The Septuagint — European History

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Wo. Today's Stone Choir is episode two of our Septuagint series. Beginning with episode ninety-nine, we did a prequel called Context Window, where we discussed kind of the framework that we're using for covering a very expansive subject. And the point that I made there that I reiterated in the first episode of the SEP2AGent series, and I'll reiterate here briefly. We're covering so much ground, particularly in this episode, there's no possible way for you to keep it all in your head. And in the last episode, we covered a lot of time, but we focused on a relatively short list of events. As I said in that episode, no, none of this is revolutionary,

1:19 none of this is new information, but the way it has been framed in the modern world, looking back through history is false. So everyone will repeat the same facts, but they'll lie about the context. And that's where the confusion has come today about understanding why the Septuagint matters or doesn't matter. Till a couple of years ago I didn't, you know, I knew it was just trivia. It was the Greek Old Testament and okay, whatever, it's that's a jeopardy answer. It wasn't relevant to the church. This episode we're going to be covering basically the European portion of the history of scripture. So in episode one hundred, we went through a couple thousand years, it was focused on the Near East.

2:01 And in the context window episode, I mentioned if you hear something that you disagree with or you think we're nuts or whatever, we begged listeners, if you get mad, write it down, take notes, and then try to set it aside, so that we can make the case. This episode, I'll repeat that, but I don't think there's probably going to be very much the people are going to get mad about till we get to the end of this episode, because you're probably not going to recognize most of the names that come up today. Or you'll know a little bit about them, but they won't seem to have anything to do with the Septuagint. So while I would encourage you if you do get mad to continue taking notes, you probably won't need your notepad much this time.

2:37 I knew a few of these names before we started and you know didn't seem to make much difference. One of the fascinating things about this subject subject. As we look at the European history of the Bible itself, what we find is that although this is part two of our Septuagint series on the historical aspects of it, and just to recap, part three is going to be specifically focused on Old Testament differences and then part four will be focused specifically on New Testament quotations of the Old Testament, which is when we will finally validate what we've been saying all along. The Septuagint is the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles in the early church. We'll prove that in the fourth episode beyond any shadow of a

3:18 doubt. And I kind of waffled about four versus five episodes. The fifth episode of the Septuagint series, we're going to do it. It's kind of going to be bonus content because we're going to talk about how to fix this mess. But that's gonna be entirely opinion. It's got nothing to do with history or the Bible itself. It's just what we think we need to do to solve it. So you can take or leave that episode depending on what you think of our opinions, but this stuff is just facts. In this second historical episode as we're focusing on the European history of scripture, the Septuagint never comes up once. None of the men that we're going to talk about ever talked about the Septuagint. And that's the reason we're talking about them.

3:54 Because if we're telling the truth about the Septuagint being the Old Testament of Jesus and the apostles and the early church, not only, hey, where did it go? But B, why did no one ever notice? And so at every point, we're going to highlight these minor inflection points where a decision was made in the church. Some decisions were bigger than others. Some of these moments that we're going to mention are pretty small. None of them by themselves add up to a complete rejection of the Septuagint, but what they add up to is every time there was an opportunity for someone to ask the question, hey, what about that old Bible? What about those codices that we have that are from the fourth century? The Bible of the Council of Nicaea?

4:38 Why don't we look at that? There were opportunities for that question to be asked and nobody ever asked them. And so we're going to highlight 15 or 20 moments in from like 400 through Reformation. We're basically going to cover Jerome very briefly again, up through the Reformation, specifically focusing on Europeans this time. No one ever talks about the Septuagint. And that's why this is part of our Septuagint series is to say, hey, where'd it go? Because when we're sitting here in the 21st century asking the question, what is this old thing and why is it relevant to us? You have to understand all the moments in church history where someone could have asked that question and then didn't. And so when we lay out the pattern, you're going to see

5:21 that moment after moment, someone who could have asked the question didn't. As I was trying to come up with a way of framing this to sort of make it more obvious what it is we're trying to accomplish, there are a few metaphors that came to mind. The first is if you know you listen to classical music in particular because it has much more dynamic range than modern music, you'll have pianissimo sections which are followed by a crescendo, where it's very soft, and then there's this swell of sound as the music fleshes out loudly, boldly. The function of that pianissimo is to draw attention and build anticipation for the loudness that comes next, you know, not loud in an abrasive sense, but just way more decibels, way more volume, way more

6:05 intensity. And so the quiet part actually you don't focus necessarily on the quiet part when you're listening, other than it makes you anticipate. But the loud part, the crescendo that comes after, is accentuated by the contrast with the quiet part. Another metaphor for kind of what we're dealing with here would be a pregnant pause in a conversation. I can't really do it here because the audio software I use chops out the hesitations. But you know, a pregnant pause in a conversation, someone says something, maybe something weighty or interesting or whatever, and then there's a pause that's too long for the normal flow of conversation. It just sits there. And then the conversation continues.

6:46 And so what happens with a pregnant pause? It accentuates what came before and what came after by silence, by the complete absence of anybody talking. And so you don't notice the pause, you notice what's on either side of it, but what's on either side of it is amplified by that absence, by that pause. And last metaphor that I think is perhaps the most apt for what's going on here is negative space in a visual composition. If you're looking at a painting or a photograph, oftentimes someone who is skilled and has a particular idea in mind, they're not just going to put the subject right in the center. The subject may be off to one side, and maybe most of the canvas or the photograph is empty space or it's kind of

7:29 neutral, it's not detailed, and then you have something perhaps off to one side where your eye is drawn. And the function of negative space is the absence of something on most of the canvas, most of the picture, forces you naturally to focus on wherever there is something. So the composition would be completely different. It would just crop down to the thing itself. And so what we have in each of these cases is the absence of something accentuating and making far more important the thing that actually happened? And so really what we're talking about in this episode is a whole bunch of negative space moments where when you look at church history, you're not going to look at any of these moments as

8:12 being having anything to do with Septuagint. Because I said the Septuagint doesn't come up. And that's the point. The negative space here is the conversations that did not take place when they could have, and we are arguing should have. At every one of these points, Christian men should have said, hey, what happened? Why are we not using that? And what we're going to demonstrate by this series of seemingly small, for the most part, historical moments is that they were solving an immediate problem naturally. It's a what problem are you trying to solve situation for almost all of these. And so they weren't stupid, as we said earlier on, they're not faithless men, they weren't dumb. They had an immediate problem to solve, and it never occurred to

8:56 anyone that the solution to their problem might have been to use the Bible of Jesus and the apostles in the early church. The question simply never came up. And so these examples, these moments will demonstrate why those decisions were made. And in almost every case, what we're going to have is fundamentally two false decisions, because they never thought about the third question they could have asked. They were making a false choice between two options that were both bad in some way, never considering the third option of use the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles in the early church. I keep repeating that phrase because it's true and it's ridiculous that it never came up. But in the moments when they were dealing with the media problems,

9:37 it simply didn't matter. And so to briefly revisit one of the last moments that we covered in the previous episode, we have Jerome. Jerome was tasked initially by Pope Damascus I, initially just to harmonize the four gospels and to get a Latin translation that was good and was consistent with the manuscripts that they had in Greek. Because already, and we're gonna round numbers here, there's so many more names and that we could discuss. We don't want to confuse and overwhelm you. So we're gonna be a little bit sloppy by omitting names and actually generalizing some of the dates so as not to confuse you. So I'm just gonna talk about AD four hundred. Jerome AD four hundred, the very beginning of the fifth century, is

10:18 tasked with translating Greek into Latin. Why? Because Greek was already being lost in the West. The Western Roman Empire was losing the ability to read and to speak Greek. So they needed Latin Bibles. There was a proliferation of Latin Bibles, virtually all of them based well all of them were based on the Septuagint until Jerome. When Jerome was tasked by the church, very sensibly, with coming up with a new Latin translation of initially the New Testament, and he chose to do the Old Testament as well, it was solving the right problem to have a good solid Latin translation in Latin because it was the vernacular. That was the vulgar language of that day, which is why Jerome's Vulgate, his name Vulgate, it was the vulgar language.

11:00 It was the language of everyone. Because they were losing Greek, they had to have something they could read. That was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Jerome, unilaterally, without permission, without any discussion, without any church council, chose chose to use Hebrew as the basis for his Old Testament. No one had done that in church history previously. Now we mentioned that Origin about two centuries before him had compared the Hebrew to the four exemplars that they had of different Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint versions. But he was principally solving the problem of A arguing with the Jews and saying, hey look, it's consistent, and B just demonstrating like which one is gonna be the best.

11:43 So that was Hebrew scholarship, but it never entered church practice. And it was never an argument that we gotta learn Hebrew to understand. He was doing something that was very specifically academic. He was doing something that was very specifically academic to just make sure that the Septuagint was being used consistently. When Jerome chose to use Hebrew as an entirely different thing. And we made the argument last week that what Jerome did in that moment was satanic. He did something that rejected the scripture that the church had adopted to that point. But the point of bringing it up again is that no one talked about it apart from Augustine. Augustine fought it. There was some controversy.

12:23 After a couple decades, it died down completely, and the question went away. After Jerome translated the New Testament and then the Hebrew into Latin, now we just have another Latin Bible floating around. And crucially there was no Hebrew scholarship after that point for eight hundred years. And even Jerome's translation was not automatically dominant, although it had the blessing before Pope Damascus died of hey, go do this. It was not immediately and universally accepted by everyone else. So just keep that in mind at the very beginning of this conversation, there was never a discussion about using Hebrew. Jerome just went and did it. He just decided he wanted to do it. And absent a fight, apart from Augustine's quibbles, you know, he fought

13:14 for a little while, but then Augustine basically gave up. He just quit fighting. After that it was just the Latin Bible. And past that point, no one really cared what the underlying text was, it was just their Bible in Latin, which incidentally was exactly what the Septuagint was to begin with. It was just the Bible in Greek, which is what everyone was reading and speaking in that day. So there was nothing wrong with the project that Jerome undertook, except for the fact that he changed the rules without permission, without discussion. And then everyone just kind of forgot about it. So that's going to be the predicate for this entire episode today. One decision by one man to reject the Septuagint never comes up

13:52 again. Augustine fights it, and that's just the end of the discussion. By the time we get to the end and we're talking about the Reformation, it will come up a little bit, but the intermediary events that we're going to discuss have accumulated to the point that there is absolutely no possibility that the reformers would ever consider the Septuagint. And so this episode is to show all the layers of decisions that prevented that question from ever being asked again in church history until today. So for the sake of this episode, we are going to try to avoid going down too many tangents or rabbit trails just for the sake of time and being concise. But every so often there are things that are worth mentioning, and

14:36 so here at the outset leading into one of the other individuals who plays a part in this narrative, I want to mention what is called the quadriga, the traditional fourfold interpretation of scripture, because it winds up playing a role in how some of these things play out in time. And for those who are unfamiliar, the fourfold interpretation is first the literal interpretation, second the allegorical, which winds up playing a large role in some of this, third the tropological, which could also be called the moral, and then fourth the anagogical, which is sort of the spiritual, but in the higher sense almost eschatological. And these different senses of interpreting scripture become relevant because the focus

15:25 on the allegorical is part of what lays the groundwork for a later return to a focus on the literal. We're not saying that you cannot have all four of these levels of interpretation, because of course, there are certainly passages in Scripture where all four of these are in play. One of the most commonly used examples would be the Exodus. And so, of course, you have the literal sense, which is the history. The Exodus literally took place. Old Testament Israel literally came out of Egypt. There was a literal physical exodus. Then of course you have the allegory, you can draw that out to Christ himself. You have the typology there of Christ, who does in fact go to Egypt and then return. You have the tropological sense of it, you have the moral sense,

16:18 so that could be tied to personal conversion, for instance, and then you have the anagogical sense, which would be the eschatological fulfillment of God's plan of conversion of his people of the elect. And so you can draw that out from different parts of Scripture, and there's nothing wrong with doing that. When it became a problem was when there was a focus on the allegorical at the expense of the literal sense. So when you abandon the literal sense of scripture and focus only on this spiritualizing away, which is what it became, of the proper foundational understanding. One of the men who is involved in this is Pope Gregory I Gregory I, Pope Gregory the Great. He is not the one who introduces this into the church because

17:07 this traces all the way back to the Church Fathers, but he sort of formalizes it and entrenches it in the Western Church, because he is one of the very early popes, he plays an important role. He is a faithful man, that is worth noting. He is on our calendar of saints. He introduced many good things. He did liturgical reform, for instance, he supported a number of churches, but he helps to lay the groundwork for this later focus on the allegorical which then lays the groundwork for a return to the literal As we mentioned, as Will mentioned specifically in the opening in the introduction there, sometimes some of these decisions don't seem like they cause problems until later on. Or they may even not be bad decisions in that time, but

17:57 what they did not take into account is the long-term consequences, or in many cases, the source of the fruit of the thing that they are introducing into the church. In the case of the fourfold interpretation, it is not in and of itself dangerous, but again it becomes a problem when allegory takes over from the literal sense. Now, for instance, with Pope Gregory, that was not a problem for him, specifically, because for instance, in his comments on the book of Job, he says that the literal interpretation must be taken first because it lays the foundation for the spiritual interpretation for the other levels. That is correct. You have to take the literal sense first and foremost. But Satan is willing to take something that can be used for

18:48 good and later on use it for wickedness. And so we will see that as we proceed through this episode, through these individuals, down through these centuries, that this allegorical interpretation is part of what Satan then uses in order to later on, not according to the allegory, but according to the right desire to return to a literal sense Satan uses that as an opening, as an opportunity to say, oh, if you want the literal sense, well you should go talk to the Jews, you should look at the Hebrew. And that is going to be a constant refrain here. Almost any time you see a decision, a question comes up, a decision needs to be made, and the decision winds up being, well, we should go talk to the Jews.

19:34 That's where things go off the rails. And as Christians, of course, as mentioned in the first episode and as we've mentioned elsewhere, you should recognize this as a danger. Because as a Christian, you do not go to those who have rejected Christ and hate Christ to ask them questions about the Word of God, because to them the Word of God is a closed book. Moses' veil remains. They cannot see the truth, they have nothing to tell you, they have nothing that is good to give you. But Satan takes as an opportunity to bring back in this Jewish influence and to undermine the church, and we will see that as we proceed through the episode in some later individuals. And this is one of many examples as we're going through these

20:21 where there's a lot of bouncing back and forth from century to century. So when Gregory the Great begins to push the allegorical, as Corey said, not exclusively. He wasn't bad, but his arguments became the basis for later, much heavier pushes into very, very heavily allegorical readings. And this came up in the previous episode when we mentioned Philo, the Jew from Alexandria, who was not a racial Jew, he converted into Judaism probably after they murdered Christ. He said, Yeah, this is my team. One of the things that Philo did was to import this sort of allegorical reading from Platonism. So it wasn't a typical argument that was made by the Jews at that time, unless you're looking at their Kabbalah.

21:10 They have sort of two different tracks where historically the rabbis, when they're talking about things, especially when they're talking to Christians, are going to focus on the literal. If you get them talking about their Babylonian black magic, their Kabbalah, then everything gets allegorical, mystical, symbolic, completely departs from the literal reading. But ironically, when Philo converted into Judaism, he didn't Allegorical read from Kabbalah, he got it from Plato. And as we mentioned, Origen picked up on it, he liked it, and so some of the early church fathers used it. But interestingly, we mentioned this previously, Augustine and Jerome agreed on literalism. Augustine because he was a faithful reader of scripture, and Jerome because

21:53 he'd been talking to the rabbis. So both of them agreed with literalism over rejecting Origin's allegorical reads. Pope Gregory comes along two centuries later, this is around 600 AD, so two centuries after Jerome and Augustine had their fight. Gregory begins to go in the other direction. He begins to make it more allegorical. And from this moment on, from about 600 AD until about 1200, which we'll talk about later, more and more and more of the reading becomes very, very heavily allegorical. Basically the pitch was that the literal sense was seen as merely a husk that contained the richer spiritual kernel. And some of this was actually pushed because when they could make allegorical the readings of scripture, they could push some of the monastic

22:42 ideas that were being developed in the West. And when you talk about monasticism, everyone wants to talk about the doctrine. Maybe you want to talk about the history. Nobody ever wants to talk about the money. The reason that Rome today is the single largest holder of real estate on the planet was monasticism. It was a cash grab that specifically targeted rich families to make sure that as much as possible the church could be the inheritor of those estates. A lot of dig like this happened well, well before the Reformation. But when you hear these hermeneutic choices, don't always assume that it's just specifically someone making a better argument from scripture, a different kind of argument.

23:27 Sometimes they're political reasons. Now that was not Gregory's reason, but later on, part of the reason for pushing it was that it turned scripture into more of a wax nose that could sort of justify where the church wanted to go anyway. One other thing to note, we're already past the fall of the Western Roman Empire here. And today when we talk about the Western Church, Rome, and the Eastern Church, which we just typically call the Orthodox, those are visible remnants of the Rome itself. The Roman Empire, which was geographically the size of North America. It was the entire surrounds of the Mediterranean. It was a big place. In the early three hundreds, that was divided administratively, and then by

24:14 the end of the fourth century, it was officially divided into the Eastern and Western empires. And that is when Byzantium was renamed to Constantinople, Constantine City. The capital of Rome was moved from the west to the east, and not long thereafter the Western Roman Empire essentially collapsed. Some call that the Dark Ages. Some people get very mad and say it wasn't that dark. But there was so much turmoil in the Western Roman Empire, which then went away and there was no longer any Roman Empire. In the East, the Roman Empire lived on. And so today, what we call orthodoxy, historically, you know, ignoring doctrine and everything else, there is a degree of continuation right from when Constantine was Christianized and he was a Roman Emperor.

25:05 So these divisions of West in one direction with Latin and East in the other direction with Greek and maintaining Greek are not only theological, but they're political, and they're principally political. The theological is really just along for the ride. Because ultimately wherever you live on the planet, you're gonna speak the local language, you're subject to the local laws, you're stuck with your local neighbors for good or ill. So it's important when you're looking at historical moments, you know, like the fall of the Roman Empire and then what came after. If you're trying to focus just on religious things, just be aware that you're missing a huge part of the picture because these were all political moments too.

25:49 And that's a big part of this. Again, small pieces of this thing happen because The West forgot how to speak Greek. As we mentioned last episode, Greek was the language of the Roman Empire. And then over centuries, Latin became predominant and essentially wiped out Greek in the West, but not in the East. And undoubtedly that was one of the reasons why that empire ended up splitting. There was just a natural separation because they were being alienated by mutually unintelligible languages. Another important thing to consider is that when Rome lost Greek and transitioned into Latin, this was no different than what we've seen previously, where Israel lost Hebrew and switched to Aramaic because they were conquered

26:36 by Babylon, and then they lost Aramaic and switched to Greek because they were conquered by Greece and then conquered by Rome. Rome lost Greek, gained Latin, developed Latin, and everyone just went along with it. So as I said, Jerome's translation into Latin was absolutely necessary. And this is a speculative claim on my part, but I'm fairly confident in saying that I believe if someone other than Jerome had done that translation, it would have in effect been an inspired translation of Latin. Because one of the crucial things that happened when God killed Hebrew and replaced it with Greek as the language of Scripture is it was put into a proper, fully fleshed out, advanced, modern written language,

27:23 which meant that there was no more need for any oral tradition whatsoever. It also meant that among the other European languages, the languages of the sons of Japheth, you can take any oral or written Greek and translate it into Latin identically, such that there's zero ambiguity. They're both rich nuanced languages. They have sufficient complex structure for all the various parts of speech that are necessary to capture some of the complex thoughts that are present in Scripture. As we mentioned previously, notably Koina Greek that was used for scripture was much less sophisticated than Attic Greek. In a in last week's episode or the last episode I called it Hillbilly Greek. I realized when I re-listened that some Southerners who haven't listened previously

28:10 were probably offended by that. Half my family is from the south, they're Tar heels. They lived in exactly the spot in western North Carolina that was destroyed. I'm a Yankee, I was raised a Yankee, but my kin going back over three hundred years are hillbillies. So I meant nothing derogatory by that. We all know the difference between the King's English and Hillbilly English. And that was a distinction I was trying to make. So if I offended anybody with that hillbilly comment, I apologize. I was trying to distinguish the fact that it was simplified, which was necessary, just as Aramaic was a very simple language, it was a shemitic language. That's why we say Semitism today, because it's the same language group.

28:49 If someone other than Jerome, who had been a faithful Christian, had done the translation of Greek into Latin, Latin and had used exclusively Greek sources, I think we can have every confidence that that would have been an inspired translation. Because you can correlate Greek to Latin with no ambiguity. So absent someone making some sort of mistake or deliberately manipulating it, I think it's reasonable to argue and to assume that God would have blessed that translation effort, just as he blessed the much more difficult translation effort out of Hebrew into Greek that occurred by numerous anonymous scribes prior to the birth of Christ. As I said before, and we will make the case extensively in

29:33 the fourth episode, the Septuagint, when it's quoted almost exclusively in the New Testament, is not limited to the first five books. It's not limited to the Pentateuch, which incidentally is a Greek word. It's all of them. It's all the books of the Bible that are quoted in the New Testament are quoted from the Septuagint. So again, there could be no argument that there was even if you take the the story, the legend, the factual reporting, depending on your perspective, of the seventy-two rabbis, the seventy-two scribes, miraculously translating the first five books. According to Jesus and the apostles, all the books were miraculously inspired, because they quoted them extensively and said this was breathed out by

30:14 God. There's no reason to believe if God did that for Greek coming out of Hebrew, that he would not have continued to do that into Latin, into German, into French, into English, and subsequent generations except that Jerome introduced the Hebrew. He departed from the faith by subscribing to something that Jesus and the apostles in the early church had expressly abandoned, without a comment. They never said we renounced this. They just acted like it didn't exist because it didn't. And so this history is one of that one decision by one jerk that was never evaluated by anyone reverberates without any further conversation until today. It's perfectly reasonable, in fact it's intended by God, the scripture be

30:59 in the vernacular. That's one of the other things that the Septuagint proves. There's no magic Bible language of Hebrew in to be explicit. We're not saying that Greek is a magic Bible language either. The only thing that's special about Greek is that it is the sole language with which God chose to transmit his word, the His word that he breathed out to the early church and to us. That doesn't mean you have to learn Greek, doesn't mean you have to be an expert in it by any stretch. Anyone who can learn Greek sufficiently to translate into English and produce a translation that if it's faithful, you know, there were famous men in the past, Luther and German, Tyndale in English, and a number of others in various languages, who went to great lengths

31:43 and were blessed by God in the work that they did translating into the vernacular so that God's word could be shared locally. I think that we have lost sight of the fact that the proliferation of all these translations is unhealthy and unnatural, but it's going to happen when frankly you don't have someone politically sort of minding the store. And that's the next thing that comes up here. We're going to talk about Alquin of York. This is two hundred years after Gregory the Great. Alquin was an Englishman, he was an English theologian, who was dispatched by his regent to Charlemagne's court. This is Charles the Great, Carolus Magnus, the Emperor of France and much of Europe at that time. Charlemagne assembled quite a court.

32:30 He was a very serious man, he was very learned, and he was very devout. And one of the purposes of the men that he assembled in his court was to reinvigorate learning because this is on the far side of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. He's trying to rebuild something. He's unifying a bunch of disparate much smaller kingdoms. I'm descended from Charlemagne like virtually everyone listening because most people listening are Western European. Virtually everyone descended from Western European stock has Charlemagne as one of their ancestors. I'm also descended from Pepin the First. I don't know if everyone is, but I guess you'd have to be if you come through Charlemagne. So yeah. We're all descended from the King of Paris too, which is a

33:13 cool, pretty cool title, but it's a much smaller domain than the extensive empire that Charlemagne had. When Alquin of York was dispatched to Charlemagne, he very quickly became one of Charlemagne's very favorite men. He was learning and he became Charlemagne's personal tutor and the tutor for his sons. And sorry, Pepin was Charlemagne's son, I can't remember the name. Charaber was the the king of Paris. Apologize for that. When Alkin became Charlemagne's tutor and became his really spiritual guide, his spiritual head, even though Charlemagne was his king, they mutually came to the conclusion in Charlemagne so ordered that the proliferation of Vulgate versions was causing problems in Charlemagne's kingdom.

34:06 800 AD, there were a bunch of different Latin translations floating around, incidentally the exact same problem that Pope Damascus I had four hundred years previously, that he tasked Jerome with solving. The difference is between four hundred and eight hundred, Jerome's Vulgate had mostly won over. It took many centuries of adoption before it became predominant. And by this point, it had mostly won, but not completely. And so Alquin and Charlemagne in concert with each other determined that they were going to standardize the entire empire on Jerome's Vulgate. And so Alquin's task was to derive Jerome's original Vulgate from the various manuscripts that were floating around. Because what had been happening for four centuries is there were still

34:53 a bunch of Latin translations floating around, some the old Latin, the Wetus Latina, that was based on the Septuagint, some based on Jerome, and then variations of the manuscripts of Jerome's translation, so they weren't all the same. Alquin fixed this, he produced a single Bible that was the Latin Bible, Charlemagne had many copies of that printed, and we're talking about eight hundred AD, so this is printed by hand, dispatched to many of the great churches and learning centers throughout his empire, with a specific orders that this is the Bible is to be used from now on, and crucially, if you're going to copy a new Bible, use this as the basis. Let's stop copying those older versions that are floating around.

35:36 We have one Bible now, let's standardize on it. So this is the very first time that Jerome's Vulgate from 400 AD, 400 years later, is finally sort of official. And even at that, it wasn't completed option in the West, because obviously Charlemagne didn't rule all of the West. And even within the tradition of drome's translation, you have things like the Psalter, where he did his own translation from Hebrew. The other Psalter, if you're a music nerd, you're gonna know about this better than me. The drome Psalter was not typically used. There was another one based on the Septuagint that was usually used because it was more beautiful and it was a tradition. And so you'd have a case where scripture would read one way

36:14 and then the chanting would read another way. That was the reason why. So even once Jerome's Volgay was blessed, it still didn't become completely universalized. A few centuries later it did standardize. But crucially, what have we talked about? The Septuagint. Alquin's choice of adopting the Septuagint and his encouragement of Charlemagne to do the same, Hebrew was never in question, because Jerome was the last guy in church history to learn Hebrew. There were no Jews around to teach it, and no one else ever went looking. Four centuries later Alquin didn't know Greek, he didn't know Hebrew, he knew Latin fluently, and so his translation was just let's fix the Latin. He didn't refer to any other languages.

36:56 That's a really important part of the story because you don't hear that today. You might hear it as a historical aside, but it's never put in the context of there's no continuity of Hebrew or frankly Greek scholarship in the West. That's not how we're told post-Reformation the church is operated. We're told that you know every pastor for all times always learn Greek and Hebrew, and that's just that's what you do if you're a cleric. Well, four hundred years after Jerome, no one knew Hebrew, nobody knew Greek. All they had was the Latin. So what didn't they discuss? What's the negative space here? Septuagint never came up. There was no discussion of the textual source that Jerome used. It was simply this is the Bible.

37:36 This is the Latin Bible. They respected Jerome's scholarship. It was popular. Let's use it. And that was the extent of the conversation. The Septuagint never came up. So we aren't going to get deeply into the intellectual movements underlying some of this here, but just briefly in passing, it's worth noting that this is sort of the first renaissance we see happening here in the Carolingian court. This is what's known as the Carolingian Renaissance, and then what will follow on the heels of this sort of there's a little bit of time in between. By a little bit, I mean a century and a half or so. Scholasticism is what follows on that will become relevant for this episode and for future episodes as well.

38:20 Then we have humanism, which is relevant for this episode, the Protestant Reformation, which is where we will end, and then the Enlightenment. And I'm not drawing a direct line between each movement and the subsequent one for those who think that I'm saying the Protestant Reformation caused the Enlightenment. That's not what I'm saying. This is similar to how the allegorical interpretation became a tool in Satan's handbag later in time. Just because something is good does not mean it cannot be used for evil. That is what we see taking place. This renaissance in the Carolingian court is by and large a good thing. The problem, of course, is that it is using this already corrupted version of the Old Testament.

39:08 Instead of the true version of the Old Testament, which was on hand, it was something that was available certainly in Rome, more so than some of the outline Outlying parts of Europe, which were very quickly becoming not outlying, but the core parts of Europe, because politically this is the era where you see the transition, as it were, from the Roman Empire and the regions that were part of the Roman Empire proper into what will become the Holy Roman Empire, the First Reich, as it is typically called in German literature, and then subsequent to that the other ones as well. And so this is where Northern Europe is starting to become the political center, even as some of the religious center of the Western

39:56 Church is still of course located in Rome, because and indeed, by and large, the church, because we have not yet had the great schism at this point, because that of course happens a little later than this. And for a number of reasons, many of which are in fact political and not theological, but also as Woe already mentioned, some of that, of course, was due simply to drifts in culture and particularly language over time. Because of course the Eastern Roman Empire continued to use Greek. The Western Roman Empire basically started using only Latin because of course initially Latin Latin was the language of the empire, Greek was the language of everyday life, and so they sort of split between the

40:40 two. The Western Roman Empire adopted the imperial language and kept it, the Eastern Roman Empire adopted the everyday language and kept it. Unsurprisingly, considering that Greece is in the East indeed. So subsequent to this sort of sort of interest that we have in cleaning up the Latin, we see the beginnings of the movement of Hebrew influence into various European courts, and particularly into some of the schools. Now, as we have already mentioned and gone over a number of times, the Hebrew language is still effectively a dead language at this time There are no Hebrew speakers. You can't just go to someone and learn Hebrew. Because it's not a real live language at this time. It is, in fact, basically an entirely dead language, as we've mentioned

41:41 previously, not like Latin, where you have always had those who know Latin. There have actually always been Latin speakers down through the centuries, not many at some points in European history, but Latin never really died in the sense of being gone. Latin died in the sense of no longer being an everyday language, a language of any particular region as the first language, because it was a language that was used for communication between academics, for instance, because they all learned Latin, so they could all use Latin. But Latin wasn't their first language, it wasn't the one that they used in their everyday life. So if you lived in Germany, or what would become Germany, your actual language was German, but as a scholar you used Latin.

42:30 Not the case with Hebrew. The rabbis use a little bit of Hebrew in secret at this point because they're not pushing Hebrew quite yet. That will come a little bit later. But by and large, they're still using Aramaic because most of the Talmud is indeed in Aramaic. Aramaic is a language they've sort of maintained in their own enclaves, but they're also using pidgin forms of the local language and so the equivalent of what would become Yiddish in German lands, and whatever the option is in French speaking lands, etc. But you see a sort of revival of an interest in Hebrew, because if you're using this version of the Old Testament, the Vulgate, which is based on Hebrew of some kind, as we went over

43:19 in the last episode, we don't actually know on which manuscripts Jerome based his translation, because we don't have them. He didn't give them to Augustine, he did not provide them to the Pope. We don't know what he received from the rabbis. He received something in Hebrew, and then they told him what it meant. But we start to see this growing interest in Hebrew in Europe, and there are a number of individuals who play an outsized role in this revival. Part of that is due to a growing access to writings of rabbis. Again we see this theme that will recur throughout this entire episode and in others as well, you see Christian men who have questions, and they go to the rabbis, or they read rabbinic literature.

44:10 They ask the Jews questions despite the fact that the Jews have explicitly rejected rejected Christ for over a thousand years at this point. Because one of the next relevant individuals is Rabbi Shlomo Yetzaki, however you want to pronounce that last name with a sufficient amount of phlegm, born shortly after the year 1000. So at this point, again, remember, the Jews have been deliberately, openly, intentionally apostate for a thousand years, praying multiple times a day, three to five times a day, against Christians, cursing Christians, cursing Christian rulers, cursing Christ, reading in their Talmud that Christ is boiling an excrement for eternity. And these are the readings, this is one of the authors, whose

45:06 works Christians start reading in order to understand the Old Testament. This is completely and utterly ridiculous. I should note that one of the names by which this rabbi is most commonly known as Rashi, that's probably the name. If you are aware of this individual, you'll know him by that name. He was a French rabbi, and he commented on the Torah, on the books of Moses, on the Old Testament. And so Christians start to read these commentaries. There are a number of individuals who really go all in on reading the rabbinic commentaries and bringing this stuff into the church. And insofar as such a thing existed at this time, Rashi was known as a master of the Hebrew language, which basically just means

45:58 that he could, to some degree at least, read the Hebrew portions of the Talmud. Because that was really the focus of the Jews. The Old Testament is not the focus of the Jews ultimately. The Talmud is the focus of the Jews in squabbling over the Talmud. Because Because again, I will remind you: the most common, most well known saying about the Talmud is what Torah forbids, Talmud permits. It is essentially a direct inversion of what God has said. And so if God has said you cannot do X, the Jewish rabbis will do everything they can to explain away that prohibition and make it so that in reality you can do X just with these caveats. One of the best examples we can think of in the modern context, of course, is their special little rope that they place around

46:48 certain cities, because then they can declare it to be a home. And the reason they do that is because they have created certain rules about what you can do on the Sabbath if you are in your home versus if you are outside your home. Now if you put up the special little rope, then everything inside the rope is your home technically, according to their interpretation, and so you're permitted to do more things on the Sabbath, because you couldn't do them without the rope because then it would be outside your home. And they actually get very weird about when there's a break in the rope. It is completely anti Christ, anti Christian, and anti God. You cannot imagine anything more evil than attempting to Jew God.

47:34 Trying to get around God's rules by creating your own interpretations of his rules is wicked to a point that could probably not be overstated. And yet these are the men to whom Christian scholars are going to learn about, supposedly, the Christian religion So Rashi's work was exclusively within the community of Jews that were living in Europe. He had no contact that I could find with Christians. These commentaries that he wrote that are considered to be authoritative until today, they were tremendously influential in later Jewish activities, and they were immediately recognized as such, which is why he's honored by having that acronym Rashi use is his common name today. So he wasn't directly interacting with Christians, and no Christians were coming

48:31 to him. When Cory described Christians seeking out Jewish teaching, it was not yet. The seed was planted by Jerome, but the question was never asked because until Jews started moving into Europe, there was nobody to ask. It was a dead language, it wasn't a written language at all, until incidentally the Mazoretes had just finished their work shortly before Rashi's birth. And as we mentioned earlier, crucially, Rashi's commentaries are very literalist. So when he's writing about the Old Testament, he's writing literally when he's discussing the text. That's sitting there in those commentaries until some Christian comes along. and what we see next is the door finally being opened by Satan for direct interaction for the first time since Jerome between Christians

49:23 and those who pray multiple times a day for every Christian to be murdered. In Paris, a man named Hugh of Saint Victor. He led the school there. He died around 1140. He was tremendously influential in the Western Church from the time that he took over that. Over that school, principally because he strongly advocated for the primacy of the literal historical sense. So in effect, we have a period of time from Pope Gregory the Great around six hundred to Hugh of St. Victor in Paris around eleven forty, when he died, where allegorical readings were predominant in the West. Hugh went back to what Jerome and Augustine had argued. He wanted literalism. He rejected Origin. He rejected Gregory. You of Saint Victor said, I want literalism, I think it's better.

50:15 He was right. That was the Christian read. When you look at some of the allegorical readings that came out of some of the fathers that went down that path, as I said last episode, it gets weird. You're reading some of the stuff and it doesn't seem like a Christian voice at all. Like, not that it's evil necessarily. It's just like, why are you talking about this? This isn't what the Bible is about. It's completely alien to us today. And it's alien in large part because Hugh of St. Victor rejected it. And Hugh of St. Victor himself did not interact at all with Jews. He didn't know Hebrew, but the emphasis that he replaced on literalism shaped Christian church doctrine in the West from that point on.

51:00 One of his pupils was Andrew of St. Victor, same place, next generation. Andrew is his student, Hugh is his his teacher. Andrew basically took over and leading this effort after Hugh of Saint Victor died. Andrew, Augustinian in Paris, went beyond what Hugh did because of what Rashi did. So this is why these pieces are present, why they're starting to come together to paint this picture. Andrew learned Hebrew. How'd he learn it? He obviously learned it from Jews. The only way to learn Hebrew was to go talk to Jews who pray to Satan, the Christians die. Andrew, following the footsteps of his teacher, his master Hugh, said I want literalism too, and he found out, you know who has it? The Rashi commentaries.

51:48 These guys who have the Hebrew, these Jews, look how literal their interpretations are. He's looking at the past you know six, seven centuries of Western Christian writing, and he's seeing increasingly strange to his eyes and his heart, allegorical readings, and then he looks at what the Jews wrote, and it seems pure and clean. And so what's just happened? No one talked about the Septuagint, no one talked about the Greek. What happened? You have bait of correct hermeneutic of literal interpretation of what is written. The Jews maintained that publicly when they weren't doing Kabbalah against again, they get far beyond allegorical when you look into their black magic practices. But the basic straight readings you're going to get when they're talking

52:34 to Christians, very literal. And so it was pleasing to his ears. And so what does he naturally conclude? I need Hebrew so I can know the Old Testament better. I need Hebrew so I can know God better. He was one of the first who went back to what Jerome had said talking about Hebraic Awaritas, the Hebrew truth, which is completely oxymoronic. It was never something that was part of the Christian church between Jerome and Andrew of Saint Victor. But Andrew learned Hebrew from rabbis, he read Rashi's commentaries. He went nuts. He loved it. Like this is the stuff. He preferred Rashi's literalism. When we look at the literalism versus allegorical reasons. Again, we have Philo of Alexandria, the converted Jew, went allegorical.

53:25 Origin the Christian followed Philo. Jerome, Augustine, literalist. Then you have Pope Gregory six hundred AD, more allegorical, reshaping the church until Hugh of Saint Victor comes along and says no, we need to get back to the literal interpretation. His pupil comes along, Andrew, learns Hebrew and says, Look, the Jews have it. And this was one of the key moments. Some of these other things could have happened or not. Like Alquin of York, it did happen, but it wasn't huge. It was a nudge in this direction because it standardized and formalized the Vulgate as being the Bible of the entire Western Church, which hadn't been the case previously. Here in the 1140s, 1175 is the very first time that Christians are studying Hebrew since Jerome.

54:18 That's crucial. That's less than half of church history. Has any Christian been studying Hebrew with the exception of Origen and Jerome. I found a couple other names of other writers in the first millennium who had quoted things in Hebrew, but it's clear that they didn't, they were quoting what had been written principally by Jerome. So they're basically kind of saying things like Yahweh, which you hear today. Sounds more authentic. But they didn't know Hebrew. They weren't, they never learned it. They were using Hebrew phrases occasionally as what they perceived as scholarship, but they were not personal participants. Andrew of St. Victor is the first man after Jerome to actually open the door

55:00 to consulting with with Jews, to learning at the feet of rabbis and to saying, yeah, we need Hebrew to have the Bible. For those of you paying careful attention, some of the comments about the Hebrew language may seem confused or confusing and there's a reason for that. It's because a lot of this is a mess. A giant rat's nest mess. When it comes to the Hebrew language, it's important to bear in mind that when we say Hebrew, when really anyone says Hebrew, it's an umbrella term that is encompassing a number of different languages that are related to each other. And so you have Biblical Hebrew, or ancient Hebrew, which is the lost language. That was the one, no continuity, not maintained. God caused the Old Testament to be translated into the Greek in

55:57 the In order to preserve it, and then killed the Hebrew language. It is dead and gone beyond being able to be resurrected. Then you have what is developed by the Masoretes, because they are the ones who create the vowel pointing system and interpret what they have written down of the older form of Hebrew, but without having any continuity to do so reliably. Because that inspired oral tradition was dead and gone for centuries at this point. And so they are attempting to resurrect something that cannot be resurrected. You have, in addition to those two, a sort of pidgin form of Hebrew, Mishnahic Hebrew, which is used to interpret the portions of the Talmud that are in Hebrew. This is something over which the rabbis constantly squabble, and in fact

56:53 they fight amongst each other with how to interpret simply the words, insofar as they are written, that are written on the page, which is to say, the consonants they fight over which vowels to put in between them. The rabbis don't even agree with how to read their own documents. It is a combination of Masoretic and Mishnac Hebrew that winds up becoming Medieval Hebrew, which even calling it Medieval Hebrew is somewhat misleading, because the Jews in medieval Europe do not have a unified medieval Hebrew, because they have regional variants of it because they actually pull in bits and pieces of the languages around them when they're interpreting this supposed Hebrew language. And so you'll have a version of medieval Hebrew in Germany that

57:46 is distinct from medieval Hebrew in Paris in France, that is distinct from medieval Hebrew in Rome. You have to bear in mind that Hebrew is not a monolithic thing. It is this umbrella term for a very complex history and a very And a very complex history of deceit, of lies. Because what it is used to convey oftentimes, particularly to the modern ear, from modern false teachers, is some sort of continuity that was That was never there. There is no continuity from biblical Hebrew, again, an entirely lost language, except for we have the consonants, which aren't useful unless you have the ability to interpret them, for which you need the inspired oral tradition, which is dead and gone, because God rendered his judgment on

58:40 that, by causing it to go extinct. But you have that beginning and then the line through these other ones up to modern Hebrew, which is yet another language, another child of this Hebrew umbrella if you want to take it in that way, that is spoken in modern day Israel, so called. Not the same language. It is not a direct line from one to the other. It is this convoluted rat's nest, this mess of deception and lies. Because the Hebrew language dies and is dead for centuries before it is resurrected. In fact, by the time we get to the resurrection that is modern Hebrew, this constructed artificial language, Hebrew had been dead for basically two thousand years. Because you have these offshoots that are created from this dead branch,

59:35 from this dead root. But they are not all the same language. They are not like, for instance, Old English, Middle English, Modern English. There is a direct line there. Each one is essentially a daughter language of the previous one. The same thing occurs with every European language. You have Old High German, you have modern German, you have some different forms of it as well. You have Low German, for instance, which is a child language of the older version of German. That is not the case with Hebrew. So bear in mind when speaking of Hebrew, when we say Hebrew, it is a shorthand for this complex and complicated underlying and again deceptive reality. What they are using as medieval Hebrew is this thing that they

1:00:26 have cobbled together and constructed in order to pass it off to Christians? Yes, they use it among themselves as well to squabble over their text, but by and large, they're having their discussions in Aramaic. Because Because Aramaic is still an extant language. Aramaic is an actual language, unlike this medieval Hebrew. But when Christians come to them, or when they go to Christians, they try to pass off this medieval Hebrew as being this is the actual language of the Old Testament. You need this language, in order to understand what God actually wrote. And above and beyond that actually you need more than just the language, because well those are only the consonants, you actually have to

1:01:08 talk to me. You have to talk to a rabbi. You have to come and talk to the Jews in order to understand the Word of God. And we see all sorts of wicked fruit down the line from this wicked tree. This is one of those concepts that we repeat very often. And it's important. It's one of the reasons it's on the challenge coin. Wicked trees produce wicked fruit. This is similar to something that we have, in fact, it is directly comparable to something that we have in our courts of law. In our courts of law we have the concept of the fruit of the poisonous tree, which basically means, in I'll give the most common concrete example, in a criminal case, if law enforcement violate your rights in the law during their investigation, the evidence obtained subsequent to,

1:02:06 pursuant to that violation, cannot be admitted, typically speaking, because it is the fruit of the poisonous tree of that violation of your rights, of that transgression of the law. And so if they obtain a murder weapon because they illegally searched your vehicle, illegally searched your house, it will probably not be admissible because it is the fruit of that poisonous tree, unless they can say in some other way that they would have necessarily discovered it, for instance, but that starts to get complicated legally. The point is we have a similar thing here with regard to theology, with regard to spiritual matters. You do not go to a poisonous tree to get good fruit, because you will never find good fruit on that poisonous tree.

1:02:58 Even if, for instance, in some of these cases you have things where Satan has taken something that was good and used it for evil, it is never the case that what you have that is good came from the poisonous tree. It came from something else that was good, it came from a good tree. Good Good trees produce good fruit. Wicked trees produce wicked fruit. And this is sort of a constant refrain throughout this entire narrative. You will see very few, unfortunately, but a few Christians will recognize that's a poisonous tree. But usually they will only go so far as to get rid of the poisonous fruit that's lying on the ground, and they'll say, no, we'll keep the tree around. The tree is the tree is okay.

1:03:45 We'll keep dealing with the tree. Pois trees don't ever produce good fruit. That is the error that keeps being made by these otherwise Christian men because they are not examining the source, which is sort of a great irony because one of the cries eventually we will see in this narrative becomes adfontes, back to the source, back to the spring. And you see that, of course, even with Jerome, who tries to argue for going back to the Hebrew, a thing that you could not do, a thing that you cannot do. You should be wanting to look back at that source. You should be wanting to find the tree that produced the fruit. They don't do that. These men don't actually do that. Because what they look at is they say, well, we're going back

1:04:33 to the source, and then they decide Hebrew's the source. They don't look, what is the source of this Hebrew? What is this thing that I have been given by the rabbis? Don't believe what the rabbis told you. The rabbis are going to say, Oh, this is the Old Testament, this is the Hebrew, this is the Word of God. We have kept this thing for thousands of years. We've preserved it faithfully. Here you go. But if you actually look at what they did, if you look at what God did, that thing that they hand to Christians and on which they base their various commentaries, and then you have Christians like Andrew of St. Victor, like Peter Comastor will talk about him next. You have these Christians going to these writings based on this false

1:05:20 version of the Old Testament, this corrupted text that is not God's word anymore. It is simply something the rabbis have spun out of their own minds, in some cases, in many cases, in fact, with demonic influence. This is not a valid source for Christians, Because again it is poisonous fruit of a poisonous tree. And it is particularly damning when we actually have the Old Testament as preserved by God in the Septuagint, because the Septuagint at this point is sitting in archives, in various places in Europe. It exists. There's access to it. The Greek language isn't dead. The Greek language is still spoken in the East. It's been lost by and large in the West, but it can be relearned. Just like today, you could pick up and learn Latin.

1:06:08 Because Latin is a dead language in the sense that people don't use it as an everyday language. It's not dead in the sense of being gone and unrecoverable. The same was true of Greek in this day and age, of which we are speaking right now, in the Western context of Western Europe. They could have used Greek, they could have learned Greek, they could have gone and looked at the Septuagint, and they didn't do so. The reason that Peter Comestor, who was one of the contemporaries of Andrew of St. Victor at the same school, so same place, same time, twelfth century Paris. He didn't learn Hebrew, but he was very much in the vein of the literalism that Hugh had pushed and that Andrew found exemplified in the commentaries that he got from Rashi.

1:06:59 The reason that Peter Comester is important is that he wrote the Historia Scholastica, which was a Bible textbook that was used throughout Christendom. Just to give you some idea of how much of an impact Peter Comestor's Historia Scholastica had, today, there are over eight hundred extant manuscript copies that were produced between his death in eleven seventy five and about sixteen hundred. eight hundred 800 copies of a manuscript survive. So that tells you how prolifically it was copied, how important it was, how valued it was, and what did it carry? It carried a literalist interpretation of scripture. Great. That's my interpretation. I agree completely. But what did it do as well? Which question was imported by that because of the questions they didn't

1:07:50 ask? The question that the literal interpretation that Comestor's book that was standardized in the West caused to arise in people's minds was who has the best literal interpretation. And because of the influence of Pope Gregory the First, Gregory the Great, who was a good Christian man, but because of what came after him with allegorical readings, you have from sometime after six hundred through twelve hundred roughly, almost everyone writing was writing very allegorically, certainly more so than after that. Enough that when this Paris school basically repristinated the literalist interpretation, it was revolutionary. It reshaped the Western Church. What does that mean? It means that from Gregory through Hugh of St.

1:08:38 Victor, you hardly you hardly have any Christian writers that are going to be commenting in the literal interpretation. So if you go back and read their writings in this day, if you know when you're talking about Andrew and Peter's day, if they went and read someone from two or three hundred years previously, they're gonna get a whole bunch of allegorical slop that no longer seems good to their eyes or their ears. That has created a situation where they're now hungry. They're desperate for literal interpretations. And where do they find it? And a rabbi's commentaries. Satan planted these seeds all along just to be sitting there waiting for someone to get hungry, and the tree would spring up and

1:09:17 the fruit would come forth, and the Christian who never asked the question Who is this from? What are they doing? How did we get to this point? What did we not think about to get here? They only ever thought about the question that was right in front of 'em, which is how everyone behaves. Like that's they weren't stupid. That's how normal people behave. You don't think in terms of centuries and millennia if you're a normal human being. It's too much trouble. If anything, it's mostly just gonna confuse you, which is why we did episode ninety-nine on the context window. Because this story that we're telling here could be confusing if you want it to be. We're trying to make this as straightforward as possible, but it's moving

1:09:56 pieces going back and forth where you have, you know, Augustine and Jerome agree about literalism. They disagree about Hebrew. Origin and Pope Gregory agree about allegorical readings. And then the church rejects that in the twelfth century with you and Andrew of St. Victor. And then Peter Comester's book is standardized throughout the Western Christian world up through the days of the Reformation. Everyone who was reading about the Bible, remember, they're not reading about Hebrew here. They're just reading about how to interpret the Bible, how to understand it. What do they find? They want they find literal interpretations, a literal approach to the scriptures, which we agree with. But there was almost no one in church history that had produced

1:10:38 something that was a pure version of that prior to Hugh of St. Victor and Andrew of St. Victor, and the men from that school and then what was produced afterwards. So right at this moment, the very first Christian since Jerome, who learns Hebrew, is the one who says, I want to be a literalist. This is one of those false choices I mentioned earlier. All along Satan has executed this perfectly, where suddenly, right in the moment where we fix the hermeneutic, we get rid of the crazy allegorical stuff that at some point went off the rails and like it's not worth reading. These guys came to the same conclusion, rejecting their Christian fathers up up to prior to Gregory, but instead of looking at some of

1:11:18 the earlier church fathers, they said, You want this Rashi commentary is amazing. He's got the Old Testament locked down, it's so literal, it's great. Everything I could ever want I get from a Jew in Hebrew. Elle rejoices. What a perfect execution of that plan. And no one noticed. No one looked because they were just trying to learn. There's a bunch of scholars in a school trying to learn more about God. And if they had asked the one bloody question that Corey just raised, why am I talking to a Christ killer who prays multiple times a day for my death, who dances in the blood of Christ, why am I asking him about God? How can he possibly know more about God than the fathers and the faith? But because of the errors with allegorical reading, because of the abandonment

1:12:02 of Greek, the loss of Greek entirely in the West, when the Paris school begins to pursue some learning of Hebrew. And again, Peter the contemporary didn't know Hebrew, but Andrew did. Somebody knew, so they could look at the commentary and so you have a specialist. Later on, it escaped to the realm of specialists to being generally used. But even then it wasn't used for the purpose of scholarship. As we go through this timeline and these individuals and Their decisions, the actions, the undertakings, you can sort of see how Satan plans things and then executes on them. He places the seeds, or whatever the object happens to be, and then he waits for someone to pick it up and look at it. That's sort of his MO down through the ages, and particularly

1:12:56 with regard to the Hebrew language, to this constructed Hebrew language as used by the rabbis. The next individual is another rabbi, and you'll see that Satan does the same thing here. This is Rabbi Radak, also known as David Kimhi. He writes a number of commentaries. He writes also a Hebrew grammar. This is something that will be used by later scholars because this is a man who, insofar as it is possible, of course, extensively studies the Hebrew language, the one that the rabbis are busily constructing to To use to undermine Christianity. Now for some of them that may actually not be the goal that they have in mind. They may just very well be squabbling over their Talmud and arguing with other Jews.

1:13:52 But Satan has the larger picture in mind. That is a vitally important thing to keep in your mind, because there are many who will argue this couldn't possibly have happened because human beings can't manage this sort of action over this many years, and that's very well true. Humans are very bad at planning on the scale of centuries and certainly bad at planning on the scale of millennia. But Satan isn't. Satan doesn't sleep. Satan is immortal. He doesn't have sixty years of productive lifespan, and then outside of that he can't do anything. Or in some cases even less, because if you're going to be a scholar, you may very well be in school for many years before you have any real influence. Satan doesn't have that problem.

1:14:44 He can plan on the scale of centuries or on the scale of millennia. He has a patience that a human being cannot have. You can't have the patience to wait for something to happen in 500 years. Because you and I will both be long dead 500 years from today. Long before 500 years. And so what Satan does with this particular rabbi is he sets up something that will be useful in about a century, maybe a couple centuries depending on the individuals who pick it up and use it. Two of the men who pick up and use the materials produced by this rabbi are Nicholas of Lyra and Reuchlin. Reuchlin is going to become very relevant in this story because he is one of the men who leads into what happens during the

1:15:36 Reformation. There are a number of other men we'll get to before we get to Reuslin, but that is an important name in all of this. But you have this rabbi who doesn't really personally have much contact with Christians. Now he's living in a Christian land because he is living in France, but by and large he is keeping to his Jewish community, his Jewish ghetto. But he is producing these Hebrew materials that Satan will use to deceive others in the future. In fact, he will use them to deceive men, Who are, perhaps not so much in the case of Reuchlin, but in the case of Nicholas of Lyra, otherwise Christian men. Because they didn't ask the important question. They didn't wonder about the source, about the About the provenance of

1:16:28 this material handed to them. Or in some cases, they actually knew. They just didn't ask the important question. Because if you're looking at materials written by a rabbi in the year 1000 or the year eleven hundred, in this case about the middle of the eleven hundreds, you don't have any questions about if you actually think about it, about the beliefs of this man. You know that he is a Jewish rabbi. To be a Jew is to reject Christ. To be a Jew is to curse Christ and Christians and his church and Christian rulers. And so if these Christian men who go and pick up these materials, a century later, two centuries later, whatever it happens to be, had thought about what they were actually doing, they may have realized

1:17:21 what they were doing was wicked. They should never have been taking these materials from a rabbi, and yet that's what they do because they don't ask the important questions. They don't ask about the Hebrew language. They are curious about the Hebrew language because they don't ask what did God do historically? Has this language been maintained? Yes, to some degree, of course, we have the advantage of hindsight. We have the advantage of greater access to information than these men had. But at the same time, they cannot be fully excused. Because they knew the nature of Jews. They knew the nature of the Jewish religion. They knew they were dealing with men that Christ Himself had called children of their father the devil.

1:18:14 These are the children of the men who called for Christ's blood in Pilate's courtyard, who are proud of what their ancestors did or they wouldn't be Jews still. Still, they would have converted and become Christians, and we'll be talking about a man who did that, two men who did that. That's two in two thousand years. But these men are going to those who are still proud to call themselves Jewish rabbis, who are creating these materials that by and large they're creating them for their own community. But Satan has other plans. Satan knows what he is going to do with these materials, how he is going to use them, to infiltrate and corrupt the church. This is a plan that took him fifteen hundred years to execute.

1:19:03 Really longer than that, because some of the fruit of it really becomes apparent. Some of these things come to full fruition in the nineteen hundreds. Again, Satan does not have the disadvantage of having a lifespan of 80 or 85 years. And so he can plan on this sort of timescale. It's not to say that we have an opponent and he's so powerful, what can we possibly do? We can never compete with that. Because we have God on our side. Christ is on our side. All we have to do is actually listen to the Word of God. Listen to what the Word of God says about the Jews, what it says about these wicked men who hate Christians, who hate Christ, who seek to destroy and undermine Christ's church, even when they

1:19:50 aren't actively doing it, because this man when he's creating a Hebrew grammar is probably not actively seeking to destroy the church. But he's still a son of Satan. And Satan is going to use that work product in order to cause havoc in the church. This is just one particular waypoint, one step, one rung on the ladder. And one of the points that it's important to grasp is that virtually none of these men were essential. Satan could have used other men. Satan is very good at a bar fight, is an example that I used when Woe and I were discussing this before we started recording. Satan understands the concept of a bar fight, and in a bar fight, the best weapon is the one that is to hand. Satan is willing to use whatever man he can use to move

1:20:44 the ball downfield. He's a lot better at politics than most men. He understands the nature of the beast. He understands that if you are making yards, you're winning. He doesn't care who's moving the ball. He doesn't really care that much if it is moving quickly or if it's not moving quickly. If it's moving in his direction, great, he's willing to take it. More Christians should understand that concept And so it seems like here, not much is being done. You have a rabbi who is commenting on the Old Testament for other Jews because it's written in a language that no Christian understands, and he's writing a grammar, books in order to understand this language for his own people in his own community.

1:21:31 But Satan is going to use that because Christians, because of what we've already said about this timeline, this interest in supposed Hebrew scholarship has already been introduced, this poison has already infiltrated the church, particularly with Jerome as the major starting point. And it is going to accelerate, it is going to be exacerbated, by the availability of these materials, by the presence of Jews in their ghettos, in Europe, who are creating these materials under Christendom. This wickedness, this pagan, evil, this deliberately, explicitly, virulently anti-Christian religion, because that's all that Judaism is, Judaism is the inverse of Christianity because it is hatred of God, and it is hatred of

1:22:22 his church, and it is hatred of his sheep, and this is being tolerated in Christian Europe. None of these problems would have occurred. None of these problems would have existed if you did not have these Jewish communities living in Europe in order to pass off these materials to Christian scholars. Because the materials would not have been there. The materials probably wouldn't have even existed. This is an ongoing problem that we see down through the centuries, because Christian rulers keep kicking the can down the road. And in many cases, they do it because they're worshipping mammon, because Jews are allowed to give loans. Christians can't, because Scripture is very clear: you can't charge interest.

1:23:07 That's usury. That's wicked. That's a sin. But the Christian princes in many cases are perfectly willing to let Jews do it, because who cares if the Jews are sinning? Well the problem is that Christian prince is himself sinning by dealing with the Jews. He is as guilty of their sins as they are because he is the one facilitating it, encouraging it, and benefiting from it. To a certain degree, he's also destroying himself and his people ultimately. Satan has long-term plans. As Christians, we don't have to be so much worried about his long-term plans, as we need to recognize that that is a thing that occurs. We have this enemy, and we should be on guard when he is trying to bring things into the church.

1:23:51 In this case, it should be extremely easy. Because he's doing it with Jewish rabbis. He's doing it with men who hate Christians. This should not have been a difficult question for our ancestors to get right. But because of all these seemingly minor mistakes down through the centuries, the stage was set for what comes next. Because that's all Satan is trying to do. He's just setting the stage to get another foot, another yard on the play, whatever it happens to be. And so we see these Jewish rabbis producing these materials that Christian scholars will turn to in later centuries to use because you have already had the church infiltrated with this corrupted version of the Old Testament, which is now in Latin, because Satan conveniently didn't

1:24:44 preserve this use of supposed Hebrew, because now all you have is the Latin Old Testament, which which is based on Hebrew sources to which you don't have access, on a language you don't speak, and now what do you do if you're a Christian scholar and you believe that that is the Old Testament? Well you have to go to the Jews. And that's exactly what Satan wants. So after that very kind series of words about the Jews, we come to one of the only two faithful Christians in this entire story, and that includes every one of the reformers. The only two men who are blameless in this entire story are both Jews. The first name is Nicholas Donan. We've spoken about him previously. You can look up the trial of the Talmud or the Disputation

1:25:34 of Paris. He was a Jew who converted to Christianity sometime around twelve thirty, roughly, we don't know exactly. When he became a Christian, he was horrified at how he had been raised, because he had been raised his entire life to do all the things that we've just been complaining about. He was raised to pray the prayer that we've talked about now multiple weeks in a row. What did he do? He went to Pope Gregory and said, Do you know what these Jews are doing in Christian lands? And he went in great detail and told the church, he told the world, he told the French government, these people are wicked. These people call for the death of Christians. They blaspheme our God. He was a faithful Christian.

1:26:19 He ceased to be a Jew. He repudiated the Jews and he spent the rest of his days going to war against them because of their wickedness. So all the things that you know you just heard Corey go off for a few minutes like that seems really mean. A Jew said this same thing and worse when the disputation of Paris or the trial of the Talmud took place, he was the prosecutor. Nicholas Donan, the converted Jew who ceased to be a Jew, which is the only way you know if someone has actually ceased to be a Jew, is when they go to war against the Jews. Is this man did and as the later man did we'll talk about at the end. Nicholas Donan went against the Jews in Europe because of their wickedness that they concealed in these secret languages that Christians did not know.

1:27:00 And And what happened was the equivalent of probably billions of dollars worth of blasphemous Hebrew and Aramaic scrolls were burned in public. They were reviled, and to this day, Jews hate King Louis the Ninth, because of this, because of the disputation of Paris. Because when the Talmud was put on trial by Nicholas Donan, it was burned as many copies they could get their hands on, cartloads of Jewish writings were burned in public. That's the Christian response. That's the response that we find in Acts. Remember the story where the Mat and the Magicians became Christian converts and they brought out all the things that they had their writings with black magic and they burned them in the public square.

1:27:49 This is the Christian response. This is what repentance actually looks like. You can tell whether or not a Jew has repented by how much he hates the Jews. That is the only way to tell that a Jew has repented. Because he was guilty of their wickedness. He was an active participant his entire life. And when he did actually become a Christian, he was horrified, and he was filled with righteous anger and hatred at the murderous blasphemy taking place by his own blood. This is one of those cases where when you look at the commandment to honor your father and mother, for someone such as a Jew, the only possible obedience to that is to skip over all of those who rejected God. You cannot honor your father and mother in a godly fashion when

1:28:34 they're wicked. So obedience to God involves the first table of the law. To respect God to have God as your only God requires repudiation of the evil that your race has participated in. Nicholas Stonen and Johannes Pfefferkorn, the other Jew we'll talk about near the end, are the only two Christian Jews I'm aware of in history. After we get out of the early period where the elect were being discovered inside synagogues. That was why, as we said in the previous episode, up until AD 70, Christians and Jews were still meeting together, and most of the Christians were Jews who had converted and ceased to be Jewish. But they're still going to where worship was. After God destroyed the temple, after God destroyed everything about what they

1:29:20 pretended was left of their religion, they changed their prayers to call for the murder of Christians, to blaspheme God. At that point, there were no more Christians, there were only God haters and Christ killers inside synagogues. All the Christians were chased off. And so at that point, either you were a Christian who had ceased to be a Jew or you were damned. And we see that pattern consistently up until this day. People who claim to be Jewish converts have nothing but good things to say about Jews except they're really sad that they don't have Jesus. And if only we could do more evangelism, then they would be better. It's absolute wickedness. Nicholas Donan was a faithful Christian and I can't wait to meet

1:30:00 him in the new earth. He was born a Jew. So for those who think that this is about race over religion, you're missing the point. The point is faithfulness to God. Where we find inexorable wickedness from a race, then we judge the race. But in the case where there's an exception, he's an exception. I have nothing bad to say about Nicholas Stonen or Johannes Pfefferkorn in this entire episode. And I can't say that of anyone else. I can't say that of Luther. Luther is guilty of heinous sins against God for listening to the Jews rather than listening to Nicholas Donan. Had the church listened to Donan, we wouldn't have any of these problems today. Stonequire wouldn't exist. If Donan had ignited a revolution against the Jews in Christian lands,

1:30:47 if all of their writings had been destroyed and all of them had been driven out of Christian lands, we wouldn't have the problems we have today. We'd be living in a fundamentally different world. So I hope you're noticing that as we're dealing with these historical facts, it's not about doctrine. This is the fight that everyone post-the Reformation wants to have, fighting over Protestant versus Roman Catholic doctrine. We're not talking about the things that matter. Those things do matter. Justification matters. Indulgences were crap. They shouldn't have existed. It was a fight that needed to have, that needed to be had. But the fact that we ignored the textual basis, and again, like the septuagin's just gone.

1:31:29 Unless we say the word Septuagint, you're not going to find anyone bothering to look. The things that were burned were all written in Hebrew and Aramaic. They were all in the possession of those Jews. And on one hand you have Nicholas Donan saying, Hey, we need to burn all the Talmuds in virtually everything else. There's very little of the Jewish writing that was not destroyed at that time, because that was the godly thing to do. And as Corey said, even the king wasn't blameless, because he didn't destroy everything. He left these wicked people around because it was beneficial, as it had been for centuries in Christian lands to tolerate wicked people doing these wicked things. And they all kept the secret.

1:32:09 Every single Jew for centuries living in Christian lands, kept these secrets about cursing Christians praying for our death and the blasphemous things in their teachings that they prayed multiple times a day. They all were in on it's not a conspiracy. It's their religion and it's their race. Nicholas Donan converted to Christianity and he despised Jews. It's very hard to find an account of either Donan or Pfeffricorn that doesn't go insane calling them rabid anti-Semites and they ginned up hatred and they engaged in tropes and stereotypes and all the exact same crap that's said today was said about them and it has been said about them because if you can discredit the man's claims, you have to deal with them.

1:32:52 You don't like the guy, then forget whatever he's talking about. That guy just he was excommunicated from his Jewish community and then became a Christian and he was bitter. That's what they say about donut. It was bitterness. It was sour grapes. Well that was the purpose of the trial. Let's see if there's just sour grapes from one Jew who got kicked out of his shedl, or is it a Christian who's saying, hey, all these Jews are murderers, all these Jews are blasphemers? The result of the trial was that the Talmud was burnt. That's the Christian response. So again, two Christians in this entire story are blameless, and they're both Jews, who became Christians and ceased to be Jews. You cannot talk about how we talk about these subjects and admit

1:33:37 that we say such things. Because when you faithfully obey God, it's true. A Jew can be converted. Nicholas Donan is proof. And Johannes Pfefferkorn a couple centuries later is the last time we have any proof of it happening. You don't find other Jews doing what these men did. You don't find other Jews converting out of this Christmas Christ-killing, Christian-hating, murderous, demonic cult and saying to Christians in their own lands, Do you know what these guys are up to? Find me a Jew who does that and I'll recognize them as a Christian brother. Otherwise, what you have is someone who's participating in the same kinds of lies have been going on for two thousand years. As we pointed out a number of times, a lot of the men

1:34:20 in this narrative are a mixed bag. And that shouldn't be surprising to anyone, because basically all men ever to live have been mixed bags to various degrees. Some of these men were by and large faithful. You can go back to one of the first men we've mentioned, Pope Gregory the Great was by and large a faithful Christian man. He made errors, he made mistakes, he laid the groundwork for some of the later problems, and that is the case with many of the men on this list. And that is certainly the case with basically any of the Reformation figures you can name, and that includes those who opposed the Reformation. So regardless of what denomination or tradition or whatever it may be, the men you like from the Reformation era made these same sort

1:35:14 of mistakes. It doesn't matter if it's Luther, it doesn't matter if it's Melanchthon, and we'll get into that. It doesn't matter if it's Calvin, or Tshingli, or any of the popes, or any of the men at the Council of Trent, all of these men made the same errors. And the great irony, as Wo just pointed out, is that the two most faithful men in this narrative were both were both former Jews. But they were former Jews in the fullest sense of that. They rejected having been wicked, apostate, demonic Jews, and became Christians. We both fully expect to meet Donin and Pfefforn in Paradise, and we look forward to that, because they're Christian brothers. Yes, they were Hebrew according to their genetic lineage, but they were

1:36:09 Christians because they rejected what Jews have become as a people. Because the entirety of Jewish identity of the Jewish race at this point, after two millennia of wickedness, is their rejection of Christ. That is what they are in their essence. And the way to become a Christian is as Woe said, to reject that entirely and to fight against it. Because that is what it means to truly repent. Because to repent is to turn from your former wickedness. And in some cases where that wickedness is of a certain kind there needs also to be Public penance. This is something they had in the early Christian church. Now to be clear, I am certainly not saying that penance saves you. What I am saying is the same thing that was said

1:36:59 by the early writers, by the early theologians of the Christian Church, who said of those who fell away, who went back to pagan practices under persecution, that in order to truly repent and come back to the Christian church, you need to publicly do penance for your previous wickedness. That is in order to show that the repentance is real. It's not just to show the repentance is real to the world, but it's to show also that the repentance is real to yourself. It is necessary sometimes to repudiate former wickedness publicly. Private repentance is not sufficient in certain cases. And when it comes to what the Jews have done for two thousand years, that repentance needs to be public. It needs to be a repudiation of that evil, and it needs

1:37:50 to be a true turning away from that to the Christian life. And the next man in this list, as it were, is Raymond Martini. And that's why I started off by speaking of mixed bags. Because he is another man who is a Christian man, but he gets some things wrong. He gets some important things wrong. He He actually does go fairly hard against the Talmud, which is good, because he agrees with Donin in terms of the Talmud and its wickedness. And so on that count, he is entirely right. Just to give you a little more background of him, he is a Spanish Dominican friar and a scholar. And so you can think of sort of the historical context of what is going on at this time in Spain, because of course they are currently having rather a large Muslim problem, which comes with,

1:38:48 incidentally, and curiously, a large Jewish problem. But that's where Martini goes off the rails. Because while he recognizes that the Talmud is wicked, which is the core document, the core confession of Judaism of the Jewish people, He is still willing to converse with Jewish scholars. He is still willing to consult them. He thinks that their insights, so-called, on scripture, are useful. And so he engages with Jewish scholars. He engages with these materials that have been produced by rabbis in either contemporary times and other places or in previous centuries. So he's engaging with these materials, designed despite recognizing it's a wicked source. He's a very mixed bag, like so many other men on

1:39:40 this list. It is important to examine your priors. In many things in life, certainly it is important to do this sort of thing in the Christian church, because if we are simply accepting materials blindly, we may very well be accepting materials that have come ultimately from Satan himself. This isn't something that we necessarily have to worry about all the time. I'm not calling for people to be paranoid. We would never advocate for that But we should know better than to go to those who hate Christ and his church and ask them for insight about the Christian religion. We have the Word of God. It has been faithfully preserved for us. Thankfully, we don't have, and this is something that is worth bearing

1:40:29 in mind throughout this entire series, we don't have these problems with the New Testament. No one has ever seriously contended that the New Testament is anything but Greek. I'm of course deliberately leaving aside the insane Judaizing scholars who tried to argue that Matthew, for instance, was first written in Hebrew. As we proved in the previous episode, that's not only ridiculous but impossible. The New Testament has always been Greek. The New Testament was faithfully translated into a number of different languages. We have faithfully translations in Latin. We have faithful translations in German. We have them in French. We have them in English. We don't have to worry about these problems.

1:41:14 There are some minor things here and there with word choices in modern English translations, sure. I'm not leaving that aside, I'm not ignoring that fact. But we have faithful translations upon which we can rely. This entire series, this narrative, as should be obvious because it's about the Septuagint, is about the Old Testament and the ways in which the Jews have corrupted it and then snuck it into the churches because Christians have been insufficiently attentive and insufficiently faithful. Because to be faithful this man should have recognized. Okay, I see that the Jews created the Talmud. I see what they say about Christ in the Talmud. I should never ask these men any questions about Christ.

1:42:02 I should advocate for the prince, for the local Christian authority to expel them from his lands, because these are wicked men who blaspheme God. These are men who are calling down judgment on us by existing in our lands. Read through the Old Testament. Look at what God has done when wicked pagans, when those who blaspheme and deny God have been tolerated in otherwise Christian lands. Because bear in mind, Old Testament Israel, insofar as it was faithful, was indeed Christian. But when they tolerated the wicked in their lands, they wound up being cursed along with the wicked. The same thing has happened to Christians down through the centuries. That's what this is. Part of being cursed is the natural consequence of permitting this sort

1:42:50 of evil in your lands, because again, if the Jews had not been permitted to come into Christian lands, these problems would never have arisen, because no scholar would have ever thought I should go talk to the Jews and even if some crazy man somewhere had had that thought, it would not have been an option, because there would have been no Jews around producing these wicked materials to pass off to Christians. What we want men to be is truly and fully Christian. That is what Donin was. That is what Pfeffricorn was. That's what it means to be a Christian. To be a Christian, you reject the wickedness of those who blaspheme and deny Christ. And above and beyond all others in history, the Jews are the

1:43:37 most wicked, the most depraved of all blasphemers, of all deniers of Christ, because they are the ones who murdered Christ, and they are proud of it to this day, and every so often one of them lets the mask slip a little bit, and says sometimes on Twitter even, We're proud of what we did and we'd do it again. Christian men should never go to anyone like that to ask them questions about the faith. The only Christian response to that sort of wickedness is at a bare minimum to banish them from Christian lands, so that they can no longer corrupt Christianity, they can no longer corrupt the morals of the land, and they can no longer create and pass off these wicked materials that undermine Christ's Church, and eventually wind up collapsing Christendom.

1:44:29 One of the important things about Raymond Martini is the timing. One of the famous works that he produced is the Puggio Fidei, or the translation of the full title, his dagger of faith against the Moors and Jews Jews. So as Cory said he was a polemicist, he went hard against the Jews in Christian lands in Spain. This was forty years after the trial of the Talmud in France. So on one hand, in French lands, we have the total destruction of Jewish writings. In Spanish lands, we have the Dominicans, which was a newly formed order in that century. The Dominicans and the Franciscans were both mendican orders. that were basically created to move monasticism away from the cloistered life, to move them back into population centers, to be more focused on

1:45:19 evangelism, on outreach, on doing more Christian things. It was a good idea in principle. And so the approach that the Dominicans took in these lands against the Jews was polemical and to some degree it was evangelical, in a sense. The problem The problem was that A, they were engaging with them, and B, they were specifically engaging in Hebrew. And so as part of the Dominican push to engage against the Jews, they founded the School of Hebrew Studies in Barcelona in the 13th century. This is the very first time that there was institutional teaching of Hebrew by any Christian in history. We have Jerome, and then in the 12th century, we have another man, and then here in Spain the following century, we have a

1:46:07 school being founded. This is the very first time the Hebrew's being taught. Now initially it's being taught why? For reasons very similar to Origins, when he learned Hebrew was to argue with the Jews, and so he could make sure that he could vet the Septuagint. The Dominicans had the same approach. They were learning Hebrew to argue with the Jews and to convert them if they could, because they wanted to convert both the Jews and the Muslims in their lands. That's the reason we spent so much time going over the doctrine of shaking the dust off your feet. After centuries of murder and warfare at the hands of Jews and Muslims, how much more rope do we have to be provided before we stop doing this?

1:46:46 The Dominicans chose to do something that on paper was the right thing. The problem was it ignored one of the other questions, two of the other questions. One, should we still be talking to Jews or Muslims at all? Why are we tolerating in our lands? And two, again, the fundamental question of this episode, where's the Septuagint? It's nowhere. There's no Greek. There's only Latin. And oh, I guess we need Hebrew so we can argue with the Jews. So as Corey said, like he went hard at Jews, he went hard at Muslims, he did the right things, but he did it in Hebrew. Because at that point they were always begging the question. Because remember when we talked about in the previous episode, up until the murder of Christ, Greek was the only scripture that they used

1:47:29 in their teaching. They were talking, they were arguing in Greek. Sanhedrin is a Greek word. I did a thread a while back on all the Greek loanwords in our modern lexicon that are considered to be Jewish, like synagogue. That's a Greek word. It's not Hebrew. Every time you say synagogue, you're saying Greek. Why is such a fundamentally Greek word a fundamentally intrinsic part of the Jewish experience to this day because all they had was Greek. All they had was Greek. Their daily lives, their preaching, everything was done in Greek. All the talk about, oh well maybe it was an air make, where's the evidence? There's no evidence that any of that survived. What we have is Sanhedrin and synagogue and all these other things

1:48:16 that were Greek, because that's what they had. So the repudiation of the Greek by origin, the repudiation of the Greek by Raymond Martini, not consciously in the latter case, but simply by virtue of why would anyone think about that? We have the Bible in Latin, and sure it's based on the the Hebrew that like Jerome provided, but that's what it was originally anyway, so who sees the problem? At no point did anyone ask the question that we're asking here, which is why they missed it. Had they asked the question, hey, where's the scripture of Jesus and the apostles in the early church, many of these errors would have been avoided. At any point along the way, they could have asked those questions

1:48:54 and they could have avoided these errors. Instead, we have the Dominicans founding the School of Hebrew Studies in Barcelona. This was something that later spread throughout Christian lands for similar purposes. In fact, Hebrew was studied in Europe for centuries before Greek was, because one interesting artifact of the split of the Roman Empire, all the councils, all the ecumenical councils, were conducted exclusively in Greek, and later on when the emissaries from Rome were there, it had to be translated from Greek into Latin. All the proceedings were in Greek, and the the Western side had to have translators there. They were fundamentally alienated by a mutually unintelligible language. And so there was simply no Greek scholarship until the 15th century.

1:49:43 It was not long before the Reformation before we see any concerted Greek scholarship whatsoever. But we find Hebrew scholarship centuries earlier. And again, it was polemical and it was evangelical, but it was totally disregarding Christ's command to shake the dust off. It's a question that was never asked, just like the question of Greek was never asked. And so next we have a man who was mentioned earlier in connection to the writings of a certain rabbi, because this man winds up using them, and that is Nicholas of Lyra, who is a French Franciscan friar, he's a biblical scholar. He's born in Normandy, winds up studying at the University of Paris, you'll see connections to that, particularly if you decide to look into

1:50:27 this on your own, you'll see a lot of connections to some universities in Paris. But in his commentaries, we see from Nicholas of Lyra that he is familiar with the works of particularly Rashi, and so he is using these materials that were produced by Jews and using them to attempt to interpret Scripture. And at risk of beating the dead horse, the Jews cannot understand Scripture. Because Scripture is very clear. It is a closed book for those who do not have the Spirit, and certainly those who have not only rejected Christ, but in fact hate him and curse him and his followers daily, do not have the spirit That should go without saying. It should be very obvious to all Christians. And yet here we have a man who is otherwise a Christian,

1:51:23 using these materials in order to teach Christianity. And of course, he has knowledge of the Hebrew language. He does indeed learn Hebrew because he believes that he needs it in order to read and understand the Old Testament. One of the biggest things we want you to take away from this entire series is that Hebrew is wicked. It was spun up by apostate Jews, pushed by apostate Jews, used by apostate Jews, infiltrated into the church in order to bring these teachings of the apostate Jews into the church and undermine the church. And we already have the Old Testament in a proper European language. We have it in Greek. And in fact, it's not very difficult to translate Greek into any other European language we happen to use, whether it is the English

1:52:16 we are speaking now, or the German of Luther, or any other language. There is no reason to learn Hebrew. In fact, learning Hebrew should be seen as a black mark. We will get into that more in future episodes, but Hebrew does not give you insight into the Old Testament. If anything, it denies you certain insights. It makes your understanding of the Old Testament worse because you have corrupted yourself with this false and wicked interpretation of the Old Testament that has been passed off as true by the Jews. And that is what we see happening here with Nicholas of Lyra. He is one example among many, of course, because this is sort of the firm beginning of the use of the Hebrew language, the

1:53:08 formal teaching and learning of the Hebrew language to use it in order to supposedly exegete the Old Testament, and in doing so, they inevitably rely on rabbinic works, which its which it's again that question that should always worry you, or that answer to a question, depending on how it's phrased. What do the Jews say? We should go ask the Jews. No Christian should ever have that thought. Certainly no Christian should ever pursue that thought. If you look at the Old Testament and wonder, what do the Jews say about this passage? That is an anti-Christian thought. That is not a Christian question. And I know there are those who will try to say, Well we need to know what the Jews think in order to

1:53:54 interact with them, as Wo just said and as we've said previously. Two thousand years is more than enough time. The apostles did not wait two thousand years to shake the dust off their sandals. We have waited two thousand years, for the Jews to convert, for the Jews to hear the voice of God in Scripture, which is again in Greek, not in Hebrew, and they have not done so. They have instead explicitly rejected it. and created their own religion that is an inversion of Christianity, that is an opposition to Christianity, that seeks to destroy Christianity, that seeks to annihilate Christ's Church, because they are of their Father the devil, and he was a murderer from the beginning, and they desire only

1:54:45 to do his will. Those are the words of Christ. So if you are concerned about what I just said, if you think that it's mean or anti Semitic or anything like that, then your problem is with God. Because Christ is God in the flesh. Your problem is with him, it's not with me. You can think of the rebellious Jews, the rebellious Israelites in the desert, when they stand up against Moses and Aaron, and Moses said, Your quarrel is not with me, your quarrel is with God. Because that is ultimately what they were rejecting when they were wandering in the desert, wandering in the wilderness, they weren't rejecting Moses, they were rejecting God. And so those who have a problem with the things that we say on this podcast about the Jews, we are simply relaying history

1:55:33 and Christian teaching, and in many cases simply paraphrasing or quoting scripture. So if you have a problem with what we are saying, and I am saying this primarily not of course for our audience, but for those who are listening to out of spite or malice. If you have a problem with the things that we are saying, your fight is not with us. Your fight is with God. And I know that I've mentioned things in this episode and elsewhere that makes it seem like Satan is this grand opponent that's powerful and we should be concerned. Again, God is on our side. Laugh at Satan, mock him. He hates that. We don't have to worry about that sort of enemy. Yes, he's out there prowling as a lion seeking whom he may

1:56:14 devour. But we are on the winning side. Our God is more powerful than the false God of the Jews. We don't have to fear these people, and we don't have to ask them any questions. These people are evil, they rejected God, they continue to do it to this day. And Christians should not be consulting them. And so when Nicholas of Lyra decides he has to learn Hebrew in order to understand the Old Testament, that was wicked. That was an evil thing to do, that was an anti Christian thing to do. And it is possible, yes, to say that Christians have done anti Christian wicked things and yet they were still saved. I don't believe that most of the men on this list are in hell. I believe they were Christians who made errors.

1:57:02 And so if we get to it in this episode if we discuss the Reformation figures, I don't think that Luther's in hell. I don't think that Calvin is in hell. I believe that those men were Christian men who made mistakes. Yes, they made some pretty important ones, but by and large they were building on the errors of previous centuries. At this point, we've gone through a number of centuries, we've gone through five to seven hundred years, give or take. Those in the Reformation, by the time they got to the period of the Reformation, were building on almost a thousand years of errors. They didn't manage to correct everything. It's one of the points of this series. There is work to be done in correcting this error that has

1:57:49 been allowed to persist in the churches for far too long. It's one of the points we will make in the fifth episode in this series. This is not something that necessarily endangers your soul if you get it wrong. There's a little danger there, I won't deny that, but it's not something that necessarily does so. You can still remain a Christian and make these mistakes. But it's the same sort of problem we've brought up in so many other areas in so many other episodes. You don't make these errors, even if it doesn't damn you, because it may do so to your great great great grandchild. And as a Christian, that should be a core concern for you. One of the greatest concerns of the Christian life is passing on

1:58:35 the faith undefiled and intact to future generations, to make sure that they can also be Christian. Because look down through the pages of history. It is It is nothing but a constant series of men failing to transmit the faith with full fidelity, and so eventually, their great great great great however many greats it happens to be grandson no longer has the faith. When Shem stepped off the ark, he knew the true faith. In fact, Noah says that God is the God of Shem, which is to say that he has the true faith. And yet look at what Abraham is when God calls him. He's an idolater, he's a moon worshiper, living in a land of idolatrous people who do not have the Lord God as their God. When Japheth stepped off the ark, he had the true faith.

1:59:34 He was a believer, he was a Christian, like Father Noah. But at some point along the line, he lost it. And our ancestors started worshiping gods who were not gods. It is possible to lose the faith, even if it is done only incrementally, and the sins of the fathers do wind up burdening their sons. That is what we want to guard against because the consequences are disastrous, particularly if those of us in the West lose the faith. Because we're the only church left. We're the only church that can preserve the faith over a span of centuries across time. These are not minor matters, even if they seem like they are at the time, even if they are in fact a small step. Any deviation from the path is not a small step.

2:00:30 An example we've used before because it illustrates this perfectly, if you launch a rocket from Earth and you're off by a millimeter, you are not going to be even in the vicinity of Mars by the time you get there. You're gonna miss the moon by the time you get there. That's why these things matter. They matter because of the longitudinal consequences. And so when you look at those who bring in, for instance, Pope Gregory, starts to emphasize perhaps a little too heavily the allegorical, or at least he opens the door to it. Perhaps you don't lay the blame at his feet, but then you get others on down the line, who focus on that to the exclusion of the literal, and then you get those who bring back

2:01:14 the literal, but they botch it by saying well we should go ask the Jews about it. These errors compound down through the centuries, if no one goes back and looks at it and says that's where we went off the rails, we need to correct that. And incidentally, because all of this stuff is the fruit of the poisonous tree, we need to eject it as well. Because again, the goal, the overarching goal, as is always the case, is fidelity to God and His Word. It's to the truth. That is the highest value of the Christian is truth. In all of this, the goal is the truth. That's the case for every single one of our episodes, and it is particularly the case for this series. It's why we have said this series is such an important thing

2:02:01 among all the things that we have done, perhaps among all the things we ever will do, and I agree with Wo when he says that. One of the most important things we'll ever do is this series. Because this is a major problem. This is something that needs to be addressed, and we'll get into that again in the fifth episode. Just because it seems like it's minor does not mean that ultimately it is a minor thing. Tiny errors in your course will leave you miles off after a certain time. That is what we have here. Because this man, Nicholas of Lyra, what he does, doesn't seem in his context like that much of a problem. Now, if he'd thought about it again, he should know that you don't ask the Jews these questions because they aren't Christian, they have

2:02:49 no insight. But he was building on, and he was inheriting centuries of this general sentiment that you go to the Jews to ask about Hebrew, because you have to know Hebrew to ask about the Old Testament. It was false then, it's false now. It needs to be rejected. And as we continue through the rest of this episode, we'll see that this problem continues to compound, continues to get worse, because no men ask the necessary questions and pinpoint the necessary point in time where the error occurred, with the exception with regard to the right course of action at least, the two Jewish men in the list, formerly Jewish men, now certainly Christian brothers. Donin and Pfeffricorn. The way that things really went off the rail with Nicholas of

2:03:45 Lyra was was the degree to which he focused on literalism and pointed to the Jews in doing so. His magnum opus was the postilla literalis. He spent a great deal of time basically recycling Rashi's literalist commentaries and laundering them into the Christian church. So much so that his nickname was Simeus Solomonus or the ape of Solomon Rashi. Everyone knew that he was just recycling what this Jew had said in his literal commentaries. But the impact was that those commentaries are the most widely circulated commentaries in that time. In fact, today there are probably about a thousand manuscript witnesses to Nicholas of Lyra's commentaries. they were even more impactful than Comastor's Historia.

2:04:40 And so what we have here is a man who was aping a Jew, was recycling what he said in his literal commentaries. Maybe some was right, was Corey layout. It doesn't matter. It's not a question of who's right, it's where you getting it from. If you're getting it from a bad place, don't repeat it, even if it's good stuff. That's what people say about us. If they were right about us being bad, the argument would be true. That's why the argument rings true with some people, because it's good advice. If your kid finds a drug dealer who also happens to repair bikes or something, you don't send your kid there to have his bike repaired. You're going to get into trouble. Everyone understands this in everything except for religion, which is why we're

2:05:23 adamant that you can't dismiss going to rabbis to learn. The school, the Nicholas of Lyra was a part of came out of the Council of Vienne in thirteen eleven, thirteen twelve, which ordered study of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic basically at all the major universities in the West. So Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Salamanca, and the papal enclave itself. So this is the first time that throughout Christian lands, men are indirectly consulting with rabbis. And that's why the other rabbi who made the he did commentaries, but most of his work was on translation, on teaching people Hebrew. So when those were produced and those were distributed, it was possible finally, because again the Masoretes had finally turned something like Hebrew into

2:06:17 a fully fleshed out written language, you could actually learn Hebrew without talking to a rabbi, but you're only going to be learning the oral tradition that was finally written down. So it's a level of intermediation that means that you still have a rabbi in the loop, but you might not be talking to one. And that's why Nicholas of Lyra in particular did so much damage, is that he took Rashi's teachings and put them everywhere in Christianity, which normalized studying in Hebrew and normalized studying from rabbis, and no one was the wiser. No one ever asked the question: why are we doing this? Should we be doing this? And so this is one of those inflection points that while it doesn't seem obviously bad, if you consider the alternatives, it can kind

2:07:01 of become horrifying. But again, this was a product of the 13th and 14th centuries where they were coexisting with those populations and they were trying to evangelize them, which, as we said in the previous episode, and we'll say again, on paper, that seems Christian. It totally ignores what Christ said and what Paul and Barnabas did, but it sounds Christian, and so they ignored the advice I say advice, we're talking about God, they ignore the command of God to shake the dust off your feet against those who reject Christ. They said no, all right, keep trying. We're gonna learn in their language and argue with them. And the Jews were happy. And that set the stage for what flows into the Reformation.

2:07:47 Now, all of this to this point has been when everything had to be written down by hand. It was entirely manuscripts. So faithful transmission was a big deal. It was a very important skill. Penmanship mattered a great deal. There was the development of certain font styles that were more readable, that were more clear. There were innovations like putting spaces between words and adding punctuation and lowercase letters. All those things are later innovations in language, including in European languages. By the time we get to 1440, we have a very brief moment where the Gutenberg press is invented. When a movable type is created, now for the very first time, it's possible to produce far more printed material without a huge budget.

2:08:34 It was still expensive by the standards of those days, but relative to the cost of producing what you know, who knows how many of those manuscripts of Nicholas of Lyra were produced, for a thousand of them to still exist today is it's unbelievable when you consider the expense. That's why we mentioned the value probably in the billions of dollars of all the Talmuds and other Jewish writings that were burned at the trial of the Talmud, that stuff was worth a kingdom because it was so difficult, because it was manual. This changes in the mid fifteenth century, the creation of the Gutenberg press sets the stage for everything that happens after. Everybody knows that. Like it's we're not saying anything new there.

2:09:15 But particularly when you're talking about the production of Christian or non Christian documents, this was an inflection point. Previously you had to be rich. Like you had to you had to have seriously deep pockets to be able to produce written works. With the Gutenberg press, suddenly you could have tracts and stuff that were produced relatively cheaply. They had basically introduced mass production into the realm of literacy, such that by the end of the fifteenth century, there were over 20 million volumes produced and in circulation in Western Europe. That's just astonishing to go from everything had to be handwritten to twenty million volumes in circulation. That shows the impact of what mass production did for writing.

2:10:03 And while it was frequently used for religious things, it was done for political purposes, it was done for other religions. Some of the things we're going to talk about next were Jewish writings also being mass produced, which never should have been permitted, but it was good money, so it happened. So as we mentioned earlier, Greek was not used in the West at all during this period. There were a few guys who popped up occasionally who taught basically taught themselves Greek. Interestingly, the only ones I could find virtually were in England or Ireland. Seemed like only in Great Britain did anyone really engage in Hebrew in Christian history after it was lost in the West. That changed in the Italian Renaissance in the early 1400s.

2:10:49 A man named Lorenzo Valla, he was a pivotal figure on on reintroducing Greek scholarships specifically for Christian studies. So the Renaissance humanist period, a lot of it was focused on let's go back to antiquity, but they weren't focused on the Bible. They were focused on the other stuff, you know, plays, writings, philosophy, all the stuff that's considered to be part of a classical education today. That was what they were mostly working on. Lorenzo Valla changed things by specifically creating a groundbreaking work that was published in fourteen forty four or is written in fourteen forty four, but it wasn't until Erasmus published it in fifteen oh five that it got that it got significant circulation.

2:11:34 Lorenzo Valla, he systematically compared the Latin Vulgate against Greek manuscripts and he pointed out a number of translation errors. And he did pretty good job, but this was one of the only times in Christian history that a Western theologian had looked at Greek and compared it to the Latin. That hadn't been done since it was translated. And so this is seminal, and this flows directly into Erasmus' work, because you know, remember right now, just before the beginning of the Reformation, where that was a big deal, the departure from the Vulgate to look back to the original languages, the Greek was a laggard. It was Hebrew had been studied for centuries at this point. And again, that was mostly focused on polemics and on evangelism.

2:12:17 It wasn't principally seen as a means of studying scripture. You still didn't have pastors learning Hebrew left and right, it really wasn't done, but they didn't have to because Rashi's commentaries were translated and republished by Nicholas of Lyra, put everywhere. So yeah, you don't need to read Hebrew if you could just read Rashi and the languages of Nicholas of Lyra stuff was published in. So that's why the language story here is so interesting, and it's one that's basically untold. Because if you listen to guys who've gone to seminary in this century, this millennium, now we're in the you know the third millennium here of the church age, you would think that everyone is just learning Greek and Hebrew all along.

2:12:57 It's just a fabrication. They weren't. Only two guys in church history prior to the thirteenth century ever learned Hebrew, and fewer than that learned Greek until Lorenzo Valla. That's crazy based on what we know today. It's just a small historical tidbit, except don't pretend the looking at the original language as so-called in the case of Hebrew has been the universal practice. It wasn't. Latin was the only Bible they had, which is one of the reasons that Rome was so angry about the Reformation. Like, what are you doing? This is what the church has always done. And they were right about that. The problem was that the church shouldn't have done that. The church should not have followed in the footsteps of Jerome.

2:13:35 But as I said at the beginning, no one is asking the Septuagint question. They're just okay, it's a Latin Bible, and we standardized on it. It's good to standardize. And it's good to standardize in the language you're using. What's not good is when the underlying text was the wrong one. So no one ever asked the question. And that's how we ended up here today. So, as Will already mentioned, obviously the printing press plays a role in all of this, and we're all familiar with Gutenberg. So that's the end of the 1300s, early 1400s, you have he's born and then he dies fourteen sixty eight. But the two men we're going to mention here own printing presses. These are men who are involved in the production of these works.

2:14:20 One is Jewish, one is not. The first, the Jewish man is Gershom Sonsino, he's a Jewish printer and publisher. He works at publishing a lot of Hebrew writings. And he's named Suncino because he was born in Suncino in Italy. He later did move to Spain though. But he is printing primarily works that are in Hebrew. So this is where you see the beginning of the mass availability of these works because as Woe mentioned, as we mentioned a number of times, it's very expensive to produce things when you have to reproduce them by hand. It is much, much cheaper when you can do it with a printing press. Still not as cheap as today, but you can produce tens of thousands of copies of something, whereas it would take much longer to

2:15:10 produce a single copy prior to the invention of the printing press. The other man is Daniel Bomberg, which he plays perhaps an even larger role for a number of reasons. Partly is politics, which inevitably politics is going to be involved down through this entire narrative. We're dealing with popes in some cases, we're dealing with wealthy men in others, we're dealing with the courts of emperors and kings. Daniel Bomberg has connections to the papacy, and this is a pope many of you will know if you have studied Reformation history at all, Pope Leo X 10th gives Bomberg a multi-year monopoly on the printing of works in Hebrew. One of the things that he produces is the first complete printing of the Talmud.

2:16:03 This is the first time that a printed as opposed to a copied or transcribed in the sense of literally scribed by a scribe, printed versions of the Talmud are available. It can be produced far faster than before, far more cheaply. So now many Jews who otherwise could not have access to this material personally, because it would have only been in the homes of the wealthiest of rabbis, well now they can afford this. And so the Talmud spreads far and wide whereas it could not have done so without the advent of the printing press and this support for the Pope. And not by just the Pope, incidentally, his nephew also provided financial support. This Pope, worth noting, was a Medici, and so of course his

2:16:54 nephew, also a Medici. But Bomberg advocates for the importance of Hebrew materials. He advocates, of course, to the Pope and to others, partly because he has this economic interest. This is making him a lot of money. There are many Jews who are willing to pay him a lot of money. Relatively speaking, obviously again, the hand printed version, the hand transcribed version is worth a lot more, but it's much cheaper to produce these mass produced versions of the Talmud with the printing press. And so he's making a great deal of money producing these resources. The sort of thing that no Christian should ever produce. There are some things that are, just as an example, sort of, quoted in the Book of Concord, and they're quoted in Latin, and

2:17:43 it actually says it is something so wicked that Christians should hesitate to translate them. They are left in the Latin, in the German version, and in the Old English versions. This is the sort of thing that Christians should not be producing and disseminating. Things that are outright blasphemous and heretical, like the Talmud, a Christian printer should not be producing, though certainly not with the approval of the Pope, and making money off doing so. But that is the sort of wickedness that we see leading up here to the eve of the Reformation, because the Reformation, the very beginnings of it, sort of 1517 with the ninety-five theses, overlaps the lifespan of both of these men, both the Jewish owner of a

2:18:30 printing press and this Christian, otherwise supposedly Christian man who owned a printing press. But again, where there's money to be made, some men will compromise their principles. One of the greatest reasons why Suncino and Bomberg are important to our story of the Septuagint is that in 1494 Sonsino published the Bresica Hebrew Old Testament, which was most likely the Old Testament that Luther used for his initial translation work. When he translated the first five books, the other Bible I'm about to mention didn't exist yet. And given the volume of production and the quality, it's most likely that Sansino's Bresca Hebrew was Luther's basis. The other book that was produced, Daniel Bombard, produced a couple rabbinic

2:19:21 Old Testaments. The first came out in fifteen sixteen seventeen, and the second came out in fifteen twenty-four or twenty-five. The second rabbinic, so-called Bible, Old Testament, would have been the one that we know Luther used for all of his subsequent translation work, because it was more complete. So yeah, it's a small part of the story, but it's important to know that prior to this ready availability, not being able to learn the Hebrew language and not having access to readily available inexpensive sources, Would have made it simply impossible to do fresh translations from Hebrew. That hadn't been done since Jerome. And that's a point that kind of gets lost here with all these names floating around.

2:20:08 But another thing to keep in mind. The version of the Hebrew that's being published by Sonsino and Bomberg is downstream from the Masoretic text from 1008 AD. So when we think, oh Hebrew Old Testament, it's you know that's two thousand twenty five hundred years old at this point, right? No. It was five hundred years old at this point. That was what they were publishing. They're publishing a five hundred year old version. And crucially, we know that for a fact because it had the vowel pointers. It had enough that you could sit down with the Old Testament in Hebrew, and if you knew Hebrew, you could read it with no oral tradition whatsoever. That was made possible in part by the fact that Sonsino also

2:20:50 published the grammatical works by Radak that we talked about earlier. So see that's why that Radak's commentary's not so important, but his grammatical work crucial because once Sonsino shows up publishing it, so it was freely well not freely, but it was widely available in Europe, suddenly you could learn Hebrew, you didn't have to have a rabbi in the loop anymore, which is why it became easier and easier and easier for Christians to think that they weren't doing anything wicked when they engaged with this Hebrew language. They were just you know learning an old language and they were reading God's word, so obviously, it was fine. No one ever asked the important questions, which is how we end

2:21:30 up in this place. The reason for presenting this swath of history is that no one ever talked about the Greek. The only time the Greek comes up when we're looking here is looking to the New Testament. Because why would I want to look at the Greek Old Testament? That's just trivia. At this point, it's a jeopardy answer or jeopardy question. Everyone in the Renaissance in the humanist vein subscribed to Jerome's comment about the pure spring and the muddy stream. All of them. That was universalized. It became a mantra. Yeah, we talk about things like the sola, sola scriptura, sola fide. Jerome's comment about pure springs was one of those for all of these men, because they believed if they went to the Hebrew, they

2:22:18 were going to get something more pure. They didn't look at his genealogy. They didn't origins. What do they look at? They looked at the fact that a few centuries earlier, as soon as we started talking to rabbis again, looking at Rashi's commentary, we get really good literal commentaries. We get things that sound Christian when you're superficially looking at the arguments from scripture. It's like great. That was how the discontinuity occurred. Jerome legitimized, well, we're going to use Hebrew. Augustine lost the fight. Everyone forgot Greek and Hebrew, so all they had was Latin. And then eight hundred years later, when they start looking at these old languages again, it's rejecting the hermeneutic, not talking about languages at

2:22:59 all, but rejecting the notion of allegorical readings versus literal readings. And tada, we have these Jews with their literal readings and their literal interpretations Conveniently explaining the Old Testament better than we had in the church for centuries. Satan laid the table perfectly, and when the reformers showed up, they just gobbled it up because everything that they wanted was right there. They had the old language, they had literal interpretations, they had the ability to engage in the language themselves without talking to any rabbis who didn't want to. And so game set match. All these moving parts that seem to be disconnected are part of an infernal machine conceived in hell. Satan knew what he was doing with all these moving parts.

2:23:44 You know, we did episode ninety nine about the context window. Look how much crap I've put on the table for you to have to understand what's going on here. That's why we keep repeating certain elements because once you see how one part plays into another, like, well, yeah, that makes sense. No one's ever looked at this before. They didn't look at it in the Reformation. They didn't look at it before. Like why would they? They were solving the problem right in front of them. And the problem that Luther and the other reformers had right in front of them was they wanted to get a cleaner version of the Bible than the Vulgate. You asked the wrong question, you get the wrong answer. They didn't ask the right form of the question, and so they

2:24:20 looked in the wrong place. That's why it's you know, so many of our previous episodes we spent a lot of time defining terms and sort of making sure we're going down the right path at the beginning because if you go off just course just slightly, as Corey said, you're gonna blow a thousand miles past your target. If you're on a long enough timeline, on a long enough distance, a small area at the beginning can be catastrophic by the time you would be at your target if you had not made that minor error at the beginning. So the next prominent figure in all of this is Cardinal Francisco Cisneros is a longer full name in Spanish, but that's sufficient for our purposes here. Of course, as mentioned, he is Spanish, and so those of you

2:25:06 who are more familiar with this particular point point in time, this particular span of years in history, will recognize that we are now coming close to the Spanish Golden Age, which occurred subsequent to the expulsion of the Jews, which took place in fourteen ninety two. This man is alive during that time and in fact does advocate for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. However, he is again a mixed bag because he does not advocate for the destruction of the Hebrew materials or using the Greek, certainly he doesn't go that far, but he does view Hebrew as a tool for converting the Jews. This is one of those refrains we've mentioned a number of times. You see this down through history. You even see it today.

2:25:56 You see those who will learn Hebrew, modern Hebrew in this case, of course, and then go over to Israel to try to use it to convert the Jews. Well the problem, as we've mentioned a number of times, is one, it's being unfaithful to Christ's command to shake the dust off your feet, but two, the Jews just enjoy arguing with you. If you learn Hebrew to argue with a rabbi, you've already lost. Because what you've done is in no way ever going to be productive. If the rabbi had a real interest in Christianity, if he had any inclination whatsoever to consider what you are trying to tell him, he wouldn't be using Hebrew with you. He would use whatever other language it happened to be. So in this case, they would have used Spanish.

2:26:46 In the case of those in German lands, they would have used German. Because bear in mind, again, the first language of any of these men was not Hebrew. It was always something else. And so Cisneros, while he does advocate for the Christian thing in expelling the Jews from Spain, which does, of course, happen as we know historically, expelled again in fourteen ninety two, he does not recognize the danger posed by Hebrew and so he thinks still that learning the Hebrew language is useful in order to attempt to convert Jews to Christianity. This is again one of those men who should have known better, because historically, the reason one of the reasons the Jews were expelled is because the Jews had collaborated with the Muslims during the conquest of

2:27:39 Spain, and then had collaborated with the Muslims again when the Spanish were expelling the Muslims from Spain, this is something that is ongoing at this time. And yet he still doesn't recognize as a Christian man having dealt with all of these issues, that the problem is the Jews are present and producing these materials. He recognizes half of it. He recognizes the presence as a problem, and so he advocates for their expulsion. But he doesn't recognize that that poisonous fruit produced by that poisonous tree is also part of the problem, and part of that poisonous fruit is Hebrew and the materials produced in it. Satan is using the Hebrew language to undermine the Christian church. And one of the reasons that we've picked individuals from various different

2:28:27 places in Europe is we're showing that Satan was doing the same thing across basically all of Europe, everywhere that he had the possibility to do so, which is to say everywhere that he had managed to plant a Jewish community. This is happening in Spain, it's happening in Germany, it's happening in France, it's happening in Italy. This is not isolated to any particular place in Europe. This is happening everywhere almost at the same time. Because Satan has already set the stage and now he is springing all of his traps into action. And it just so happens that some things played out rather perfectly, so for instance with technological development, that printing press came along at exactly the right time, yes, for the Reformation, but also for Satan's

2:29:14 plans with regard to Hebrew, because as Woe mentioned, it wasn't just the printing of this Hebrew Old Testament given to Christians by the Jews, it was also the printing of the materials created in Hebrew by rabbis necessary to read that Hebrew Old Testament. And so you can feel like there's no rabbi involved. What I'm doing obviously is fine, there's no rab Yeah, the rabbi created all of the materials you're using. The wickedness is already baked into the cake, and now you're eating it. Perhaps in clean conscience, believing that what you're doing is Christian, and it's not. As we see in so many cases the issue is the half measures. He expels the Jews, he at least advocates for expelling the

2:29:59 Jews, of course it is the king and the queen who ultimately expel the Jews, but he advocates for expelling them from Christian lands. That gets done, but he doesn't get rid of the poison that's left behind. So one of the important things that came out of Cisneros was the production of the Complutensian polyglot bible, which similar to Origins Hexapla contained usually both Old and the New Testament in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. This was a very large multi-volume set. It was very expensive. There were 600 copies made. And so obviously, this had a scholarly audience exclusively. And the timing was perfect because this was right when we have all the reformers looking at producing their own translations.

2:30:48 And crucially, because it was a polyglot Bible, it put side by side. As I said, you have Hebrew and Aramaic, Greek and Latin. And so those can all be put in chronological order of when we think they entered Christian lands, which is going to be inverted because Hebrew in that list is the newest of all of them. It's the newest language on the list. But at the time of the Reformation, that's not how they were looking at this polycopel. They were looking at it and thinking, well, the Hebrew is the oldest, and then we have this weird Septuagint thing that was a you know interesting, maybe it has some some different translations we consider, but you have the Latin translation and then you have the Aramaic

2:31:28 is kind of the least important, but at least it's the oldest. Putting those side by side is useful for scholars, but what it did in practice was on one hand, you know, this is the first time the Septuagint actually shows up, but it's really as a footnote. It's like, oh, well, here's this interesting thing. You know, having the Aramaic and the Greek side by side really kind of hammers home that it was only the Hebrew and the Latin that they were actually engaging in. And obviously if you're a reformer, the Latin is the one that, you know, you're being critical of, and then the Hebrew is the one you're going to rely on. So between Sansino, Bomberg, and the Complutensian Polygot Bible, you have multiple

2:32:09 avenues for the reformers at the beginning of the Reformation to go consult, to learn Hebrew, to do their translations, and to never even think about the question of whether or not that was the Bible of Jesus and the apostles in the early church. So before we come to Reuchlin, whom we've mentioned a number of times as one of the more important figures in this, sort of because he is essentially a spider who has his strands of his web all over the place. He's involved in many things. He, for instance, corresponded with Cisneros, he's involved in many other things. But before we come to him, we have Jacob Ben Yehil Loans. He is a Jewish scholar and rabbi, as you might have guessed from the name.

2:33:00 Lives in Italy during the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. He's a prominent figure in the Jewish community. He is a teacher of Hebrew, which is a vitally important fact here. He is one of those who helps to spread the Hebrew language to various other individuals, most notably Reuchlin. He is the one who teaches Reuchlin his Hebrew. And so he becomes prominent both both in his own advocacy for the Hebrew language, and in the advocacy for Hebrew that he bestows on his students. His students carry this forward. Reuchlin again is the most prominent of these, but there are a number of others as well. So one of the reasons that loans was so important was the use of personal physician to Frederick III, the Holy Roman Emperor.

2:33:58 Not to be confused with the later Frederick III in German lands. When loans taught Reueschlin Hebrew just before fifteen hundred, they formed a very close personal bond. We will put a link in the show notes to a paper that's titled A Unique Phylosemitic Public Intellectual. It's a glowing review of Reuchlin, basically calling him the first phylosemite in history. And that's based upon in large part his relationship with Loans, which is why Lones is coming up here. I'm gonna read you an excerpt from that paper, just so that because it has some of Reuchlin's own words to give you an idea of how important loans this rabbi, this physician to Frederick III was. Quote. In his letter he addresses loans as follows My Lord, dear master

2:34:50 Jacob, my companion and my good friend, with deep longing I wish to see your blessed face, to delight in the radiance of your bright countenance by hearing your most pure doctrine. And now I have written this scroll to you after I left you. I succeeded in my studies and made a great achievement. I know that you will be pleased and rejoice. Several years later, Reuslin published this letter in a book that included his correspondence with eminent Christian scholars such as Erasmus and Perkheimer. This letter triggered harsh attacks from Johann Pfefferkorn, an anti Judaic convert from Judaism to Christianity, who described it as an unbearable demonstration of Reuchlin's love for Jews and Judaism?

2:35:34 In his Rudiments of the Hebrew Language, Reuchland praised My teacher and my opinion, the powerfully learned Jacob loans a Jew, and my most humane teacher, the excellent doctor. So this introduces us to sort of the political situation just before Luther comes up. You have loans, very closely connected. He's a court Jew in the Holy Roman Empire. He teaches Reuchlin, and Reuchlin describes him as teaching most pure doctrine. Now Now, we've gone overboard talking about how despicable it is to go to Jews to learn doctrine, but think about that sort of comment from an alleged Christian. Because yo Johannes Reuchlin was ostensibly a Christian. That's why he had access to these places. When he says that loans, the rabbi has pure doctrine, what are

2:36:31 we as Christians to make of that? Well, maybe you don't know what to think. I will tell you because another link that we're going to have is going to be one that shows Reuchlin's extensive habilistic treatment. The incredible achievement that he mentions in his letter was a Kabbalistic work. The one of the first things that Loans did when he taught Roychl in Hebrew was also to teach him Kabbalah. And Reuschlin was invigorated by learning about Kabbalah. He felt that this unlocked the secrets of Christianity. And so one of the first things that he did in this glorious achievement that he knew that his teacher of pure doctrine was going to be delighted in, was Reuchlin's Kabbalistic tome, where he tried

2:37:18 to synthesize Kabbalah, Christianity, and Philosophy. Thankfully, the church rejected that. Unfortunately, Reuchlin was not burned at the stake as the heretic that he was. A Christian ruler, a truly Christian ruler, would have ended Reuchlin's life on the spot for publishing that. But he was a nerd. He was an intellectual, he was just publishing really interesting stuff that he was excited about and thought it was cool. So they let it slide. And everything that happens afterwards, just remember Reuchlin saying saying the pure doctrine is coming from a rabbi, is publishing the Kabbalah, is trying to import Jewish Babylonian black magic mysticism into the Christian faith. He's the man who teaches our next appearance?

2:38:06 Hebrew. What we see in Reuchlin's presence here in the Holy Roman Emperor's Council, by having access, he wasn't a direct participant, but again, he was close friends with a member of the court. He was very well connected politically. And that mattered a great deal because it meant you can get away with more things. You know, it's kind of like you know, the president's son who gets caught doing stuff probably gonna get treated differently than you or me. Another thing that was mentioned in that letter was that Roischlin had a dispute with a man named Johannes Pfefferkorn. As we mentioned earlier, there are only two good guys in this entire story of this episode. or the previous episode, really.

2:38:47 One was Nicholas Donan, the Jew who became a Christian in France in the thirteenth century. The other is Johannes Pfeffricorn, who is a Jew who became a Christian at this time in these lands? Pfeffricorn, when he saw what Reuslin, the ostensible Christian, was saying about Jewish teachings, was horrified rightly. This is despicable. And so Pfeffricorn did exactly the same thing that the other honest convert did centuries earlier. Pfeffricorn campaigned with the support of the Dominicans to confiscate and destroy Jewish books, particularly the Talmud. And this is based on an imperial mandate. And initially he did have approval to do it. Reuchlin, the ostensible Christian, swooped into the defense of the Jews.

2:39:36 So again we have these inversions that have happened over and over again in the story. This is really them coming to a complete head. On one hand you have the man born a Jew, Fephricorn, becomes a Christian, and is opposed to the wickedness of the Talmud. On the other hand, you have an ostensible Christian named Roichlin, who learns Hebrew, instantly gloms onto the Kabbalah, instantly gloms onto wickedness of the lowest degree, the most perverted stuff imaginable, coming from ancient Babylon, truly demonic stuff we're never gonna remotely touch, and you shouldn't either. We're gonna link to a demonic page that talks about how excited they were about Roischlin. I trust that you'll have the sense to read the bits about

2:40:18 Reuchlin, and I'll go exploring on the rest of that page. You're grown up. I don't need to sanitize things for your protection, but please just understand. Some of the wickedest people imaginable love Roychlin and they hate Pfeffercorn. They love the Christian, the wicked men love the Christian, and they hate the Jew who became a Christian Pfefforn because of this. Because when a Jew converts he ceases to be a Jew and he despises the Talmud, he despises Jewish teaching, and he knows that no Christian should be going near a rabbi to learn pure doctrine. That's why he was horrified. Pfeffercorn was as horrified as I was when I learned that. I didn't know of Roichlin's name before I began this investigation over

2:40:59 a year ago. When I discovered this it was like the lights came on, and suddenly it became clear that this moment began with Jerome and ends with Roychlin entering. These were the two moments in this entire story where men were linchpins. They were absolutely pivotal in Satan's plan because without Jerome going to rabbis, consulting with them, falling under their spells, importing their stuff, and then burying it in Latin so no one ever noticed. At the other end, 11th centuries later, we have Roischlin going to another rabbi, learning Kabbalah, learning black magic, bringing it into the church, saying, Look at this amazing stuff, I I know so much more about God now that I've studied Kabbalah.

2:41:45 He was excited to teach Hebrew to as many people as possible. As Cory said, Loans had numerous Hebrew students, but Reuchlin was as most prolific because of the access and the influence that he had on the Reformation itself. That's why I've said for a while, this episode in this series is going to upset absolutely everyone. Because what we are saying in no uncertain terms is this where there was a direct demonic influence on the men who shaped the Reformation? Does that mean that the Reformation shouldn't have happened? No. It was obvious that they were solving the right problem. And that's why the context window episode was done. That's why we say that this stuff is not cut and dried. There are no complete bad guys here.

2:42:30 Even Jerome was not a complete bad guy, even though he was profoundly wicked in many of the things that he did. Racial Reuchlin, I would say I I take that back. Reuchlin absolutely burning in hell. He was demonic beyond compare, because he was a Jew. Whether he was one by blood or not, he became a Jew the second he learned Hebrew, which incidentally is something we see left and right to this day. The problem is that when Reuchlin consulted with Loans, learned Hebrew, and then he took it into the Reformation, which is what we're about to get to, it shaped everything that came after. The Septuagint was out of everyone's mind. They were excited about Hebrew. They wanted to learn it. They wanted to go back to that pure spring.

2:43:13 For centuries that lie had been told over and over again. Not that the idea is wrong, as I said in the last episode, of course, this is exactly what we are saying here, return to the pure spring of the Septuagint. It's begging the question to assume that the Hebrew is older. It's not. It was five hundred years old at this time, and it was used under demonic influence of rabbis through Roychl and the Kabalist, such that the Reformation was poisoned at its very inception by the Hebrew language and by the men who practiced it. They never stood a chance. Now, what are we not talking about here? We're not talking about doctrine. We're saying that you don't go to a poisonous well for any purpose. You don't hang around it.

2:43:54 It doesn't matter if you're drinking from it or not, you don't go near it. This is precisely and what people say about Stone Choir. The people who hate us agree completely. You don't go anywhere and you're evil men. It doesn't matter what they get right, you don't listen to anything, because their designs are always turned in evil directions. I agree with that completely. That assessment is one hundred percent true, which I said earlier is why it rings true with people. Don't go near that guy, he's evil. I don't care if what he gets right. We're saying this of loans, the physician, the rabbi. Reuchlands would never have gone near him. Frederick III should never have permitted a Jew in his court, but

2:44:32 of course that was common at that point. It was basically stylish to have court Jews. That's a term of art, the court Jew. It's a thing you do. It shows that you're serious. How far did Christendom fall that we got to that? At one point we have Louis IX incinerating Talmuds in the public square, and Jews lined up shrieking about it, and then we have the Holy Roman Emperor celebrating them and passing off Hebrew as scholarship. That's how quickly things went wrong. Now, quickly in the sense of the story, but we're talking about centuries. This was Satan's long game. He put these pieces in play, he made these moves so that right at the very beginning of the Reformation you have a demon Kabbalist teaching Hebrew to the fathers of the Reformation.

2:45:19 And to give you an idea of how connected these individuals were to each other and also politically. Loans convinced the Holy Roman Emperor to gift to Reuchlin his first personal copy of the Hebrew Bible. So he received that as a gift from the Holy Roman Emperor because his court Jew told him he should do so. And Reuchlin is indeed very connected to the Reformation. And the reason that he's connected to the Reformation is not just because of materials that he produces and indeed Jewish materials, Hebrew materials that he protects, but also because he is actually related to to Philip Melanchthon. And so that relationship is used by Reuchlin to convince Philip Melancthan to learn Hebrew. Not just to learn Hebrew, but he is the one who gets

2:46:19 him his first position in a university to teach. Incidentally, he starts off teaching Greek, but he does end up teaching Hebrew and other things as well, and Melanchthon, of course for those who don't know, close confidant of Martin Luther, wrote some of the confessional documents in the Book of Concord, prolific writer, reformed the educational system in Germany. By and large a faithful and good man except for this influence from Reuchlin, except for the fact that he believed that Hebrew was necessary in order to truly understand the Old Testament. It's that same poison that we see down through the centuries in this narrative. Reuchlin, because of how well placed he is, and because of everything

2:47:08 that came before him, leading him to have this viewpoint that it is okay to go and talk to rabbis about Christianity. Reuchlin loses his soul in this bargain. Because he goes and talks to Lones, and as Woe said, Loans doesn't just tell him Here's Hebrew, I'll teach you Hebrew. You can learn this, and then you can really understand Scripture. He goes further, and he does exactly what Jews do given enough time. What he does is he tells him, Well you have the scriptures, but here's the real religion. Here's the real truth. Here is how you actually understand what's written in this book by interpreting it in this way with these other materials, that may sound familiar to you, because it's similar

2:47:56 to what was done with the allegorical interpretation of Scripture when it was taken too far. When you take the allegory and disconnect it, untether it from the literal reading, from the actual meaning of scripture, you wind up with a new religion. It's the same thing we see the Jews doing here. It doesn't matter what is actually written in that Old Testament that he gives to Reuchlin. Because ultimately what he gives Reuchlin is Kabbalah. That's his religion. It's the wickedness, it's the black magic that came from Babylon and probably also Egypt to some degree. It's this chained down through history of a demonic religion passed from Jew to Jew to Jew, and sometimes pawned off on non Jews. In this case Reutschlin.

2:48:44 Now, if you go and examine his family history, you'll probably find some things that point to a possibility of Jewish heritage. However, it wasn't raised by those who attacked him at the time for what he was doing, which was open Judaizing. It was not brought up by Pfeffricorn, for instance. So, by and large, it seems like he was probably actually originally a Christian, not a Jewish convert to Christianity, a Christian who essentially converted to Judaism. And then goes to work poisoning the well of the Reformation. Not in the sense again, as Wo said, not in the sense of doctrine, but in the sense of this belief that you need to go to the Hebrew, which isn't even a thing, but you need to go to this thing that was created by the rabbis

2:49:35 and passed off as the Hebrew in order to understand the Word of God. Don't go to the Septuagint, don't go to the Greek, don't go to the actual foundation of the church used for centuries by Christians who had zero access to Hebrew because Hebrew was dead and gone. Don't go to that. Take this thing that was given to us by rabbis who were Who worship Satan? And that's where we start off unfortunately in the Reformation. But again it is worth remembering. This is both sides of the Reformation, it is not just the Protestants. Yes, you have this direct connection between Reuchlin and Melanchthon. But Trent also affirms for the Roman Catholic position the use of the Hebrew in the Old Testament. This is an error that is made by all Christians at this

2:50:27 time. Again, the only two men who stand up in this narrative and say, No, you need to destroy these materials. These materials are wicked. You cannot use them as a Christian are the two men who actually converted from Judaism to Christianity and repudiated their former wickedness. Because Pfeffrovorn, just like Donin before him, says, you have to destroy these materials. It is not sufficient not to use them, they have to be destroyed, because they're wicked. What they contain is blasphemy, it is heresy, it is anti Christian. Using them, simply permitting them to continue to exist is wicked. That's the Christian response. And the only two men again who do it are the two men who used to be Jews.

2:51:09 All the Christians in this narrative are quite happy to use the Hebrew materials. They're quite happy to go and talk to rabbis, even though they should know better. But that sets the stage for what happens from that point forward. And it's what we're dealing with today. It's the same sort of problems we have now because all the way back with Jerome is when things went off the rails. And Christians have just been doubling down on it since despite the fact that there have been dozens of times in history to turn from the wickedness, they have not done so, because they have always fallen for this trap of believing the Hebrew is older or the Hebrew is necessary to understand Scripture, as we demonstrated in the previous

2:51:54 episode, it's not older. It's not necessary to understand Scripture. God gave us an inspired Old Testament in Greek, which we have had all along. All of these men could have learned Greek, and they could have gone and found a copy of the Septuagint and used it. Not one of them did so. I want to impress upon our listeners just how connected Roychlin was to Philip Melancthan's life Johannes Roychlin was Philip Melancthan's great uncle. At age eleven, Melancthan's father and grandfather died within two weeks of each other as well As a result, Philip immediately moved in with his great aunt, who was Roischland's sister. Put them in the same place at the same time. Philip Melanchthon's original name was not Melanchthon.

2:52:49 Philip was born Schwartz. Guess who named him Melanchthon? It was Reuchlin. Reuslin literally gave Melanchthon his name at this time when he was eleven or twelve years old, because Philip was a brilliant young man. He was absolutely brilliant. He was a precocious student. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Heidelberg at age fourteen, just two years later, and he finished his BA in two years. He wasn't going to Heidelberg yet when he met Reuchlin, or when he spent time with him, I'm sure he'd met him before. But when he moved in with his great aunt, he was suddenly very near to Reuchlin, his great uncle, who took him very much under his wing, tutored him, taught him languages, taught him classical renaissance

2:53:37 humanism, everything that he needed to be a scholar. Reuchlin did that. Reuchlin was positioned to do that when Philip's father and grandfather died at almost the same time. So Philip gets his BA at fourteen, two years later he gets his master's degree in Tubigan. Within five years of that, he gets a professorship, but within five years he's appointed professor of Greek, as Corey said, in Wittenberg. And this was with Reuchlin's direct orchestration. So fifteen eighteen, just a year after the ninety five theses are posted, less than years I think it was August, yeah. August when he shows up in Wittenberg. One year after the ninety five theses are posted, Luther's gone gangbusters, there is an introduction of Luther to Melanchthon, and this is effectively

2:54:30 how they met. I'm just gonna read a summary here and because it does a really good job of capturing everything that was going on at this moment. Four days after Melanchthon arrived in Wittenberg, he delivered his inaugural lecture which was titled On Improving the Studies of Youth. In elegant Latin, Melanchthon laid out a program for educational reform grounded in humanist principles. He strongly advocated in returning to the classical sources at Fontes and emphasized the critical importance of studying Greek and Hebrew, not just for appreciating classical literature, but specifically for understanding the original text of scripture accurately. He critiqued the dry logic chopping methods of late medieval scholasticism

2:55:14 that dominated university theology. Luther was present and was electrified by the speech. Any initial skepticism that he had of this very young slight man vanished. He immediately recognized the profound significance of Melanchthon's vision and skills for his own burgeoning theological reformation. Melanchthon wasn't just a classicist, he was advocating for the very linguistic tools necessary to bypass centuries of potentially flawed interpretations and engage directly with the Bible's original languages. Luther saw Melanchthon's program as perfectly complementary to his own theological aims. Luther was deeply impressed by the young scholar's intellect as eloquence in substance of his argument.

2:55:57 Luther wrote enthusiastically about Melancthan almost as Almost immediately in a letter to Georg Splatten, who was Elector Frederick's secretary. This was just a couple days after the speech that Melanchthon gave. Luther lavished praise on the inaugural address of Melanchthon himself, dismissing any concerns about his slight physical stature compared to his immense intellectual gifts, Luther saw Melanchthon not merely as a language teacher, but as a powerful ally whose humanism could serve the cause of theological truth. So where did Melanchthon get his love of Hebrew and Greek? He got it from Roychlin. His notion of adfontes is Jerome. We have eleven hundred years lining up perfectly so that this precocious

2:56:46 young man, this brilliant young man, who's going to go on to become a prolific scholar, at the seminal moment in his life, when his father and grandfather struck down so that there's no one else to take care of, and there's no man in his life any more, except for Roychlin. His great uncle in effect became kind of his custodial father, certainly by virtue of the influence that he had, to the point that he literally renamed him, which was common at that time. It was typical for them to take on a name that indicated their proficiency as a scholar. But But for Reuchlin to be the one naming Melanchthon, Melanchthon is still a pretty big deal. That shows you how much influence the guy has. Imagine you're eleven years old, your father and your grandfather die, and

2:57:30 some incredible scholar with all these worldly connections and this amazing secret knowledge, of course you're going to be thrilled. What young man, no matter how brilliant he was, isn't going to get excited about that? The smarter the kid is, the more exciting that's going to be. Particularly in the dire circumstance of almost becoming well, he effectively was an orphan, so he's living with his great aunt. This is nothing short of Satan's plan snapping into frame. Everything lined up for this moment. Not because Luther's theology was demonic, but because this moment with Reuchlin taking Melanchthon under his belt, and then Luther glomming onto the much younger Melanchthon's astute scholastic abilities, ensured that no one was ever going

2:58:21 to look at the Hebrew. So we see later on when Luther is translating Esther, he doesn't want to do it. He despises it. He doesn't want to include Esther in the Bible because it doesn't include a single mention of God. He can say it to be a godless wicked book is not really a great story. There's no mention of God. It was he didn't want it in the Bible. He wanted to go down to sixty-five books. The tragedy of that was that Luther was well aware of the Septuagint. He was aware of the so-called additions to Esther and the Septuagint. And we'll put a link in the show notes to in a couple weeks, well next week we'll include in the show notes, an article that lays out the many differences between Esther and Septuagint

2:59:04 and Esther in the Masoretic text. It's a completely different book. Luther knew that the Septuagint version talked about God, and yet because of the blinders that Satan brought Roychlin with Melanchthon into Luther's life, he wouldn't even consider it. Because for his mind to open to the even the possibility that maybe there was something worthwhile in the Septuagint would have raised too many questions. He couldn't Luther in his own mind couldn't risk asking the question. If he had translated Esther from Greek instead of from Hebrew, he would have loved it. It's a great book. He was great about it? The king is a Christian. The non-Jewish King is a Christian. Very clearly. It's a very Christian and very God-fearing book.

2:59:52 So guess why it got censored? The Masoretic version of Esther is demonic. The every copy should be burned. It should not exist. It is a wicked book. Luther was right about that. The Holy Ghost was warning him when he looked at Esther. This is crap. So we'll detail that next week, but just remember, this precise moment in history, Reuchlin, the Kabbalist, takes Melanchthon under his wing, teaches him Hebrew, makes him love Hebrew. Of course Luther, who is not nearly as good at this point at Hebrew as Melanchthon, is going to be like great, this guy can solve my problems. It was the perfect setup. It ensured that godly men like Melanchthon and Luther, who were asking the right questions, would never ask the one that mattered most.

3:00:35 They were tackling justification, they were tackling big ticket items, they were tackling all the things that we're told are the most important things about the Reformation. The single most important question the Reformation was never asked. The question was what is the textual source for the Old Testament? From Jerome to that day, everyone just assumed that it was gonna be Hebrew. There was no fight after Augustine. No one put up a fight. No one pointed to the Septuagint. No one cared about Greek at all. And as soon as they do start caring about Greek again, you know, less than fifty years later, it's only for the New Testament, which was fine. That was a good thing. That was important too.

3:01:14 But the Latin New Testament's not in bad shape. It's the Latin Old Testament that had a problem, because it was not based on Scripture. It was based on Hebrew. So as I said before and for over a year now, the conclusions of what we must face when we're looking at evaluating the church history with regard to the Septuagint on our dyer, it puts us in an impossible situation. It puts us in the same situation that Luther found himself in five hundred years ago. He was in a situation where it turned out that there was an accumulation of errors for centuries, and facing those errors, he had to do something. And those changes ended up having to be radical because when you unwind the errors, you have to do things that maybe were accepted

3:02:00 for centuries. And that's why the Reformation was such a ultimately violent and terrible split in the Western Church, because you have centuries of tradition and teaching and doctrine that had to be excised. The church went in two different directions, and that's always going to be painful and ugly. What Satan did with Jerome and Roychlin as the two pivot points of this entire story was to ensure that no matter what happened in the Reformation, no one was going to look at the Septuagint. It never happened. The engagement that they occurred with the Septuagint was trivial. It was, you know, like, okay, let's look. It's incidental, but it was genuinely trivia. It was not important. It was certainly not seen as the Bible of Jesus and the

3:02:45 apostles in the early church. They just ignored that entirely because they bought the lie that Jerome told. Satan put a couple men on the board and then filled out the rest of it with It with filler, like we said, most of these people are kind of filler. They could have come and gone and it wouldn't make much difference. With Jerome and Roischland on the board, Satan ensured that there was never going to be any consideration of Greek after the after the Reformation. And so here we are over five centuries later. And we'll see if there's any consideration. We'll see if the question is finally asked. We're raising it. And we're raising it with full knowledge that this is the most disruptive thing that's happened in many centuries in the church history.

3:03:26 Because if you honestly take a look at what the New Testament says about the Septuagint, you can't follow the path of these people. And And the reason that's such a winding path is that there are so many false choices put in front of men. You have arguments over allegory versus literalism. And then the argument is, okay, well, literalism comes from the Jews. We need more Hebrew. It was always a series of wrong choices, and in every step the choice was let's get more Jews in here. We see that just taking off like a rocket today. The reason that we have Seder meals in churches in the 21st century is a Masoretic text. It's because the Septuagint was rejected by the church falsely under demonic

3:04:08 oppression, under the direct involvement with Satan, ensuring that the question would never be asked. It's a simple question. And, you know, as we're raising it, it's with full knowledge that if they had asked the question genuinely as we're asking it, they would have arrived at the same answers. The only reason that they didn't use the Septuagint in the Reformation, or at any point previous, is no one asked the question. That's why it's humorous at this second, even longer episode about the Septuagint, none of the guys ever talk about it. Until that polyglot Bible, it doesn't show up once. Why would it? No one could in the West could even read Greek until the mid-1400s. The Septuagint was never even possible.

3:04:48 And then at the very moment when you have reformers doing true reform to the church as was necessary because of the false doctrine that it accumulated, and they were looking at the textual sources, Reuslin relamed Philip Melancthan, put him in front of Luther and guaranteed that question would never be asked. Had Luther lived longer, had Reuchlin not lived at all, we would have seen some very different answers. Now that's it's a counterfactual to history that can't be proven, but when you look at the end of Luther's life historically, the trajectory he was on, he probably would have started asking some of these questions, even though it would have proven him a fool at certain points. Because he became a lover of Hebrew.

3:05:30 He spent time on it. We see that today. The guys who spend a lot of time learning Hebrew love it. They think that it's so alien and foreign and it has richness and it's just it's defining for them that they've learned this because they were told that it was the original language. They should have just learned Greek. It was wasted time. Every one of them wasted time. But crucially as part of this story, it wasn't until the thirteenth century that anyone was learning Hebrew. It's a joke. The way that pastors are raised up today and trained is an ahistoric joke. It has no basis in the history of the church. And at every point, the wrong question was asked and the wrong path was taken because they were trying to solve the small problem,

3:06:10 not the great one. At this point we are about halfway through this series because in reality it has four core episodes we'll be doing the episodes actually properly comparing the text in the next two weeks. Well, not the next two weeks, but the next two episodes. And then we had the introductory episode and then sort of the hanger on episode where we will be discussing what needs to be done in our opinion. Again, we won't be the ones doing this. This is a task for other Christian men. This is not a task for us. And so we are not going to be the ones doing the new translations, creating what needs to be created for the sake of the Christian Church, for the sake of a future Christendom, for the sake of restoring the things that have been lost down through

3:07:00 these centuries. of men failing to do what it was their duty to do. But I'd like to echo what Woe said and perhaps emphasize it a little bit. I do firmly believe that if God had given Luther another ten twenty years of life, he would certainly have figured out his error on this particular question. Because he died in fifteen forty six, but in fifteen forty three you have on the Jews and their lives and their lies, and then his final sermon, in fact, before dying, that he preached the night before he had his final health issues and then wound up dying sometime in the night, he preached against the Jews, he preached against their wickedness, he preached against the synagogue, and the evil that

3:07:46 it had brought into Germany and into Christian lands. And there are those who like to condemn Luther for seemingly they think they think, going overboard. Given what we've laid out in this episode and the previous one, and in our series on the Jews, I hardly think that a Christian could consider anything that Luther did or said to have been overboard with regard to the Jews. And for those who think that when Luther describes the synagogue as an incorrigible whore in an evil slut, if you think that that language is inappropriate or overboard or unbecoming of a Christian, I would point out that realistically he is simply paraphrasing Chrysostom, because Christom in his homilies against the Jews caused calls the synagogue a brothel and

3:08:35 a theatre, and in fact he says it is the domicile of the devil, a place of idolatry. The synagogue is worse than a brothel. It is a den of robbers, a hideout for wild beasts. Christom, of course, was preaching back before Hebrew became a problem. He was preaching from the Old Testament, in the inspired Greek. That's the Christian position. That is what true Christian teachers have taught down through the centuries. Unfortunately, for a period of time we simply forgot that we had the Septuagint. Some of you will have undoubtedly have already connected these two events together, but I would remind you of something we have mentioned in a number of episodes. For a period of time, Old Testament Israel lost lost the Bible,

3:09:28 what portion they had of it, in a wall, in the rubble, in the temple. They totally forgot they had it. We did the exact same thing with the Septuagint, except we forgot it was in the archives at the Vatican and wherever else copies were stored over the centuries. We had the Old Testament in Greek the entire time. at any point in this span of fifteen hundred years at this point longer, someone could have gone, taken that, learned Greek, and translated it into languages that were then in use. That was always on the table, that was always an option. God preserved his word faithfully as he promised he would do. We never lost the Greek. We misplaced it for a period of time, stupidly. Not even truly misplaced it, we knew it was there.

3:10:21 The Jews had totally forgotten and didn't even know where it was. We still knew that we had it. Some of these scholars were aware of the existence of the Septuagint, they had to be, because the church fathers wrote about it. They just never managed to connect together we have the Greek, we have the Old Testament as God preserved it for us. We should be using that. There's this sort of spell that falls over most men when it comes to foreign languages. If you use a foreign language, people assume that you must be highly educated and highly intelligent. Peasants living in Palestine in Christ's Day knew two or three languages. Men who were otherwise uneducated, generally couldn't even read, but they knew

3:11:10 three languages. There are many today who have virtually no education and speak two or three languages. Knowing a second or a third language should not particularly impress you. Yes, to some degree, depending on when you learn it, it is an intellectual or an academic achievement, but it's not a particularly great one. And so this sense that we have of being wildly impressed because someone managed to learn Hebrew, how great is that you learned this foreign language. You should not have that reaction to it. Think of it in the same way that you'd think of someone who becomes obsessed with Japanese culture learning Japanese. Okay great, I know some tidbit about your life you have a weird hobby.

3:11:52 Except in the case of Hebrew the language itself is evil because it came from the pits of hell. Learning Japanese isn't going to endanger your soul. What we have seen down through the centuries and even today, particularly today, and particularly in response to this episode, Hebrew endangers the soul of the men who learn it. Because it was created for wicked purposes, by a wicked people, inspired by Satan himself. That may seem like it's an extreme statement, but look at the fruit of this tree. We went up to the Reformation. We didn't even go beyond that. To some degree and in some ways it gets worse after that, because dispensationalism is fruit of this tree. Judaizing in the modern form is fruit of this tree.

3:12:39 The modern nation state of Israel, so called, is fruit of this tree. The world wars to a large degree are fruit of this tree. So much wickedness and suffering and death has flowed from this error, from this evil on the part of those who knew what they were doing and those who should have known better. There is no way that a Christian can possibly interpret it other than to look at it and recognize that it comes from the pit of hell and must be rejected. We need to have new translations of the Old Testament from the faithful Greek. Because the Greek is what God preserved. The Greek is what God gave us. And I want to emphasize that point again. God preserved the Greek. What does God promise in his word?

3:13:32 He says that he will preserve his word. He says that none of it will be lost. Did that occur with the Hebrew? From what we have told you of the history in these two episodes, and by all means go and research it for yourself if you are so inclined. The Hebrew was not preserved. If the Hebrew was not preserved, then you have two options it's not the word of God or God lied. And that's an either or. We advocate, we are stating firmly and in no uncertain terms that the Hebrew is not the preserved word of God. It is not the divinely inspired word of God. And the reason that we say that is that we believe what God says in his word, and he says that none of it will be lost, and incidentally we have that in the New Testament

3:14:25 over which no one is squabbling about the original language. We all know that's Greek. God says nothing will be lost, nothing was lost of the Greek. Almost everything was lost to the Hebrew. That's a simple choice for a Christian. God said he'll preserve his word. God preserved the Greek. The Greek is my Old Testament. The Greek is the Old Testament of the Church Fathers. The Greek is the Old Testament of the Early Church. The Greek is the Old Testament of the establishment of Christendom in the lands of Japheth, as Father Noah promised and as God fulfilled. All we have to do is believe what God has said. That's the baseline for being a Christian. Yes, to be a Christian, you have to have faith in Christ,

3:15:12 and we all know the creeds and the doctrines and those things we've gone over them at length in other episodes. But a foundational matter is simply believing the word of God, believing the things that God says are actually true. What we are saying is that God has spoken the truth, He has fulfilled His word in time, and that we believe him according to the things He has said, according to the way that He has brought it about in time. Others are telling you that you instead have to believe what rabbis say, what those who blaspheme God daily say, what those who hate you and call for your death and your destruction say. Don't believe them. It's similar to how we mention in politics you have two options.

3:16:01 When it comes to politics and social issues, you can believe what your ancestors said about the Jews, or you can believe what the Jews say about your ancestors. Again, fourth commandment should not be a difficult decision for Christians. I believe what my Christian ancestors said. I don't believe what the Jews said about them. And similarly, in the same vein, I don't believe what the Jews say about God. I believe what God says about Himself, I believe the words of Christ, and the words of Christ are that nothing will be lost. And incidentally when Christ says that, he's speaking Greek, and he's talking about the Greek, and we still have the Greek, and we should rely on and use the Greek, because that is the Old Testament

3:16:44 of the Church, it is the received Old Testament of the Church, it is the foundation of the Church, because it is God's Word.