now they're all going to use this as evidence: "See, he doesn't know what he's talking about!"

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] "You got a date wrong! Busted!"

Fr. Stephen: So in the proclamation of it as a dogma, Rome deliberately introduced an ambiguity to try to include us in the East. As I said, this is pre-Vatican II, so it wasn't so much that they cared about us as that the way a proclamation of dogma works in the Roman Catholic Church is that they declare that some particular belief was held always, everywhere, and by everyone in the Church—which is super fascinating with the Immaculate Conception and Thomas Aquinas.

They're saying that what they were proclaiming as dogma about the Assumption of Mary was held always, everywhere, by everyone in the Church. And they were aware of, at least in broad strokes, the difference between the tradition in the East on this and what they were declaring. So they put this nebulous little phrase, because what they were declaring as dogma, effectively, is that the Theotokos, Mother of the Lord, the Mother of God, did not die but ascended into heaven and ascended into heaven in a manner parallel to Jesus' ascension, to Christ's ascension.

Fr. Andrew: And interestingly, if you actually read the text of this dogmatic declaration by Pope Pius XII, which is named—I'm going to get this wrong—Munificentissimus Deus. That's pretty good. They link it directly with the Immaculate Conception. It actually says that she completely overcame sin by her Immaculate Conception and as a result "was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body." So it links it to that earlier Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and you notice the language there. Unlike Moses, there wasn't a— She didn't have to die and there didn't have to be a fight. So she ascends into heaven and linked in the way it's celebrated, in the iconography of the feast in the Roman Catholic Church, is— When I say it's paralleled with the Ascension of Christ, I don't just mean flying up into the sky, because Elijah and Enoch—potentially with Enoch—flew up into the sky. What I mean is, as we talked about in our Ascension episode, Christ's ascension is really about his enthronement. And if you look at the celebration of the Feast of the Assumption of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church, it's really about the enthronement of St. Mary as the Queen of heaven.

Fr. Andrew: If you just want to check this, just go to Google Images and type in "Assumption of Mary," and it will show you a gazillion Roman Catholic paintings, and you can see: This is her being enthroned in the heavens.

Fr. Stephen: And then you can search for "Dormition of the Theotokos," which will show you the Orthodox icon, and you can see the difference.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where you see her dead body on the bottom center, and Christ with her soul in his hand right above the body. So the Dormition icon is very clear that she physically dies.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, being at least somewhat aware of this and wanting to make the claim at least semi-legitimate that this was always and everywhere believed by everyone when it, you know— There is an ambiguity introduced into the dogmatic proclamation by Rome that she may or may not have died, even though, clearly, from everything that is said, like the quote that Fr. Andrew just read, from all the iconography associated with it in the West, they're saying she didn't. [Laughter] They're saying she did not, but they introduced that ambiguity so they can try and rope in all of the Eastern texts and all of the Eastern discussion of it.

Fr. Andrew: They'll quote St. John of Damascus and various other things.

Fr. Stephen: Right, as evidence in support of what they're proclaiming, even though it's different. So there are some fundamental differences there. There are just some fundamental differences there. And we don't deny— As Orthodox Christians, we don't deny that "Queen of heaven" is an appropriate title for the Theotokos. We did an episode about the Theotokos, talking about her as Queen and Mother, so it's not that we deny the title is appropriate, but we think there is something fundamentally different going on in the Dormition of the Theotokos and what's going on in the Assumption.

That's in part linked to the Immaculate Conception also, which we do reject fully. And our concern with that in the Orthodox Church is pretty much exactly summed up in that quote Fr. Andrew read, that you're making the Theotokos something other than a human, and it's because Christ takes his human nature from the Theotokos— If she's something other than a human descended from Adam like the rest of us, then what does that mean about Christ's humanity, that his humanity is different than the humanity of the rest of us. And the whole thing falls apart.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think it's worth noting, by the way, that if you look up Roman Catholic explanations of this dogma, you can find different opinions about whether or not the Virgin Mary actually died, and that's because—

Fr. Stephen: Right, because that ambiguity is there in the proclamation.

Fr. Andrew: Because that ambiguity is there.

Fr. Stephen: You're allowed to believe either. [Laughter] But all of the positive statements, the hymnography, the iconography, and all of those things are pointing in the other— in one direction. But there's that language again: You're allowed to believe the other.

This is what we're getting into. When this issue comes up, one of the first things between Roman Catholic folks— One of the first things you'll hear from the Orthodox side is that for us it's not a dogma, and I think that gets misinterpreted a lot. It gets misinterpreted a lot. Part of the reason for that is what the Roman Catholic Church means by "dogma" and how Protestantism has traditionally reacted to that, because especially, since most of these conversations are happening in places like the United States and Canada and the Anglophone world that are dominated by Protestants and then minority Roman Catholics and then tiny-minority Orthodox, most of these conversations that are taking place that we have access to are taking place between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and there isn't an Orthodox person to be seen in the vicinity. [Laughter]

And so the Roman Catholic view is clearly that anything that's a de fide dogma, which would include, since mid-20th century, the Assumption of Mary, which includes the Immaculate Conception, which includes all those things that have been proclaimed as dogma—de fide dogma, you have to believe it or you don't go to heaven, in very brief form.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, necessary to salvation.

Fr. Stephen: It's mandatory, yes. Now, there are— You know, again, because no matter what I say I'm going to be accused of misrepresenting the Roman Catholic position— I have quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church and been accused of misrepresenting the Roman Catholic position. It's amazing I don't give up! [Laughter] But there are qualifiers, like this only applies after the dogma has been declared. So, for example, Thomas Aquinas didn't really believe in the Immaculate Conception, but it was declared a dogma 600 years after he died.

Fr. Andrew: Which, I mean, let's think about that for a second. You must believe this in order to be saved, but if you didn't used to believe it before the dogma was declared, you could be saved, suggesting that salvation now works differently because there was a—

Fr. Stephen: Right, because now if you don't believe it, you are rejecting the truth, so that's the distinction that's made.

Fr. Andrew: Understood, okay. Still!

Fr. Stephen: So Thomas Aquinas was just kind of ignorant.

Fr. Andrew: So he'll be all right.

Fr. Stephen: In his place and time, he didn't know how important this was. And so if you're ignorant because it hasn't been made a dogma yet, or you're just ignorant in general, like if you're living somewhere in the world and you've never heard of it— But the idea is, if you're aware of it, so if you're, say, a Protestant, and you've read the decree and you've heard about it and you reject it, you can't go to heaven. That's the official teaching. I know post-Vatican II we've all gotten mushy about everything, but that's still the official, on-the-books, in Latin teaching of Rome. If you consciously reject one of these dogmas, you can't go to heaven. And of course, the Protestant response to that is like: What!? [Laughter] These things that aren't in the Bible, first of all, because Protestants generally hold to some form of sola scriptura…

But so because of that kind of debate, the debate then shifts. That mode of argumentation shifts the overall debate to: What are the things you have to believe in order to get into heaven? Or, reversing that, what are the things that denying them would cause you to not go to heaven?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, technicalities.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, but not just technicalities, but it creates this kind of minimalism. If you're trying to compose mere Christianity, for example. [Laughter] Yes, that's shots fired, C.S. Lewis fans. I don't think that's a good impulse. I want minimal Christianity? No, I want more Christianity! I want all of Christianity! [Laughter] I want the whole thing; I don't want the turkey sandwich! But this idea of: We need to just whittle down what are the bare minimum things… And some of this is in reaction to, you know—here comes the bugbear again—the idea of ecumenism. I want to whittle this down enough that I can— so that I can call more people my brothers—

Fr. Andrew: Hands across the world and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: —and opt out of theological debates and stuff, because I'll decide all that's not really important. But this has all kinds of bad effects. This has all kinds of bad effects, and this slides in only one direction. The direction this slides in is fewer and fewer things get important with each generation. There are these folks out there—you can find them on the internet—they're called Reformed Baptists.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Reformed Baptists: they're Baptists who are Calvinists, meaning they're Baptists who hold to a theology formulated by people who killed Baptists as heretics.

Fr. Andrew: I know. It's amazing.

Fr. Stephen: So this issue, not baptizing your children, was such a serious issue in the 17th century that people were killing each other over it. And now Presbyterians and Reformed Baptists go to the same seminaries and they call each other brothers and they both hold to the Reformed faith and "Oh, it's not that big of a deal." Both Luther and Calvin believed that a Baptist church was not really a church. They believed that a Roman Catholic church could be called a church, but that the Baptists were a sect; they were worse than Roman Catholics, according to Luther and Calvin. But now, hey! We're all friends!

And now that this sliding of what's important, now that we're in the 21st century and we're down to almost nothing, and it's gone from just theological issues like how you formulate the Trinity or who Christ is—which are now up for grabs, apparently— It's gone from that— Now that it's gotten into moral issues and ethical issues, now all of a sudden all of our Protestant friends are realizing the problem. To be blunt, now that it's "Oh, whom you have sex with isn't really all that important," now there's an issue. Tacitly denying the doctrine of the Trinity 30 years ago we just started winking at, but now that it's gone into this moral zone, now it's serious, ironically.

But it's not going to go in the other direction, guys. When you start whittling down what is mandatory about the Christian tradition, it's going to be less and less that's going to be mandatory with each generation. And now we're pretty much at the point, as we've said before on the show, where what it means to be a Christian is "I identify as a Christian." It doesn't matter what I believe, it doesn't matter how I live: if I just identify as a Christian, I am a Christian and you have to acknowledge that or you're a bad person. You can't tell me I'm not one based on how I live or what I believe or what I do or where I go to church or if I never go to church or if I start my own in my garage. That's where that leads! C.S. Lewis did not want it to lead there! I'm not blaming him for it! [Laughter] But that's where it leads! That's where it leads.

But it starts on a very personal level. It starts with individuals, this idea, that, again, comes out of the Reformation, that if you tell people they have to believe these things, that teaching you something about the history of the Church that isn't in the Bible literally, plain as day, can't question it, can't doubt it— So teaching you about the fact that, "Hey, did you know that after the Theotokos died her body was taken up into heaven?" I am somehow imposing on you—I am binding your conscience.

Fr. Andrew: I think that's one of the things— I see this a lot, because a lot of the work that I do is aimed at evangelism, and so people ask the question: "Well, do I have to believe that in order to be an Orthodox Christian?" I mean, often the short answer to most of those questions is yes, but I think the more important answer is: "Look, do you want to be part of this community? Do you want to live this life?" because, as I've found, especially when I was doing pastoral ministry, that conviction actually tends to follow conditioning, that the things that you believe actually tend to flow out of the way you live and what you're participating in, rather than being the prerequisite for that.

And it works the other way, too. I've watched people, for instance, who were faithfully Orthodox, and then they, for one reason or another, they started to attend another church. One example that I know of, for instance, a family member asked them, "Would you please come with me or take me all the time…?" And it wasn't that they had a conversion experience while they were there or that they suddenly realized, "Hold on a second, I no longer believe this and I now believe this," it's that the habit of being in that other church turned them into that! And then all kinds of doctrinal explanations followed. But it wasn't like: "Hey, I came to an awareness of— I disagree with this now, and I agree with this, so therefore I'm going to go over there."

And that's why there's also this whole phenomenon—I see this a lot, too—of people who say, "Oh, I agree with all the stuff, but I just can't bring myself to walk through the door. I agree with all of this." Or even people who call themselves Orthodox but have never actually even been to an Orthodox church. There's this disjunction. It's this notion that Christianity is a list of things that you get— as you said, boxes that you check off: I agree; I disagree.

Fr. Stephen: The core of it is that it's not a question of what you believe; it's a question of whom you believe.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, to whom are you faithful.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And even folks who are out there who are all about the individual conscience, ultimately you're believing somebody. You're not coming up with all this yourself.

Fr. Andrew: As the man said, "You've got to serve somebody."

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. And you're not just saying— I know there are people out there: "Well, I believe the Scriptures." Well, okay. Someone's explaining them to you. You're believing someone's explanation. And it's for a variety of reasons. And I'm not just saying this if you're not Orthodox. Orthodox people, too!

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: People, if they are parishioners in my church and I get up and preach and I preach about what a reading from the gospel of St. John means and they believe it, they're trusting me. They have, for various reasons, decided that they can trust my explanations of these things. And there could be a variety of reasons among the different members of my congregation, so this isn't just— Again, this is everyone. This is every human. You are believing someone. You are trusting someone, someone's explanation, someone's interpretations—and for various reasons. There are various reasons why you accept Person A's as opposed to Person B's, or Group A's as opposed to Group B's. You may or may not be aware of them at any point in time. You may be very aware of them, you may be very conscious of them, it may be related to decisions you've actually made, or that may be kind of sub rosa, kind of unconscious or subconscious with you, but if people believed things because they were true, no one would ever be wrong. They'd always believe the truth. So we have all these other reasons. So you're trusting—

That's the real question we have to ask. There's some danger here because if we set up— if I set up myself as the judge of all things, I'm going to hear from the representatives of all these different views and then I'm going to decide for myself who is right and what the right thing to do is or the right way to go is, Scriptures tell us there's a way that seems right to a man, and its end is destruction. We should remember that. So I can't just trust my own judgment. My own judgment is flawed and sinful by definition; I need others.

So we're going to choose to submit to something, to be a part of something, to receive something, to enter into a Christian tradition that existed before we were born. If it didn't exist before you were born, don't even think about it; it's not worth it. [Laughter] If it got made up last weekend, it's wrong, I assure you. And that's what we submit to. When people say things to me or around me like: "Well, I agree with a lot of stuff in the Orthodox Church" or "The Orthodox Church seems good to me in these various ways, but, for example"—this is something I've heard someone say—"if I joined, I'd have to pretend I believe some other things that I don't believe, and that wouldn't be authentic" or something.

No. That's not what the Orthodox Church—I'll speak for the Orthodox Church as an Orthodox priest— That's not what the Orthodox Church calls you to do. The Orthodox Church does not call you to agree or pretend to agree to a list of things in order to be a member. What the Orthodox Church requires you to do is to not make that decision for yourself. What the Orthodox Church requires of you, if you decide to join the Orthodox Church, is that you decide: This is Christ's Church; this is the place where Christ is; this is the place where I encounter him: therefore what Christ's Church teaches is what I will believe, no matter how it seems to me. Some of it may make total sense to me, and some of it may not make any sense to me, but I'm going to believe it either way because this is the place where I encounter Christ; this is Christ's Church.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. All right. Well, all that said, we're going to go ahead and take our first break, and then we'll actually start diving into these texts that this episode is about! We'll be right back!

***

Fr. Andrew: And we're back! So we just spent an hour and 25 minutes setting up the framework for the two texts we're going to be discussing, which are the Ascension of Isaiah and the Assumption of Moses—or is it called that? We'll get to that. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Or is it? If that is your real name!

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly. Exactly, ancient texts, if that is your real name! It's important to understand the difference between an ascension and an assumption, and the basic thing that they turn on is whether the person is dead or not. If they're alive still and they're caught up into heaven, it's an ascension; if they're dead, it is an assumption of their body. This is the Orthodox take on this. As we said, there's the Roman Catholic take, and there's ambiguity built into that. You can find all kinds of explanations of that, so go look that up for yourself if you want to read all about the way that the Catholics explain what happened there.

But the first of the two texts we're going to talk about is the Ascension of Isaiah! So we know who the Prophet Isaiah is, but it turns out there's actually a whole bunch of traditions surrounding him that are not mentioned explicitly in the Old Testament, some of which, then, these not-Old Testament traditions, get mentioned in the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: They're nearby. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, they're nearby. They're Scripture-adjacent.

Fr. Stephen: They're not in the… Yes. So the Ascension of Isaiah is— And this is something— We already talked about this, actually, with the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, but we'll find this with a lot of these texts as they've come down to us. A lot of these things that we refer to—"Oh, this is a Second Temple Jewish text"—the written documents we now have are sort of often multiple texts put together, amalgamated, where not just a composite of oral traditions—almost all of these are repositories of pre-existing oral traditions—but actual written texts that have been put together and/or iterated upon.

What we now call the Ascension of Isaiah actually has three different pieces that have been put together. The main body of the text is sort of in two pieces that were originally two separate pieces, and then another chunk of text has been kind of smushed in in the middle. So it's three texts put together, but it's not sort of like: Text 1, Text 2, Text 3. It's : Text 1 and Text 2, and then Text 3 is kind of rammed into the middle of Text 1, toward the end, off-center. But we'll talk about that more in detail here in a minute.

Using that numbering, Text 1 followed by Text 2, and then Text 3 squished in: Text 1, the first piece, is a Second Temple Jewish text, meaning it's Jewish as opposed to reflecting any Christian emphases.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and probably dates to before Christ? We're not sure and certain?

Fr. Stephen: Well, no… Probably not… It's probably contemporaneous with some of the earliest writings of the New Testament, like a couple of St. Paul's epistles.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that's the problem, by the way, folks— We often refer to "Second Temple Jewish texts," but as a distinct category from, say, the Old Testament and the New Testament, but the reality is that the New Testament itself is a set of Second Temple Jewish texts.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And that doesn't necessarily mean not-Christian, because Christianity was a Judaism along with a whole bunch of other Judaisms that were around in that period.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just take note that we're using short-hands that are not perfect rules.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So what we're really saying here is that that first part had non-Christian Jewish origins.

Fr. Andrew: Right. There's no indication in this part that it is from within the Christian community.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. On the other hand— And the reason we're making that point is that the other two pieces are very definitely Christian. Now, we've talked about, in terms of the other texts—we've only talked about a few so far, but even the ones we've just talked about—we've talked about how there are times where scholars— any time they see anything that looks even vaguely Christian, they're like: "Oh! Christians added that!" like knee-jerk: "That's a Christian interpolation! Christians added that! Christians changed that!" And we've seen that a lot of times those are silly. If you presented them the book of Isaiah, like the canonical book of Isaiah, and you didn't tell them— And you told them it was from, say, the third century and they didn't know it was the biblical book, they'd probably claim that a bunch of things were Christian interpolations, because they sound Christian. [Laughter] There's stuff that sounds Christian all through the Old Testament. Guess what? [Laughter]

So we've talked about how that's kind of silly. So when we say here that these two other pieces are very clearly Christian, we're not doing that. They are way too on-the-nose. One of them uses the phrase "the Christian Church." Christians were first called Christians in Antioch— That's a Christian document, talking positively about the Christian Church as something they're a member of. And the other one isn't quite that explicit, but talks about things like the apostles going and evangelizing, so it's like… Yeah.

All three parts come from the second half of the first century AD. So these things, including the Christian parts, the two parts that we're calling Christian parts, were written during the time when a lot of the New Testament was being written. That's important to keep in mind. This is— The stuff we're calling Christian material here is not like later Christian material. It is as early as—and earlier than—some of the books of the New Testament. The three parts were put together in the form that we have them now sometime early in the second century; in the first half of the second century, it took its current form. We know that because we start finding citations of the text in the second century in the shape that it's in now.

So this is as early as it gets. That's going to be important to remember when we see some of the content of some of the Christian sections, by the way. But it is a composite like that. Part one, piece one, the non-Christian Jewish part—and again, by that, by the fact that I'm saying "non-Christian," do not assume that that means anti-Christian. [Laughter] It just means it came from a Jewish source, and the Jewish source that produced it was not a Christian, so there's no antipathy to Christianity or anything here. And it doesn't seem to have been edited by whoever… Someone could have— Whoever put it in its current form with all the Christian pieces in it and on it could have gone through and edited this part, if they'd wanted to. They could have gone and made it really obviously Christian, too, but they didn't. They didn't, so the fact that they didn't shows you that it's definitely not anti-Christian. [Laughter] It's not contradictory; they didn't feel the need to. They felt like they could just add to it; they didn't need to change anything.

So this is what makes up chapters one through five—and a note here. I wanted to do this earlier, but I forgot. When we give chapters and verse numbers on these texts, we're almost always—there are exceptions, but almost always—going by Charlesworth's numbers.

Fr. Andrew: Which are not necessarily universal.

Fr. Stephen: And we're doing that because every time people have asked us where to get these texts, we point them to the two-volume Charlesworth Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Since that's what we point people to, those are the numbers we use, almost always. Sometimes there's pieces of texts that aren't in Charlesworth or something, and so we have to do something a little different, but almost always when we give them, we're using Charlesworth.

Those are not standardized. Chapter and verse divisions are new enough to the Bible, but with the Bible everybody has kind of agreed on them. With these texts, everyone who's published a translation has done their own numbering, literally. And part of the reason for that is that some of these texts exist in multiple forms, so eventually when we do the one on 1 Enoch, there are radically-different-in-length versions of the book of Enoch in different languages, of 1 Enoch. If you tried to follow the same numbering scheme, it would be a mess. In the shorter versions, if you were translating one of the shorter versions— If you're translating, say, the shorter Greek version—the Greek version is much shorter than the Amharic version—then you'd have to figure out how to use the numbers. Do I skip verse numbers when there's material that's left out of the shorter version, so I go verse 27 and then verse 33, hope people don't notice and think it's weird? So there's a reason for that: everybody just numbers the version that they're translating.

So that means if you have some other translation, other than Charlesworth, and you try to look up this stuff based on the numbers we're giving, you might not have a good time. You might be like: "Wait, that doesn't say anything about that!" That's why you don't need to send us emails or anything. I mean, Fr. Andrew always loves getting emails, but—

Fr. Andrew: Always!

Fr. Stephen: —you don't have to send us emails saying, "That's not what verse blankety-blank says," because you're reading a different version. That's because you're reading a different version. Save yourself the time typing it, even if you don't care about Fr. Andrew's spam folder. [Laughter] So, yeah. We're going by Charlesworth's numbering.

This is chapters one through five, the first section. This is referred to as the martyrdom of Isaiah. This is basically a written record of earlier Jewish traditions regarding the death of the Prophet Isaiah. His death is not recorded in the book of Isaiah or in the books of the kings. That's not recorded in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, but there was a— When we say traditions, we're meaning orally handed down memory of how he died and when he died, because he had disciples who compiled the book of Isaiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they're going to know about how he died and tell the story of it, because he's a very well-known and -love and -revered prophet. And this is one of those examples where: here's a tradition represented in these kinds of texts that is also represented in the New Testament. Not saying that the New Testament gets it from this text in this particular case, but that they're both representing stuff that's not in the Old Testament. The fact that Isaiah was sawn in two and that's how he died—he died as a martyr—that's the detail that you find in this text and also in Hebrews 11:37—and also in the Talmud! It's also in the Talmud.

Fr. Stephen: Well, the Talmud is a little different, honestly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Because Hebrews just makes a reference to an Old Testament saint being sawn in two.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that's right. It doesn't explicitly say that it was Isaiah.

Fr. Stephen: It doesn't explicitly say it was Isaiah, and there's no elaboration of the story, like: how did that happen, who did it, why… [Laughter] There's not like a whole story there. It's just a reference to these traditions, and that's especially why we can't say it has anything to do with this text, because that basic idea, that that's how Isaiah died, obviously was going around in oral tradition completely separate from this written text. The Talmud, when it talks about the death of Isaiah, actually follows and includes more information from the story as it's told in the Martyrdom of Isaiah, in these chapters.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so it seems that the Talmud version, then, is pretty clearly dependent upon this text that we're talking about.

Fr. Stephen: Well, or very close to it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, or they maybe have a common source perhaps.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So we can't say for sure, but much more closely related to it, in that it includes more of the details and more the shape of the story is there in the Talmud. That's part of the reason, by the way, that we say that this part comes from a non-Christian Jewish source, because if it came from a Christian—even a Christian Jewish source—it's unlikely that the Talmud would pick it up unaltered. This is part of the general reservoir of Jewish tradition, not the specifically Christian strand of Jewish tradition.

Basically what happens, in terms of the narrative, is that Hezekiah dies. Isaiah has revealed to him that Manasseh is going to become king of Israel. Manasseh is a bad dude. We have the tradition as represented in the prayer of Manasseh, a little piece of extra-biblical content, that Manasseh eventually repented, but for most of his life he was exceedingly wicked and sort of brought back paganism full-force in Israel. So Isaiah kind of realizes this is going to happen, is forewarned because he's a prophet. So he takes the community of the prophets, which was a thing, and takes them into the desert, the Judean desert, away from the cities, to be away from the king and his ability to enforce his evil decrees.

As I mentioned, we talked about this in our episode on the phenomenon of prophets, which I think was called "Prophet Motive" as a super clever pun—

Fr. Andrew: And a Star Trek reference! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: There's a whole community of prophets and their wives and their children who lived together in sort of a communal mode of living. We see this reflected throughout the Hebrew Scriptures in a whole series of points. Remember, there's this city of prophets where Samuel is that Saul goes down to and then rips off all his clothes and thrashes around on the ground. And there's Elisha, after the Prophet Elijah ascends into heaven, as we were just talking about, goes back to the community of prophets. So this community of prophets is a thing, sort of in the background all through.

Fr. Andrew: Kind of, in many ways, like a monastery; in many ways sort of the template for monasticism, actually.

Fr. Stephen: And so they go out into the desert to avoid Manasseh. Manasseh brings back paganism, and his revitalization of paganism allows Belial—also sometimes spelled Beliar, just replacing the last L with an R—gives him a chance. We've talked about Belial before. It means sort of the yokeless one. And remember, we talked about, in some detail, in the Antichrist episode, about the man of lawlessness. That lawlessness is the man of Belial.

But anyway, so Belial means the yokeless one, like the lawless one, so this is a devil-figure again in our Second Temple literature. He possesses a pagan prophet. He's able to possess him because this pagan prophet is involved in pagan worship of demons in Israel. And the prophet he produces or whom he possess is named Belkira, which is probably not what his mom named him, because Belkira in Aramaic means lord of evil! [Laughter] Yeah, not a good baptism name, folks. Will not baptize little baby Belkira.

Fr. Andrew: Definitely a villain for your next RPG.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! That title, by the way, "lord of evil" or Belkira in Aramaic, is one of the titles for Samael, the fallen archangel.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh. Yeah, we really do have to do a devils episode.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So this is— Bad dude possessed by the devil, basically, is the idea here. And possessed Belkira goes out to track down Isaiah, because he's the prophet of God, of the true God, and they capture him and they put him in a log, and they saw him in two. And that is how Isaiah dies a martyr's death. So he's sort of murdered by this demon-possessed false prophet.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Creepy.

Fr. Stephen: That's sort of narrative part one. Part two—this is the first of our Christian parts—is the material that's in chapters six through eleven. This is an apocalyptic vision that Isaiah has. Now, you may be thinking—

Fr. Andrew: Hold on, now! Isn't he dead? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Well, you may be thinking, "Oh, okay, so he died. So is this like: his soul goes up into heaven and has this vision?"

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: No! This is a prequel. [Laughter] This is an apocalyptic vision that Isaiah had well before he died, well before he was martyred, that is just recorded here. And the section from chapters six through eleven is often called the vision of Isaiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, although in a sense this is kind of like the ascension proper, sort of?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, kind of. So "ascension" is being used somewhat ambiguously, to refer to both his visions and his death. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: It recounts this apocalyptic vision, where he's led by the Angel of the Lord, the Angel of the Lord figure from the Hebrew Scriptures, on this journey through the seven heavens where he sees all of these things and recounts all of these things. When he's talking about the Angel of the Lord, the Angel of the Lord shows up, and Isaiah comments, "Oh, he's very different. This angel is different, different [from] all of the angels." That this is this very different figure, this higher figure, this greater figure, and refers to how he's very different from the angels that he saw all the time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it's kind of an interesting detail in the text, that he sees angels all the time, and: "Oh, this one's different!" [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: "But wait, this is a completely different thing." And that seeing angels all the time, we've talked about with prophets before, like Elisha and Gehazi, when he opens Gehazi's eyes to see the angels, implying that Elisha saw that all the time, that these very holy people sort of have constant access to the spiritual world in a way that we don't, as sinners.

So he asks the Angel of the Lord his name, because he can see: "Well, who's this? This is totally different." And he kind of says, "Well, I'll tell you my name at the end of our journey." Spoilers: it's Christ. And this is one of the things where we know that this is very obviously a Christian text, because it's not even the Messiah; it's way more specific than that! And this shows us— This shouldn't be too much of a surprise, that we already, in the first century, have someone making the identification of the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament with Christ, because pretty early in the second century St. Justin Martyr says the same thing, and just presents it as the Christian belief. Without any argument, he just says: This is what Christians believe. So it shouldn't surprise us that this was already around in the first century at least somewhere.

And so they go on this trip through the seven heavens. Interestingly, what passes for hell where the evil angels are held is one of the heavens. Kind of counter-intuitive for us.

Fr. Andrew: But it makes sense if you understand the devil is the prince of the powers of the air.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it's one of the lower levels, but yeah.

Fr. Andrew: There's this sense that angelic powers, both good and evil, are kind of in the air. And this is, of course, before the end of the world, so they're still kind of loose.

Fr. Stephen: Well, sort of.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Kind of, sort of, somewhat.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, but also that the heavens—we're talking about the seven heavens here—doesn't mean the sky, literally, and it doesn't even mean the place where God is.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It's associated with the sky in an imaginary sense but—

Fr. Stephen: But what it really means is the spiritual world. It means the spiritual world. The seven levels of the spiritual world is really what we're talking about. And they get in a fight with Samael at one point, because that guy's no good. And then eventually, once they get to the seventh heaven, this is where it gets really interesting. And I say really interesting: you might find all the seven heavens interesting, but if you read a lot of this literature, if you start reading a lot of apocalyptic literature, you go through so many different visions of the seven heavens and they're all different. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It kind of blends together after a while.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and, you know— But the part that's really interesting to me—and what I mean when I'm saying this is: opposed to all those other ones, what's really interesting about this one in particular as opposed to some of the things that you'll find in many of them, if not all of them, is when you get to the seventh heaven and you get to the throne of God. Part of what I think makes this different and unique and interesting is that this is a first-century Christian document. So you're getting a window into the Christian view of this at the earliest stage, at the apostolic stage.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there's still apostles around when this is being written.

Fr. Stephen: When they arrive there, they're at the throne of God in the seventh heaven, the highest heaven. In front of the throne of God, Isaiah sees the angels and human saints. Angels are holy ones, too, but the human holy ones and them. The only one of the human saints that's mentioned by name is Enoch, but there's more. It says there's more of them there. So these are the people like Enoch. And it says that they no longer have garments of flesh or garments of skin, but they have new or renewed garments. We've talked about garments of skin before, this idea of the flesh, the sinful flesh, flesh that's subject to change but also to death, mortality, corruption. That's been changed or renewed to this new garment. Think of St. Paul's language in 1 Corinthians about being clothed with immortality.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, this doesn't mean that they don't have bodies any more; it means that their bodies are different, that they are changed.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They're referred to as being like the angels.

Fr. Andrew: How about that?

Fr. Stephen: And he sees that there are crowns and thrones and garments there, waiting for future human saints.

Fr. Andrew: And those images come up over and over again in the text. They talk about the crowns and the garments and the thrones.

Fr. Stephen: Now this— If our Roman Catholic friends felt that I was picking on them at the end of the last half, now I guess I'll pick on our Protestant friends, a little bit; or pick at a little bit, maybe. But I think it's important— So again, this is first century. This is first-century use of language. There has been a predominant— I will just say a predominant view within Protestantism that the language of clothing and changing clothing, from an old garment to a new garment, this changing of clothes language, especially as St. Paul uses it but also in other places where it occurs in the New Testament, that this is talking about imputed righteousness; that this is talking about sin in the sense of guilt and deserving punishment on the one hand with the old garment and that the new garment is referring to righteousness in some positive sense, like merit. So this is taken to be an image of justification or of salvation or of being born again, of accepting Jesus; that the old garment that represents this sin and the need for punishment is taken off of you and put on Christ, and this perfect robe of Christ's righteousness and merit and goodness is then put on you in this kind of— in what's sometimes called the great exchange.

Here we have a real problem with that because not only here do we see this language being used in a Christian text and it not meaning that at all—here it refers to mortality and immortality, death and life—and none of these garments is being worn by Christ. This is a garment there in heaven that's awaiting these people at the end of their journey.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it would also— The image doesn't make sense if this is Christ's garment, because there's multiple sets of them around.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So it doesn't work that way. Now, someone who holds to that other view, that predominant Protestant view, might say to me, "Yeah, okay, but the Ascension of Isaiah isn't in the Bible."

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: "And I'm going to hold out that the Bible uses it in a different way." All right. Here's the problem with that. 1 Corinthians 15—go read 1 Corinthians 15— St. Paul uses that language in 1 Corinthians 15 to mean exactly this. So we have evidence both within the Scriptures and a Christian interpretive text outside of the Scriptures showing this other usage of that language. So to take this other view that presupposes, amongst other things—I mean, there's all kinds of other things we could say about this and argue about about this—but minimally, you have to presuppose that St. Paul uses the same language in two different places—or three or four different places—in completely different ways.

Fr. Andrew: Or…! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And that one of the ways he uses it fits perfectly with the Christian use of that language contemporaneous to his epistles and immediately thereafter, and the other way he uses it, the other kind of contradictory way he uses that same language in other places, does not conform to the ways that Christians used it in the first and second centuries. Occam's razor, it seems to me like he's probably always using it the same way, and it's probably consonant with the way Christians used it at the time when he was using it and immediately thereafter. That seems more likely.

Now, that's not: "Checkmate, Protestantism! Ah, see, all Protestantism is wrong and you need to become Orthodox." I mean, you should, but— But it is to say on the point of that language, I think it's very difficult to argue that St. Paul himself was using that language that way. You can argue it's a valid theological metaphor, it's derived from something else somewhere else, sure, but to try to say that St. Paul is using that language that way in, say, Romans I think is a really hard argument to make in light of everything.

But you may be just as informed as [I am] and disagree still, as we said in the first half.

Fr. Andrew: That is a thing.

Fr. Stephen: I don't want to be totally hypocritical. Just a little bit. [Laughter]

So in addition, some other little pieces we get here at the end of this second section of the Ascension of Isaiah: the saints, the human saints, human holy ones who are there with the angels, are replacing the angels of the lower world.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It's interesting because the language that's there— There is this reference to them being lower, but there's also this reference to the angels on the right and on the left, and the ones on the left are lower. So it's this very, very, very association of the right with goodness and left with evil or whatever. But we've talked about this many times in the podcast before. It's representing the same image of what we call the left hand of God, which we see in heaven before Ahab gets it.

Fr. Stephen: And that's how St. Gregory the Dialogist reads Job when it says the angels gathered at God's right hand and his left.

Fr. Andrew: And the ones at the right—

Fr. Stephen: —are his elect angels, and the ones on the left are the other ones.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. So the idea here is that the left ones, the lower ones, they have departed from obedience to God, and humans are going to take their place.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And the particular way here— And this is— Some of these elements we're talking about here, you're going to find out in our last half, are the reason why these two documents are related, more even than the ascension/assumption idea. The reason that, or the way in which they rebelled— So the Enochic literature tends to focus on the giants and the nephilim, but the focus here of the rebellion is that they sought to be worshiped by humans; they became the gods of the nations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is sort of the post-Babel idea.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That's sort of more the focus here in terms of these angels and their judgment. You also see—quite frankly, I think this is hard to avoid. You see not just the Trinity in the sense of referring to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, which you get, for example, in Matthew 28, not just mentioning the names, not just mentioning the three Persons, but in this first-century document—late first century, admittedly, but still first-century Christian document—you see some detail and some depth into the doctrine of the Trinity as it will be sort of codified, if you want to use that language, at the Council of Nicaea.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. And this is contemporaneous with the New Testament, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So the text refers to the great glory, which is a reference to God the Father, because it's saying the great glory that no one can look upon, which is sort of God, proper, O Theos, the God, God the Father. And then there are two other figures whom Isaiah sees. One is Christ, the Beloved. And when I said it's not ambiguous, this isn't just the Messiah, this is Christ, it said that he is the one who descended and then ascended again to his former place. It's very clearly referring to Jesus. And we'll see it gets even more on-the-nose about that. So this is very clearly Christ. And then he refers to— He says he sees the Angel of the Holy Spirit.

Now, there are folks out there, reading this, who— This kind of ruins their whole day if they're scholars, because, remember, our going assumption since at least the 19th century and our German friends has been that the doctrine of the Trinity evolves over the course of centuries. So finding a text like this from the first century, now that's a pain, right? [Laughter] This is a place where they read— It says he sees the Angel of the Holy Spirit, and they go: "Aha! Here's our out. We're going to say that this means that this text is saying that the Holy Spirit is an angel." Okay, now, this isn't even "need to take a logic course to get a PhD" time. This is, like, SAT-level reading comprehension. When he saw the Angel of the Lord, did that mean the text was saying that the Lord is an angel?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no.

Fr. Stephen: No! [Laughter] If you go out into the parking lot, and you see the car of Fr. Stephen, and you say, "I saw the car of Fr. Stephen," does that mean you're saying Fr. Stephen is a car? Okay, so this is what I mean by sub-"logic course level." That's not what that means.

Fr. Andrew: And also, frankly, if you look in chapter eight—so it's a few chapters before what we're talking about right now—it actually says— I thought this was really interesting; I'm just going to read it real quick. It says, "He took me up into the sixth heaven, and there were none on the left." So this is the idea there, the angels have left, the ones on the left have left. "There were none on the left, nor a throne in the middle, but all were of one appearance, and their praise was equal. And strength was given to me, and I also sang praises with them, and that angel also, and our praise was like theirs." And then this: "And there they all named the primal Father and his beloved Christ and the Holy Spirit, all with one voice." It's like: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, explicit here, were all being worshiped by the angels, and Isaiah is worshiping them with them.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but if you've based your whole career and all those articles you've published on the idea that Nicene Trinitarianism doesn't exist until the fourth century, and you find it in the first century, you've got to try to argue that it's not Nicene Trinitarianism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, come up with something.

Fr. Stephen: Or admit you're wrong, but we can't do that. [Laughter] That's not possible.

The fact that he sees the Angel of the Holy Spirit implies that the angel he is seeing is not the Holy Spirit himself, obviously, but the Holy Spirit does not have a bodily form.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so you don't see him.

Fr. Stephen: So if he's going to see this in front of him—he also doesn't see the great glory; that's why he just refers to God the Father as the great glory that no one can look upon—then you're going to have to see some kind of representation of the Holy Spirit, some kind of image of the Holy Spirit. So this angel or messenger is a representation of the Holy Spirit that he sees, is definitely not saying that the Holy Spirit is an angel.

The context in which he sees it is important, because he sees this worship being given. Worship is being given not only to the great glory, not only to God the Father, but also to Christ and to the Holy Spirit. But he makes this important point, that the worship that's given to Christ and the Holy Spirit, Christ and the Holy Spirit then pass on to the Father. They then pass on to the Father. Why is this important? Well, this is the same principle, the same idea, that lies behind, in the formulation of Nicene Trinitarianism, what St. Basil the Great—especially St. Basil the Great and, in this case— St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nyssa on why there are not three gods. St. Basil the Great uses some important terminology with this.

Part of the reason why Christians are not tri-theists, among many, but one primary and very important one, is that Christians worship one God. Who is that one God? Christians worship one God, as it says in the Nicene Creed: the Father Almighty. The Father is the one God. And the worship that is given to Christ and the Holy Spirit, as St. Basil the Great says, the honor given to the image passes to the prototype.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and Christ is described as the image of the Father.

Fr. Stephen: The express image of the Father, who is begotten of the Father. The Son is the image of the Father, by definition. That's how father and son works, biblically. And the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father as the image of the Father. So the worship offered to them passes on to God the Father. And if you want direct Bible reference to this, remember when St. Paul talks about Christ subjecting all things to the Father. This is how the early Christians understood what it meant when Jesus said, "The Father is greater than I," or when Jesus says, "This is life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent." He is not there denying that he is God, that he is divine; he is there affirming that there is one God, the Father, while also other texts affirm that Jesus Christ is God, because he is the express image of the Father, meaning everything that the Father is, he is also, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God: all of that Nicene language.

And so that principle that St. Basil the Great points to, to that principle that the honor given passes to the prototype— He's making that distinction using Greek philosophical terms, but he's making the same point that's being described in narrative here in the Ascension of Isaiah.

Fr. Andrew: Again, contemporaneous with the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Contemporaneous with the New Testament, a Jewish Christian source. This is also important. Get out of here with this "Oh, the Bible was written with the Hebraic mindset, and the Church Fathers had a Hellenic mindset." Get out of here with that nonsense! They're using different sets of terminology in different languages to describe the same reality. That's what's happening.

The core element, at least a core element, of Nicene Trinitarianism is here in a Jewish Christian work in the first century, in the Ascension of Isaiah, incontrovertibly. Is every element of Nicene Trinitarianism here in this one text? No, of course not. Of course not. But this core element is. And I think, frankly, this by itself is enough to validate the claim that the Council of Nicaea makes that what they taught was apostolic, because this at least shows that in the time of the apostles there were Christians who believed what was proclaimed at Nicaea. It's impossible for me to prove every Christian did or that any particular Christian did, but it was clearly believed at that time by Christians. Sorry, just about everybody. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All right, so what's the third part that's actually not the third part?

Fr. Stephen: Wait, we have to talk about the very end of this section, then, [which] is sort of a summary about the life of Christ. It's beyond on-the-nose. It's very clearly dependent upon the Christian Gospel, not necessarily any of the written— probably not any of the written gospels. It doesn't seem to be— There's not enough detail in it for you to say, "Oh, this is based on Matthew," but there is enough detail that it's like: "Obviously, this is— Especially combined with everything else, this is clearly a Christian document."

But the way it's presented—this is what's important about it—is that it's presented in terms of— Because, remember, our literary figure here is Isaiah. This is a vision Isaiah is having, so the idea behind this recounting of Christ's life is it's using terminology and things to connect it to the canonical book of Isaiah, to try and say, "Oh, Isaiah, in the canonical book of Isaiah, was really talking about Christ, and not just the Messiah in general."

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you get stuff that is, as you said, so super on-the-nose, like, for instance, it talks about him being a baby in Nazareth. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. But this is connected to things in the canonical book of Isaiah to try to show that Jesus is the one whom he was talking about.

So then there's this third part, and this third part gets wedged into the first part. This third part is called the Testament of Hezekiah, and is, as the text now stands—and again, we're using the Charlesworth numbers—chapter three, verse 13, through the rest of chapter three and all of chapter four. And it's been just kind of crammed in there. [Laughter] Again, obviously Christian. [Chapter] three, verse 13, refers to the Christian ecclesia, the Christian Church. I mean, it uses the word "Christian."

But this piece is another vision of Isaiah, in which he sees, again, in very on-the-nose detail not only the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, but the coming of the Holy Spirit, the apostles going and evangelizing the whole world. So this is clearly Christian. But then he goes on, in the vision, to talk about the coming of the Antichrist. And if you read the description of the Antichrist, much like in the book of Revelation, it's pretty clearly that Nero— that Emperor Nero is kind of the model here, but that's what you'd expect at the end of the first century. In the second half of the first century, everyone was using Nero as the model of the Antichrist, including the book of Revelation, which was written at that time, too.

And then after the coming of the Antichrist you have the resurrection of the dead, you have the last judgment, and then the beginning of the eternal kingdom. So essentially his vision is the Gospel. For all intents and purposes, Isaiah sees the Gospel in this vision, and it's presented that— it's wedged in there so that they can say the fact that he had this vision, the fact that Isaiah knew the Gospel, in advance, that's why Belial came and killed him. That's why it gets crammed in there. That Belial didn't want anybody else to know about this, so he goes and sort of assassinates Isaiah, through gory means.

Now it's important— So this is again— We talked about this already with the idea of pseudepigraphy, as we were talking about some of these texts— Modern readers tend to come to these texts and assume that there's some sort of fraud or falsification going on. This text is making the claim that Isaiah had these visions and knew these things. That's not what's happening. That's not what's happening.

Fr. Andrew: It's more like Isaiah is a character that is being used as a mode of interpretation of his prophetic book that's in the Scriptures.

Fr. Stephen: Right, of Isaiah.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. It's a way of saying, "Isaiah's prophecy connects with what we know from the gospels, and here's a way of talking about the connections between them."

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so the reason these texts gravitate together is that you have this text just recording Jewish traditions of how Isaiah died, and then you have some Christian texts where Isaiah is used as a figure to represent the book of Isaiah and show the connections between that and Christ, what Isaiah prophesied and the death and resurrection of Christ and these other things: the bodily resurrection and the last judgment, all of this. So they gravitate to each other. But this happens all the time, even in the New Testament.

In the New Testament, it's very common to quote: "St. Moses says…" and then it's just a quote from the Torah. Sometimes what's being quoted isn't something that Moses said, like the person Moses isn't the one who said it. Sometimes it's God who said it, but if they're quoting the Torah, they'll just say, "Moses spoke, saying…" And sometimes they'll quote psalms that aren't even psalms of David in the New Testament, and say, "David says…" because David as a figure is just used to represent the Psalms. And Solomon is just a figure that's used to represent wisdom. At some point I'm sure we'll go into more detail on this on the show, but I hate to tell you, folks, the book of Wisdom was written in Greek in the first century, and the Fathers who quote it who refer to it as the Wisdom of Solomon knew that. You know how I know they knew that? Because a lot of them list it as part of the New Testament, not the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I mean, this just underlines what pseudepigrapha is in this period. It's not an attempt to steal somebody else's name and pass your stuff off as theirs; it's using them as a figure, in some ways maybe to invoke their authority, but in many cases, like this, as an interpretive device.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Isaiah here represents the book of Isaiah. So you should read a statement like— a summary statement, like: "Isaiah foresaw the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ"—you should read that as what they're claiming actually in this text is the book of Isaiah prophesied the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. "This is the correct way to read the book of Isaiah."

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So this is a way of doing interpretation, a sort of narrative way of doing exegesis. It is not making a historical claim about the historical Isaiah and what he knew and when he knew it. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: This is just like what we saw with Jubilees. Jubilees is a way of interpreting and understanding Genesis and a little bit of Exodus.

Fr. Stephen: And we'll talk about this more because we're going to see the same thing here as we move into the third half with, in the Assumption of Moses, the way Moses is used as a figure in that text.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. All right. Well, we're going to take our second and final break, and we'll be right back with The Lord of Spirits.

***

Fr. Andrew: And we're back! It's the third half of this episode of The Lord of Spirits, and we're talking about— We just discussed the Ascension of Isaiah, and now we're going to be talking about the text called the Assumption of Moses—or is it?

Fr. Stephen: Probably. [Laughter] If that is its real name.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we can't just assume that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Yeah, we do have to kind of start there. So we have this text. We only have one copy of it, and it labels itself the Assumption of Moses. From ancient sources, we have references to a book called the Assumption of Moses, to a text called the Assumption of Moses, and to a text called the Testament of Moses. This text that we have, while it is called the Assumption of Moses, in literary genre, it is a testament. [When] we talked about the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, we talked about how testaments are: these are the final words of some biblical figure.

Fr. Andrew: Last will and testament.

Fr. Stephen: So this is the last words of Moses to Joshua; that's what's in the text that we have. Okay, in genre it's a testament; it calls itself the Assumption of Moses. We have these sources talking about the Assumption of Moses, them talking about the Testament of Moses—maybe this is the same book, you might think, by two different names.

Fr. Andrew: Well...

Fr. Stephen: Here's the problem. St. Nikephoros the Confessor of Constantinople, whom we've mentioned before on the show, who made in the ninth century, when he was the patriarch of Constantinople— made a list of books, of books that were publicly read in all the churches, meaning effectively canonical everywhere; books which were read publicly in some churches but not others, meaning were considered canonical in some Christian communities but not others; and then books that were to be read privately, by everyone's consideration. And these are all texts that were available to him in the library at Constantinople, so it's a very helpful list. It shows us where things were at in the ninth century. He not only lists the names of the books, but he lists their length in lines: how many lines of text there are in the work, how long it is. And he has separate listings for the Assumption of Moses and the Testament of Moses, with different lengths, like a major difference in length.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so these are different texts for him.

Fr. Stephen: Which makes it clear that he had in front of him two different texts, one of which he was calling the Assumption of Moses and one he's calling the Testament of Moses. So these are not— There are two different texts.

Fr. Andrew: So which one is this that he had in front of him?

Fr. Stephen: Well, so… [Laughter] There's more confusion.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the question is: How many lines, in what language?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so, um… Well, we can't use that to figure it out, because the one copy we have of this text is missing the last third, so we don't know exactly how many lines are in it in total. Now, we do have— There is a quotation in St. Athanasius and a few more in some Byzantine writers where they quote things that are in this text that we have and say they're quoting the Assumption of Moses. This is why we're calling it the Assumption of Moses. [Laughter] This is why we've chosen "assumption" rather than "testament"— is the witness of St. Athanasius to the text and these other Byzantine authors, and the fact that it labels itself the Assumption of Moses.

Fr. Andrew: But if you're going to look this up in Charlesworth, he calls it the Testament of Moses.

Fr. Stephen: He calls it the Testament! [Laughter] He makes the other decision!

Fr. Andrew: Just putting that out there.

Fr. Stephen: And of course that side can argue… Guess what's in that last third that we don't have? The actual assumption of Moses. The place where his body is actually taken up into heaven: we don't have that part of the story. So Charlesworth can say what we actually have is a testament, because the assumption piece is missing. Now, our side can then respond and say, "Well, actually, if you read the part we have, Moses refers to the fact that his body is about to be assumed up into heaven in what we have, so surely that was in the piece that's missing, because it's telegraphed earlier." But you can't be conclusive.

Fr. Andrew: It's a testament about the assumption, and some other things.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We made a call. But there's an issue there. On top of everything else, the one manuscript we have is in Latin. It's a Latin translation.

Fr. Andrew: And seems to be a translation of a translation, probably.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because there's non-Latin phrases in there.

Fr. Andrew: Latin from Greek from Hebrew, probably.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And the copy itself is from the sixth century AD.

Fr. Andrew: And dug up in the 19th by an Italian—

Fr. Stephen: We used to have none copies!

Fr. Andrew: —who found it— It's what they call a palimpsest which means they used— He found— It's like a text that was erased, and there was another text that was written on top. So he read the erased parts. But it wasn't obviously perfectly erased, which is why we could still see it. It was reused.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because they didn't have erasers. It's on vellum, so you have to scrape it.

Fr. Andrew: So they reused the vellum, which is animal skin. A lot of ancient texts are this way, folks. There's a lot of things that we have only in palimpsests.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that's the word for today.

Fr. Andrew: There you go: palimpsests.

Fr. Stephen: Whenever someone says "palimpsests," scream real loud for the rest of the day. Not going to be much screaming in most homes, I don't think. Or it's going to be deliberately goaded. But, yeah, whatever texts St. Nikephoros was looking at would have been the Greek versions, so, again…

Pretty much everyone agrees on the dating of it. Like I said, the copy is sixth century, but pretty much everyone agrees that this was written in the early first century AD, for a couple of reasons. One reason is there's nothing to point to this being a Christian text.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but this would mean, though, Jesus is alive and is, you know— This is pre-Jordan.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That's what early first century means.

Fr. Andrew: He's been born, but there's no—

Fr. Stephen: Probably during the life of Christ himself, this was written. So it seems pre-Christian, but also in the texts that we have, a major portion of it is sort of recounting the history of Israel, and it kind of goes right up to the first century BC. So no one thinks this is a mystical prophetic text. [Laughter] It was written after the events it records. Because, I mean, it goes through the Hasmonean period, talks about the Maccabean revolt. It goes right up into the— Normally when you find texts like that, when you see apocalyptic texts used to recount history, it's leading up to the time of writing. Everyone's pretty much in agreement that this text is doing the same thing all those other ones do. If you take pre-Christian, plus records events from first century BC, you get beginning of the first century AD, and pretty much everyone agrees.

Moses, as we mentioned at the end of the second half, is used here to sort of represent the Torah, to represent what he wrote in giving this recounting of history. And we should remember that in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament proper, the books from Joshua through 2 Kings (or 4 Kingdoms) are referred to as the Deuteronomistic history because they're not objectively describing the history of Israel; they're describing the history of Israel from the perspective of, in particular, the book of Deuteronomy, and the blessings and cursings that come upon Israel based on their faithfulness or faithlessness regarding the commandments of the Torah. That's the basis. This is a similar kind of thing going on. This is put into the mouth of the person, Moses, but Moses is here representing the Torah, representing that perspective on history.

As we mentioned, genre-wise, this is a testament; this is Moses speaking to Joshua before he dies, within the frame story. During that, as I mentioned, he talks about the fact that his body's about to be assumed into heaven, so, I mean, that's part of how we know that that— some version of that was in the piece that's missing.

Now, again—this is the second time—this one isn't quite as bad as the Angel of the Holy Spirit, but it's not good either. Some scholars have looked at this text and said, "Oh, look. This text is saying that Moses predicted in detail all these things that were going to happen over the next—depending on where you put Moses—millennium and a half, millennium and a quarter. This text is claiming that the historical Moses knew all of these things. Well, if the historical Moses knew all of these things for sure, then that would mean they were all set in stone."

Fr. Andrew: What!

Fr. Stephen: "And therefore whoever wrote this text was some kind of, I don't know, early Jewish Calvinist or some kind of fatalist who believed that all of Israel's history was set in stone beforehand."

Fr. Andrew: Because that's how prophecy totally works. Even given that idea… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, not only is that not how prophecy works, as we were just saying at the end of the last half, this text is not making a historical claim that Moses really said this.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is not untold secrets of Mosaic prophecies! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Moses is here—they're not trying to scam people; they're not trying to trick anyone; they're not trying to start their own Jewish sect— Moses is here being used; he's speaking for the Torah. He's a literary vehicle. This is very common in apocalyptic literature. People use a kind of apocalyptic prophetic recounting of history in order to comment on their own times, in kind of a sub rosa way. You don't just come out and say, "The current high priest is garbage, man. He's corrupt," because bad things happen to you if you go and say that publicly. Or you start talking trash about the Romans: bad things happen to you! But you produce a text where you have—I don't know, I'm just randomly picking—Daniel saying all this stuff about the horrible Greeks or the horrible Babylonians, and the Babylonians or the Greeks in your text just happen to sound a lot like the Romans? You can convey your meaning. Or you're talking about the Assyrians—wink, wink.

I mean, this is— Again, I think part of this is the assumption that ancient people were stupid and weren't capable of kind of nuance. Because, you know, do you think anybody would go and read George Orwell's Animal Farm and would say, "Well, this text is claiming that animals could talk and form complex societies on farms"? Of course not! [Laughter] He's very clearly using these animals and their relationship to the farm in the context of critiquing totalitarianism. We get that. And there's no reason why someone in the first century AD couldn't do something similar, and why readers of that text in the first century couldn't understand what the author was doing, because they're just as smart as we are. This is just… should be basic kind of stuff.

Now, that said, the author, like pretty much all Jews, I'm sure believed in the providence of God, and part of this narrative recounting of history is that God is doing things. God is a mover within history, and God is doing things, and he's bringing good out of evil. He's doing things. Providence is a thing; it's real. So it's not to say the other extreme, away from fatalism on one hand so we're going to say it's a random event. It's not random events. That flies in the— That contradicts the text just as much. The text is not saying it's random. There's a purpose and a meaning to these events that the text is trying to bring out, but that doesn't imply some kind of predestination or, worse, fatalism either. It's in between. Not everything is an extreme.

One of the central sort of interesting themes in the recounting of history is that, unlike— So some overviews— Like, if you look at the Deuteronomistic history, you probably have to conclude that the focus there is on different kings. That's why we call it 1 and 2 Kings. There's good kings and evil kings. And sort of the fate and fortunes of Israel as it's recounted there in the Deuteronomistic history sort of ebb and flow with who the king is. You have David as the archetypal good king, some other archetypal evil kings; you have Josiah who reforms— That's sort of the focus.

With this recounting of history in the Assumption of Moses, the blame is placed more on the tribe of Levi for everything going wrong. Because everything goes wrong: they end up in exile, they end up under the Romans. Why is everything a mess? Because the priesthood became corrupted. And so when the priesthood became corrupted and the worship of Israel became corrupted, that was the first domino with all these other things going wrong. The evil kings and— From the perspective of this text, the evil kings, the injustice, all the other horrible sin, and everything that was going on in Israel was the fruit of the poisoned tree of the false worship and the corrupted priesthood.

That said, if we're looking at this being written in the first part of the first century AD, it starts to materialize: Okay, using this historical commentary as a way of commenting on the present time, this is probably directed against the Sadducees, against the current high priest and priests, who controlled the Temple, who were definitely corrupt, who were beyond corrupt. Not only were they collaborating with the Romans to keep their power, we've talked before on the show about how they used the Temple tax to— for their family to take possession of 70% of the land in Judea that wasn't owned to the Romans, belonged to the high priestly family, because they confiscated it for back taxes, by levying Temple taxes that they knew the people couldn't pay. And then they went to work as tenant farmers on what used to be their land. And it wasn't just that it used to be their land, like they used to own it; this was land given by God in the Torah to their families.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, these are the allotments.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and they took it for themselves. So this is sort of the image of ultimate corruption. Again, standing up in Jerusalem and publicly denouncing the high priestly family: not good for your health and well-being. But this is a way to do that, by showing— You're saying, "This is the problem in Israel's history, is a corrupt priesthood."

That also tells us the likely circles out of which this text emerged: probably the Pharisees. Pharisees are, of course, opponents of the Sadducees, but not just that. Remember, as we said when we were talking in the first half about the assumption of Moses' body into heaven, this is intimately connected to the idea of the bodily resurrection. So it's very likely that this text emerged from Pharisaic circles, and this sort of sharp critique of the Temple's corrupt priesthood is aimed at the Sadducees at the time, through this vehicle. And Moses is being used to represent what the Torah has to say about this corrupt priesthood.

And so then at the end of it, though, or the end of what we have, the end of the testament part, there is this sort of final prophecy that Moses gives, because of course his recounting of what for the author was history was presented as Moses prophesying, too. But you jump from the first century BC and the recounting of history; you jump to the end of days. You jump to the Day of the Lord, and so there is this final concluding prophecy about the Day of the Lord that is quite interesting.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. I'm going to read it, and, everybody, just listen closely and maybe it'll remind you of something as I'm reading it. Don't worry: we will tell you what it should remind you of after I'm done reading it, but I just want to put it in front of you first. Okay, so it starts like this:

Then his kingdom will appear throughout his whole creation. Then the devil will have an end. Yea, sorrow will be led away with him. Then will be filled with the hands of the messenger, who is in the highest place appointed. Yea, he will at once avenge them of their enemies. For the Heavenly One will arise from his kingly throne. Yea, he will go forth from his holy habitation with indignation and wrath on behalf of his sons. And the earth will tremble; even to its ends shall it be shaken. And the high mountains will be made low. Yea, they will be shaken; as enclosed valleys will they fall. The sun will not give light, and in darkness the horns of the moon will flee. Yea, they will be broken in pieces. It will be turned wholly into blood. Yea, even the circle of the stars will be thrown into disarray. And the sea all the way to the abyss will retire, to the sources of waters which fail. Yea, the rivers will vanish away.

For God Most High will surge forth, the Eternal One alone. In full view will he come to work vengeance on the nations. Yea, all their idols will he destroy. Then will you be happy, O Israel, and you will mount up above the necks and the wings of an eagle. Yea, all things will be fulfilled. And God will raise you to the heights. Yea, he will fix you firmly in the heaven of the stars, in the place of their habitations. And you will behold from on high. Yea, you will see your enemies on the earth and, recognizing them, you will rejoice and you will give thanks. Yea, you will confess your Creator.

I mean, there's a lot going on here that's sort of end-of-the-world sort of imagery like you see in the gospels, frankly, which, you know, not written yet. Possibly some of the writers not even born yet. [Laughter] So, yeah, they didn't make all that stuff up. But you get this image of God rising up from his throne, and he's about to enact vengeance, and the idols of the nations are going to be destroyed. And then, finally, you get the image of him saying that—

Fr. Stephen: The powers of the sun and moon are crushed here.

Fr. Andrew: Crushed, yeah. Oh, yeah, the earth quaked. The earthquake: the foundations of the earth will shake. And then: "You, Israel, will be raised up to the heights and be fixed firmly in the heaven as the stars, in the place of their habitations."

It seems like this is a kind of expansion on Psalm 82 in a number of ways. You get God enacting judgment—

Fr. Stephen: Well, he arises first.

Fr. Andrew: He arises, right. "Arise, O God." Remember, this is Psalm 82. "Arise, O God." And even the language—

Fr. Stephen: "And judge the earth."

Fr. Andrew: "God will surge forth": this is this sort of— in Greek, right: Anasta, rise up, uprising. It's not exactly the same. It's not just a retelling of the psalm—there's a lot of eschatological imagery in here—but definitely something going on here that's very similar in a lot of ways.

Fr. Stephen: And interpreting it as him judging the gods of the nations.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the idols are going to be destroyed, and then you get the part about putting—

Fr. Stephen: Sun, moon, and stars.

Fr. Andrew: —the holy ones in their places.

Fr. Stephen: And then they're exalted as stars: "up into the heavens in their places." And the righteous stand before the throne of God; the archangels did. The fallen gods, the gods of the nations, are punished in Gehenna.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it says— In the Charlesworth it says, "You will see your enemies on the earth," but what is the earth? It's that sense of eretz.

Fr. Stephen: The underworld.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the underworld in Genesis 3.

Fr. Stephen: So that's the end of the world expectation and prophecy here that we get depicted at the beginning of the first century AD in this Jewish source, that again shows us how that was understood, which is very much how it's used and understood liturgically in the Orthodox Church on Holy Saturday, as prophecy.

As we mentioned— We talked about back, way back in the first half, so long ago now— We talked about his reference in Jude 9 to the devil and St. Michael contesting over the body of Moses. Of course, that would be in the piece that's missing. [Laughter] All the stuff about Moses' dead body is in the piece that's missing. We do have a decent reason to think that that was in this text because the earliest commentators that we have on the book of Jude— So as you might imagine, there's not just mounds and mounds of commentary on the book of Jude.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, there's not much to it anyway; it's really a short text.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but the earliest commentaries we have on the book of Jude—we have earlier quotations from it, but I mean places that comment on Jude 9, frankly—the earliest people who comment on Jude 9 and that we still have—that are still extant today—are a certain fellow named Gelasius of Cyzicus, whom I know you've all read everything he's written, and Origen, everyone's favorite non-saint. They're the earliest ones, in the third century, who comment on Jude 9, and both of them connect this reference to St. Michael and the devil contesting over the body of Moses to a text they call the Assumption of Moses. Of course, our case that that was included in the missing portion of this text is based on our case that this text is the Assumption of Moses, so that's not 100%, but I think that's pretty good testimony that what we have is two-thirds of the text that contains the tradition St. Jude is referring to; that if we had the whole thing it would include that element.

Now, that doesn't mean, by the way, we don't have— We certainly can't say for certain that St. Jude is quoting this text. That would be going way too far, because we can't even demonstrate that what he was referring to was in this text 100%, and there's probably an oral tradition element here, too, where the idea that that happened precedes this actual text and so could have a common source. St. Jude could just be referring to the tradition that underlies this, etc., etc. But there it is. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: All these things on the table look a little similar to each other, or a lot similar, so there's reason to put them on the table together.

I think the main theme that is my take-away from this is this question of— I mean, it's funny. We talked about ascensions and assumptions at the beginning, and even those categories don't totally fit everything we're talking about, although of course with Moses I think the assumption is a pretty clear thing, that that's the tradition, even though it's not— that part doesn't show up in this text that we talked about that has that name, because we— parts are missing.

But I think the thing that I want to come away with is this notion of the exaltation of the human person. And this, I think, is particularly important because of this—and we've talked about this a bunch of times on this show, but I think it bears repeating, and especially from another angle in this case—this idea that Christianity believes that you go to heaven when you die if—fill in the blank here: if you're a good person, if you've asked Jesus into your heart, if you—whatever it is. If you've done the thing, then you go to heaven when you die, period, end of story. I know full well that that is not the official teaching of most churches—definitely not Orthodox, definitely not Catholic, definitely not most Protestants—but it is, however, an extremely common theology that people have, really, really common, that this is what it means— that this is what the afterlife is about: "Heaven and hell when you die, and that's the end. Oh, by the way, there's going to be a resurrection some day."

I think the problem is that even if people do mention that, it's a "by the way," that the hope of the resurrection is not the key vector of the way that a lot of people think about the afterlife, the life after this life, that there is the possibility of bodily assumption, that there is the possibility of bodily ascension, even though, for most of us, certainly bodily ascension is not going to happen to us, which is being taken up to be with God even while we're still alive in this life, not having died, as Enoch and Elijah did. And even though the bodily assumption that Moses experienced, that the Theotokos experienced— even though that is not going to happen in the same way for most of us, it is actually eventually going to happen for the righteous.

I want to make a disambiguation here, of course, because everyone is going to be raised from the dead, the righteous and the wicked. As Christ says, the righteous to eternal life and the wicked to eternal condemnation or damnation, depending on your translation. So everyone is going to be raised from the dead; everyone will have their souls and bodies put back together, but the righteous, their bodies will be changed, and that's really what this assumption is about. Assumption into heaven is not about a change of place. Now, it's depicted visually— The imagery that we have is of a change of place, but it's interesting if you think about the assumption of Moses actually. We don't even have— I don't know— Is that even an icon? I mean, I've seen icons actually of the devil and Michael battling over the body of Moses. I've seen that. It's relatively rare, but I have seen icons— A friend of mine who's an iconographer sent me some pictures of that. But you don't get the assumption of Moses in terms of a flight up into heaven. Of course, for the Orthodox, the Dormition of the Theotokos is not depicted as a flight up into heaven. The imagery is not that. But even if you want to think of it in terms of going from one elevation to another, that's still not the point. It's not about a change of place.

This is about, as St. Paul says, being caught up to be with Christ in the clouds, which doesn't mean we're all going to hover up, Rapture-style, into the air—sorry, dispensationalists; sorry, everyone who's been affected by that theology, which is bunk! Rapture theology is bunk! What it's interpreting badly is the language in Scripture that human beings, when they are raised from the dead, and those who happen to be still living in this life when the end comes, when the true end comes, that the righteous, their bodies will be changed. They're going to be exalted. We're going to cast off mortality and put on immortality. This is the crowns and garments and thrones that we talked about in the Ascension of Isaiah that is over and over again in that text, and we see that same kind of language in Revelation; we see it in St. Paul; and of course we have Christ himself saying that humans will become equal to the angels: the righteous will be equal to the angels; the sons of the resurrection will be equal to the angels.

That's the destiny of Christians. That's the destiny of the faithful: bodily resurrection and then this exaltation of the human person, in which we will certainly still have material bodies, but they will be changed. We don't know exactly how, but they will be changed. St. Paul makes the comparison between a seed and a plant, which I think is a great image, because if you've ever planted a seed and then you see the plant that comes, those two things don't look anything like each other! But we know that they're the same thing. That seed that you put in the ground broke apart and became that plant. It's the same thing, and even if you were to do a DNA test on it, you would see that it's the same thing, but it's radically changed. And St. Paul says that the bodies that we have now are like the seed, and the bodies that the faithful will have in the age to come are the plant.

I think seeing that clearly and understanding that clearly puts a shape to our Christian hope that is much more vivid and much more motivating, in terms both of trying to live according to the commandments of Christ and also in terms of our evangelistic necessity. It's a much more powerful vision of what the life of the age to come is than simply "going to heaven when you die." That is a very static, a very flat way of understanding the age to come, and, frankly, it's wrong. It's just incorrect, not just technically incorrect, but every— It's just incorrect! It's just way too limited and reduced and so forth. That the life of the age to come for the faithful is going to be dynamic and active and exalted and glorious. Part of the value of these apocalyptic visions is we have a glimpse of what the possibilities for human beings really are: to take the place of the angels, to be set among the stars.

And if that sounds pagan to you, if that sounds—"Oh, Greek mythology talked about people being made into constellations"—that's not what that meant, but they were correct in the sense that human exaltation, to be like the stars, that is to say, like divine beings, that that is a possibility. What the Greeks and all the other pagans who talked about this stuff got wrong was, number one, it's not done through great feats of glory—you're not trying to impress the gods so that you become one of them—and, number two, it's actually available to everybody, not just to emperors and sons of gods and whatever; it's available to everybody, including the lowest slave, the smallest child. The most abused, stomped-on person in the world can become like the stars. And in fact, they probably have a better shot at it, frankly, than those who are glorious upon the earth. They have a better shot at it. When Christ came, he came as humble. He came as humble, and thus showed us the way.

So I think the value in looking at texts like these is that they help us to see more clearly what it is that we as humans can be. This is our actual possibility, and the key to getting there is, with the grace of God, to be faithful, to repent every day, to follow the commandments, to say, "Not me, but you," to actually love your neighbor, and to worship the Lord Jesus Christ with his Father and the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Stephen: Is that my cue?

Fr. Andrew: That's your cue. [Laughter] Period. Amen.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about picking up what we were talking about at the end of the first half, a long, long time ago, so long we can't remember when. [Laughter] Talking about intellectual humility, which, for some of us at least—I'm including myself in that—may be the hardest kind of humility. As I may have said on the show before, I talk a lot. I do this, I do a Bible study, I preach, I talk to people, I teach classes—I do all this stuff, so I remember saying things, but I have trouble very often remembering where and when I said them, so I end up repeating myself a lot in things. But as I may have said on this show in the past, I have, for literally decades now, been reading Nietzsche during Lent—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Bless you!

Fr. Stephen: —to help me work on my intellectual humility, to sort of beat my reason over the head for a while and try and force it into submission. I mean, just to give an example of what I mean by that, how that would work, Immanuel Kant said there are these certain things that just have to be true. We have to presuppose them, because if they're not true then logical thought and reason become impossible. And Nietzsche's response to Kant on that point is: "Who said rational thought and reason were possible?" It's a way of reminding myself repeatedly that all of the things I think I know for sure, I really don't know; and all the things that I think I've figured out, I don't really have figured out; and all the things I think I totally comprehend and understand, I don't really understand and don't really comprehend, which is hard to really convince yourself of. That's why I have to keep doing it repeatedly.

We, especially now—and this isn't just as modern people; this is a very contemporary thing, and I'm saying this as somebody in the United States, but I don't think it's all that different in most of the other places where people are going to be listening to this—have entered an era in which we take X-Files and Stone Cold Steve Austin way too seriously, and we don't trust anybody, except ourselves. We have an unbelievable amount of trust in ourselves and our own ability to understand things and figure things out and do our own research and find the truth ourselves and get to the bottom of things, but we don't trust anybody else.

If we don't trust anybody else in terms of just other individual humans, once you start getting groups of people together, we trust them even less, if that's possible. And when those groups of people form institutions, we trust them even less than that, if that's possible. There's a basic problem with that, and that's that we still have to live. We still have to live our lives every day. We still have to do things. And you can't actually live like that.

I just took a plane flight last week; I'm taking another one this week. I don't want to; I hate flying, but that's another topic. But I think honestly, if I'm honest with myself, one of the things I don't like about flying, that drives me bonkers about it, is that when I'm sitting there on a plane I can't pretend I'm in control of anything. I have to trust this plane that's probably very old and may or may not be well-maintained. I have to trust the pilot that he knows what he's doing and has managed to get some sleep, and his co-pilot. I have to trust that the maintenance crew did what they were supposed to do, that we're properly fueled up… I don't like it. When I'm driving in my car, I'm also having to trust in all kinds of things regarding the car and the maintenance that it's been done on it and my own attentiveness to that maintenance, but I at least can give myself the illusion of control because I'm driving. I mean, I'm not controlling all the other motorists on the road, so I'm not really, but I can pretend. Can't pretend on the plane, because it's more obvious that I'm being forced to trust.

And the more we're honest about our lives, the more we realize our lives are more like being on a plane and less like being the commander of our own destiny in every respect, that we constantly have to trust other people, even groups, even institutions, just to function every day. And I think the only way around the various impasses at which we find ourselves, community-wise, is not to continue to deny the fact that we have to trust but to, at the same time, become intentional about the fact that we have to trust somebody and become intentional about whom we trust, whom do we believe. Usually when people decry the lack of trust in our modern society, they're comparing it to an imaginary version of post-World War II, pre-Vietnam War history, at least in the United States, where there was trust in institutions, and people "believed science." So we're decrying the fact that we don't believe scientists any more, or that we don't believe newscasters and journalists any more. Let me be honest: those probably weren't the best people to trust in the first place.

But there are institutions and people we can trust—not because they're perfect, not because they never make mistakes. You can trust God; you can trust Christ, because he'll never make mistakes. But his Church is made up of humans, and the clergy is made up of people like me, who are sinners and are unreliable and will make mistakes and will have bad days and sometimes give you bad advice. But when you make the decision—this is the other piece— When you make the decision not to trust people and institutions, even institutions that God has established, even people that God has given some level or degree or area of authority, you are directly choosing, then, rather than trusting them—because you've got to trust somebody—to trust yourself, to trust your own ability to know and your own ability to understand and your own ability to work things out. Any confidence you pull away from everyone else is going to go there. If you start to lose confidence in yourself without putting it in anyone else, then you're in real trouble, because you can't function at all.

But the intellectual humility comes in in the realizing: I can't trust myself. Remember that thing I just said about being a sinner? That doesn't just apply to the advice I give other people; that applies to my own understanding and my own ability to decide what's right and what's wrong and what I should and shouldn't do, what I should and shouldn't say in a given situation. If you listen to this show, you know I have no clue what I should and shouldn't say. I think it and I say it, for the most part. And so I'm not trustworthy. I'm one of the least trustworthy people I know in that regard, in terms of whom I myself can trust. The most untrustworthy, in general, person I know is probably more trustworthy when it comes to me, to telling me the truth about who I am and what I do than I am in my own impression of myself.

And so it's not just— I know when we talked about this at the end of the first half, there were probably people who were saying, "There he goes, attacking Protestants, on the issue of trusting the Church." But it's not just about that. It's not even primarily about that. It's about things far more basic than where we put our trust. That's why we have spiritual fathers in the Orthodox Church: so before I make an important decision, I can get a second opinion; so when I realize I messed up, I can get some advice on how to start fixing it and not mess up again, at least not the same way—I'll find other ways.

It's why we live in a church community and are part of a community: living in a community instead of living by yourself and visiting a community. Living in a community puts all of these bumpers and barriers and frames around everything you do. That's where you learn, living in a community, what some of the things are, at least, that you should think and not say. You probably shouldn't think them at all, but you definitely shouldn't say them. Where you can learn the things that you don't do. That's where you learn there are lines that you don't cross, and that's how you learn how to live and how to function. But doing that means you have to put some trust in the community and in the people around you. You have to enter into that in a trusting way rather than a distrustful way, rather than in a skeptical way.

I think that's not only important in how we approach "What church should I belong to?" not that that's not— That's super important, but, again, more basically: "What do I do? How do I live my life?" has to start with trusting the people around me, the people whom I care about and who care about me, people whom I'm in a relationship with. It has to start with not being skeptical of everything they say and do. How do you be skeptical of something someone does? You read all kind of motives into it that probably aren't there, speculate. Rather than assuming everyone is an honest actor, you assume everyone is a bad-faith actor.

This is where it starts. We have to do that to live, we have to start being intentional about it, and we have to start trusting other people—the people God has put in our lives—more than we trust ourselves and our own ability to think things through and our own ability to understand, because, ultimately, the truth is Christ; ultimately, the truth is God—God whom we cannot comprehend, God whom we cannot even frame correctly in human words. So in the face of the Truth being something we cannot understand or comprehend, what we're left with is trust.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that's our show this time around. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. We weren't live this time and we won't be live next time, but, God willing, we'll be live again in—

Fr. Stephen: But someday, and for the rest of your life...

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That's right, we'll come alive again in July. But we'd like to hear from you! You can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; you also can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits, and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or you need need help to find a parish, head over to OrthodoxIntro.org.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts—normally—on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. "Fish don't fry in the kitchen; beans don't burn on the grill. Took a whole lot of tryin' just to get up that hill."

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