Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening! Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And if you are listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Matushka Trudi will be taking your calls tonight, and we’re going to get to those in the second part of our show.

Tonight we’re on part three of our four-part series of the Christology of the Old Testament, and we’re talking tonight about what “Son of Man” means. Now, that phrase, “Son of Man,” appears over a hundred times in the Old Testament. Most of them are in the book of the Prophet Ezekiel. It shows up again dozens of times in the gospels and then gets used elsewhere in the New Testament. What does this mean? Does this refer to Jesus? Does it refer to him every time? So stick with us tonight, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, though we’re not going to the far land of Far Oom, where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, but rather beginning with a quick trip into the New Testament, at least for a moment, which is probably a little surprising for this podcast. So, Fr. Stephen, why is it important that we look at this phase, “Son of Man”?

Fr. Stephen De Young: Does everybody see what he did thar?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] They’ll get there.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, okay. They may now be expecting the references from you, I don’t know.

So, yeah, I guess we should say it’s important. I mean, if I said, “Well, it’s not that important,” everybody would just turn off the show. So we don’t want to say that. [Laughter] As we’re going to see, there’s a couple reasons why “Son of Man” is important. The one we’re going to start with because, yes, we’re in some ways reversing our usual approach, is that “Son of Man,” that title, is the primary term in all four gospels that Christ uses to refer to himself. So there’s lots of titles for Christ in the Old and New Testament—Son of God, Messiah, all of these things, some of the ones we’ve talked about already: the Word of God, the Angel of the Lord, whom we’ve been talking about in the Old Testament—there’s bunches and bunches and bunches of them, the Lord, but this is the one Christ applies to himself when he speaks, and there are not a whole ton of things that go across all four gospels with complete consistency; very, very few. And even most of the things that do go across all four gospels are not identical; they’re similar. Like there are a handful of stories that are in all four gospels, but even in those cases often the details are different; different details are brought out by different authors. But this is true and completely true of the portrayal of Christ in all four gospels. In all four of the gospels, the primary thing he calls himself is the Son of Man.

And while that’s true, you mentioned it’s used in some other places in the New Testament, but not that many, actually. [Laughter] Other than Christ referring to himself as the Son of Man in the gospels, and a bunch of times where the New Testament quotes the Old Testament and the Old Testament quote contains that phrase—so other than those two things, it only actually shows up once. And that is in Acts of the Apostles 7:56. And this is at the end of the story of St. Stephen, as he’s being—or as he’s about to be—stoned to death.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this should be very familiar to everyone who’s read Acts 7 or who knows anything about St. Stephen. It reads: “And he said, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!’ ”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so one of the things we see—not just there, but in St. Stephen’s final words, even though that’s a rabbit-hole we’re not going to go down—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, some other time, perhaps.

Fr. Stephen: In terms of textual variants and that kind of thing. I know there are people who are now disappointed. They’re like: “No! I like that nerdy, that nerdy, nerdy text-criticism stuff!” But not today.

Fr. Andrew: Some other time, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: But what we see going on there is, with those final words of St. Stephen, that deliberately he’s using phrases and speaking in a way that Christ spoke, because the idea is that St. Stephen is speaking the way Christ spoke because he’s dying the way Christ died. So his martyrdom is sort of the… As the protomartyr, he’s set up there, not only as the first Christian martyr but establishing that sort of the core of what it means to be a Christian martyr is to die the way Christ died.

So that’s the only other place, and, again, he uses it there because literarily St. Luke it wanting us to connect his speech to Christ’s speak, and that phrase is so characteristic of Christ that his using it does that. And then it’s Old Testament quotes, and that’s it in the New Testament.

You get close to it—just to stop somebody from trying to “Um, actually…” us—in Revelation 1, and we’re going to talk about that passage later, but that is not actually the title, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. And by “a minute” I mean, like, when we say, “Let us complete our prayer to the Lord,” and there are 45 minutes left in Liturgy.

Fr. Andrew: A nice fat “minute.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that kind of minute. A liturgical minute. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The “in a minute” that I give my kids.

Fr. Stephen: The “one day is like a thousand years” minute, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so then all of those Old Testament quotes obviously are coming out of the Old Testament by definition, but also when Christ applies it to himself, he’s drawing on this existing concept of the Son of Man that pre-existed, that is reflected in the Old Testament. So it’s not just sort of an affectation by Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a reference. It’s a reference that people are going to recognize.

Fr. Stephen: And I say it’s not just an affectation because a friend of the show, Bart Ehrman—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Is he?

Fr. Stephen: If I keep calling him that, maybe he’ll come on. Who knows?

Fr. Andrew: That would be good. [Laughter] We’ll finally have a guest.

Fr. Stephen: He treats it as an affectation. He says this is just Jesus’ sort of affected way of referring to himself in the third person for some reason.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Which, A, makes no sense, and B, even if it were true, you still have to wonder: Well, okay, why did he pick that particular affectation that was sort of loaded with Old Testament freight? Like, it doesn’t really get him out of the problem he’s trying to get out of.

So now we have to follow our more usual pattern and go back to the Old Testament, and go back to sort of the original languages.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So Hebrew and Greek, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so there are two ways that “Son of Man” occurs if you want to be woodenly literal. So there are cases that could literally be translated “son of a man.” There are cases that could be literally translated “son of Adam.”

Fr. Andrew: Or “son of humanity,” yes.

Fr. Stephen: Hence your Lewis-ing activities earlier on.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’ve got to get my one reference in for the night. Now I’m reaching out to the wholesome homeschooling audience out there. Hey, everybody! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Wholesome content.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right!

Fr. Stephen: And the reason for that is that in both Hebrew and in Greek, there are two different words that are translated “man,” one of which sort of means a man, as in a male person, and one of which refers to man like humanity or mankind, more that idea. In Hebrew, the word for sort of “a man,” as a male human, is issh, and the word for humanity is adamah, and you can see the name Adam in there, and that means more like “human.” And then in Greek, aner is sort of “a man,” and anthropos is more “human,” talking about humanity as such.

Fr. Andrew: Aner is a word that is very dear and close to my heart. [Laughter] See, I’ve got to get another reference in early on for everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I know people are still hung up on that “multiple words for love” thing. Made a lot of people angry with that like I always do when I bring it up, so we’re kind of… I’m glad you gave to the Lewis fans, because, once again, we have to also take away, because synonyms are a thing. They’re a thing that exist in the world, and they exist in Hebrew and Greek, too. So you may say, “Wait, look, you just said those two words have different shades of meaning.” Well, those two words can have different shades of meaning, or an author can use them interchangeably. So we have to figure out what the Old Testament does.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think it’s also important just to point out that just because you have an individual word… You have to have it embedded in whatever phrase it might be being used in to kind of hone in on the actual meaning of that usage. You can’t just take every word in the phrase and just throw them together literally and say, “That’s what that means.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “Butterfly.” Right.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. “Breakfast.”

Fr. Stephen: Words in and of themselves, lexemes, words, do not have meaning. Words gain meaning by usage.

Fr. Andrew: Context, right.

Fr. Stephen: So we have to look at how they’re used, and so what we find in the Hebrew and in the Greek of the Old Testament is that you’ll have examples of effectively a phrase like ben issh, son of a man, and ben adamah, son of man-like-mankind. And you find in the Greek places that are uios aner, son of a man, and uios anthropos, son of mankind. But here’s the thing: they don’t match up.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the Greek translators don’t consistently translate ben issh as uios aner or ben adamah as uios anthropos. It’s not one-to-one correspondence between them, which basically means that when the Greek translators were reading them, they understood those two phrases to basically be interchangeable synonyms.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They understood them to be synonyms in Hebrew and then they used them as synonyms in Greek. So it’s hard to get around that, right? Again, if you’re going to argue, it’s not enough to just say, well, these are two different words, and that they are sometimes used with different meanings. You have to show that, in a particular case in a particular phrase, a particular author is using them as technical terms. So St. Paul, for example, has some words he uses that way, as technical terms. He has other times where he just uses synonyms interchangeably. And that’s true for all of us. If we took all of our writing, there would be times when we used specific words with a very technical meaning, and there are times when we’re just using words casually and using two different words to mean the same thing in the same conversation, or in the same writing, where, for example, it’s good English form not to just repeat the same exact word over and over and over again. That’s why they made you buy a thesaurus in school, so that you wouldn’t have to do that.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Stephen: So these two phrases: don’t get too stuck on which of the two occurs at a particular place, because all of these are being used in this sort of interchangeable way in both languages, as we can see from the translation activity into Greek.

Fr. Andrew: Which, I mean, I would conclude from that that the English translation of kind of all of them as “Son of Man” is pretty warranted, but you still of course—and we’ll get into this—have to look at the context to understand exactly how “Son of Man” is being used in a particular case.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Which is true in the original languages, too, so you can’t just say that’s a bad translation because it’s not coming up with multiple translations in English.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the likely reason, I think, why they were seen as being synonymous, even though they were two different words, is that people forget. So we have these names, Adam and Eve, in our head—

Fr. Andrew: Right, as names.

Fr. Stephen: —for those two folks in Genesis, and those aren’t their original names. Their original names were Issh and Isshah.

Fr. Andrew: Man and Woman.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, and so issh and adamah, if you’re interpreting them as a name, they were both the name of the same person in Genesis in different parts of the story. So, yeah. So that, to me, is the most likely explanation for why they just saw this as conveying the same thing.

So then what’s going on with this phrase, then? And so first we have look to at the—as we’ve broken down phrases in the past—“son of” part. And this is a general sort of Semitic idiom. It’s not even confined to Hebrew. Almost all Semitic languages have some variation of this, so you get it in Hebrew and Aramaic and even Ugaritic. And that is “son of blank,” and then it will be either a quality or a person. So a famous one of these in the New Testament is Barnabas or Bar-nabas, “bar” being the Aramaic for “son of,” and “nabas” meaning encouragement.

Fr. Andrew: So, shout out to Fr. Barnabas Powell!

Fr. Stephen: And Barabbas, who was Bar-abbas, but anyway…

Fr. Andrew: “Son of the father,” isn’t that what that would mean?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “son of his father,” which, yeah, kind of applies to everyone, but whatever.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He’s just an everyman figure!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So someone’s called the “son of encouragement,” or Judas Iscariot is called “the son of perdition, the son of hell, the son of damnation.” And Christ, in St. John’s gospel, tells the Pharisees and the teacher of the law that when they say they’re sons of Abraham, he says, “No, you’re sons of your father, the devil.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, and because they do his works is what they said.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so we’ve talked before about this. This idea that the son is the image of the father. He images the father, so he does the things that the father does. We’re going to come back to this later with Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Just as a spoiler, for instance, when the Lord says, “I must be about my Father’s business,” that’s him talking about this exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, right, so if someone is the son of encouragement, that means they have this quality of being an encourager. They are encouraging.

Fr. Andrew: This is what they do, who they are.

Fr. Stephen: Right, if you’re the son of damnation like Judas Iscariot, you can figure out what that means about you. And Jesus Christ says, “They’re the sons of their father, the devil, because he’s a liar and he’s a murderer from the beginning.” So he’s saying, “You possess these qualities. You enact these qualities of this person. That makes you their son.” So that means “Son of Man, Son of Adam,” means that this is someone who has a quality that Adam possessed. And so there may be some folks out there trying to run ahead on this. They say, “Oh, possessive quality—Adam possessed…” And they’ve got St. Augustine rattling around in the back of their brain, and they’re thinking about sin. They’re thinking about: “Yeah, Adam did bad stuff and now we all do bad stuff. That’s how we’re sons of Adam.” They’ve got their whole original sin on. And…

Fr. Andrew: No!

Fr. Stephen: …that’s not what we’re talking about! [Laughter] That ain’t in the Old Testament. So it’s worth reiterating. I know we’ve said this before, but it’s worth reiterating: Adam, as a figure in the Old Testament, is the source of mortality. He is how death comes to the human race.

Fr. Andrew: Right. If you’re looking for the father of sin, you want to look at Cain.

Fr. Stephen: You want to look at Cain, right. And failing to disambiguate that, failing to disambiguate those two, as St. Augustine did, causes all kinds of theological problems down the road and makes a lot of the New Testament very hard to interpret correctly, and you end up with things like Calvinism. But anyway!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Sorry, not-sorry, Calvinists.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So we’re talking about if mortality, then, is the quality that exemplifies Adam, then somebody who is a son of Adam—that’s talking about someone as being a mortal human. It’s talking about humanity—a human being qua mortality, weakness, fragility. And it’s used this way… So this is used, this phrase is used often in the Old Testament to address people—people in the Old Testament, individuals, persons—who aren’t Christ. So it’s used in contexts where it’s sort of reminding them of their fragility and weakness.

Fr. Andrew: The most colorful one, probably Job 25:6, where it refers to “man who is a maggot and the son of man who is a worm.” That’s not about Jesus! So to answer the question we posed in the beginning: Is it always about Jesus? No, the phrase does not always refer to Jesus.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It always refers to a human.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, and at least in this sense, it’s almost sort of a synonym for the way in English we use “mortal” as a noun. You know, “for us mortals.” It’s emphasizing us as being mortal, as having death.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and when you read that Job quote, it’s very easy to look at it as just an insult, calling somebody a maggot and a worm, unless it’s Dennis Rodman, is like, not great. [Laughter] But the point is: what are maggots and worms associated with? Death.

Fr. Andrew: Eating dead bodies.

Fr. Stephen: Death and decay. So even that choice, it’s not just yicky things. [Laughter] It’s aimed at that mortality; it’s aimed at that death that humanity is sort of embued with this sort of mortality that makes us weak and fragile and frail. And there’s other places, if you want to look later when this is recorded and you want to slow it down if you really want to look up some more. Some other examples are Psalm 8:4, Psalm 144:3 (or 143:3), Psalm 146:3, and Isaiah 51:12: other places with similar things.

In addition to those sort of spotty uses of the term in various places to refer to various people vis-à-vis human mortality and human weakness, when you look at—if you do the good ol’ concordance method of biblical research and just look at all the places where it occurs in the Old Testament, the phrase “son of man,” you will find that there’s this sort of huge concentration of them, this nexus of them, in Ezekiel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like 93 instances are in Ezekiel, out of I think 120 in the whole Old Testament.

Fr. Stephen: And that title there is being applied to Ezekiel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “Prophesy to the bones, O son of man,” etc.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “son of man, son of Adam,” over and over again. So why does this all of a sudden become so concentrated around the figure of Ezekiel in particular? Well, of the sort of major writing prophets, Ezekiel is the one who is living in exile in Babylon. He’s the one who’s outside Jerusalem, the Temple’s been destroyed, there he’s with the refugees and the exiles. And for us, moving to another country, even if you were sort of a refugee, is a long way from being dead. In fact, you probably became a refugee so you wouldn’t be dead. That was the alternative. But we have to keep in mind sort of the sweep of Old Testament theology. So, starting way back with Genesis 3 and with Adam, when Adam is exiled from paradise, when he’s cut off from the tree of life, when he’s put out of God’s presence, that is death. “The day you eat of it, you will surely die.” That spiritual death: that’s the real death. And then physical death follows after that as a result.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think the other thing that probably hinders the exile from homeland with death for us as modern people is that, with so many modern technological conveniences, being pushed out of your homeland is not necessarily the worst thing in the world. You’re going to be probably okay, whereas for pre-modern people, that’s where your whole network of survival is. I mean, people did not just tend to get up and move.

And one of the ways actually that’s kind of illustrated in the English language is that the word, the modern English word that we have, “wretch,” w-r-e-t-c-h, now we use it to mean someone who’s in a terrible state, but the original meaning of that word—well, I shouldn’t say “original—an early meaning of that word meant “exile.” It meant someone who was exiled, and so there was that sense of this is— and so then later we began to mean: this is how you feel when you’re in exile. You’re away from the source of your life, your family, your homeland, everything that defines who you are. You’re outside of all of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, in this case in particular, the Temple, the place where God is. You are now far off. And you see this reflected in the Torah. There’s this ambiguity, where we usually just chalk them all up as death penalties, but the language applied to most of the death penalties in the Torah is: “This person needs to be cut off from among the people,” and that could refer to death or that could refer to being cast out into exile, and that doesn’t need to be clarified in the Torah, because those two were seen as being pretty much the same thing, so we don’t need to disambiguate that.

And so this is the picture we talked about, back when we talked about the geography of the underworld; this is the sort of picture people had of Sheol, that you’re living this kind of shadowy, wandering existence, or in Hades, until sort of your memory fades and you sort of fade off into oblivion.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and even that idea of the wandering spirits, which are dead giants, but the wandering spirits: they’ve been exiled from their proper bodies. They’re disembodied spirits, and so they’re wandering over the earth. This is supposed to be a very miserable condition. They’re cut off from life.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so in a very real way, Ezekiel is going not just in that one passage where he prophesies to the bones—and that’s the language that’s used: “Prophesy to the dead bones”—he is a prophet to sort of the undead.

Fr. Andrew: Whoa! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: To the dead in Sheol, who become the exiles in Babylon.

Fr. Andrew: Wow, that’s going to be a t-shirt: “Ezekiel, prophet to the undead.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, like, that’s what’s going on in Ezekiel in the paradigm. And so then it’s not a coincidence that this phrase also shows up, for example, in Daniel 8:17, another prophet who is living in exile. He’s referred to as the son of man, because it’s a reminder of this mortality, this fragility, this state that they’re in.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I just want to read that real quick. This is a vision he’s having. It says:

So he came near where I stood, and when he came I was frightened and fell on my face, but he said unto me: Understand, O son of man, that the vision is for the time of the end.

So there’s even that sense of the end of the world coming along with that, and he’s calling him “son of man” in the context of that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so that’s where sort of this is going, but now we have to turn to sort of the paradigmatic use of the term “son of man” in Daniel that’s going to become paradigmatic for a whole lot else down the road and is going to be the basis for most of what we’re going to be discussing for the rest of the evening in terms of this term, and that’s: we’re going once again back to Daniel 7, which we’ve already gone to… We’ve gone to this well a couple of times, but we’re coming through with another trajectory here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, another pass. So we talked about Daniel 7 when we did our episode on the Ascension earlier this year, and we talked about it not too many weeks ago when we talked about the four beasts that arise up out of the earth in the first few verses of that chapter when we did our episode on Leviathan and Behemoth. So, yes, welcome back to Daniel 7, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and so even though the figure here is referred to as “one like a son of man,” this figure becomes known, after Daniel 7—so, within Second Temple Judaism, within early Christianity, in the first century, when Christ is applying this term to himself critically—as the Son of Man, the definite article, as it were, sort of capital-S, capital-M, as opposed to these other references.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so if you’re walking around in the time of Jesus in Judea, and you talk about “the Son of Man,” pretty much everyone who knows anything about the Old Testament Scriptures is going to be thinking about this passage from Daniel.

Fr. Stephen: Daniel 7, yeah. That’s where their brain’s going to go when they hear that term. So we’re going to, because we just talked about it recently—go back and listen to it—we’re not going to spend a lot of time on verses one through eight of chapter seven that talk about the four beasts, because we just did that not too long ago, and people love beasts, I know, but we talked about how these are, again, not just sort of visual representations of earth empires, but these are the spiritual beings, the demonic forces, that are animating those empires, that succession of empires that culminates with the fourth beast, who’s sort of the super-beast, who’s Rome. And then, after we’ve had those described and that sort of final beast has the horn that’s blaspheming, etc., etc., and then we get to verse nine.

And this is where we’re going to pick up on our focus, and as Fr. Andrew mentioned, we talked about this in terms of the Ascension, but now we’re going to be going through it specifically in terms of the two figures we see here involved in heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I just want to read this passage real quick just so everyone can have this in their heads as we go, so I’m just going to read this really quick. This is Daniel 7; I’m going to read verses nine through twelve.

As I looked, thrones were placed and the Ancient of Days took his seat. His clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool. His throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came out before him, a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him. The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. I looked then, because of the sound of the great words that the horn was speaking. And as I looked, the beast was killed and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. As for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away, but their lives were prolonged for a season and a time.

So that’s the first part we’re going to be looking at now.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so the figure we have here is the Ancient of Days. And he’s described—he’s named as that, and it’s sort of expected that we all know who this is, even though this is not a title that’s used for Yahweh the God of Israel in the other parts of the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s unique to this spot.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not one of his sort of regular titles, the Ancient of Days. And “Ancient of Days” here is basically a phrase. We’ve sort of so categorized it in our heads that we sort of missed it. Ancient of Days, having many days or having many years, was an idiom for being really old. So the idea is that here Yahweh the God of Israel is being depicted as this elderly man, this very, very old man. And that goes with the: his clothing being white as snow and the hair of his head being like pure wool: it’s white. So now we’re going to freak people out, but don’t get too worried unless you listened to the Ascension episode, then you know where we’re going with this, but some people are going to get…

So in this description, Yahweh the God of Israel is being described with descriptive terms that were normally used for the God El in Canaanite mythology.

Fr. Andrew: Right, the father of Baal.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Press hold—we’ll come back; we’ll explain. Don’t freak out. He’s being described in those terms. They’re not saying he is El. The name El does not appear here. It’s just descriptors are being used that would connect it to that in the ears of the hearers originally. Notice also—and this becomes one of the keys things about this passage—is that thrones, plural, are set up. And the God of Israel takes his seat, and his throne is described as being fiery flames; that’s an angelic descriptor: the cherubim and the seraphim, on whom he’s enthroned. And we get the description of wheels because this is a throne-chariot, as we’ve talked about before. This is the merkavah, the throne-chariot. And the court sits in judgment. So this is the divine council. This is Yahweh the God of Israel and the angelic beings, with whom he has chosen to share his rule. And they’re now going to deal with these beasts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so they’re being called in front of the court, basically.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it says that the… Now, again, when we say “court,” I know there’s some of you who are thinking courtroom.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no, this is a royal court.

Fr. Stephen: It’s a trap! Royal court. Royal court.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s a trap!

Fr. Stephen: They didn’t have courtrooms. They didn’t have that kind of… This is the royal court where judgments take place. And the books are opened is the way it’s translated. This is another rabbit-hole we’re not going down today. At some point in the future we will do an episode on the heavenly books. I know there are people who are like: “No! Now!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Books in the Bible, not the books of the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: The short version is—and this is something that’s not just an Old Testament thing like the book of life and the heavenly books and these kinds of things, and shows up again in the New Testament, but this is an Ancient Near East thing. And the idea, in a very general sense, and again we’ll talk about this more in the future, is that there are tablets or scrolls or books in heaven, in which sort of angelic or divine scribes write down everything that happens on earth: the words that are spoken by people, the things people do. That these are all noted.

Fr. Andrew: So this is the evidence, basically, that’s being pulled out against the beasts.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that final beast, the super-beast, gets killed and given over to be burned. And then the other beasts, the lesser beasts, have their dominion taken away, but they’re not imprisoned or thrown into the fire.

Fr. Andrew: They’re still around.

Fr. Stephen: They’re let—they’re still around; they just don’t have their authority any more. So that authority, that dominion that they had, as angelic beings who were governing the nations, is taken away from them, and now in verses 13 and 14, we’re going to see that authority that they had seized over the nations, these demonic beings, is going to be given to someone else.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. Okay. Verses 13 and 14.

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven, there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him, and to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So we see now this second figure, this second person, who is described as being “one like a son of man.” So he looked like a man; he’s a human. But, even though he looks human, why would you say he just looks human? Why wouldn’t he say, “Then I saw a man”? Or that I saw the son of man? Because he arrives—he comes up in front of the Ancient of Days riding on the clouds of heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which, as we’ve seen before, this is co-opting Baal language.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is Baal language, who was the son of El in Canaanite mythology. And so what we’ve got here is sort of a remix, a correction of—and we talked about this more in the Ascension episode—the enthronement of Baal in the Baal cycle, where, after Baal has “totally” won all of his battles and stuff, “total winner,” then he gets enthroned by his father. But what’s interesting here in this case—so, continuities and discontinuities—so on one hand we’re taking over: no, that Baal story, that El and Baal story is propaganda, so we’re going to correct the record. And part of that correction here, one of the discontinuities in the two stories, is that that Baal language that’s applied to the Son of Man here is applied to Yahweh in the rest of the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: So this is an indication that this one who is like a son of man is Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and probably the most famous place for at least our Orthodox listeners for that is going to be Psalm 104 (or 103), verses three and four, because we read it at vespers. That talks about riding on the clouds of heaven.

Fr. Andrew: “Makes the clouds his chariot, rides on the wings of the wind.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then Isaiah 19:1 does the same thing, and there are more examples. But this Baal language has already been co-opted to Yahweh. So part of the correction that’s taking place here is that both the divine Father figure and the divine Son figure are both Yahweh, the God of Israel. But the divine Son is both divine and human.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Because he’s son of Adam, but also is doing what Yahweh does.

Fr. Andrew: Yahweh things.

Fr. Stephen: And so the correction here is that Baal did not go and totally win a whole bunch of victories and kick everybody’s rear and then get enthroned by his father El after he successfully had his revolution and overthrew the most high god. Rather, Yahweh—a human Yahweh—is enthroned by his Father who is Yahweh. So we have two figures, two Persons…

Fr. Andrew: Who are both God.

Fr. Stephen: Who are both Yahweh, the God of Israel, not just divine in a general sense, not two gods.

Fr. Andrew: One God.

Fr. Stephen: They’re both Yahweh, the God of Israel. One a Father, one a Son, and the Son is also human. That’s in Daniel 7. [Laughter] You’re going to say, “That sounds like Christianity”—and you’re right.

Fr. Andrew: Ha! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And so what happens when he’s enthroned? Well, in verse 14, again, “to him is given dominion, glory, and a kingdom.” That dominion and glory and kingdom that was taken away from those demonic powers is given to him. So all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him, here in Daniel 7.

Fr. Andrew: One could put it that way! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And notice the language here, too, that in Daniel, all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. Why throw in languages?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it’s a reversal of the Tower of Babel, not just to say everybody’s going to serve him, but if you think about what happens at Babel, this is the beginning of human beings being dominated by the fallen dominions. So these are those people, understood specifically in Babel terms, being handed over to the Son of Man.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and his dominion, then, is an everlasting dominion that doesn’t pass away. His kingdom is not destroyed; it’s permanent. There’s not going to be another successor, there’s not going to be anybody else, and his kingdom shall have no end—sorry, dispensationalists and pre-millennialists in general. [Laughter] It’s Daniel 7, man. What can I say?

So we do need to briefly address something that is popular in some Orthodox circles.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is the part where some people might get a little unhappy with us.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, we’re going to make people mad all night tonight. We got the C.S. Lewis fans mad at us again…

Fr. Andrew: Yay!

Fr. Stephen: Now we’re going to get these folks mad at us. That’s okay. I’m not on social media, so I won’t even know!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I have to take it all!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, you’re the scapegoat for the show.

Fr. Andrew: Yes. I’m the one sent out to Azazel. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And this is that there are folks who, for a variety of reasons, want to identify these two figures in Daniel 7 not as God the Father and God the Son, not as the Father and Son within the holy Trinity, but they want to identify the Ancient of Days as Christ’s divine nature and the Son of Man as his human nature.

Fr. Andrew: Which… I mean, when you put it that way, it sounds like a vaguely Nestorian scene.

Fr. Stephen: It is kind of… Now, none of the people we’re talking about are Nestorians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they’re not trying to go there.

Fr. Stephen: They’re not trying to do that; they have no intent to do that, right.

Fr. Andrew: But it’s problematic, because it’s clear that there’s two Persons in Daniel 7. One is enthroning the other. The one who comes on the clouds comes to the Ancient of Days. It’s very clear that there are two different figures here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and if this is some kind of depiction of the Incarnation, this would mean you have this divine person, Christ, who pre-exists, and then this human person gets joined to him somehow, which again—that’s kind of what Nestorianism is. They don’t push it that far—

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s not the intent.

Fr. Stephen: —but if you push it at all, that’s where you end up. That’s why this is problematic. So, yeah, it doesn’t work for a bunch of reasons, and also the Son of Man here isn’t just a human. He’s riding on the clouds: he’s a human-divine figure. So you have a divine figure and a human-divine figure, not a divine figure and a human figure. So it doesn’t—the text doesn’t really work that way either. So sometimes where folks will go, the folks who have this idea, the way they’ll get there or the way they’ll back up that understanding is to go to Revelation 1—it’s “Revelation,” singular, folks—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Just say “the Apocalypse.”

Fr. Stephen: “-tion.” Yes, or the Apocalypse—not the Apocalypses; the Apocalypse, singular. —chapter one, verses 12 through 15, in which there’s a description of Christ, of the heavenly, resurrected Christ, whom St. John sees.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s a single figure here. So St. John says this:

Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and, on turning, I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands, one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace. And his voice was like the roar of many waters.

So there you’ve got that description of him with the really white hair, “like wool.” So you get the descriptive language of the Ancient of Days figure from Daniel 7 now is being applied to Christ. So that kind of explains why people would read—would try to read Daniel 7 in that way. But, I mean, what is going on here? Why the Ancient of Days’ physical description—why is that now being applied to Christ?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so they want to interpret it as sort of the two figures merge together, sort of in the Incarnation, which, again—kind of Nestorianism if you push on it. And I don’t think that’s what St. John is saying here, right?

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: So the place where we go to understand what St. John is doing here, because Revelation is easily the most difficult part of St. John’s writings, easily the most difficult part of it to understand, by a fair margin—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think most people would agree with that. That might be the most uncontroversial thing we’ll say this evening! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, pretty much all the Church Fathers agree on that. That’s why most of them had issues with the book in general, like maybe we don’t want people to read this—because, hey, what could go wrong? It’s not like people could start cults or something! [Laughter]

But so what we want to do is—this is the way… What we have here within this apocalyptic literature, within this vision, we have this sort of poetic description of Christ, of the risen Christ. So if we want to get this in another format, an easier-to-understand format, something more like prose and less like poetry, we go to St. John’s other writings and say, for example: In St. John’s gospel, how does he see Christ? For lack of a better term, what is his Christology? How does he talk about Christ in his gospel? And then how might that be reflected in this description? And what we see, over and over again in St. John’s gospel in particular, is this idea of Christ as Son of the Father in the sense we were talking about before, in the sense that he is imaging the Father. So he’s going to say he does only the works of the Father; he does only what the Father does. He says only what the Father says, only those things that the Father gives him. He’s going to say to his disciples, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” So that’s image in a very literal level, that he is the express—as St. Paul is going to say, he’s the express image of the Father. “Christ who is seen is the express image of the Father who is unseen.”

So if we read St. John’s gospel first, and that’s how we have the idea of Christ, then if he’s going to see the risen, heavenly Christ, who’s he going to look like?

Fr. Andrew: His Father!

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we have a description of the Father from Daniel 7.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so then here’s the part that’ll… This is where the rubber meets the road for some people. What about icons of this scene from Daniel 7? So what we’re seeing is that—

Fr. Stephen: Like the one we posted?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, just like that one, the one we posted online, where if we’re saying that if this is the Father and the Son, I thought there was a rule that you’re not allowed to make icons of God the Father. What’s up with that, yo? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: There kind of is. So there is a basic thing—and Fr. Steven Bigham (not me; another Fr. Stephen)—he spells it—

Fr. Andrew: And definitely not me! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, he spells it wrong; he spells it with a V.

Fr. Andrew: With a V! Oh, man!

Fr. Stephen: Fr. Steven Bigham wrote a book called—

Fr. Andrew: I’m sure he is a lovely man.

Fr. Stephen: Hey, I’m about to promo his book; he can take a little ribbing! [Laughter] —wrote a book called The Image of God the Father in Orthodox Theology and Iconography that was published by St. Vlad’s Seminary Press—St. Vladimir’s, sorry.

Fr. Andrew: Still available!

Fr. Stephen: And he sets out this issue very plainly in the book, and that issue is: It is very clear that it is verboten in the Orthodox Church to make icons of God the Father. It is also true that if you travel at all and go to centuries-old churches in the Orthodox Church—in Russia, on Mount Athos, and other places—you find icons of God the Father. There are miracle-working icons that depict God the Father.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, when I was on Mt. Athos four years ago, I saw them just about everywhere. Like, they were really, really common. And they weren’t all even depicting this scene necessarily. Some of them, you get what we call the paternity icon, where it’s Christ as a young man, seated in the lap of the Ancient of Days, his Father. Others you get them side by side, on thrones side by side: Christ as a mature man, bearded, and then the white-haired God the Father next to him. But yeah, super common; super, super common.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and both of these things are just true. [Laughter] That’s reality for you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, although to the best of our knowledge—so don’t “at” us, bros… Actually, go ahead. Go ahead: send us the email.

Fr. Stephen: “At” him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, “at” me, exactly. I am the one sent to Azazel… [Laughter] But the only explicit canon against this that we are aware of was from the Moscow Council of 1667. It has an explicit canon that says you may not make icons of the Father. Clearly, when they put out a canon like this, that means that it’s happening.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Enough that they had to say so.

Fr. Andrew: You don’t make a rule against something that’s not a— You try not to make a rule against something that’s not a problem, but it seems that generally within the Tradition, it’s more often that there’s commentaries on iconographic canons that draw this as a conclusion, that you’re not supposed to make icons of God the Father. And yet, here it is. And this is the reason, then, why some people try to reconcile these two things. Like, you’re not supposed to make icons of God the Father, and, boy, that looks like God the Father up there. Oh, that must be— Christ is the Ancient of Days. And sometimes you even see icons where you see the cruciform halo above this Ancient of Days figure.

Fr. Stephen: Or the words “Ancient of Days.” With the cruciform thing, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which doesn’t really line up with what you see in Daniel 7.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and, well, beyond that. People will say, “Oh, that’s the Ancient of Days. That’s the pre-incarnate Christ” kind of idea, in order to get around and say that’s why that icon’s okay. Here’s the problem: That makes the icon uncanonical. Because there is an ecumenical canon, from the Quinisext Council, that says that Christ is only to be depicted as he appeared in the Incarnation in iconography. He is not to be depicted as a lamb, he is not to be depicted—

Fr. Andrew: —as an old man.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so you can’t… Depicting the pre-incarnate Christ, or claiming to, is a violation of an ecumenical canon, whereas technically God the Father isn’t! [Laughter] So that’s actually worse.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, of an ecumenical canon. Now, by saying all this, we’re not trying to put our flagpole in the ground and stake out a position on whether you should or should not, or could or could not. We’re just saying this is kind of the way that it is. This is what we see. There’s these rules against it, but we see lots of them as well, in many venerable churches, painted by master and sometimes sainted iconographers.

Fr. Stephen: And God has worked miracles through some of those icons.

Fr. Andrew: Right. So, you know, we’re not saying the rules are bad, but God is not bound by the rules, even his own rules.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s where this comes together. God is not bound by his rules. And this applies in a lot of places. So we talk all the time about—there’s canonical order in the Church. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of order, not of chaos. And there is good order in the Church, and so when the Church says all kinds of things, like baptism is necessary for salvation, people will say, “Well, what about… what about… what about…?” All the cases where there’s somebody—“Does that mean they go to hell?” And it’s like: No… God is not limited by his rules! Yet, God has given us these rules, so you need to get baptized.

Fr. Andrew: Right, these are the norms. They’re the norms.

Fr. Stephen: That’s what we’re saying. So we follow what God says, and then God does what he will, that goes beyond our expectations and beyond our understanding, but we follow what he told us to do. These are restrictions on us, not on him. So God can take imperfect, even non-canonical icons and work through them if he so choses.

Fr. Andrew: And he does.

Fr. Stephen: And that doesn’t void the rule either. That doesn’t make the rule irrelevant either. It just means God can do what he wants, because he’s God, and I’m not. [Laughter] So I follow the rules as best I can.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God for that! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, I like you, but… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No, I would be vengeful and terrible. I’d be way more in the Zeus camp than the… Yeah.

So there’s a little more here in Daniel 7, because after… I mean, that’s the vision, really, but from verse 15 to the end is Daniel, then, sort of having a conversation with his angelic guide about what he just saw, so there’s a little more interpretation about that vision that comes out in these last verses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the angelic guide gives this interpretation, saying these four beasts are, it says, “kings who shall arise out of the earth,” but remember, everybody, this is not just about particular emperors or kings; these are the demonic forces that back those empires. And then it says in verse 18, “But the saints, the holy ones of the Most High, shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, forever and ever.” So there’s this sharing of the kingdom with the saints.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that “arise out of the earth” is important, because we see the word “earth,” and we think the ground, the soil. And it can refer to that, but ha’aretz is also used to refer to the underworld in Semitic languages.

Fr. Andrew: And a newspaper in modern-day Israel.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, now they mean it in the sense of earth or the world, I’m pretty sure.

Fr. Andrew: The world, yeah. Not the underworld?

Fr. Stephen: Not: hell, the newspaper.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Oh, well.

Fr. Stephen: But, yes, it is used in these ancient— to refer to the underworld. When the serpent is cast down “to the earth,” he’s being cast down—the devil’s being cast down to the underworld. That’s that here. So when we hear about these kings, these beasts, arising up “out of the earth,” that’s what we’re intended to see. These are demonic spirits we’re talking about, not just the humans whom they’ve enslaved to do their bidding.

Right, and here it’s the holy ones of the Most High who receive the kingdom, and then we get a little more in verses 19 through 28, in that interaction.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I’m not going to read all those ten verses, but there’s a war that happens between these demonic forces and the holy ones of God, the angels/saints—because, remember, everybody: angels are the original saints. And then that’s what the rest of this section is about, is that. And then there’s a judgment given and the kingdom is received. Anyways.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so this isn’t just talking about these foreign nations are persecuting Israel.

Fr. Andrew: No!

Fr. Stephen: Which, by the way, doesn’t exist at this point in time. They’re a bunch of exiles from Judah, from one tribe—one and a half, really, but anyway.

And the beasts, the first one is Babylon, and Babylon wasn’t persecuting Israel. Babylon was sent by God to take Israel into exile, to chasten them for their sins.

Fr. Andrew: As judgment.

Fr. Stephen: Right, as God’s judgment. So that’s not just: Oh, evil persecutor. And the Persians, Cyrus let them go home! So Cyrus isn’t an evil demonic beast. This isn’t talking about the humans involved; this is talking about where, elsewhere in Daniel, the prince of Persia, the prince of Greece whom the Archangels Gabriel and Michael battle against and do battle with, these are the demonic forces behind those empires who were in conflict with the holy ones of God. And so that judgment we read about from the Ancient of Days resolves that conflict. The Son of Man is victorious over those demonic forces. And then here, when it’s described, the kingdom is received by the people of the holy ones of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s interesting. Where is that phrase? I’m trying to see where this is. Anyway, yeah, it is… Oh, yeah, yeah, in verse 27, given to the people of the saints, or the people of the holy ones of the Most High. Which is interesting: it’s not just a repetition of the phrase earlier, that it’s going to be given to the saints or the holy ones of the Most High; it’s the people of them. So you have the sense now that these are human beings; they’re not just the angels.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this victory that’s won by this Son of Man—spoilers: by Christ—he receives the kingdom. The holy ones receive the kingdom; the holy ones are victorious. And Christ’s people receive the kingdom and Christ’s people are victorious in this spiritual war. And so this understanding of what’s going on in Daniel 7, this is where St. Paul gets the idea that he tells to the Corinthians, that we’re going to judge angels someday. And this is where St. John gets the idea that in Christ’s kingdom the martyrs are reigning with Christ over this world as part of the council, that they have received this kingdom also.

Fr. Andrew: So are you saying that the apostles aren’t just making this stuff up in the New Testament?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Had to get at least one of those monosyllabic answers! All right, well, that wraps up the first half of our episode of The Lord of Spirits tonight, and we’re going to take a brief break, and we’ll be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back, everyone, to the second half of Lord of Spirits. I think we should check out that OrthodoxIntro.org, Fr. Stephen. What do you think?

Fr. Stephen: It sounds like a good website, but the guy promoting it there seemed a little untrustworthy, so I don’t know.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s true. Well, there’s a few other people involved.

Fr. Stephen: I’m sure he’s not there, like reading it to you or anything, so you could probably just go, and… Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: No! [Laughter] All right, well, welcome back. And so we just covered a whole section from Daniel 7, where we talked about the Son of Man and what happens in there. And now we’re going to kind of, I don’t know, pan out a little bit, take a higher-level look at some of this stuff and see what’s going on in this, with this title of “Son of Man,” especially now as it gets received in the literature of the Second Temple period. So, Daniel 7, it’s not some chapter in the Old Testament. It actually gets really focused on a lot, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Daniel 7, this story we just went through in some detail, becomes the locus classicus for a whole discussion within Second Temple Judaism. So Second Temple Judaism, remember, forms after the return from exile. And so Daniel is one of, if not the latest sort of prophetic book that’s written in the Old Testament. Now, I’m defining “prophetic” really strictly there. We have other historical books—Ezra, Nehemiah—in the larger canon—1 and 2 Maccabees, that kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Prophets, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: But in terms of a writing prophet, this is one of the last. And so it represents for the Second Temple period, sort of the visions of Daniel and this kind of thing represent sort of the state-of-the-art of their expectations of God’s deliverance in the future. So, again, this is a rabbit-trail we won’t totally go down—maybe we’ll just do a Daniel episode at some point.

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy!

Fr. Stephen: But Daniel pretty much predicted exactly when Christ was going to be born, like, to the year.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That’s cool.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s why—and they understood it that way at the time—you get all these phony messiahs showing up in the first century BC and the first century AD, because they were doing the math from Daniel and were like: “It’s around time…”

Fr. Andrew: They didn’t just have a Harold Camping around at that time, predicting the end of the world?

Fr. Stephen: No, no, they were actually reading it very closely, and they said this is sort of embedded here. Now, we can say, to be fair to old Harold, who at least had the decency to admit that he was he was wrong and retire from prognosticating—

Fr. Andrew: He did!?

Fr. Stephen: —to his credit; we can be charitable and say, well, he thought, “Hey, if Daniel did it, maybe St. John did, too, and we can do this with Revelation,” but the answer is no.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: But in particular, Daniel 7, the discussion here is that you see here very clearly what becomes referred to in these Jewish sources as “two powers in heaven.” You see these two figures who are both Yahweh the God of Israel in some sense. And it’s not going to be clear to them in exactly what sense—we’re going to talk about a whole bunch of different views and ideas of what’s going on here within Second Temple Judaism—but it’s clear that something’s going on here. And then the reason I say this is the locus classicus is that then the discussion branches out from here. So it starts here, where it’s sort of clear that there are these two figures. And then they go back and start reading some of the passages we’ve been talking about the last couple of shows and saying, “Oh! Well, yeah, here there’s this Angel of the Lord figure, and oh here there’s this Word of the Lord figure, or Word of God figure,” and some more stuff we’re going to talk about next time, but it sort of branches out from this Daniel 7 passage, to go into these other passages and say, “Well, this must be that same second figure, the same second power in heaven.”

Fr. Andrew: Because it’s so clear in the Daniel 7 passage that this is a divine figure, who is also Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: A divine-human figure.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a divine-human figure who is also Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: And so to clarify the terminology, when we say “second power in heaven,” the word that’s being used in Greek is not dynamis, which we sometimes—that’s where “dynamite” gets its name. That can mean power or strength, and that’s why we yell it before the “loud” verse of the Trisagion.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right. In Greek, in Antiochian tradition. Sorry, Russians. You guys don’t get to do that.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is not that word. This is the word exousia, and you probably heard ousia in there, which is usually translated as being or essence, and you probably heard ex in there, like “out of,” and you’re thinking, “Wow, I can do something here…” But it’s like “butterfly”: don’t go crazy.

Fr. Andrew: It doesn’t mean “butter fly.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, you can kind of do something with this, but it’s not worth the time and effort. Here’s what the word means: it’s power in the sense of freedom to act.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I was going to say, this word also gets translated sometimes as “authority,” but, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: It is the word in “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: It means freedom to act, and another invariable future episode will talk about what the will is, because the ancient understanding of words like “nature” and “will” and “free will” and these kind of things is very different [from] our modern understanding. So when I say “freedom to act” or “free will” for exousia in this case, people are probably thinking, “Well, wait a minute. Nobody else can choose?” [Laughter] But that’s not what it’s talking about. The idea is that in a “monotheistic understanding,” or a henotheistic understanding or however you want to look at it, you would have a Most High God who is sort of utterly free to act. And then all subsidiary created beings, by virtue of being created, would be in some sense limited or restricted by their created status and therefore not completely free. So we have agency as humans—we’re able to do things—but agency is restricted by structures, by created reality. So I can’t fly. I can will myself to fly. I can fly downward at terminal velocity, but that’s about it. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Don’t they say flying is throwing yourself at the earth and missing?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] I would hit. I would hit if I would try that. So there’s all kinds of things that restrict that freedom to act, based on being created. And so the angels, while we call them heavenly powers, the powers of heaven, and they may be freer than we are in certain senses, are not utterly free: they’re created beings, and so they are likewise restricted. So the idea of a second power in heaven is that there’s a second Person who, like God, like the Most High God, is able to act freely. That does not necessarily imply—this is another thing that we’ll eventually talk about in that free will episode—that they could be at odds with each other.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, two wills doesn’t mean—or two freedoms or whatever…

Fr. Stephen: It’s not two wills. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Excuse me, sorry.

Fr. Stephen: Two beings who are free.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry. Two free agents.

Fr. Stephen: [Sigh]

Fr. Andrew: I’m sorry!

Fr. Stephen: More heresy from Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: No! But it is true—

Fr. Stephen: Bro, do you even Sixth Ecumenical Council? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No, but I was going to say: two wills does not necessarily imply opposition when you’re talking Christology. Just saying. That’s what I was trying.

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. Okay, there we go.

Fr. Andrew: A little off-topic, but nonetheless true. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. The fact that we say the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, for that matter, are free, that doesn’t mean that they ever are at odds. That is not required for freedom, but, again, we’ll get into that in a later episode.

Fr. Andrew: In the future.

Fr. Stephen: But that’s the idea, is that there is this second figure who is free in the way God is free. And so then within that, you get the question of: Who is this Son of Man?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what exactly does that mean?

Fr. Stephen: Who is this second figure whom we see in this various—in Daniel 7 and then in these various other places throughout the Old Testament? Who is it?

And I’ve kind of grouped—and this is just me, trying to group things—I’ve grouped these, and there’s a lot of different ones and variations, but these into three main categories. And so the first category is you find Second Temple Jewish literature that takes the position that the Son of Man is a divinized human. So this is a human person who has been divinized in some sense.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so like an example would be adoption.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so one way that can work is adoption: he is sort of the adopted son of God and then is glorified. Other folks hold that this is a human who lived at some point who was glorified upon their death and is now going to return. So the Son of Man is going to return from heaven after having been glorified, and there’s a whole bunch of candidates for that in Second Temple Jewish literature, so you get Adam, you get Enoch, you get David, you get Elijah, you get Moses, you get Abraham, sort of all the people you might think might be the one who comes back. Elijah we even see in the New Testament; people ask if Christ is Elijah and if St. John the Forerunner is Elijah.

Fr. Andrew: I think it might be worth it just at this point to say that, as you said, this stuff is around in Second Temple Jewish literature, and it kind of gives us a clue what the proper way is for Christians to understand this literature is, is that just because it’s around in this literature doesn’t mean we believe it.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: This is the stuff that’s in the air. It’s being written down; it exists within these traditions.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The key is that everyone thinks there’s this second figure.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, right, and that’s the thing to talk about.

Fr. Stephen: Everybody is at least a binatarian, but they’re very confused about who the second figure is, because he hasn’t revealed himself yet. He’s still a mystery that’s been hidden from the ages and is unknown even to the angels. Anyway.

Fr. Andrew: I heard that somewhere…

Fr. Stephen: To coin a phrase. [Laughter] So there’s that idea that this is someone who started out as a human and then was divinized.

So then there’s a second category where they think that this is some sort of created being or some second Yahweh, second being that came into existence. So this would include the idea of the archangel Metatron, or views saying that it’s St. Michael the Archangel. And this would also include things like we talked about Philo of Alexandria, who thought that the Logos was sort of this being created out of God’s own essence, which was a kind of idea that would later be found in semi-Arianism in the fourth century. So that’s sort of a second category, that this is a second, subsidiary, separate being.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, a lesser divine being that gets created by Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but a divine being nonetheless. Doesn’t start as a human. And then that being is sort of humanized in some way. Rather than a human who gets divinized, this is some kind of divine being who gets humanized.

And then the third category is that this is an eternal second hypostasis of Yahweh, that Yahweh has always existed in at least hypostases.

Fr. Andrew: And, for those playing at home, this is what we believe, that category.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is the one that turns out to be right; this is the one that turns out to be true. And then that figure—so Yahweh himself, this particular hypostasis of Yahweh, is humanized at some point in the future, generally as the Messiah, and this is what turns out to be right. But this is present in Second Temple literature people reading this and getting this out of it before it happens.

Fr. Andrew: And even before the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and before before the New Testament; before Jesus is born. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Before the before times! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, so this is before that revelation happens. There are folks who get it right, or at least in the broad strokes.

So there’s this one thread. There’s a whole bunch of threads that you find coming through Second Temple Judaism, and one of those threads becomes Orthodox Christianity. And what then sets— If we’re going to talk about Christianity—or Christianities, you know, if we want to be 19th-century Germans about it—

Fr. Andrew: I’ve never wanted to be that, weirdly, I don’t know. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You’re just a big Beethoven fan and like to cause plays in 19th-century Germany. —then what separates those… If you’re going to say, “Okay, so there’s all these threads of Second Temple Judaism in different parts of the world, different ideas, and these different groups, which ones are the sort of Christian ones?” if you want to talk that way. But we’re going to end up saying one of those is Orthodox Christianity, and the other ones are Christian heresies.

Then what separates out the Christian ones is that the Christian ones are the ones who identify Jesus of Nazareth, who identify Jesus Christ as that figure. So within that you have the Orthodox Christianity that we just talked about, but you also have groups who stick with the adoption idea and just apply it to Jesus.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so what you… I mean, this is the origin of a lot of early Christological heresies, and if you’re looking for those dots to be connected, Fr. Stephen was thinking about writing a book about this, but then he discovered he didn’t have to! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because someone else already did.

Fr. Andrew: Someone else already did! So the scholar Andrei Orlov, who is one of the foremost Orthodox scholars in the world especially focusing on Slavonic studies…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Slavonic pseudepigrapha: he is the man.

Fr. Andrew: He is the man, yeah. So he has a book called The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology. So it’s all there. Andrei Orlov, O-r-l-o-v. And this book came out a couple of years ago, but I think it just recently came out in paperback. Pretty affordable, so go check it out.

Fr. Stephen: And remember, we’re using the term “orthodoxy” and “heresy” here. Remember what “heresy” originally meant. Or maybe I need to tell some folks what “heresy” originally meant.

Fr. Andrew: What did it originally mean, Fr. Stephen? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, you sometimes get these folks who, again, want to do this etymology thing on it and say, “Well, it’s related to the verb ‘to choose,’ so these are people who choose what they believe.” Not really. It doesn’t fit nicely with folks’ anti-Protestant propaganda, but in reality the word “heresy” was not even a pejorative originally; it wasn’t a slur. It just meant a faction or a sect or a school or a group within a larger group.

Fr. Andrew: Originally, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So, for example, when you read Josephus, Josephus talks about Jewish heresies, and he talks about the Sadducees and the Therapeutae and the Essenes, and he talks about the Pharisees. He says—talks about the heresy of the Pharisees, and he was a Pharisee.

Fr. Andrew: It really rhymes nicely, too.

Fr. Stephen: I know. But he was one. So he was not calling himself a heretic in the modern sense! He was just talking about: This is a sect. So you have one of these, and then you have these other sects. So you get some of these people who still have some of that 19th-century German in them who say, “You can’t talk about Orthodoxy in the first century. There’s just all these different groups.” Well, it’s like: Yeah, you can, because there’s a group that become known as the Orthodox Church, and they were already there, believing those things, and so that’s whom we’re talking about. And then there are other groups who believe other things, and they’re heterodox, or we can call them heresies.

So, right, and you can see how, with those categories, you get adoption Christologies. You can see how you get Arianism and semi-Arianism, from the people who believe that this is a created being who’s humanized and just identify that with Jesus of Nazareth. So that’s where it comes from.

We’re now going to look at one particular Second Temple Jewish source and how it conceives of this second power, because this particular source is going to be hugely influential, not only within Second Temple Judaism, not only within the pages of the New Testament, but among the early Church Fathers.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so, boys and girls, this is the moment where we start talking about 1 Enoch. Well, I shouldn’t say “start.” This is the moment where we really focus in on what it is and how it fits into all this, because we’ve talked about it a bunch of times. But now we’re going to talk about Enoch as a book.

Fr. Stephen: And we’re going to have a little excursus here before we get into the text on “Son of Man” in 1 Enoch, because—

Fr. Andrew: We have to have some sense of what to do with this stuff.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we get a lot of questions about this, which when Religion of the Apostles came out, one of the first questions we got—I don’t remember if it was on Facebook or in an email—was asking if I was saying that 1 Enoch was canonical.

Fr. Andrew: Right, well, if you belong to the Ethiopian Church, it is.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, otherwise no. [Laughter] But yeah, so I think it’s worth—we get a lot of questions about it; we do quote it in our intro… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Thanks, Voice of Steve!

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to give here sort of some context for that, sort of: How is it important? Why is it important? What kind of authority does it have? What kind of authority does it not have, in being non-canonical? And we’re going to try and do that as quickly as possible, which, pff, you know—this is us.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, believe it or not, everybody, this show was originally only supposed to be 45 minutes to an hour long!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t think we’ve ever succeeded in doing that.

Fr. Stephen: No, not even close!

Fr. Andrew: Not even, yeah. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So strap yourselves in, folks. Hope you brought snacks!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Okay, so the first place to start—I mean, this is one of the first places I always start when I’m looking at some weird ancient text is I always look: When was it written? How did it arise? Well, 1 Enoch actually has lots of parts that seem to have arisen at various times, but the general range seems to be that the oldest stuff is from somewhere around 300-200 BC, and the newest stuff is from somewhere around 100 BC. So that’s the range.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because… We call it “the book of Enoch” or “1 Enoch,” but there are several sub-books that have been sort of tacked together into this one big book, and even within that, there are sub-books into which pre-existing books have been incorporated. So, yeah, it’s sort of Russian nesting dolls of an ancient text! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah! So 1 Enoch is the matryoshka or the ma— I don’t know how to pronounce that—of the BC world.

Fr. Stephen: Alienating even more of our audience.

Fr. Andrew: I know. I can’t pronounce all the things.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so this composite text comes to be in use and being read all over the Judaisms, the different forms of Judaism, within the first century. So we have to, again—we’ve talked about this before, but remember: there’s not just “Judaism.” We tend to have in our heads, as modern Western people, the idea that Judaism in Christ’s time, in the first century AD, was basically Palestinian Judaism, and Palestinian Judaism was Pharisaism, and Pharisaism is modern Rabbinic Judaism, and they’re just all the same.

Fr. Andrew: And none of that is true. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, literally none of those things are true. That is fractally wrong, every part of it.

Fr. Andrew: People just marked a bingo square for that one, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: So all of those things are not true. So even the Pharisees—Pharisaic Judaism, which is part of Palestinian Judaism—from which Rabbinic Judaism came, is not identical to Rabbinic Judaism. And we’re going to talk more about that in a little while, in the third half, I think.

But part of that, and the part that’s relevant to this, when we’re talking about 1 Enoch and how it’s being read and used in these different communities, is that these groups, all of these diverse groups in these diverse places, had diverse views of what texts held what authority. And some of the most well-known ones—probably the two most well-known ones—would be the Pharisees and the Sadducees who show up in the New Testament. You may know in your New Testament course, they tell you right off the back: the Pharisees accepted basically, in broad strokes, what basically became the Rabbinic Jewish canon; they weren’t totally sure about Esther and they had Ben Sirach, and there are some other differences, but roughly. The Sadducees sort of only accepted the Torah and didn’t accept anything else as being truly authoritative.

Probably the next one in terms of that people have heard of would be Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. In Qumran, you can go and look up a list of “we found all these scrolls,” and there’s a huge chunk of the scrolls that are books of the Old Testament and other Second Temple Jewish literature. And we get an idea: we count up how many copies we found, because all of these texts from Qumran… Qumran was going to get wiped out. They took and they hid these texts in these caves in sealed jars; that’s how they were preserved. So these are the texts that were precious to them that they wanted preserved, and we get an idea of how important a text was by how many copies we have. So there are a couple of Old Testament texts that we have zero copies of there, so we can conclude from that: Well, they must not have been that important to that particular Jewish community. And there’s other texts where we have tons and tons of copies that they saved.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so we don’t have an actual sort of Qumran canon; we just have their library, what they’ve been keeping around.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and if they have 28 copies of something and only one or two copies of some other things, then we can probably conclude that that thing they had 28 copies of was more important to them than the one that they only had one or two. So, number one, in terms of number of copies, is the book of Genesis. You might kind of expect that. Number two is the book of Enoch. Number three is the book of Jubilees; number four is Exodus.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Just for the record. So Enoch is not only there: it’s very important. And what some folks listening may know, because our listeners are nerds like us, a lot of them, is that the whole reason the Qumran community separated and went out into the desert was they were devoted to using the Enochic calendar which is found in the book of Enoch, because the Pharisees were a bunch of liberals.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. Stephen: So they had altered the calendar.

Fr. Andrew: So these are first-century Jewish Old Calendarists, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, absolutely. Qumran: Old Calendarists, made the Dead Sea Scrolls. So obviously, the book of Enoch is hugely important to them. Obviously, Ethiopian Judaism… The reason the Ethiopian Church has 1 Enoch in their Old Testament is that they took over the canon of the Ethiopian Jews who preceded them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which was big.

Fr. Stephen: Which included Jubilees and 1 Enoch. So 1 Enoch is all over the place. And even the Pharisees, even beyond just what they think is sort of canon or not—and really, using the term “canon” at this point within Judaism is anachronistic—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’ve just got: These are the texts that are being used.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that are being read, that people see as authoritative. It’s much more subtle than that. But even somebody like—let’s look at St. Paul, who is a Pharisee among Pharisees, according to his own account, he references texts that are outside of the Pharisaic canon all the time in his epistles. He talks about the rock following Israel in the wilderness; he talks about Jannis and Jambres, whose names aren’t in Exodus, but they are in Second Temple Jewish texts; and he doesn’t distinguish. He doesn’t do the thing that a lot of modern preachers do, where they’re like: “Well, this is in the Bible… Well, this is just a tradition, but…” He never does that.

Fr. Andrew: He just mentions it.

Fr. Stephen: He just talks about it like it’s all of a piece. And so it’s not that he was a bad Pharisee, it’s just not how canon functioned then. So, within that, even though, again… Whether something is canonical is an objective thing. There’s literally not a question as to whether something is canonical and stuff for a group. It either has authority with that group or it doesn’t. I mean, I guess you could make an argument that this other text should exercise authority, but that’s a stretch, to say that that’s really a canonical disagreement. It either does or it doesn’t.

So even though the communities, as far as we can tell, that all of the New Testament authors came from, which were pretty much all Judea, Galilee, maybe Antioch, none of those communities were per se seeing Enoch on the same level as, say, the Torah of Qumran. The New Testament is loaded with allusions and references to 1 Enoch. So there’s a whole bunch of these little things that you can find books cataloguing them. One of the examples right off the bat: St. Matthew’s gospel and the book of Revelation are full of references to the book of Enoch. So are 1 and 2 Peter. But in St. Matthew’s gospel and the book of Revelation, where this eschatological—this lake of fire at the end that the devil and his angels are thrown into, you can go all through everybody except Ethiopia’s Old Testament and you’re not going to find any references to a lake of fire and the devil being thrown into it. You do find it in 1 Enoch. So at the very least, 1 Enoch records traditions, records Jewish traditions that were viewed as authoritative by New Testament writers. And the pinnacle of that is St. Jude, in his little epistle, quoting the book of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so in Jude—well, we say chapter one, but there’s only one chapter—so Jude, verses 14-15:

It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”

And that’s a quote from Enoch. He’s just quoting from there. He’s saying this is what Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so that seems pretty clear. Now, again, that doesn’t add 1 Enoch to the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: But it’s quoted in something— St. Paul quotes Menander. He’s not saying Menander’s Greek comedies are part of the Old Testament, but it’s viewed as being authoritative by St. Jude and by his original hearers, such that this quote would mean something to them, so it has some kind of relative authority.

And we’ve mentioned before on the show that in the East, very clearly, and I think even in the early West, but in the East very clearly, there are three categories, not two, of canonicity. Canon is not like an on/off switch; it’s not binary; it’s not zero or one, canonical or garbage. But that there are books that are read in the church, which are what we would call canonical, properly. And then you have books that are to be read at home: they’re not read in the church, but they’re this other category where they’re helpful and useful. And then there’s this third category of books not to be read. That’s the heretical stuff.

Fr. Andrew: That’s the garbage. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so we find a question when we start reading the Fathers as to whether 1 Enoch is in the first category or the second category, because there are churches, like in Ethiopia, where it was being read.

Fr. Andrew: Right, in church.

Fr. Stephen: And there are a lot of churches, in fact more churches, where it’s not being read, where people are reading it in the home and people are citing it and quoting it and using it as St. Jude did with this kind of relative authority, which would be category two: books read at home. So, for example—we’ll try to run through these relatively quickly—the epistle of Barnabas, which is usually found in collections of the Apostolic Fathers, quotes 1 Enoch as Scripture. It uses: “As it is written…”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the Scripture language.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s literally—the “written” part is the Scripture.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s cited by St. Justin Martyr or St. Justin the Philosopher, Athenagoras, St. Irenaeus cited, referenced it. Clement of Alexandria quotes it in parallel with Daniel; so he says, “Enoch and Daniel tell us this.” So he’s paralleling it with the book of Daniel. Tertullian, in his pre-Montanism days, and Origen in his, well, he was already heretical days… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, not-sorry, Origenists!

Fr. Stephen: Both treat it as canonical. In fact, Origen at one point says that the Church accepts only the first book of Enoch. So he says 1 Enoch is canonical and the other ones aren’t was his opinion. And given, he’s not a saint, so this is just a relative opinion. And in the third century, Anatolius used it to say here’s what ancient Judaism believed; like, Judaism before Christ came believed— and then he just says we can tell this is what the believed, because this is what’s in the book of Enoch. So he’s sort of using it as an intellectual history source, as we’d call it in modern times.

When you get later, so even somebody like St. Augustine— and St. Augustine, if you know anything about St. Augustine and 1 Enoch, what you probably know is that St. Augustine is probably the first really major figure to really make a point of rejecting the idea that the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 are angelic beings. He’s the first major Father—and, yes, an Ecumenical Council called him a Church Father; deal with it—he’s the first one to really reject that and really argue against it directly, not just propose another explanation, but attack that idea. So you might say, “Oh, well, he must’ve just hated the book of Enoch. He must have just thought the book of Enoch was heretical trash.” Except, no, when you actually look up St. Augustine in The City of God talking about the book of Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s this little—I mean, there’s this whole long passage we could quote here, but I’m trying to quote the key bits— He says:

We cannot deny that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, left some divine writings, for this is asserted by the Apostle Jude in his canonical epistle, but it is not without reason that these writings have no place in that canon of Scripture which was preserved in the Temple of the Hebrew people by the diligence of successive priests.

Then he goes on to basically say it’s kind of under suspicion, because if Enoch from being before the flood, how could these writings have possibly survived? Because it’s like, yes, something must have survived, but we can’t really be sure exactly what it was. That’s sort of where he lands on this.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so St. Augustine says within the book of Enoch, there’s stuff that’s legitimately from the historical Enoch, which is kind of the opposite of how his view is generally characterized, but that it’s so old—and when you look at it, since it’s a composite book, it’s clearly been edited—so he’s saying we can’t know what in here is from Enoch and what in here comes from later. And so, you know… And Fr. Andrew actually asked this when we were talking about it earlier. Yes, you do find people, like Tertullian wrote about how Noah took a copy of the book of Enoch on the ark, and that’s how it survived the flood. That’s how far some of these folks go in explaining.

Fr. Andrew: There’s all kinds of fun legends and stuff about how various things from before the flood show up after the flood. And one of the explanations, for instance, of how there’s giants after the flood is that Og, king of Bashan, was an antediluvian giant who stowed away on the ark, which I just kind of love that story. I don’t believe it, but I kind of love that story.

Fr. Stephen: Like Tubalcain in the movie with Russell Crowe. Spoilers. [Laughter]

So even St. Augustine, who clearly wants to reject the teachings of major sections of the book of Enoch, still has to give some kind of deference to some things about the book of Enoch. He just sets up a situation where he can keep what he likes and get rid of what he doesn’t. So then, going past St. Augustine— So St. Augustine is the beginning of the fifth century he’s writing.

Cassiodorus, in the sixth century, treats 1 Enoch as the authoritative interpretation of 1 and 2 Peter and Jude. When he’s doing his commentary on the general epistles, he’s like, “Well, look. We read this stuff in 1 Enoch. That’s how you understand what’s going on in these New Testament epistles.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there’s some fun weird stuff in those epistles.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so then if we want to come to the two figures we’re going to talk about now—if you want to come to: Where does the Orthodox Church end up on the book of Enoch? We’re going to go a few more centuries into the future here. Where does the Orthodox Church sort of end up on it? This is what we’ve got. So George Synkellos, who served St. Tarasios, patriarch of Constantinople—so this is at the end of the eighth and the beginning of the ninth century—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and “Syngellos” is not his last name; that’s his job. He’s basically like a private, live-in secretary and servant. That’s what a syngellos is for a bishop.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so he begins work on this text that is going to eventually be published by the next figure we’re going to talk about, St. Nikephoros. But so he starts work on this text, the Chronographikon Syntomon, which is sort of—shout-out to Richard Rohlin and Jonathan Pageau—a universal history. It’s the history of the world from Adam until his day sort of idea. And “history,” again, not in the modern, positivist 19th-century German sense of, like, “here’s what really happened,” but the story, the story of the world, the overarching story. And when he’s talking about the early history, starting at Adam, he uses 1 Enoch as his historical source for what happened.

And so then St. Nikephoros of Constantinople, who becomes the patriarch of Constantinople after St. Tarasios was deceased at the beginning of the ninth century, publishes the Chronography, and he adds to the end of it, he appends, what he calls “canon lists.” And this is not—I mean, this is the ninth century; people had a pretty good idea of what was in their church’s Bible and what wasn’t, what was being read and what wasn’t. But the important thing here is that St. Nikephoros has these three categories.

Fr. Andrew: The “read in church,” “read at home,” and “not read” categories, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Well, in this case it’s a little different because he’s got… He lists books that everybody agrees on, meaning not talking about debates: books everybody agrees on meaning “these are the books that all the churches I know of use.” Then you have books where there’s disagreements, meaning “some churches use these and some don’t.” And then you’ve got what he calls apocrypha, which would be those books in that second category, the books to be read at home, that nobody’s reading in their church that he knows of in terms of his circle as patriarch of Constantinople, but that are worthy of being read. So there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there if you go and look it up. Like, for example, he has the book of Revelation, still in the ninth century, as a book that some churches use and some don’t, for example. And he’s also got, in there with the book of Revelation, like the Acts of Paul. So there’s some interesting stuff there.

But in that apocrypha category, that books to be read in the home—and here’s what makes clear what he means by that category—when you go to what he calls the apocrypha of the New Testament, he includes, for example, what we would call the Apostolic Fathers—the writings of St. Clement, the epistles of St. Ignatius…

Fr. Andrew: Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas...

Fr. Stephen: Right, that kind of stuff that we put in the Apostolic Fathers, he calls New Testament Apocrypha. So it’s pretty clear, when he talks about that in the New Testament, he’s talking about these books. When he lists the Old Testament apocrypha, not coincidentally it’s a bunch of Second Temple Jewish literature, and it’s pretty much the exact texts that we find preserved in Orthodox monastic communities. So he’s got the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and our manuscripts from that come from Mt. Athos. He’s got Joseph and Aseneth—our manuscripts of that come from Mar Saba. So these are from Orthodox monastic settlements. So this is not coincidence; this is reflecting the understanding of the Church of which of these Second Temple texts were worth reading and worth preserving. And we see that they were— It’s not just in the eighth or ninth century, because they were preserved to the present day in those monasteries, those Orthodox monasteries. And in there, in that category, is 1 Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I was going to say, this is the ninth century, which means that Orthodox Christians have been copying these texts for a thousand years, just about, almost, by this point. 900 years or so. So not only are they sort of being read—it’s not like they were published in the first or second century BC and then someone just happened to keep copies of these books around, because books from that period don’t last that long. That means they’re being copied over and over again. Over and over again.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and these texts—these are pre-Christian Jewish texts—Rabbinic Judaism did not preserve them.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which we’ll go over in a second.

Fr. Stephen: It was Christian. It was Christians who preserved them, and specifically Orthodox Christians who preserved this subset of them—not all of them, but this subset that they thought were helpful and important to read.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the conclusion then to everything we’ve just said, to be very Pauline about it: Therefore the application then is we use all of this, what we just talked about, as a reflection of where Second Temple Judaism was when Christ came, and also then, as to reflect its ongoing use of the text within Christianity. So that’s what we’re saying. We’re not saying this needs to be added to anybody’s Bible if it’s not already in your Bible. We’re not saying that every single word of it must be believed in a literal way. That’s not…

Fr. Stephen: Or in any way. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s not it at all.

Fr. Stephen: We’re just saying 1 Enoch is a text that the Orthodox Church has historically thought, outside of Ethiopia, was helpful to read, that there were things in it worth reading, and that help us understand parts of the New Testament in particular and that show us what the beliefs of—1 Enoch in particular shows us what people were thinking by at least 100 BC. So when we get to the first century, this is what they’re thinking when they’re thinking about who the Son of Man is. So now we have a couple longish quotes that we’ll close this half on from 1 Enoch on this topic.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, believe it or not, this was about the whole “Son of Man” thing. [Laughter] Yes. All right, so this is from 1 Enoch 46:1-4.

And there I saw the One to whom belongs the time before time, and his head was white like wool. With him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man, and his face was full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels. I asked the angel who went with me concerning that Son of Man and who he was and whence he was and why he went with the One to whom belongs the time before time.

He answered and said to me, “This is the Son of Man who has righteousness, with whom dwells righteousness, and who reveals all the treasures of that which is hidden, because the Lord of the spirits has chosen him, and whose lot has the preeminence before the Lord of spirits in uprightness forever. This Son of Man whom you have seen shall raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats and the strong from their thrones, and shall loosen the reins of the strong and break the teeth of the sinners.”

And I just have to point out to everybody, as you did to me when we were doing prep for this, raising up the kings and the might from their seats and the strong from their thrones—yes, that is indeed referenced in the Magnificat in Luke when the Virgin Mary is singing, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” Go look it up! And you’ll read it; you’ll hear it right there. She is basically quoting—because this is from a long time before that—she’s basically quoting from Enoch there.

And who are these mighty and these strong that are being tossed off of their thrones? It’s the demonic dominions who had been governing the world.

Fr. Stephen: And that are judged in Daniel 7.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, judged in Daniel 7. So she’s referencing the Enochian interpretation of Daniel 7 in the Magnificat, which is just so cool. I just—I’m sorry, I have to be a little wild about that for a moment.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and so now the other quote that we have, at least part of it will sound very familiar maybe, although it’s a slightly different translation.

Fr. Andrew: A little different translation, yeah. Okay, so this is from 1 Enoch 48. This is verses two through ten.

And at that hour, that Son of Man was named in the presence of the Lord of the spirits, and his name before the One to whom belongs the time before time—yes, before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of the heaven was made—his name was named before the Lord of the spirits. He shall be a staff to the righteous whereon to stay themselves and not fall, and he shall be the light of the Gentiles and the hope of those who are troubled of heart. All who dwell on earth shall fall down and worship before him and will praise and bless and celebrate with song the Lord of the spirits.

For this reason has he been chosen and hidden before him, before the creation of the world and forever more. The wisdom of the Lord of the spirits has revealed him to the holy and righteous, for he has preserved the lot of the righteous, because they have hated and despised this world of unrighteousness and have hated all its works and ways and the name of the Lord of the spirits. For in his name they are saved, and according to his good pleasure has it been in regard to their life.

In these days, downcast in countenance shall the kings of the earth have become, and the strong who possess the land, because of the works of their hands, for on the day of their anguish and affliction, they shall not be able to save themselves. And I will give them over into the hands of my elect. As straw in the fire, so shall they burn before the face of the holy; as led in the water, so shall they sink before the face of the righteous, and no trace of them shall any more be found. And on the day of their affliction there shall be rest on the earth. And before them they shall fall and not rise again. There shall be no one to take them with his hands and raise them, for they have denied the Lord of the spirits and his Messiah. The name of the Lord of the spirits be blessed.

Fr. Stephen: So here the Son of Man has existed before the creation of the world, before the creation of the angels, before the creation of everything. He has existed, he will exist forevermore, and he is going to come as the Messiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. And all these things about him enacting judgment, and all those who would deny the Lord being… They shall fall and not rise again: there’s no hope of redemption for these demonic powers.

Fr. Stephen: As one early Christian writer said, “The Jews cannot accept this writing, because it is too Christian.”

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Yeah. Yeah, that’s… I can’t say I delivered it as well as the Voice of Steve does.

Fr. Stephen: You gave more of the context.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed! All right, well, that’s the end of the second half of our episode for tonight. This has been a long one. We’re going to take one more break, and we’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: All right! Welcome back, everyone. It’s the third half of the show. This has been a big one, but it’s a really big topic. We’re talking about the Son of Man.

Fr. Stephen: We should say, since we played that commercial, that despite what you might intuit from the recording quality in the commercial, the book is printed with modern printing methods.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, that is true! Yes. I think I did… Did we mention this before? I did that interview—this has been a few years now—over the phone. So that’s why it sounds like that.

Fr. Stephen: And by “phone” you mean a tin can with a string attached to it.

Fr. Andrew: That is correct. Yes, exactly. That reached all the way to Indiana.

Yes, okay, so we spent the first half talking about “Son of Man” in the Old Testament particularly, and then in the second half we talked about how it was received in Second Temple Judaism, and then especially we looked at some passages from Enoch. And now we’re going to get to how it appears in the New Testament and even look at how it gets looked at in the Talmud. We don’t do that very often; we’re not usually super interested in what the Rabbis are…

Fr. Stephen: We usually disregard Rabbinic Judaism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, for good reason. Yeah, okay, so “Son of Man,” as we said at the beginning, it’s the most common self-identifier that Jesus uses. It appears in all four of the gospels—and just to give you the quick counts: 29 times in Matthew, 14 times in Mark, 26 times in Luke, and 13 times in John.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and, interestingly, in the synoptics, that maps out to about how many chapters are in each book.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: Not exact, but close.

Fr. Andrew: Almost.

Fr. Stephen: But that just means it’s sort of an even dispersal.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because the apostles didn’t put chapter numbers in there.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so Christ calls himself this. Folks might be tempted to say, “Well, we can just take all this ‘Son of Man’ stuff we’ve been talking about—from the Old Testament, from Second Temple Judaism—we can just import all of that every time Christ uses those terms.” And, I mean, no one can stop you, but if you try and do it publicly with someone who disagrees with you, they’re going to disagree with you, because, like everything else in the Bible—because journal articles have to be written and dissertations have to be written—everybody argues about them. When is Christ using it in the sense of referring to this figure from Daniel 7 and Second Temple Jewish literature, and when is he using it in some other way? And people go back and forth. We talked about friend of the show Bart Ehrman and his kind of wonky view of that.

But so there’s a lot of references that are debated; you could say are ambiguous. But there are some that are just sort of very, very obviously referring to the Daniel 7 figure. And some examples—I’m just going to list these off; we’re not going to read them, but you can later in the recording check them out—Matthew 13:41, 24:30, 25:31; Luke 21:27. These are referring, for example, to the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven to judge the earth. So, I mean, they’re really obvious. Or coming with angels, with sickles, this kind of thing. So there’s no doubt there that when Christ is talking about the Son of Man there…

Now the potential argument ambiguity there is you can have someone—like friend of the show Bart Ehrman—who will look at that and say, “Well, yeah, but, see, look: he’s talking about him in the third person. He’s not identifying himself as that Daniel 7 figure.” [Laughter] And so, to get all of that in one spot unambiguously, we now turn to Mark 14:61-64, which is when Christ is on trial before the high priest.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Okay. So this is how it reads.

But he remained silent and gave no answer to anything. Again, the high priest was questioning him: “Are you the Christ, the son of the blessed?” And Jesus said, “I am he, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.” And the high priest, tearing his garment, said, “What need do we still have of witnesses? You have heard this blasphemy! What does it look like to you?” And they all judged him to be deserving of death.

The significance of what’s happening here is they’re debating as to whether or not he’s a blasphemer, and then Jesus says this. He says, “I am the Christ,” which doesn’t necessarily—it isn’t necessarily a blasphemous thing to say. And then he says, “You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.” And the high priest immediately tears his garments and says, “We don’t need any more witnesses or evidence. You’ve heard him blaspheme yourself!” In other words, he is claiming to be this divine figure. He’s claiming to be God; he’s claiming to be the Son of Man. And it says they all judged him to be deserving of death. Everyone there agrees that he has just claimed to be the divine figure, the Son of Man.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because claiming to be the Messiah was not blasphemy. It would get you killed by the Romans, but it was not considered blasphemy necessarily to claim to be the Messiah by the Jewish people, by the Pharisees. And the high priest, remember, is a Sadducee, so he’s even more loosey-goosey on stuff. So from his perspective, this is clear blasphemy: You’re claiming to be this second power in heaven. You’re claiming to be this divine figure.

And this same element is in Christ’s trial before the high priest in St. Matthew’s gospel, in Matthew 26:62-66—we won’t read it here. But St. Matthew’s description of it, he adds more details; it’s elaborated a little bit in terms of what everybody says. And the interesting part from this perspective, in terms of what we’re talking about tonight, is that he adds, where St. Mark has a simple future—”You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven”—St. Matthew adds the phrase aparti, which roughly means “from now on”: “From this moment on, you will see the Son of Man…”

And what’s interesting about that is, in terms of our previous discussion of the Ascension, that this is— St. Matthew wants to make it clear, because, remember, this is chapter 26—the Great Commission is in chapter 28; the Ascension’s in chapter 28—so he wants to tie this in very clearly, this Daniel 7 imagery, to Christ’s Ascension and enthronement that he’s going to describe at the end of his gospel. So Christ is about to go to the final battle, win his final victory, thence to ascend on the clouds of heaven and be enthroned with all authority in heaven and on earth given to him. So St. Matthew makes it, if anything, even less ambiguous, what Christ is claiming. [Laughter]

So that sort of… I mean, people try, but it’s really special pleading. I mean, they always have the default of “Oh, well, Jesus didn’t really say that,” which, you know… Don’t even talk to that person! [Laughter] But there’s really no getting around what the text is saying, and how the text is using this.

So if this is so clear in Second Temple Judaism, if this is sort of universal in Second Temple Judaism and people just have different views of it, but they all have it, where does it go?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, why is it that early Jews from this period, why don’t they all just flock into Christianity or become all heretical Christians? What’s going on?

Fr. Stephen: Why don’t they all just sort out into those groups? And I should say Daniel Boyarin—I was about to say “famously said”… I guess famously said in the circles I run in…

Fr. Andrew: All five of you… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That Rabbinic Judaism really never got away from the idea of God being humanized or divinized, or that humanized God being divinized, of God becoming human, humanity becoming God. They couldn’t ever really get rid of that because it’s too core to what’s going on in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: And we should point out that Daniel Boyarin is—

Fr. Stephen: An Orthodox Jew.

Fr. Andrew: —an Orthodox Jewish scholar, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We’ll mention him again here in a little bit. But so they never really do get away—and you find things all along that hearken back to this. But what we’re about to talk about now is the fact that they made a really good effort to purge it all out. [Laughter] And it was deliberate.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Two powers gets reduced to one power.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And that explicitly happens in the second century. So in the second century, that’s when Christians are expelled from the synagogue, meaning what would become Rabbinic Judaism says, “You Christians are something else. You’re not a sect within Judaism; you’re now something else.” And when the Christians are expelled, the whole view, the whole idea that there are two powers in heaven is labeled a heresy in the modern sense. This is a border line, a dividing line. If you believe in this, you’re going to be expelled from the synagogue and treated as a Christian, regardless of what version of it you hold, because Rabbinic Jews didn’t want Arians around either. [Laughter] They weren’t that picky. Just: anybody who believes any of this is gone.

And so that also meant rejecting not just the literature, the Second Temple Jewish literature that they stopped preserving and rejected and narrowed down their canon to: these are the only texts, and only these versions of these texts, and only in Hebrew. All of that happens in the second century. But they decide that letting that literature proliferate in the first place was a mistake.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there was a problem with the writing of it is sort of the idea. I mean, it’s weird. There’s this moratorium on writing. Like: don’t write any of this stuff down. The idea is like: Well, it must have been because all this stuff was being written down, and that’s what gave rise to all of this multiplicity, and that’s what gave rise to Christianity, and this was a big mistake.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so from this point in the second century until fifth, sixth century when the Talmud starts getting written, the tracts of the Talmud start being written and collected, there’s no writing. Things aren’t written down; everything is taught orally and by memorization in the rabbinical schools.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s piles of Christian texts being written during this period.

Fr. Stephen: Right, Christians keep writing stuff. We’ve got all kinds of Christian apocrypha and stuff, but not—you don’t have any Jewish writings at all, just the copying of that narrow canon—the precise copying. This is when the whole super precise copying comes in, where it’s only this version of this text, precisely preserved: that’s the only thing you’re allowed to write. And so this is a mistake a lot of people make, and this is part of where the idea that Rabbinic Judaism goes back further than it does comes from, is that when this stuff gets written down eventually in the tractates of the Talmud, they’re claiming—and in some cases are probably correct, but they say they’re writing down—“we’re writing down the opinions of rabbis from the first century, the second century, the third century, but this has been handed down orally” to that point, and it’s being recorded selectively.

Fr. Andrew: So for centuries…

Fr. Stephen: It’s not everything those rabbis ever said that gets preserved; it’s certain things. And we won’t go down the Gamaliel rabbit-trail. Someday we will…

Fr. Andrew: That would be fun!

Fr. Stephen: So once we get to these tractates that form the Talmud… The Talmud is made up of what are called tractates, a whole bunch of separate collections of sayings of rabbis on different topics. And the Mishnah is a chunk of it. There’s different parts of it. It’s a very complex thing. It’s not like… The closest approximation would be like if you go and get that sort of Philip Schaff Church Fathers collection. That would be the closest Christian comparison. It’s just a collection of oral teachings of ancient rabbis. And they disagree with each other, it’s on all kinds of different topics, it’s not… I mean, it’s not written as a unit, so it’s all just kind of put together there, and it’s selective and you don’t always know why what choices were made.

But so there are two places that—there are lots of places that are responses to Christianity, because one of the reasons it’s finally written down is that the whole not-writing-things-down thing wasn’t working. They needed… You need to enshrine things in writing as a literary monument, like we’ve talked about before, at some point. And so it’s written down, and a lot of it is written down specifically over against Christianity. The Rabbinic Jewish community, in the Talmud, is defining itself over against the Christian Church.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because by this point—I mean, we’re talking fifth, sixth century?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: By this point, Christianity is now the official religion of the empire.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so it’s over against Christianity, and Christianity has now grown to this immense size and has laid claim to these ancient Jewish texts. And so they’re defining themselves over against Christianity very consciously. And this isn’t just my interpretation; this is… Anybody in Talmudic studies will tell you that this is true. There’s so much stuff that’s just directly… I mean, cheap shots… More cheap shots at Christians than I take at Calvinists are in this. [Laughter] So it’s just very clearly: there’s something going on here.

But there are two places in two different tractates that directly address this whole issue of two powers in heaven, because we have to reckon with this, not just because, hey, we still want to make clear that this is verboten in Rabbinic Judaism in the synagogue, but also because part of what’s preserved in this oral tradition is the fact that some of these ancient rabbis in the first century believed this.

Fr. Andrew: Ope!

Fr. Stephen: And so now we want to use them as authoritative on other topics, but we’ve got to deal with that problem. So that’s part of this, too. So one of the two places—the first one we’re going to talk about, because I’m definitely not getting into the whole issue of when different tractates were written, because that’s a whole rabbit warren! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right. There will not be a future episode on that.

Fr. Stephen: No! No, there will not, because I’m not a Talmudic scholar, so I’m not qualified. [Laughter] But so the first one we’re going to talk about is Tractate Hagigah, and this story about this fellow Acher—“Acher” means “backwards”; this is what they call him—in Rabbinic Judaism, he’s sort of the prototypical heretic the way Arius is sort of the prototypical Christian heretic.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and the name itself, my understanding is that this nickname meaning “backwards” means that he sort of turned into a heretic; that’s the backwards sense: he’s gone away.

Fr. Stephen: Turned away.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, turned away.

Fr. Stephen: The opposite of repentance, turning toward. He turned away; he apostatized. And the fellow’s actual name was Elisha ben Abuyah. And so this describes… And there’s lots of stories about Acher. He gets every heresy in the book ascribed to him at some point in Jewish literature. But in Tractate Hagigah, he has this vision. He’s doing his sort of Merkavah prayers, where he’s hoping to have this heavenly ascent. And at the end of this heavenly ascent, he’s sort of in the heavens, and he sees the Archangel Metatron, and he sees him sitting down in heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is… Someone sitting in heaven is in a position of authority.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You sit to preside. This is reversed—in the ancient Church, when the homilist was going to preach in the church, he sat down and the people were standing up. We do the opposite now. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, those are the standard postures in the ancient world, pretty much for whoever is teaching or presiding sits, and everybody else stands.

Fr. Stephen: But this is why we still have the bishop’s throne. He is the one who sits and presides. That’s why he has a chair, a seat, as sort of the mark of his authority.

So he sees the Archangel Metatron there, and so he concludes: Oh look, this is the second power in heaven, because he’s sitting; he’s presiding.

Fr. Andrew: He’s like: I’ve read Daniel 7! This must be what’s going on.

Fr. Stephen: So Tractate Hagigah wants to make it clear that, as usual, Acher was wrong. [Laughter] So in this story, the Archangel Metatron gets in trouble, because they’re like: What are you doing, sitting in front of the humans? So he gets drug off and whipped.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: I guess they do that in heaven with angels who mess up. But he gets off easy, because Acher gets sent back to earth and is cursed to live the rest of his life with no hope of salvation.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Becomes a wanderer upon the earth. So all that is to attempt to communicate to you that this two power in heaven stuff is really bad, don’t do it.

Fr. Andrew: You could be damned.

Fr. Stephen: This is your brain; this is your brain on “two powers in heaven.” [Laughter] Any questions? Don’t do it, kids.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That’s a deep thought there.

Fr. Stephen: The second place in the Talmud is in Tractate Sanhedrin. And this one deals with Rabbi Akiva, who is the most prominent rabbi of the early second century, is quoted on all manner of issues all through the Talmud, is seen as a sort of a super-rabbinical authority. Not only is he seen as really authoritative, but he ended his life—he supported the Bar Kokhba rebellion that ended in 135 AD, one of those…

Fr. Andrew: So he’s a hero! He’s a hero, he’s a martyr…

Fr. Stephen: One of those fakes. And then the Romans killed him—should I say how? We’re deep in the show.

Fr. Andrew: They removed his skin.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, they removed his skin with an instrument like a metal potato peeler. You can figure out how that went.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Because the Romans were creative. So he’s viewed as this martyr, on top of everything else, which sort of gives super extra authority to his stuff. But it was also remembered in the oral tradition that he had actually believed in the two powers in heaven, as most people did in the late first and early second century within Judaism. So what’s cited here in Tractate Sanhedrin—it’s in I believe—we didn’t write this in the notes, but I believe it’s in 28b—he says, well, the two thrones—and he’s talking about the thrones in Daniel 7 when he says “two thrones”—he says the two thrones, one is for God—one is for Yahweh the God of Israel—and one is for David, meaning one is for the Messiah. And so that would be a typical two powers in heaven view, which is probably what Rabbi Akiva actually believed: there’s two thrones in heaven, one for God, one for the Messiah.

But he gets corrected in Tractate Sanhedrin, that, no, no, one is for justice and one is for mercy, meaning God sort of manifests himself—the one God manifests himself as a young man when he’s going to issue justice, like when he appears as a man of war against the Egyptians in Exodus.

Fr. Andrew: Did you say God is a man of war?

Fr. Stephen: I did. Actually, Moses did. Actually, I think that was Miriam…

Fr. Andrew: Miriam, who’s leading the song, but Moses wrote it, so.

Fr. Stephen: There you go. One for justice, one for mercy. He appears as an old man when he’s going to give mercy.

Fr. Andrew: So this is like: “This is like modalism, Patrick!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Basically, right. So the answer of Tractate Hegigah is: Well, it’s sort of Arianism, but there’s no “archangel becomes human” and “you’re not supposed to worship him; that’s bad.” And with Tractate Sanhedrin with Rabbi Akiva, in the story Akiva accepts this correction. So sort of their answer to the Akiva problem is: “Well, yeah, he believed that for a while, but he got corrected and at the end of his life he had it figured out. He was confused for a minute, but he was okay.” But what’s communicated is: No, these aren’t two powers in heaven; these aren’t two persons. This is just sort of modalism: the one God appears in different ways when he appears.

And not just the Talmud in general, but these quotes… Later in Tractate Sanhedrin, Jesus is accused of burning his food in public. They just make these random accusations in places against Jesus of Nazareth, but this one is… So this is clearly—even this bit about Akiva is clearly in this context of anti-Christianity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and we should say that the claim that Jesus “burned his food in public” is not saying he’s a bad cook. It’s saying that he offered sacrifices somewhere other than in the Temple.

Fr. Stephen: Right, illicitly.

Fr. Andrew: Illicit sacrifice, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And so there’s some debate as to whether that’s referring to the Eucharist in an anti-Christian context, saying that the Eucharist is illicit, or it’s just sort of a general accusation. I mean, they also accuse Christ of, like, sorcery and all kinds of things in the Talmud. So it could just be saying he was offering pagan sacrifices or sacrifices outside the Temple. It’s hard to tell exactly what it means.

But so, sort of in conclusion, if you want to read more about it, we’re going to save ourselves some emails and give you some reading recommendations. So there’s lots of actual literature about the stuff we’ve been talking about tonight, but the stuff I’m about to mention is stuff from Jewish authors—not that I think that Jewish authors are more authoritative than Christian authors, but Jewish authors don’t have a dog in this hunt. If you quote a Christian author to somebody, they can say, “Well, yeah, he’s a Christian. He’s reading that stuff back into the sources.” But if somebody’s Jewish, especially an Orthodox Jew, they have no reason to try to read Christianity back into ancient Judaism! [Laughter] They want to do the opposite; they have the opposite motivation. So it’s sort of… For the lawyers out there, it’s an admission against interest. So that gives it extra weight as evidence.

And so some books from Jewish authors on this, sort of the classic on this is Alan Segal’s Two Powers in Heaven. Daniel Boyarin has written a ton about this; we already mentioned him, but he has a book called Border Lines, which is about the separation between Judaism and Christianity in the second century from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, which is fascinating, because he sort of makes St. Justin Martyr the bad guy. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: From our perspective he’s the good guy, but he’s the bad guy from Daniel Boyarin’s perspective, but he acknowledges these things we’ve been talking about nonetheless. And he also has an article called “Gospel of the Memra” that’s dealing with some of the stuff we talked about last time, actually, with the Word of God and John 1.

And then Benjamin Sommer has a book called [The] Bodies of God—he teaches at Jewish Theological Seminary here in the United States—that talks about this stuff.

Israel Yuval has a bunch of work on this. He’s a professor of ancient Judaism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Definitely Jewish. But he has a YouTube video you can go watch, for all you kids who don’t like to read paper books any more. He has a YouTube video called “Did Rabbinic Judaism Emerge Out of Christianity?” Spoiler: his answer, as a Jewish person, is yes.

So that’s all some stuff from Jewish sources talking about this and confirming that this is what happened in terms of the separation of Judaism and Christianity and what was going on with the Son of Man and the second power in heaven.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. All right, well, to wrap it up tonight, you know the thing that really struck me in this conversation as we were talking about this phrase, “Son of Man,” that of course as we said Jesus applies to himself more than any other kind of language, is that a lot of times when people talk about— And this has been a kind of theme in all these episodes about Christ in the Old Testament, but a lot of times when people talk about Christ in the Old Testament, they talk about it in terms of prophesies that predict him. And we’re in December now, and we’re thinking about Christmas, and so a lot of times people talk about this, how there’s these prophecies about Christ in the Old Testament. And it’s true. I mean, it’s not an incorrect thing to say. There are prophesies about Christ in the Old Testament.

But the thing that especially struck me with this particular language, “Son of Man,” and especially as we looked at it from Daniel 7 is it’s not so much a prediction in this case, a prophecy about Christ, but these are—this is Christ, present. So when the Prophet Daniel sees this vision, he’s not receiving a description of something that’s going to happen in the future; he’s actually—he is there. He’s present to see the ascension and enthronement of the Son of Man. He becomes present there through the vision. God brings him there.

And you saw in those passages that we read from Enoch that God is referred to as the One who has the time before time, which I just thought was a really fascinating and interesting phrase. He is the One who can—who is the Master of time and the One who is outside of time. So bringing Daniel to be present at what would be, for Daniel, in the future, bringing him present to be there is absolutely possible. Again, Daniel’s not receiving a piece of information; he’s actually present, because God has brought him there.

And we see some of that same kind of stuff in Enoch, where Enoch is given this tour of heaven by an angel, and he sees things that, from his point of view—and indeed, in some cases, from our point of view—are in the future. So one of the things that these visions do, I believe, is to, in a beautiful way, kind of collapse our sense of Christ’s presence in the Old Testament and his presence in the New Testament as showing that it’s the one Christ who simply is present, in all of these scenes—all of these visions, all of these experiences that people are having—that people are meeting Christ, that they are seeing him enthroned in this particular case. They are seeing him execute judgment upon the dark powers; they are seeing him give the kingdom to his saints. That is all happening.

And, of course, with Daniel, he’s going to participate—he’s going to participate in that stuff twice, again, from our point of view: once when he’s seeing it in this vision, and then again when he is one of the saints to whom the kingdom is given, by that Christ whom he sees coming on the clouds of heaven and being enthroned next to his Father, the Ancient of Days. So that’s what really strikes me about this, that we see Christ very, very clearly. We’ve been kind of building up in some ways in these episodes—the Angel of the Lord, the Word of the Lord, and now, really, the Son of Man, very, very clearly.

And the other thing that I’m really struck with especially is that this image in particular is really taken into the New Testament and into the Church and so forth. The previous two, of course, absolutely as well—the Angel of the Lord, the Word of the Lord—we looked at John 1 with Word of the Lord—but this one in particular, there’s something about seeing Christ in Daniel’s vision that is really compelling and really powerful. And again, it shows—this also shows very clearly the unity between not just the Old and New Testaments, but the Old and the New Testaments, the traditions as witnessed to in some of these Second Temple Jewish sources, and then in the Church as well. Like when we, for instance, celebrate the Ascension, when we are present at these things through our ritual participation, we are there. We are there when all authority is given to him. We are there when he’s giving the kingdom to his saints. We are there as well.

So we are having the same experience that Daniel has when he sees Christ being enthroned there in Daniel 7. It’s just—it’s just astonishing! I know I say that a lot on this show—I’m just sort of blown away—but I think that’s what meditating on the Scriptures and how Christ reveals himself in the Scriptures, what that truly does. So it’s just… It’s just so beautiful, and not just in kind of in an aesthetic way, but it’s a beauty that really cuts directly into the human soul. So, Father?

Fr. Stephen: So, as you mentioned, we are coming up on the Nativity; we’re coming up on Christmas. It’s almost like we planned this series to lead up to it…

Fr. Andrew: How about that?

Fr. Stephen: One might think… And I think because of that, the view that we get of Christ and the material we talked about today is sort of especially important to us as modern people who have inherited a very sentimentalized, Precious Moments view of Christ in general and Christmas in particular. We’re sort of like Ricky Bobby and we really like the baby Jesus, because he’s meek and mild and cute and wouldn’t hurt a fly and we have our manger scene. We listen to Linus recite Luke 2. And it’s all very sentimental and nice and pleasant.

But what we miss out is what this feast is actually about, which is about the Incarnation. And to have the Incarnation, we have to understand, quite simply, that Jesus is God. We all say that that’s true, but it doesn’t tend to be how we think of him. It doesn’t tend to be the image of him that we have in our heads, which is very human and almost cuddly. It’s not that Christ isn’t human—he is—but he’s not a human. He’s not just a human person like us who happens to be nicer and gentler and kinder and more loving than [we]. He is all of those things, but that’s not all he is. He isn’t Mister Rogers, which is whom I just described.

Christ is the God who created the universe. Christ was there in the time before time with his Father. Through him and for him his Father created everything that exists, including us. And when he comes in the Incarnation, when he’s born in a cave, he’s coming—he’s invading the creation that’s fallen prey to the demonic forces, to start the battles that are going to lead to this great victory and his enthronement, with all authority in heaven and on earth, from whence he will come to judge the living and the dead. That’s who Jesus is. That’s who shows up as a tiny infant in a cave.

And until we reckon with that and learn to stand in awe before that and not try to reduce it to one thing or another—something we can hang our hat on, something we can control in our mind, something we can manipulate, something we can be comfortable with—until we just stand in awe and worship before it, then we haven’t understood the Incarnation and we don’t understand what Christmas is actually about.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, Father, and thank all of you for listening. That is our show for tonight. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during our 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 do read everything—at least I read everything—but we can’t respond to everything, and we do save some of 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.

Fr. Andrew: And if you are on Facebook, like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: I just got horrible news: the world’s only Popeye Chicken Buffet in Lafayette, Louisiana, is being closed.

Fr. Andrew: Oh no!

Fr. Stephen: Write to your lawmakers. This aggression will not stand, man! [Laughter] And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, good night, and God bless you all.nd be with you always.