Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Thank you, Voice of Steve! Well, it’s Goat Week on The Lord of Spirits podcast! I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and joining me tonight is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young from Lafayette, Louisiana. And if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and we will get to your calls in the second part of today’s show.

Well, like I said, it is Goat Week, and here at Goat Week we’ve got you covered. And the rest of the show will be explaining that joke. So tonight we’re wrapping up this three-part series on sacrifice by talking about atonement. It’s a word that’s core to our understanding of Christianity, and yet there are about as many theories of atonement as there are Christian groups. But where did this word come from? What does it mean? What is being atoned for? Do Orthodox Christians have any teaching on atonement? Well, again, we’ve got you covered—and no, I will not get tired of that joke.

But first—and this is where the English language nerd in me comes leaping out—let’s talk about this English word, “atonement.” Okay, so, Fr. Stephen, where is that word from? Name that word! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen De Young: It’s made up—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s made up!

Fr. Stephen: And not just in the way that all words are made up; it’s very deliberately made up, very deliberately invented to describe something that there wasn’t really another good word in the English language for.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it was created for English Bibles to translate a couple of words, one from Hebrew, one from Greek. And what’s fun about it is it actually is… Sometimes it gets explained as “at-one-ment,” and that is correct! That is not a false etymology, although usually etymologies that go like that are; they’re just nonsense.

Fr. Stephen: You mean butterflies aren’t curdled dairy products?

Fr. Andrew: They are not! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay.

Fr. Andrew: They are not, and most people who have breakfast are not breaking a fast. But, right, so atonement, at-one-ment: I looked this up, so I have on my desk a gigantic dictionary called the Oxford English Dictionary. For those of you who know what that is, you know who you are. And I looked this up: what is the earliest use of this word? And it turns out that, before it ever got into the Bible, there was occasionally this contraction of the word “at” and the word “one,” so you get “at-one,” however it would have been pronounced back in, like, the 14th century. So Wycliffe, who translates the very earliest English Bible—well, I should say [Sigh] the very earliest complete English Bible, [Laughter] because, you know, tip of the hat to Alfred the Great for translating portions of the gospels into Old English.

But he does his complete English Bible, and he uses that phrase “to one” or “one-ment,” and then even at one point he uses “at-one.” And then it was in the 16th century, in the Tyndale Bible in 1526 that he actually standardizes this word to create this new word, “atone,” as both a verb and also a noun, so you get that “at-one-ment, atone” comes into being as an English word specifically for translation of the Bible. So that’s the idea. They meant, at the time, was putting man and God together “at one.” That was the intention.

So now we’re going to talk about how, number one, they actually didn’t get it quite right, but what is the concept that that word is attempting to point to? What are the actual, original words? In the Orthodox Church, Greek is kind of our base language for theology and liturgy and so forth. So where does that word…? What is the word, the Greek word, that’s translated by “atone” or “atonement”? And where does that actually first show up?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this gets sort of double interesting, because not only do we have the made-up English word that is primarily reflecting, as you just described, an English concept than it is trying to reflect an original word… The reason for that is the Greek word, ilasterion, doesn’t occur anywhere that we still possess until Jewish folks start using it, meaning the Greek Old Testament and then works like Philo, Josephus, etc. There are sort of a handful, I think four or five, uses of it in the first century AD and later, and like half of those are by Plutarch, by one author.

But all of the earliest usages of that word in this context, having anything to do with this, are Jewish writers using it to translate the Hebrew concept, which partially explains why, when the English translators got to the Greek word, they didn’t really know what to do with it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… [Laughter] So they just kind of perpetuated what had been done before. “Well, there is no context for this… Umm… what do we think this means, in context?”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and through theology that had developed in Latin, they had an idea of what that was supposed to mean, or what it had come to mean theologically, and so they were really translating that. So you have to go back past the Greek a little bit. And by the way, those handful of later Greek usages seem to be based on the Jewish use of it, meaning it’s used in contexts where someone is making some kind of offering to a supernatural being, to a spiritual being. And I say “spiritual being” because it includes… in a couple cases it’s gods and in a couple cases it’s dead people, the spirits of deceased people, where there has been some issue between them and a living person, so some sort of offering is made to mend that relationship.

Fr. Andrew: Like a peace offering.

Fr. Stephen: But so if we go back, then, to the Semitic root that’s behind all this, you end up with what are called kefir verbs. Semitic words, Semitic lexemes have what are called triliteral roots, meaning they’re based on three consonants, and then you give the verb meaning, or the noun meaning, by the way it’s inflected, meaning literally the way it’s pronounced, because they didn’t write the vowels at all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and most Semitic languages work this way, so if any of our listeners are Arabic-speakers, which I know some are, it’s again those three consonants make up pretty much every word in Arabic.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then you can add prefixes and suffixes and that kind of thing, but you have a root that is three letters. And so the kefir roots, usually transliterated as K-F-R, is a group of words that primarily means to cover, the verb forms.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s not like the Slavic word that has to do with a gross-tasting bubbling beverage, kefir?

Fr. Stephen: No, it has nothing to do with that.

Fr. Andrew: Nothing to do with that. All right.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Nothing to do with that—as far as I know.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, actually we looked this up and we could find no link, but who knows? Richard Rohlin? I’m going to give you this job, so look this up, Richard. He’s our staff philologist.

Fr. Stephen: Maybe it was once used to cover something. I don’t know. To cover the taste of bad food? I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Nothing against you, kefir-drinkers. Sorry, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: No, no, enjoy what you like. Some people like New Coke, which, now it turns out was all a conspiracy, but I won’t get into that here.

Fr. Andrew: It was. Wow. We’re really dating ourselves with that reference! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! So, the sort of subsidiary meanings then of “cover,” number one, if definition of kefir verbs is “cover,” then your secondary ones would be like “wipe” or “smear.” If you’re covering something with something else, like if you’re going to cover your roof with pitch or what have you, you would wipe it or smear it in order to cover it; cover a wall with paint. And so then, logically enough, when you find this in its noun form—these same roots are used for both verbs and nouns and also for adjectives—when it’s a noun it means a cover or a covering.

Fr. Andrew: Like a lid, yeah, or the top.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which brings it to “I give and I take away,” and “I gave you your OED”—

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: —“and now I’m going to take away your KJV.”

Fr. Andrew: [Dramatic groan] Brutal! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes. I think that’s a net loss to you, frankly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, probably. I do… I will say, I acknowledge the King James Bible has some errors in it, translation errors—and we just lost all of our KJV-only listeners… the one. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Baptists across the South have just, you know, re-tuned their car radios away from AFR.

Fr. Andrew: “How dare you!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And are listening to that Mexican radio station that used to come through on my microphone.

Fr. Andrew: Right! Yeah, so here’s the thing, that the King James Bible translates this word, when it’s used for—

Fr. Stephen: In the noun form.

Fr. Andrew: In the noun form, right, when it’s used for the thing on the top of the ark of the covenant, as “mercy-seat,” which is lovely. Like, it’s lovely; it’s a very nice idea. But completely wrong. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And you’ll see it in even Orthodox translations, because a lot of our early Orthodox translations were either utilizing or aping the King James Version language, and so you can kind of see how you can get there, like if you go from a very developed theological idea, where you don’t really know what the Hebrew word means, so you’re thinking, “Well, okay, God is enthroned behind the ark of the covenant, between the cherubim. The ark of the covenant is like a footstool, so there’s a throne involved there, and we’re thinking of atonement as at-one-ment and peace and mercy.” So you come up with this mercy-seat thing. But the much simpler way to read it is it just means cover. So we’re talking about the cover, the lid of the ark of the covenant that has the cherubim on it.

Fr. Andrew: Alas. Another fun thing from Sunday school, ruined by Fr. Stephen De Young. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Ruined, yeah. So that was kind of over-translated. [Laughter] That was a lot of more advanced theological concepts that were packed back into the word “cover.” In light of this, though, I would like to propose that from now on we refer to cover bands—

Fr. Andrew: There we go.

Fr. Stephen: —like Brass Against and Cybertronic Spree, we refer to “cover bands” as “atonement bands.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes! I’m in.

Fr. Stephen: Or even “mercy-seat bands,” if we want to be really old school.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. You could just call your band Mercy Seat and be like, “We’re a cover band, just like the title says.”

Fr. Stephen: That would be like an inception; yeah, that might be good. [Laughter] So, yeah, that’s the word itself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, covered.

Fr. Stephen: It’s important to cover that because reading a lot of things back into that word did not stop with the King James translators who were doing their best and sort of didn’t know any better. It is very common for all kinds of, shall we say, advanced theological ideas, that have come into being over time, through a long history of development, to all be read back into usually the Greek word in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Ilasterion.

Fr. Stephen: Because of this sort of schism in the way we bizarrely celebrate scholarship of the New Testament from the Old Testament. So Greek words in the New Testament are treated as these sort of independent entities without reference to what they’re translating, and then that allows you to pack a whole bunch of things in. We’ll see more of that as we go on, but to reiterate here that this is not, in its biblical usage, any kind of specialized technical theological term. This is just in Hebrew, especially, the word that means what it says; it means “cover.” And the Greek word that’s being used is being used to pick up that meaning within a ritual context.

Fr. Andrew: Got you. Right. So, speaking of that ritual context, then, the rest of what we’re going to be talking about is the ritual of atonement, the Day of Atonement. In Hebrew, that’s Yom Kippur, which is this annual commemoration that’s made by the people of God in ancient Israel, but it’s an addition to the regular sin-offerings that are to be done every day. Why does this need to be added on? Don’t the daily offerings cover it? Sorry, I will not get tired. I will not. [Laughter] Don’t the daily offerings cover it? Yeah, so why? What do we need this for? I mean, we’re doing daily offerings for sin in ancient Israel. What’s the deal with this super-big day of offering?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and as a quick note because you said it quickly, Yom Kippur—the “Kippur” comes from “kefir.”

Fr. Andrew: There you go: the Day of the Covering.

Fr. Stephen: When a pe gets doubled, it gets pronounced like a P instead of an F. That’s why it’s usually written with two Ps. So, yeah, it’s literally the Day of Ato—Covering. [Laughter] It’s very literal. And if you read a lot of recent Old Testament scholarship, because of how loaded the word “atonement” has become, they try to call it something else. It’s never going to catch on. Like, no one’s ever going to call it the Day of Purgation; it just doesn’t have a ring to it. So “atonement” is here to stay.

But we have… As we talked about last time, the sin-offerings that are being offered every day are not transactional. It’s not like the priests are sitting there waiting, like I get to the end of vespers and sit and wait to see if anybody’s going to come to confession. They weren’t like that. They weren’t sitting there with the knife, and keep the fire going at the burnt-offering altar, because someone might show up with a pigeon.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so someone comes in: “So what did you do, pal?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “I hope you’ve got a pigeon, a lamb, and a young ox.”

Fr. Andrew: Which is not the way confession works either, by the way, in case anyone’s thinking, “Wait, what?” There’s a wonderful parallel, in some ways, between these things.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you especially don’t need to bring any livestock to the church. Let’s be clear on that.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, please.

Fr. Stephen: In fact, it’s canonically forbidden to bring livestock into the church.

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Fr. Stephen: So this isn’t transactional, so it’s not an issue of, like, “Oh, well, maybe there were some sins that got missed during the year, so we’re going to do this sort of catch-all Day of Atonement to pick up those ones that were missed.” Those were being done perpetually to cover all of the sinning that was going on, that everyone knew was going on in Israel. So when we look at the Day of Atonement we have to start with the fact that it is doing something different than the sin-offerings are doing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, because there is not just the problem of the sins of the people. There’s the effect that those sins have on not just the people—and I think this is a great thing for us to mention especially here because our next couple of episodes are going to be on sacred geography, so we’re going to be talking about space in particular—there’s an effect on the space, on the place. Sin messes up the place where you are. So that’s what this is about.

Fr. Stephen: And, briefly, since you brought up the next few episodes about geography, I know “Maps” is going to end up on the playlist, so let’s make sure it’s the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and not Maroon 5. Special request. You know who you are. [Laughter]

So, right, it has to do with… when the ritual is described in Leviticus 16—I know everyone knew that off the top of their heads—

Fr. Andrew: [Scoff] Yeah! I mean, people just—

Fr. Stephen: Everyone loves to read Leviticus.

Fr. Andrew: Right! That’s like everyone’s evening devotional reading right there.

Fr. Stephen: On the tip of everyone’s tongue at all times is the structure of Leviticus. But it’s in Leviticus 16, and the purpose of it… We often think of it in terms of: “Well, this is atoning for people or Israel and the bad stuff they did,” but the ritual is explicitly stated to be atoning for the altar of incense, atoning for the ark of the covenant, atoning for the space within the tabernacle.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which makes no sense if you think “atone” means “make up for” or “pay off” or whatever, some kind of satisfaction theology. Like, what did the altar do that it had to atone?

Fr. Stephen: It had to make amends.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like the altar has be reconciled to God? It makes no sense. But if we understand it as “covering,” which is the perfect word, because we’re about to talk about what this actually does, but the concept is based on this idea that there is sacred space that has been set aside for the holiness of God to be present there with the people, but that the people’s sins interfere with that, that they actually stain the place.

Fr. Stephen: Sin leaves a taint, not just on us.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it leaves a mark.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve talked about that there’s kind of an anti-theosis that happens—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, demonosis.

Fr. Stephen: —through our sin, that actually changes us. It not only leaves that reside and that taint within us, but within the people around us and in the actual, physical creation itself. And so, when the tabernacle is first consecrated, all of those objects are built. So they’re taken out of the world. It’s not like magic wood that they went and found in the enchanted forest.

Fr. Andrew: Aw man. That would have been a great quest line. Sorry. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And it’s not, you know, some kind of sacred gold mined from the holy mountain. It’s just regular… I mean, the tent-covering of the tabernacle was made from goat hair. These weren’t special, magic goats. So it’s just these common things that they had in the camp, but then they’re taken and they’re consecrated and they’re set aside by being sprinkled with blood. And then, through the sinning that’s going on around them and even within them, they develop this taint where they are made common again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and there’s this distinction, then, that is made… I mean, this comes in the creation, where you’ve got the whole sort of world of chaos versus the ordered space that God sets up. So at the beginning that’s Eden or paradise, but then everything outside of it, in comparison. And you just said the camp, and there’s the wilderness out there. And then, when eventually Israel makes its way to the promised land, it’s Israel, and then the nations are out there. So there’s this orderly, beautiful, purified, sacred space where God dwells with his people, and then chaos is what’s on the outside. So sin brings the chaos in, or you could say it turns what has been made orderly and beautiful chaotic again. It’s sort of spiritual entropy, so to speak. So this is about that.

Fr. Stephen: And it’s not just sort of chaos in the sense of disorder. This is…

Fr. Andrew: Corruption and evil.

Fr. Stephen: And this corruption means, and brings these things under the power of, the hostile powers that dwell out in the wilderness or that rule over the nations that are at work outside. They come into power in the same way that our sin brings us under the power, brings us into bondage under those hostile powers. And so it intrudes into the camp or into Israel or into sort of a renewed anti-typal Eden.

So that space—we talked last time, when we were talking about the other offerings, that there are sort of concentric circles, and that the closer you get to where God is dwelling… So God is dwelling in the holy of holies in the tabernacle, so that is the place where the threat of this corruption is most dire. And then as you go out to the holy place and then to where the Levites are dwelling—the Levites and the priests have to maintain this higher level of discipline and holiness—and then you get to the Israelites, who have to do this even higher level than the nations. So the place where it’s the most threat, inside the sanctuary, that’s the place that the Day of Atonement is concerned and focused on, purifying and cleansing from this taint. That is the place where it is most key that this happens within the sanctuary.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So then what does the actual ritual itself look like? How does that begin? It’s this annual thing, so it must be a really big deal.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. So we have again in Leviticus 16 a fair amount of detail describing exactly what’s going on. So it starts with, as we talked about last time, the idea of sin-offerings—it starts with a sin-offering by the high priest and his immediate sons who are going to be serving with him; it’s the high priest and only the high priest and only on this day, who was going to actually go into what we now call the holy of holies or the sanctum sanctorum, if you’re a Doctor Strange fan. To actually go in there to purify that space.

So to prepare for that, he has to offer a special sin-offering for himself, because he needs to be, because he’s going to go all the way in, he has to be at this state of purity and holiness that is unsurpassed. And people may have heard of the mostly later tradition where they’d tie a rope to the person, to the high priest, in case he wasn’t so pure and he dropped dead and they had to drag him out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… Which that’s not in there, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s not actually in there, no.

Fr. Andrew: I know. That was another thing that I was disappointed to discover was actually not in the Bible. I’m like: the rope thing is awesome! Why is that… aww! [Disgusted noises] All this disillusioning.

Fr. Stephen: It makes you wonder if that was a practicality, like, if a high priest dropped dead at some point, and everybody was kind of like, “What do we do and how do we prevent this from happening in the future?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, how do they fish him out? [Laughter] I don’t know. [Sigh]

Fr. Stephen: So he does this sin-offering, and then the sort of Day of Atonement ritual proper begins. So the first covering that happens, the reason this is done on this day, as we’ve mentioned in previous episodes, is that this is the day that Yahweh chose to appear visibly in the holy of holies. So all of this is being done on this day because of his appearance. That’s why this is the day when everything has to be purified. That’s why this—

Fr. Andrew: It’s a response. He’s coming; we have to get ready.

Fr. Stephen: Right, we have to have it perfect, because he’s going to appear, and if he appears and it’s imperfect, then this is going to get bad for us, for Israel. [Laughter] Not because God’s going to get angry… It’s not like: “I said no green M&Ms!” [Laughter] It’s because of his holiness and his purity that is dangerous to sinful people, to sinful humanity, and God does not want his people, when he comes to visit them, to be destroyed with their sins. He wants them to repent of those sins and to be purified by his coming.

So the first thing the high priest has to do is he has to, in order to prepare to enter the space, offer a whole ton of incense—not a little, not one scoop. It doesn’t matter if someone in the back was complaining; it doesn’t matter about fake coughing: he had to do a lot of incense, because the incense was covering—

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: —was making this cloud so that he wouldn’t actually see Yahweh when he appeared.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this veiling that happens.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because if he saw him directly, he’d die. And again, this is all about not dying. So that’s sort of the first covering that takes place, is through that incense offering.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and then—and here’s the part that everyone’s waiting for—the goats. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The goats.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so you have two goats… I suddenly remember that joke that goes around on Facebook: “You have two cows…” and then it has this list of all these economic systems. I’m like, it’s: “You have two goats…” And now there’s going to be all these rumors: “See? They’re claiming some kind of economic theory of atonement here!” Yeah, no.

So there’s two goats, right? I mean, is is a good goat and a bad goat? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Three billy goats gruff?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, ooh. [Laughter] No, they’ve got to both be great. They have to be the best goats, both of them are the best goats.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they have to be GOAT goats. They have to be the greatest goats of all time.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the GOATiest. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So both of them have to be perfect and unblemished, because they’re going to be used for two different purposes, but which one is used for which purpose is decided by lot.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which means it’s just a random toss, basically.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they’re going to cast lots, and one’s going to go for one purpose and one’s going to go for the other. So that means the one that’s going to be used for the more positive and holy purpose has to be pure, unblemished, no broken bones, not a runt, etc., but since it could be either, they both have to be that.

And so when the lots are cast, one of these two goats is designated as the goat for Yahweh, and the other goat is designated as the goat for Azazel.

Fr. Andrew: Here we go. There’s like cheering going up across the country now because we mentioned Azazel. But we’re going to talk about the goat for Yahweh first.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but this is the biblical, actual Azazel, so Denzel Washington and John Goodman cannot help you.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: That’s a reference you probably didn’t get, but you laughed anyway.

Fr. Andrew: I suspect—yeah, that’s right.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I thank you for the courtesy laugh, for the golf-clap of laughter.

Fr. Andrew: I’m looking it up right now.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So we’ll start with the good goat.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Just in case anyone wonders, I have not seen the film Fallen. All right.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It’s really creepy. You wouldn’t like it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m not into that kind of thing at all. So the goat for Yahweh has to be perfect, blameless, without blemish, pure, no broken bones. What do you do with it?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Basically, you extract its blood.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: So the whole thing is burned. The whole goat is burned after the blood is extracted.

Fr. Andrew: So this is not a sacrifice in the meal sense that we’ve been talking about.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and taken outside the camp. Now, a couple notes. There is literally no information—now, this ritual, when you read Leviticus 16, there’s a lot of detail here; we’ve already started with some of it, we’re going to have more detail as we go, but exactly what’s to be done, there is no detail on how this goat is to be killed. The killing of this goat is not ritualized in any way.

Fr. Andrew: I feel like that could be on a t-shirt. [Laughter] How many times have we said now: “The killing is not ritualized in any way”?

Fr. Stephen: In any way. It sounds like we’re FBI profilers. So we don’t know how it was killed. We don’t know that there were any prayers said when it was killed. No sins are put on this goat that is being killed—we’ll talk about that more in a minute. The important thing is just: you have to get the blood out of it. And, one way or another, that’s going to kill the goat.

Fr. Andrew: So the blood is drained, the body is burnt…

Fr. Stephen: Let me add a couple of other things. The goat is not caused to suffer. The goat is not—this goat is not punished or abused in any way. This goat, we don’t know nothing. And in a ritual, if something is not ritualized, when you have a detailed ritual, and it says, “Before the ritual, wash your hands,” for example, and it doesn’t say, “Here’s the prayer when you wash your hands,” that means the hand-washing isn’t ritualized, and it means it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a practical thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like when we’re serving liturgy, we turn the page in the book. Someone could stand there and say, “He’s turning the page; what does that mean? When he’s turning three pages! Oh, man, what’s happening here?” [Laughter] I just need to read this word. Sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s a practicality. So the death of the goat for Yahweh has no theological meaning, because it goes unmentioned.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and some people out there are probably like: “Why are they emphasizing this?” And the reason is that a lot of Reformation theology kind of hangs on the idea that the goat is being punished, that the goat does have… But, again, look what it says. Just read the passage, and you can see that that stuff is just simply not there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So what’s important here is just we need this blood from this goat, from this pure and blameless goat. We need the blood, because we’re going to use the blood to do something. The blood is used, the blood is smeared, wiped, used to cover—

Fr. Andrew: Boom.

Fr. Stephen: —the altar, the ark of the covenant, the other fixtures of the tabernacle in order to purify them, in order to remove that taint that’s been left there, that’s gathered there because of the sins of the people, because of the sins of the community over the course of the year, to purify it again. It was dedicated with blood; now it’s purified again and made holy again with blood.

Fr. Andrew: So, okay, a question that suddenly occurs to me is… I mean, there’s kind of a general—now, maybe I’m wrong about this, but I thought there was kind of a general rule of “Don’t touch the ark of the covenant,” and of course I’ve seen Raiders of the Lost Ark; I know what happens if you open it. But is this like the one time you can touch it, when this ritual being performed, or is it sort of sprinkled from afar?

Fr. Stephen: Actually, it was sprinkled with the finger, so the high priest would have a bowl in which the blood was collected, and he smears it with his finger on pretty much everything but the ark. And the ark he would dip his index finger in and then sort of whip it in order to sprinkle the blood onto the ark itself.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Got you.

Fr. Stephen: And without going down the whole rabbit-trail of when you can and can’t touch the ark, because that’s a whole separate thing. We’ll do an ark of the covenant episode, just about that.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, maybe we’ll do that in a future episode. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And all the Ethiopians will rejoice because they’re like: [Whispered] “We’ve got it!”

Fr. Andrew: They’ve got that covered.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So that is what is done with the goat for Yahweh in the ritual. That is that part of the ritual. The blood of that goat is used to purify the sanctuary, to purify sacred space.

Fr. Andrew: But we have two goats. So, uh, right. So the other goat is for Azazel. We’ll say what gets done with it first, then we’ll talk a bit about Azazel. It has nothing to do with Denzel Washington, probably, John Goodman. But, yeah, the goat for Azazel has sins placed upon it, in contrast for the goat for Yahweh. How do you do that? How do you put sins on a goat?

Fr. Stephen: The high priest would place his hands on the goat, on its head, to designate it for this purpose, and he would… What is says is he would recite the sins of Israel. Now, this doesn’t mean, like, he was Santa, keeping a list all year, like the high priest was going around spying on people and seeing all the stuff they did and writing it down.

Fr. Andrew: That would be a long, long list.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So it was covering all of the commandments that had been broken, which was pretty much all of them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, just list off the commandments.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you could pretty safely use the same list every year, because all of that had happened again. But those were then publicly pronounced over that goat, and now that the goat has these sins on it, has the taint, the ontological taint from the people—it’s sort of absorbed by that goat—that goat can’t be sacrificed and can’t be brought anywhere near the tabernacle, because now it’s totally unclean.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, another super-important point, that the goat that gets the sins is not killed and cannot be killed as a sacrifice.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is the only sacrificial ritual of any kind in the Torah in which sins are placed on an animal. The only time it happens is this, and that animal is not sacrificed. I have people who don’t believe me about that, but you can look it up.

Fr. Andrew: Read it!

Fr. Stephen: You can read for yourself. Don’t trust me: read the Torah for yourself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I know. It’s funny: sometimes we’ll get—people will ask us questions like: Which Bible scholar says this? I’m like, why don’t we start with: What does the Bible say? Just read the… I mean, yes, sometimes some passages are very difficult, require a lot of interpretation, but when the question is, “What is ritually done with a goat?” you could just open up Leviticus and read it. It’s not… Yeah. It’s not a big mystery.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I mean you may have to deal with this mercy-seat stuff, but now you know how that works, so you’re all set for Leviticus. [Laughter] So instead, now, this goat, this completely corrupt goat, has to go outside the camp, the city, outside, back out into the bad place, and it’s going to Azazel.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, so the idea is to take the sins of the people and get them out of the place where sin does not belong. Send it out. Get that goat out of here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this goat is so unclean, by the way, that the goat would be led out by a designated person and tied to a bush or a shrub out in the wilderness, and the person who did that was rendered unclean by it, from just like being around that goat, the sin-goat.

Fr. Andrew: And so he had to do some kind of ritual purification.

Fr. Stephen: He had to purify himself before he could come back into the camp.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, but haven’t I heard that the goat actually got throne off a cliff?

Fr. Stephen: Right, that was later. That’s another one of those things like the rope that happened later. [Laughter] And the reason they pushed him off a cliff or a crag was the very practical problem of: What do you do if the goat gets loose and wanders back into down?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! “Hey, it’s the sin-goat!”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] “Uh-oh! Our sins came back to us!”

Fr. Andrew: Ominous. Very ominous.

Fr. Stephen: So, easy way to prevent that: push him off a cliff, dump him in a hole. Not so great for the goat, but it keeps that from happening, which would be a very awkward moment.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the goat is sent to Azazel.

Fr. Stephen: Right, now, a couple of key things there. One is that he is not sacrificed to Azazel. He’s not sacrificed to anybody.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because, again, what is sacrifice? It’s sharing a meal with your god. They are not sitting down and having hors d’oeuvres with Azazel.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So he’s not sacrificed to Azazel. There are also some folks who want to suggest that Azazel isn’t a being.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because doesn’t the name literally mean… have something to do with goats?

Fr. Stephen: Az is a goat. So some people will try to… will want to translate Azazel, instead of seeing it as a name, as a proper name, will want to translate it as something like “the goat who goes away.” This is where “scapegoat” comes from, because “scape-” like “escape.” “Escape” is “go away”: the goat that goes away. So, in fact, you’ll see some—I’m trying to remember if the King James does this—a lot of older English biblical translations, instead of saying, “They will choose a goat for Azazel,” says, “It’s one for Yahweh and one for a scapegoat.” And this is what they’re doing; they’re translating it rather than taking it as a name.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. And when we were talking about this, you mentioned that, in terms of the actual construction of the language there, it’s a parallel construction, that Yahweh and Azazel are being used in parallel. So if you were to translate “Azazel” as “the goat that goes away,” then the other one becomes “the goat that is who he is and makes things come into being.” [Laughter] Like, it doesn’t…

Fr. Stephen: The goat who exists or the goat who creates… Yeah…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it just doesn’t work.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this was very clearly understood by the earliest readers, because every extra-biblical source we have from the Jewish world treats “Azazel” as a spiritual being.

Fr. Andrew: A demon.

Fr. Stephen: A demon, right, what we would call a demon—who is the one who has power out there in the wilderness. He is this desert spirit. And, supporting that within the Bible, is also in Leviticus 17:7, which is the very next chapter—and remember, the chapter-breaks weren’t there originally, so this is just a couple paragraphs later at the end of the ritual for the Day of Atonement—there’s the commandments that the Israelites are not to continue worshiping “the goat-spirits of the wilderness.” So it seems to me that Azazel is most likely one of those.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, and it probably should be noted that that doesn’t contradict what came before. Like, when God said, “Don’t worship the goat-spirits,” he’s not saying, “Now don’t do the ritual I just gave you to do”—that that’s not worshiping the goat-spirits.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s clarifying. He’s clarifying; he’s making it abundantly clear: This is not a sacrifice to Azazel. You’re not sacrificing a goat to Yahweh and then sacrificing another goat to Azazel. In case you miscontrued everything I just said: You’re not worshiping Azazel. “Repeat after me…”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because if there’s anything God does not want you to do, it’s worship anything, anything else. I mean, that is just an overarching commandment of the whole Scripture: no idolatry, ever.

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to talk about this more in the second half, but Azazel, this spirit, is seen as sort of the source of sin and corruption that has come into the camp, and so it’s basically being sent back to it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, back to where it belongs.

Fr. Stephen: “We don’t want any. [Laughter] “Go back where you came from. You take it back.”

Fr. Andrew: “Azazel, go home.”

Fr. Stephen: This goat-spirit of the wilderness is then picked up in a lot of later imagery, probably the most famous being Baphomet, this sort of Satan-figure or devil-figure.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, with a goat-head and big, leathery wings. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and he’s often associated with other symbols like the caduceus of enlightenment and that kind of thing, but we’ll talk about that more here in the second half.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, so we’ve covered the basics of the Day of Atonement ritual and the two goats, here on Goat Week on The Lord of Spirits, and we’re going to get back in just a moment, but first we’re going to take a short break, so we’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Welcome to the second half of the show, here on Goat Week at The Lord of Spirits podcast. We just walked through the Day of Atonement ritual, the goat for Yahweh, the goat for Azazel, and what those things mean. And now we’re going to turn towards the New Testament. But, before we get there, a couple of things we have to say at the very outset: All references to the atonement in the New Testament are explicitly about the Day of Atonement ritual. That’s just a good guiding principle here, super, super important; makes all these references to atonement in the New Testament make a lot more sense. I’m just going to say that at the outset. It’s not about some abstract concept or mechanism of salvation; it’s about the ritual that everyone… that the people receiving this Gospel would have known, or, if they were coming in from the nations, they would have been told about this: it was part of their inheritance now, because they’re becoming part of Israel. But Israel knows the Day of Atonement ritual. It’s a huge, huge deal, super, super important. Okay, but before we get to the New Testament, right?

Fr. Stephen: Let me throw you one quick correction here.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, go for it.

Fr. Stephen: I know you really want Goat Week to be a thing.

Fr. Andrew: I do, I know.

Fr. Stephen: But due to the frequency of the show, is it not actually Goat Fortnight?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That is true, but you can’t have the parallel with Shark Week then. You know what I’m saying?

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that opens up Fortnite references.

Fr. Andrew: That’s true, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: A whole new world.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I love that word. It’s just a good, good word for one thing, but yeah, yeah. I hear you. I hear you. [Laughter] But we did just have, or we’re going to talk about Matthew 25 in a second here. We had the Sunday of the Last Judgment, so we’ve had goats on our minds. But we’ll get to that. Okay, but before we get to the actual New Testament, there’s some stuff—surprise, surprise, Lord of Spirits listeners!—there’s other literature that surrounds the New Testament that informs what’s going on in the New Testament. So we’re going to talk about some Second Temple literature. That mentions Azazel, doesn’t it?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and a solid 80% of kidding aside, the point you made about it being references to the Day of Atonement is again important. I know we’ve said this several times already, but when “atonement” is talked about in the New Testament, it’s not referring to some abstract theological idea of atonement; it’s referring to what happened on the Day of Atonement and comparing, specifically, as we’re going to see, what Christ does, to that.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, so related to that, actually, we have a caller. We have Dan from New York, and he has a question specifically about the Day of Atonement ritual. So, Dan, are you there?

Dan: Oh, yeah, I’m here! How are you doing?

Fr. Andrew: Hey, Dan. Welcome! Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. Sorry, what’s your question?

Dan: I have two questions, if that’s okay. I don’t think they’re such long questions. So the first question… I mean, I’ll start by saying I haven’t read the book of Leviticus, so excuse my ignorance on this, but I have read actually, after hearing the last podcast you guys did, I was doing a little bit of reading, and I read that the priest would lay hands on both goats, like on the goat for Yahweh as well as that… Is that true, or would they not lay hands on the goat for Yahweh? And if they did, what was that signifying when they laid hands on it? because I know the Protestants like to interpret that as shifting their sins onto the animal so that it works with their penal substitution model.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, we can’t hang that on all Protestants, but, yeah, sometimes. No, I know what you’re saying. Sometimes, yeah, that’s interpreted… Anytime someone puts their hands on an animal, that’s interpreted as meaning that they’re putting sins on it. I mean, there are basic problems with that; for example, that’s how people are ordained in the New Testament, is by the laying-on of hands. So I don’t think they were putting their sins on presbyters. [Laughter] But when hands were laid in sacrificial rituals… It’s the goat for Azazel where it says he lays hands on it and then pronounces the sins. Other sacrificial rituals where you see the laying-on of hands, that’s to designate the animal as a sacrifice. The laying hands on someone or something is setting them apart, which means making them holy, sanctifying them for a purpose.

So we’ve got: I go out to my sheep. I’ve got all these sheep. One of them I’m going to sacrifice, so that one we go and we lay hands on it to say: This is the sheep that we’re going to offer to God. So it’s the same thing in terms of ordination. There’s a lot of people standing around; this is the person whom we’re setting apart for this purpose.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if you look at Leviticus… I mean, you don’t have to read the whole book of Leviticus, but if you look at Leviticus 16, which is the chapter that has this ritual in it, you can just read it, and it shows… I’m looking at it right now, and it says: “Aaron must then present the goat which has been designated by lot for the Lord, and he is to make it a sin-offering, but the goat which has been designated by lot for Azazel is to be still alive.” Then later on it makes the reference to him putting his hands on the goat for Azazel and sends it out, but there’s not… unless I’m missing it, it doesn’t actually say anything about putting his hands on the other goat. I mean, obviously he has to touch it, but there’s not this ritualized laying-on of hands that’s going on that I’m seeing here, unless I’m just missing it, Father; I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: There’s a tendency—and this is not an indictment of anybody, because, I mean, I’ve heard scholars whom I greatly respect publicly talk about, when they’re talking about sacrifices in the Old Testament, say, “Oh, yeah, the priest would put the sins on the animal and then kill it,” and I’m like… that’s… it’s just not there! But people have sort of imbibed this idea, so they sort of cite it. Yeah, and I mean, people do that all the time, like they say there’s three wise men. Well, the text doesn’t actually say how many there were; there were three gifts. So there’s a whole bunch of things like that, where we’ve picked it up and we assume it’s there in the text, and it actually isn’t when you go check.

Fr. Andrew: So does that help you, Dan?

Dan: Yeah, yeah, that’s really helpful. That makes perfect sense.

Fr. Andrew: Did you have a second question?

Dan: Yeah, the second question was: What was it about their understanding of the goat’s blood that was understood to have a cleansing or sanctifying effect over the various parts of the holy of holies and the Temple that you guys discussed?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what is it about that blood that actually has that purifying effect? Is it because it’s being offered to God? What’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I don’t want to get too granular about this, because there’s actually, when you get into literature about this—I did my dissertation related to this, so I read all the literature on this. I mean, people debate exactly how the blood dealt with the taint, like: Did it absorb it? Did it eradicate it? You can get super in the weeds! But the basic idea is that, as Leviticus says elsewhere, that blood is life, the blood of an animal is its life, so sin, this taint of sin and corruption, is death. It’s sort of like “death stuff.” So you use “life stuff” to purify from “death stuff.”

Fr. Andrew: There you go!

Dan: Okay. You know, that makes total sense. All right, thank you! Thank you. I appreciate it.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much for calling in, Dan. We appreciate hearing from you. All right. Okay, so—no, it’s good. We talked a little bit about that. So Azazel and Second Temple literature. What does that stuff say about him?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so as I mentioned, all of our earliest sort of interpreters within the Jewish world who talk about Azazel have him as this being, this actual demonic being, and the most prominent places where he’s discussed in terms of what Second Temple literature are focusing on are 1 Enoch, what’s called 2 Enoch or Slavonic Enoch, and the Apocalypse of Abraham. Just to set a… the latter two of those preserved for us in Slavonic. We don’t have them in the original language or even in Greek. They’re preserved for us in Slavonic and were being copied in monasteries in the Orthodox world right up into the 16th century when the printing press was invented, so they were being deliberately preserved for us within the Church, not just accidentally “we found them in the desert somewhere.”

And I was going to say, I want to give a shout-out. The scholar on Slavonic pseudepigrapha… so if you want to get into Slavonic pseudepigrapha—and who doesn’t?—is Andrei Orlov, and he’s written a ton, and a lot of it’s available for free on the internet, if you want to read scholarly journal articles.

Fr. Andrew: There you go!

Fr. Stephen: And now I’ve pre-empted the “Where can I read more about this?” messages we get after most episodes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That we always get! I know. God bless you. We understand your hunger and your thirst to know more, and we appreciate and laud that. It is good.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, so allow me to feed that a little bit.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So he’s seen in 1 Enoch, or the book of Enoch, when Azazel appears, Azazel is sort of the leader of the bad guys, the leader of the rebellious watchers, who are responsible for corrupting the line of Cain and leading them to destruction that results in the flood. So he’s sort of the main motivator of that. When the book of Enoch lists what the different rebellious angelic beings taught to humans, what Azazel is listed as having taught are the same things that Tubal-cain in Genesis 4:2… because if there’s anything people love more than Slavonic pseudepigrapha, it’s genealogies. [Laughter] ...where it describes what Tubal-cain created. So he’s being directly connected.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, all those technological advancements.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, involving metallurgy for weapons of war and those kind of things. And so, of course, as we’ve mentioned before in a previous episode, this is over against the Apkallu myth and other similar stories—Prometheus in the Greek tradition—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, where that stuff is depicted as being good, like “This spirit came and gave us this wonderful, beautiful knowledge!” And the Bible is saying, “No! That was bad for you!” [Laughter] Yeah, so Azazel is caught up in all this.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that enlightenment imagery, like the caduceus and those kind of things that are attached to Baphomet is the same kind of things.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: This idea of, “Hey, maybe the serpent in Eden was telling the truth. Maybe he was…” So that’s that pro-devil propaganda stuff again. And what this results in, in all three of those texts I mentioned—the book of Enoch, Slavonic Enoch, and the Apocalypse of Abraham—is that there’s going to be this eschatological Day of Atonement, meaning we’ve got this annual Day of Atonement that we do every year that’s sort of managing things, because every year we go and we sin a bunch more and then we have to do it again, this vicious cycle of purifying this limited sacred space. So, sort of prophetically, it said there’s going to be this sort of eschatological Day of Atonement that’s going to take care of Azazel and take care of this sin and corruption and take care of sacred space sort of once and for all.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is really cool, and it’s a really… I mean, this is a major kind of transitional thing happening here, where, as you’ve mentioned a number of times, that the sacrificial system of the Old Testament is basically kind of a management system, managing sin, managing corruption, managing taint and death, and so that what we get in the Second Temple literature is, as you said, once and for all, that there’s going to be a Great Day of Atonement, to end them all, so to speak: the ultimate, the fulfillment of all of them. Now the thing that has been done in part is now being done totally in full.

And I think this is really important to notice this because we say that Christ is the fulfillment of all things in the Old Testament, and here you have this Second Temple Jewish literature, a lot of it preceding, some of it being at the same time as the New Testament, essentially pointing to this: there’s this big eschatological version of this that’s going to be happening. And there’s the figure of the Angel of the Lord as the one who’s going to do this; he’s going to be the high priest.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There’s built in an understanding beforehand. This isn’t just kind of Christians coming up with allegorical ways to read the Old Testament, to read Jesus into it. This is before Christ’s birth, an awareness that we’re managing the problem, we’re dealing with the problem, but we’re not solving the problem. So the Torah and its rituals, including the Day of Atonement, can’t be an end in themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they don’t lead to salvation.

Fr. Stephen: And so, yes, there’s the figure, especially in the Apocalypse of Abraham, he’s named Yahoel, this Angel of the Lord figure, who serves as the high priest for this eschatological Day of Atonement. And what’s interesting there is people may know that these angelic names that end in “-el”—“El” is “God”—so “Gabriel” is “Gibor-el,” the mighty man of God; “Michael” is “Micha-el”: who is like God. And Yahoel, the “Yaho-” is Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s “Yahweh is God.”

Fr. Stephen: So the name of this angel is Yahweh-God.

Fr. Andrew: Yahweh-God. There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Because of how it’s conjugated. So that’s why we say this is an Angel of the Lord figure in the technical sense in the Old Testament: the Son of man, the Angel of the Lord, this second Person of Yahweh. This is going to be the Person who does this eschatological Day of Atonement.

And then the whole idea, not just in general terms but in its specifics, is picked up wholesale by St. John the Evangelist in the Johannine literature.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! This is so cool. I don’t know. I’m getting a little giddy here, because when we were going over this in our preparation, it was just stunning to me: once you have clarity about, especially what the Old Testament says, there’s all kinds of bits of the New Testament that just light up, left and right. So that’s what we’re going to do now. So let’s talk about what St. John says about this. He picks up this idea of the eschatological Day of Atonement, and he says, “It’s Christ. Christ is the High Priest who does this final Day of Atonement, the one that ends them all.” And he takes that over from this Second Temple literature.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and St. John’s going to say this has happened. When we say the Johannine literature, we’re saying St. John’s gospel, but also 1, 2, and 3 John, and the Apocalypse, the book of Revelation: it is found in all of this. Now, most people, when they think of atonement in the New Testament, if I came to someone just at random and said, “Hey, where would I go in the New Testament to read about atonement?” they would probably not immediately say 1 John.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right! I think sometimes people take 1, 2, and 3 John as being like these little bonus bits toward the end of the New Testament before we get to the big, crazy dream-vision at the end. Like, “Oh, it’s nice that he wrote some letters.” But the Church read these out loud in liturgy and preserved them and theologized on the basis of them, and this is from the beloved apostle who leaned on Christ’s breast at the Last Supper. So, actually, there is really important theology and teaching and doctrine that’s in these three letters.

Fr. Stephen: And historically, especially with 1 John, it’s important to note that the general epistles, which is all those letters that St. Paul didn’t write, the general or catholic epistles, the ones written by other people, out of all of those, in the very early history of the Church, were being utilized by some churches and not others. So this is sometimes expressed as there were “arguments” about them; in reality it was just some communities had them and used them and some other ones didn’t have them and therefore didn’t. But the one that everyone agreed on, out of all of the general epistles or catholic epistles, was 1 John. They would all say: the gospel of John and the epistle. A lot of them who didn’t know 2 and 3 John existed accepted 1 John. So it had this prominence beyond those other books.

But 1 John is actually the book of the New Testament that uses the actual word, ilasterion, “atonement,” most frequently. So there are others, certainly Hebrews has a very detailed, and we’re going to… Hebrews is going to be peppered throughout this half of the show, but it has a very detailed description and connection between Christ and the Day of Atonement ritual, as we’re going to see. But in terms of using the term and talking about it as a concept, 1 John is the place. And he is picking up from this, basically Enochic literature, this Second Temple literature, a certain understanding of the cosmic aspects of the Day of Atonement and of this eschatological Day of Atonement.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we have in our notes—because everyone loves it when we read from Enochic literature—1 Enoch 10:8. It says:

And the whole earth has been corrupted by the teaching of the works of Azazel. To him ascribe all sin.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the indictment that’s sort of read over Azazel before he… at this eschatological Day of Atonement. That’s his indictment; that’s the charge against him. And St. John picks up pieces of this verse; elements of this idea form part of the structure of the book of 1 John. So you see, for example, the teaching of the works of Azazel. So there’s this idea that works were being taught and handed down. Well, who would have been doing this? As talked about in the book of Enoch, this would be Cain’s line.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And we don’t normally think about Cain a lot, but when we do we think about the story of Cain and Abel and, oh yeah, he’s a murderer; he’s a bad guy. But he was particularly significant in the understanding of both Judaism of the Second Temple period and early Christianity as not only the first sinner, as we already talked about a little bit, but also as a teacher of sin. He is regarded by Josephus, for example, as the first heretic.

Fr. Andrew: That’s interesting, which is funny, because you wouldn’t think of… Like, at what point do we see Cain teaching something? “I have this crazy new doctrine of God I want everyone to follow me on.” But, yeah, there’s this reference in 1 John 3:12, which makes reference of Cain being “of the wicked one,” who murders his brother. And if he’s of Azazel, this one who’s teaching this forbidden knowledge, then he’s doing the works of his father, so to speak; he’s imaging Azazel

Fr. Stephen: It’s that sonship.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which we talked about before, a few episodes back.

Fr. Stephen: And the next verse in 1 John, verse 13, says that the reason he killed Abel is that Abel’s works were good and Cain’s works were evil. So that works is brought in there, that he’s doing the works of his father, the evil one. You also find in 1 John 5:19 “the whole world lies under the power of the evil one.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s that sense of domination of demons in the world, especially Azazel.

Fr. Stephen: The corruption of the earth, of the whole world.

Fr. Andrew: And freedom being given by Christ from that.

Fr. Stephen: And the way he’s said to do that, in 1 John 3:8, is that Christ appears “to destroy the works of the devil.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which… I love that verse, because if you ask people sometimes, “Why did Jesus come to earth?” there’s all kinds of things they might say, some true and some not so much, but I love that: He comes to destroy the works of the devil. He comes specifically to do combat with the evil one.

Fr. Stephen: And these things that the evil one has wrought in the world are here in the world and need to be purged out, need to be purified, need to be atoned for in that sense, need to be removed, wiped away, blotted out.

Fr. Andrew: Cut. Atoned.

Fr. Stephen: So what you see, after that indictment is read, in 1 Enoch and in Slavonic Enoch and in the Apocalypse of Abraham, the same thing happens to Azazel in all of them: Azazel gets bound and chained up and thrown into a hole in the ground and imprisoned there until the end of days, until the day of the Lord, at which point he will be released briefly and then thrown into the lake of fire. That might sound familiar to some folks who have read the book of Revelation, because this is exactly what happens to the dragon: he’s seized by an angel, he’s bound, he’s thrown into a pit, he’s kept there, and then on the last day he’s released briefly and then thrown into the lake of fire.

The lake of fire that gets mentioned in St. Matthew’s gospel and in the book of Revelation has no Old Testament precedent, but the lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels, as St. Matthew’s gospel says, is taken directly from the Enochic literature. It’s a direct reference.

This element of the eschatological Day of Atonement, that Azazel is finally defeated—it’s not just sending him back his sin while he continues to control the rest of the world out there, but he’s done away with and disposed of—is, as we said Hebrews is going to be peppered all the way through here. In Hebrews 2:14, it says that “inasmuch as the children have taken part of the flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared in the same,” so this is talking about why Christ became incarnate: Why did Christ become incarnate?

Fr. Andrew: Right, that...

Fr. Stephen: “So that, through death, he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil,” namely, the devil: destroy the devil. And so that’s one significant element of this eschatological Day of Atonement, and this is the one that’s particularly emphasized—it’s all in Hebrews—but this is particularly emphasized in the Johannine literature.

Fr. Andrew: Awesome. All right. Well, okay, let’s talk about St. Matthew. For those of us in the Byzantine rite of the Orthodox Church, which is most Orthodox Christians, this last Sunday was the Sunday of the Last Judgment, in which we heard Matthew 25, where we heard that sheep go to heaven and goats go to hell.

Fr. Stephen: And this is why we eat ceremonial cakes on Meatfare Sunday.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. [Laughter] Yeah, but okay, okay, so it doesn’t quite map. With the Day of Atonement ritual, there’s two goats, a goat for Yahweh and a goat that’s sent off to Azazel, but I thought in Matthew 25 it said that goats go to hell. [Laughter] Yeah, not all goats are the same in every reference in Scripture, but...

Fr. Stephen: Right, but what happens is, in sort of the symbolic mind—hi, Jonathan—of the Jewish people, sheep and lambs become associated with Passover. And as we talked about last time, at a fair amount of length, Passover representing this manumission, this freedom from slavery, slavery to sin, freedom from slavery to the hostile powers. So this sort of has positive connotations. And then, so the Israelites are referred to as sheep sort of all through the Old Testament, and their leaders as shepherds, because they’re these sheep who are now set free from Egypt and brought out into this new pasture, all of that symbolism.

And then goats get associated with the Day of Atonement, which means they’re associated with sin, blood, death, Azazel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there is some overlap there, but, yeah, it’s not a perfect, total, categorical overlap. “We have to learn to think symbolically!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Do you have to pay royalties now that you said that?

Fr. Andrew: No, I don’t think so, but yeah… [Laughter] Hello, all of you Jonathan Pageau fans out there. We understand there’s kind of like a pipeline from there to here. We welcome you. We are happy to have you. [Laughter]

Okay, so St. Matthew, he talks about Christ as being the goat that gets sent off to Azazel, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. We’re going to see, to tip our hats—spoilers—that in the New Testament, Christ is both goats.

Fr. Andrew: Boom! You have two goats.

Fr. Stephen: In St. Matthew’s gospel in particular we see a lot of this connection to Christ as the scapegoat, and one of the places where we really see that is—now this requires you reading some outside the New Testament literature—but the epistle of Barnabas gives a little bit more detailed description of how the Day of Atonement ritual was being performed, sort of in some of the small details that had accrued over time, in the first century AD.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, that’s cool.

Fr. Stephen: So where combinations have been made. They’re not out in the wilderness; they’re not encamping in tents. You’ve got Jerusalem as an established city. So he gives some of these details, so some of the details we get from that are a scarlet cord being tied around the goat’s head, and that when they… after the sins had been placed on the goat, the people would sort of gather in the streets, and they would get reeds, and they’d strike the goat and hit it to sort of drive it out. And while they were driving the goat out, they would sort of mock the goat and spit at the goat as a sign of them rejecting their sins.

I know people are being moved to sympathy for the goat in all this. The poor goat.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, but these three things: wrapped around with a scarlet cord, being beaten with a reed to drive it out, mocked and spit upon—does that sound like anything to anybody? Yeah, so St. Matthew uses this language to describe… I mean, to describe exactly what happens to Christ at the crucifixion. He’s wrapped about with a scarlet…

Fr. Stephen: At the end of his trial, he says they wrap a scarlet robe about him, which is kind of a weird way to describe putting a robe on. I don’t say, “I got up this morning and wrapped my clothes around me.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s an interesting point because what is St. Matthew doing? Is he just saying, “I’m going to come into this. I’m going to describe this. I have all these details from the Day of Atonement ritual, and I’m just going to ascribe that to what’s happening with Christ. I’m going to make it look like that”? No, what he’s doing is he’s describing what actually happens to Christ, but he’s using language that should remind you of the Day of Atonement ritual in order for you to make that connection, the connection that actually does exist. But he’s appropriately describing it to help you make that connection, because what are the gospels? They are not just a narrative; they’re narrative theology. They are teaching you and giving you the proclamation of Christ. They’re not just saying and this is what happened next! It includes that, but the way that they tell the story is designed to teach you how Christ, in this case, is the fulfillment of what was given in the old covenant. Awesome stuff! So cool!

Fr. Stephen: This doesn’t mean it’s not historical, because any historian has to choose details to include and details to omit, and will write about things and describe things in certain ways. That doesn’t make it not historical. St. John himself said, “You can’t write down every single thing Jesus did and said. There’s not enough books in the world.” So they’re choosing how to describe things and what details to include in order to convey this. So, using the color “scarlet,” using this “wrapped around” language. He says they put a “reed” in his hand; it’s the exact same word for “reed.” And then they took the reed from him and struck him with it. He could have used a word for “stick.”

Fr. Andrew: And he’s driven outside of the city.

Fr. Stephen: And the people, they mock him and they spit on him. And this is very important, because, in our modern era, a lot of people will take these descriptions of what happens at Christ’s death, and the hymns about them that we’re going to sing in Holy Week in a few weeks, and label them as anti-Semitic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which we’re actually about to show you how it’s the opposite. [Laughter] It’s the opposite! It’s not anti-Semitic. Okay, perfect example; this is probably the classic example: Matthew 27:25, where the people say in response to Pilate, “His blood be upon us and upon our children.” Now, given everything we just said about the blood of the goat, and given everything you should know if you’re a Christian about what the blood of Christ does, if his blood is upon you, that’s actually good. I mean, St. Matthew is himself a Jew—anti-Semitic?—he’s writing the most Jewish of the gospels, the most Hebraized of the gospels! When he says that Christ’s blood is going to be upon them and upon their children, that’s a blessing! That’s absolutely a blessing!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and what St. Matthew conveys there with “His blood be on us and on our children” in narrative theology, Hebrews just comes out and says, in Hebrews 9:18-22, that says, “They were sprinkled with the blood. They and their children were sprinkled at the blood at the beginning of the old covenant, and now we have been sprinkled and purified with the blood of Christ.” So that’s the non-narrative theology way to say it. But, yes, this is… St. Matthew is deliberately subverting a potentially anti-Semitic reading of this. This is like Joseph in Genesis. They meant it to him for evil, but he meant it for good. They’re cursing him; he’s taking away their sins.

Fr. Andrew: “Father, forgive them.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and note that it’s not just Jews who are doing these Day of Atonement things. It’s also the Roman soldiers who are doing these Day of Atonement things in St. Matthew’s gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re now participating in the eschatological Day of Atonement.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s everybody’s sins.

Fr. Andrew: This is so cool.

Fr. Stephen: And then as Hebrews again makes plain in Hebrews 11-12, Christ dies outside the camp.

Fr. Andrew: Outside the camp, yeah. So, okay, Christ is both goats. We’re about to talk now about how he’s also the goat for Yahweh, but I just wanted to link these two things together actually from a very familiar bit of hymnography for Orthodox Christians, and that’s from the doxology, whether the little doxology or the great doxology, if I remember correctly, this line is in both, where we sing, “O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, who takest away the sin of the world; have mercy on us, O thou who takest away the sins of the world.” Okay, so he takes away the sin of the world and the sins of the world.

This is not just redundancy and you happen to pluralize the word the next time. Taking away the sin of the world is to remove the taint, the corruption, the impurity of the whole world, which is what the goat for Azazel does; he takes the impurity out, out of the camp and out into the wilderness, although in this case it’s the whole world; the whole world becomes the camp now. And then he also takes away the sins of the world, meaning the sins that the people commit; he takes away their sins. He purifies even them. So, I don’t know, it’s cool. Christ is both goats.

All right, well, let’s talk about St. Luke’s gospel, and, of course, Acts; these two kind of form a single narrative together, with just the “In the former treatise, O Theophilus,” at the beginning. I think that’s the King James Version, at the beginning of Acts. Okay, so how does…? Luke uses the Day of Atonement imagery to describe Christ as being the goat that is sent to Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the goat for Yahweh. Remember, the blood of this goat is used to purify sacred space. And so, start with a verse near and dear to my heart, because I spent a chunk of my life with it, and that’s 1 John 2:2. 1 John 2:1 talks about… 1 John 2:1-2 is talking about the Day of Atonement. 1 John 2:1 talks about Christ as the high priest who intercedes in prayer, and then 2:2 says that Christ is the atonement, not only for our sins but also for the whole world. And what he’s doing here is he’s taking this idea of the purification of sacred space, so if we imagine that there’s sort of this layer of darkness over the whole world and there’s sort of this dome, a dome of light over Israel, over the camp in the wilderness, over Israel as a nation, over Judah, Judea, and that’s being purified sort of under the dome, is being cleansed and purified and being kept pure.

Now that dome is expanded to encompass the whole world, because Christ—not only does he not just send the stuff back to Azazel, he gets rid of Azazel. He then has broken Azazel’s hold over the world, and so now the whole cosmos, the whole creation can become sacred space, can be purified and can be sacred space. So not only for our sins, which are taken away, but for the whole world, which is now purified and made holy and sacred, first in potency, first, as with everything eschatological, this is happening in real time, like we talked about in our Halloween episode, but this will ultimately come to fruition, then, in the new heavens and the new earth, just as, right now the evil one is bound and in a hole, and he’ll be chucked in the lake of fire then at that latter point.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, now we get to talk about one of my favorite places—Emmaus! although not Pennsylvania, but the Emmaus that my Emmaus is named after. So Luke 24, you get Christ on the road to Emmaus. And then there’s this weird… And then at the end of Luke: “They worshiped him, returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the Temple, blessing and praising God. Amen.” Which is kind of a weird way to end the gospel.

Why is that mentioned? Well, okay, so there’s a little bit of backstory here, and again, Luke, using this detail about Christ being on the road to Emmaus—he’s actually on the road to Emmaus, but everyone knows what Emmaus is famous for. You guys know, right?

Fr. Stephen: Doesn’t everyone? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Doesn’t everyone? As they well should! So there’s the Battle of Emmaus—and again, not Emmaus, Pennsylvania—but yeah, so, okay, to give a little bit of background here, to make it… bring it home for Pennsylvanians, it would be like saying, “I was on the road to Gettysburg.” Well, Gettysburg is a town and it has a Lutheran seminary there, but that’s not what everyone remembers Gettysburg for. It’s remembered as being the decisive battle of the American… Late Unpleasantness. That’s for all of my Southern friends out there. It has this sort of importance as a major battle site.

Well, for first-century Judeans, that is the place of the Battle of Emmaus, and that is related to the Maccabees. There is this battle that’s fought—

Fr. Stephen: 1 Maccabees talks about the Battle of Emmaus.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the crucial battle where the Judean army, led by the Maccabee brothers, defeated the Greek forces, at the Battle of Emmaus. Again, this isn’t just a random connection. Emmaus isn’t mentioned anywhere else in the Bible except 1 Maccabees and St. Luke’s gospel right here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah! So, the reason why this battle is so important is because the Temple had been desecrated by Antiochus Epiphanes—it wasn’t Antiochus, was it?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it was Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so he goes in, and he doesn’t see an idol in there, and he’s like: “Well, what the heck?” [Laughter] He actually busts his way into the holy of holies, so the Temple has to be reconsecrated.

Fr. Stephen: Well, he actually—I think you’re mixing him with Pompey, the Roman general—

Fr. Andrew: Oh, am I? Okay.

Fr. Stephen: I’m “Um, actually"ing you in real time. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: That’s fine. Both blaspheming pagans! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Antiochus IV—Epiphanes was not his last name.

Fr. Andrew: Right. “Mr. Epiphanes?” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: The Antiochus was obviously a family name of the Seleucid dynasty, and they all took these titles. So one of them was Antiochus, I believe it was the [First, or else Seleucus III], was Soter: the Savior.

Fr. Andrew: “The Savior,” yes. As if. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so Antiochus IV Epiphanes—“Epiphanes” meant he was the manifestation of a god on earth. That’s what he named himself, and he actually went into the Temple in Jerusalem and sacrificed pigs on the altar to Zeus.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you don’t get much worse than that. And that’s what described, like in Daniel, as the “abomination of desolation,” because it rendered… Yeah, they couldn’t use the Temple any more after that. It fell into disrepair.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the Temple has to be reconsecrated; it has to be purified. It has to be made holy, set apart again for the use of God alone. What happens next? “They’re continually in the Temple, praising and blessing God. Amen.” And then what happens next? Acts, the book of Acts: you’ve got the coming of the Holy Spirit, filling the creation, on the day of Pentecost, and the day of Pentecost, it’s the feast of the giving of the Law, but isn’t there also a consecration of the Temple associated with that as well, or am I mixing stuff up?

Fr. Stephen: Well, this is… So, Hanukkah is the re-dedication of the Temple. That’s where the feast comes from, the feast of lights. So they rededicate the Temple, and although it didn’t happen that time, when the tabernacle is dedicated, when the Temple was dedicated by Solomon, after everything is dedicated, after the blood is used to purify everything and consecrate everything, then the presence of God enters in as this fiery cloud.

Fr. Andrew: That’s what it is. Yes, yes, yes! Right.

Fr. Stephen: So you see this same dynamic, the end of Luke: Luke ends with Emmaus, and then they’re in the Temple, and you pick up Acts and they’re not hanging around in the Temple for some reason, because St. Luke uses this imagery of, now, re-dedication of the Temple being the whole creation, and then, now that it’s been rededicated, the presence of God, the Holy Spirit, can come and dwell in sons, daughters, everyone, because of this purification that has happened.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t you know that y’all’s body is the temple of the Holy Spirit? Boom.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this then plays out through the early chapters of the book of Acts, the idea that everything has now been cleansed. So when Peter is called to go see Cornelius the centurion who’s a Roman, who’s a Gentile, who’s from one of the pagan nations, he sees this vision of the animals, the formerly unclean animals, being lowered in this cloth. And he isn’t told, “Don’t call unclean what I’ve created,” or “Don’t call unclean what I tell you is clean,” but: “Do not call unclean what I have made clean.”

Fr. Andrew: Purification has happened.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this purification has happened, so those animals are no longer unclean from outside the camp, and therefore, not metaphorically but literally, Cornelius, this Roman, is now also clean, just as clean as any Judean, and therefore able to receive the Holy Spirit as he does after St. Peter preaches the Gospel to him. And then this triggers everything: this triggers St. Paul’s mission now out to the nations, to go and sort of re-take them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Again, so cool!

Fr. Stephen: And consecrate them as sacred space.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, all right, well then, we’ll dip back into Hebrews which references all of this. Hebrews 9: “Likewise he sprinkled the tent and all the vessels used in the worship with the blood. Indeed, under the Law, almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” That last part, of course, often gets quoted out of context. The context is the purification of the space that’s happening.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, of material objects and physical space.

Fr. Andrew: Stuff. Yeah, by the blood.

Fr. Stephen: With blood.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right. Yeah, and then again Hebrews 10: “How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God”—and here’s the important part here, for our purposes—“and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified and has outraged the spirit of grace.” So, again, the blood of the covenant does this sanctification. This is Christ as being the goat for Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: The blood comes and purifies, and then the Holy Spirit comes to dwell there.

Fr. Andrew: Look at that, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And the pivot-point, when we go from the end of St. Luke’s gospel to the beginning of Acts, is the story he tells twice, and that’s Christ’s ascension into heaven, which he tells at the end of his gospel, and then again at the beginning of Acts he narrates Christ’s ascension again. What Hebrews 9:11-14 says that the key event that made this transition between the purification of just this small sacred space to the whole of creation is when Christ enters into the heavenly sanctuary as high priest, which is describing his ascension into heaven. So St. Luke is doing this narratively, and Hebrews is just giving it to us theologically, explaining it to us.

Fr. Andrew: Cool. Awesome. Well, before we go to break, we actually do have a call, and this is our friend, Fr. Photius in Texas. So, Fr. Photius, are you there?

Fr. Photius Avant: I am. Can you hear me?

Fr. Andrew: I can hear you! Can you hear us? [Laughter]

Fr. Photius: Praise God. Yes, sir!

Fr. Andrew: All right. Fr. Photius, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Fr. Stephen: “Can you hear me?” was your one question for tonight, unfortunately. So, it was good talking with you.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Good night!

Fr. Photius: Oh, man! Augh! Foiled again! This has just not been my day. What can I say? Yes, yes, I do have a question, and it pertains to 1 John 2:2. Fr. Stephen, I know how dear this is to you. I read your dissertation, and it’s magnificent.

Fr. Andrew: Now everyone’s going to want to read it! Don’t mention that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re rubbing it into a bunch of people.

Fr. Photius: I’m sorry. Just so you all know, it’s really good. Yeah, yeah. So I’ll take the heat for that one. That’s okay. It says that Christ is the atonement or the propitiation for our sins, not for ours only but also for the whole world. In what manner is the atoning work of Christ mediated to the world, or could we say that it is mediated to the world by the Church?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah… Here’s where I have to say that’s a mis-translation.

Fr. Photius: Yes, sir. Okay, by all means.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So, yeah, how granular do I want to go?

Fr. Photius: It’s okay!

Fr. Stephen: This is like 25 pages of dissertation; I could just refer you back there—no. [Laughter] But there’s literally a text variant there. I mean, this is how granular this gets. There’s a text variant there as to whether it says monon or monōn. But that’s how granular we get. But it’s the “only” is an adverb, not an adjective. What they’re translating as “ours” should actually be translated as “our sins.” There’s a whole bunch of lexical stuff about that. So the correct translation is “not only for our sins, but for the whole world.” The words, “those of,” do not occur.

Fr. Photius: No, they don’t. Yeah, that’s not in the Greek. I’ve seen that myself.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, yeah, but that understanding of it is responsible for a lot of Western Christianity.

Fr. Photius: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Because exactly the question you just asked. If it read that way, then you’re asking the natural question, which is what mediates between? Because obviously, if you interpret it purely as related to sins and the forgiveness of sins, then not everyone in the world has their sins forgiven, but… And so you have to… And that’s where Peter Lombard in the eleventh century comes up with the idea of sufficiency and efficiency, that Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient for the world but not efficient for the world, and on and on and on. But, yeah, that’s all based on a mis-translation.

The only other place where the phrase “for the whole world,” or the phrase “the whole world, tou olou kosmou,” occurs in 1 John is in chapter 5, the verse we read: “The whole world lies under the power of the evil one.” So if you want to interpret “the whole world” in 1 John 2:2 as referring to the people in the world, then St. John is saying that all the people in the world lie under the power of the evil one, which would include himself and the Church, and that makes no sense in the context of the epistle where he’s clearly distinguishing between two groups of people.

Fr. Photius: Yes.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, I’m actually not answering your question. I’m just pointing out that you asked a perfectly logical question based on a bad translation.

Fr. Photius: Yes, sir. It’s quite all right. I’ll take it. Thank you so much!

Fr. Andrew: Thank you for calling, Father. Okay, we’re going to go ahead and take our second break, and we’ll be back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, welcome back to the third half of The Lord of Spirits. We’re talking about atonement, and we’ve just taken a really whirlwind trip through the New Testament, just, I don’t know, astonishingly beautiful stuff, looking at how Christ is both goats in the Day of Atonement ritual. He is also the high priest who is performing the eschatological Day of Atonement.

All right, well, let’s just kind of mop up now. We’ve got a few things that we kind of need to sort of mention, and it’s interesting actually: the first thing that’s on our list, which is in our notes, was something someone actually sent to me saying, “Hey, you guys going to mention this?” and that’s the image of what’s called the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53. Okay, so how is that related to what we’ve been talking about?

Fr. Stephen: Right, if at all—no.

Fr. Andrew: “If at all,” right: is it?

Fr. Stephen: When the subject of atonement comes up in most Western theological circles, this is where they go, is to Isaiah, specifically Isaiah 53:4-5, which has those famous lines about “he was wounded by our transgressions; by his stripes we are healed,” all of that language. “He took our infirmities upon himself.” And, as you can imagine, that’s taken in a certain direction. Here’s the thing, though. We have a text in the New Testament that says that those very verses were fulfilled in Christ’s ministry.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, Matthew 8. It’s amazing. This is from an apostle, letting us know how to interpret that Isaiah passage. Matthew 8:14-17, just to summarize, this is where Christ heals the mother-in-law of Peter and then also, after that, lots of people are brought to him who are demon-possessed and sick people, and he heals them He drives out the spirits; it says he cast them out with a word. And then, verse 17, “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the Prophet, saying: He himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.” So Matthew is saying this is now fulfilled, the Suffering Servant passage of Isaiah, by Jesus’ healing ministry of sickness and demon-possession. It doesn’t say that it was fulfilled by Jesus absorbing their diseases and becoming sick, or absorbing their demons and becoming possessed himself; he doesn’t take it on himself in that way. He heals them, and that’s how Matthew interprets that passage from Isaiah 53. And you know, when an apostle interprets the Old Testament for you? We go by that. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but… we’re not just playing the Nope card.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, no, no, no, there’s more. Yeah, there’s more to it than that, of course.

Fr. Stephen: Because that kind of response kind of begs the question, where it’s sort of like: Well, okay, what is St. Matthew talking about? How does him healing diseases fulfill that? And to get at that, we get some help from some of the Church Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Yay!

Fr. Stephen: Who get what St. Matthew is doing here, and not only do they get what St. Matthew is doing here, but they talk about this in terms of atonement. They see this as a kind or type of atonement. So it does end up being germane to our topic this evening. So probably the most famous Church Father to talk about this in terms of atonement specifically is St. Athanasius—St. Athanasius the Great, St. Athanasius of Alexandria—in his work, On the Incarnation.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, his single most popular and famous work.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well, his most well-known work. And it’s interesting: I recently heard a certain…—he identifies as a Protestant, but most Protestants would not identify him as a Protestant—biblical scholar talking about atonement, and who tried to read St. Athanasius’s On the Incarnation and just said, “I can’t tell what he’s doing in terms of his…” In terms of trying to address it in terms of atonement theory. And from that perspective, it just doesn’t make sense. But what he’s on to is what St. Matthew was talking about.

So in short, because our first two halves were already more than half of our time this evening, so we’re not going to go through the whole work, St. Athanasius talks about atonement as happening through the Incarnation, that by God becoming man, he, by virtue of his holiness as God—that same holiness that they couldn’t see and live on the Day of Atonement in the Old Testament—by becoming man he purifies humanity, not just in terms of, like… We tend to think of this in quasi-spatial terms, almost like the human body seen as a physical thing.

We might go a little further if we understand that the body is this nexus of powers or potentialities, to say, well, all of the human powers and all of the human capacities, but for St. Athanasius—and St. Irenaeus does something very similar before him by a couple of centuries—he means spatio-temporally, that Christ not only sanctifies humanity in its parts and in its powers, but the moments of a human life—birth, childhood, young adulthood, adulthood, up to and including a human death—and that by living through those, not just, again, spatially, but temporally, those things are sanctified and purified by the union of Christ’s divinity and humanity in his Person. That perfect union thereby sanctifies, makes holy, purifies humanity in our basic composition.

So he’s using atonement in this biblical sense we’ve been talking about, of purification, but Christ does it by living it. And so this is what St. Matthew is seeing, too, in the Prophet Isaiah, that by Christ becoming man and living in this world and suffering and experiencing human weakness voluntarily, etc., etc., that by doing that, he is healing our humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s cool. And that just sort of beautifully anticipates St. Gregory the Theologian, where—and now he’s speaking in the context of christology, although, I mean, if you understand christology in this full sense, it really just lights up—where St. Gregory says, “What is not assumed is not healed.” And now he’s talking about: Christ has to be fully human. But within this context of atonement, that Christ assumes the whole human experience, and therefore heals it all. He purifies and atones, covers—covers it by virtue of being here, by virtue of becoming human and going… I don’t know. It’s really cool. It’s really, really cool. I’ve said that about 20 times tonight, but this is… I don’t know. I love it when the fundamental unity between the old and new covenants is shown. Yeah, it’s… You know, the unity of it all—and including also the teaching of the Church Fathers and what’s in the divine services and so forth—it’s so impossibly unified; it’s so impossibly one. But of course, what is impossible for man is possible for God.

Fr. Stephen: I love it when a plan comes together.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. [Laughter] Yeah. The A-Team. Okay, so, but there was something else also, a connection from John 17.

Fr. Stephen: John 17, 18, and 19 also talks about this same idea, where Christ—this is in the context—this is part of the long reading on Holy Thursday evening—where Christ is—this is sometimes referred to as Christ’s high priestly prayer, appropriately enough—and Christ says in verses 18 and 19, “As you sent me into the world, I have also sent them into the world, and for their sakes, I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth.” And of course “the truth” in St. John’s gospel is Christ himself. When Christ says he’s sanctifying himself, it’s not as if he was unholy before and he’s doing some action; that him sanctifying himself is talking about his incarnation, his earthly life, and his coming death, in which he has sanctified himself, his person, in order that his disciples in all ages would be sanctified, would be made holy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s cool. All right, well, the third half is going to be the shortest half. [Laughter] But, yeah, okay, so to wrap up, then, just some final thoughts. I mean, the nature of this podcast is not—the purpose of it, I should say—is not to be apologetical; we’re not here to say, “This is why Catholics and Protestants and various other kinds of religious people are wrong!” But in this particular case, even though this episode is not primarily apologetical, as the whole podcast is not, there is a disconnect that happens for people when they read the Scriptures and, as we’ve seen, bring a lot of assumptions into the Scriptures. They think that sins are put on animals and then the animals sacrificed to God—that never happens in the Scripture anywhere.

And so I think it’s really critical that we understand that atonement, as the Scripture depicts it, is not some kind of system, where “this is how you get saved, and it works like this: sins get…” for instance, in one version: “sins get transferred from you to Christ! and he has to suffer now and get sacrificed!” Like, that’s not… [Laughter] That’s not what the Scripture actually depicts. And here’s the problem; here’s the problem with that: not only is that, I think, just incorrect, but it also makes it so that all the other ways—as we’ve seen so many of them—that the ritual of the Day of Atonement is expressed in the New Testament and in the work of Christ, you miss a lot of that, because it’s been reduced to a system.

And our purpose is as St. John’s purpose: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ and that, believing, you may have life in his name.” That’s the purpose of this podcast. So I mention all that because, as we read Scripture more and as we live the Christian life more, if we understand what it is that Christ is doing and how the Scripture tells us what he’s doing, then that gives meaning to so much of our lives. If you go through something, for instance, and you experience it as a kind of harrowing—a purification, a cleansing, a cleaning-out—as we’re now about to enter into Great Lent, it’s is a process of purification, I mean, that is what Great Lent— among other things, that is what Great Lent is. But if we understand purification just in this kind of reduced sense, without all of this atonement imagery from the Day of Atonement ritual and then the eschatological Day of Atonement, then we can tend to look at Christian life as a kind of self-help program. “Okay, I’m just trying to get better like I’m doing a diet, a spiritual diet.”

And that can lead to a lot of despair. If you’re a pastor and you’re hearing confessions and you hear people struggle with all the disciplines of the Church that are intended, for instance, to purify us, to help us participate in purification, then there’s a lot of discouragement that can come from that, and I think a lot of that comes because of a kind of reduced vision of what this is about.

The other problem with seeing atonement as a kind of system is that it actually disconnects it from the actual Christian life. It becomes this mechanism that I sort of get benefited… that benefits me, rather than something that I ritually participate in. One of the big questions that Fr. Stephen often asks is not “What does this mean?” but “What does this do?” And that is the most important question to ask when you’re looking at ritual in Scripture, and then, of course, as ritual gets repeated and reused and all of this kind of stuff in the rest of Scripture and in the Church Fathers and the divine services and so forth, what does this actually do? Well, we’ve looked at this one particular ritual, and now we know what it does, and it does the same thing in us, for us, around us, throughout the whole cosmos.

And that is so… so heart-rendingly beautiful. And it should inspire us to cry out to the Lord for mercy with gratitude and thankfulness for all that he has done, and then that we would enter into that and to participate in it ourselves. So those are some of my take-aways from our conversation this evening. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we’ve covered a lot, and a lot of big stuff, so this one is kind of the hardest button to button. But the problem—and we already talked about this a bit with Fr. Photius—a lot of the problems we run into, theologically, and then that end up directly affecting our life in Christ, come from not giving the wrong answers, per se, but from asking the wrong questions. I think we’ve seen tonight how a lot of discussions of atonement are based on reading backwards, so you start with a developed theological idea, read it back into the New Testament, and then from there back into the Old Testament, instead of what we hopefully did with reasonable success tonight, which is start in the Old Testament and read forward and see how things unfold.

But also that there’s a fundamental question that gets asked in the West, and it comes under the banner of “atonement,” despite the fact that there’s not a whiff of it that we’ve seen in our survey tonight, and that’s not just “How does salvation work?” but “How does salvation work from God’s end?” It’s not a question of “How does salvation work?” in the sense of “What must I do to be saved?” which is a salutary question—pardon the pun—but it is “How does it work from God’s end? How does God see it working? How does God make it happen?”

And a very well-known biblical scholar and a very good biblical scholar, Simon Gathercole, who wrote the magisterial material on the Gospel of Thomas, for example, amongst many other great things, did a book a few years ago on atonement, trying to defend the particular “atonement theory of penal substitutionary atonement.” You get these atonement theories that are then theories of how it works from God’s end; how God does it. And he argued—one of his most prominent arguments that he repeated again again was that penal substitutionary atonement is the only theory of how it works that has a mechanism of how it works—that’s his word. The idea… There’s a presupposition there that it’s somehow mechanical, that God saving us is like an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine in an OK Go video or something, where he puts things in motion and at the end somebody gets saved.

Not only is that a bizarre assumption, that there’s no reason to believe is true—even if it was true, there’s no reasons to believe that we as humans could understand how it works from God’s side—but the dangerous thing is, again, not just being wrong, but how this affects our life in Christ. I am the biggest nerd anyone will ever meet. I am an omni-nerd. I can describe to you the inner workings of countless fictional universes. I can tell you all about Arrakis, the desert planet; I can tell you all about Gallifrey; I can tell you all about Nimbus [III], the planet of galactic peace. I can understand all that, and that’s fun: figuring out all the details, all the systems, all the lore. This kind of thing is fun, and it can be very easy, when exposed to theology, especially theology of this kind, that’s trying to explain how everything works and how everything fits together and see things from God’s perspective, to approach our Christian life from that perspective, that it’s about me figuring things out; it’s about me piecing things together: it’s about this intellectual construct that I want to form in my mind, where I have the perfect theology and I understand everything. Strictly speaking, that’s not Christianity; it’s Gnosticism.

The reality is more like what we were talking about tonight that we see unfold in the Scriptures with atonement and everything else, that there are these cosmic realities of spiritual warfare, of Christ defeating the powers of evil, of Christ setting us free and purifying us, making us holy and setting us apart and bringing us into his kingdom; that are cosmic realities that each of us has been given the gift of being able to participate in, in time. From moment to moment, day to day, we come to experience these realities ever more fully. We experience them in worship, we experience them in our interactions with other people when we show the love of God to them, we experience them in the peace we receive from God, in the actual forgiveness and healing we receive for our actual sins on a day-to-day basis. This isn’t just an intellectual maneuver; this is something we can experience and participate in in real time, and that’s what Lent and Holy Week and Pascha are going to be all about.

So it’s not about me, or me and Fr. Andrew, or the Orthodox Church, or anyone else just coming and bashing on Western churches and saying, “Ha ha ha! You guys are all wrong! You guys are all asking the wrong questions! It’s about the reality of when the rubber meets the road and how each of us approaches our Christian life. What we want is not just to understand salvation but to experience salvation, and understanding the cosmic realities and how we come to participate [in] them, ritually and every other way, is the way that that experience becomes real to us.

So I think that’s hopefully the important take-away, beyond all the fun stuff and interesting Bible tidbits; that this isn’t just about knowing the right interpretation, thinking the right thing, but it’s about experiencing the reality of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for today. Thank you very much for listening, everybody. On our next episode, we’re going to be starting a two-part series on sacred geography. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we’d love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com, or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We read everything, but can’t respond to everything—you send so much!—we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. If you have a Facebook account you should probably delete it, but if you can’t, like our Facebook page and join our Facebook discussion group where we’ll be your oasis amongst the evils of social media.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and God bless you all.