Was Matthew Written in Hebrew? Shocking Discoveries with a Karaite Jewish Expert

The question is, do we have that Hebrew version of Matthew that Papias mentions, whether it’s the original words or it’s the full gospel of Matthew or a version of Matthew? Do we have the one that you see be saw in the library in Cesar, in Israel? So we have the earliest Hebrew version of any New Testament book that we have was copied by a Jewish rabbi named Sherut around the year 1380 in Spain. This was a time when Jews were being forced to enter into these debates with Catholics. If we’re forced to engage in these debates, we have to read the New Testament, and we’ll start with Matthew so we know what they’re talking about. So he has this Hebrew version of Matthew. It was assumed this was a translation from Latin or from Greek. What George Howard in the 1980s shows is there are things in it that it’s hard to explain as translations from Greek.

Yeah, that’s what I want you to get into. This is fascinating.

I don’t know if we have time in this segment

To do it. We do, yeah, we have time.

Okay. So

Welcome back to another episode of the Covenant and Conflict podcast. We have a very, very special guest, NAIA Gordon. Is that right?

That’s right.

Beautiful. Now, is there a reason the H isn’t on the end? I heard someone say

So. Yeah, it’s interesting. I was always taught to spell it that way without the H at the end. And I once asked my mother when I was an adult, why don’t everybody else has the book of Nehemiah in the Bible has the H at the end. And she said, well, your father didn’t want it to spell out the name of God, so the name means ya. Comforts like hallelujah. Ya is a shortened form of God’s name. And so when Jews traditionally write God’s name, you’ll see like they write G dash d. And the reason they do that is the thought is one day that piece of paper is going to end up in the garbage and it is sacrilegious to throw God’s name into a pile of garbage. So whenever I write my name, I’m writing it without the H. That was my father’s idea that I wouldn’t write it with the H, so it wouldn’t be writing God’s name, which might end up in the trash heap. It’s okay if my name ends up with the trash heap, but not God’s

Name. Wow.

Yeah, and there’s actually a really interesting historical thing related to that. So we have something in, I studied Jewish history

And

One of the greatest collections of documents for Jewish history is called the Cairo. It was this sort of like a broom closet in a synagogue in Cairo where for a thousand years they would put old books because they wouldn’t throw God’s name into the garbage. And because of that, scholars have been able to come after a thousand years and collect hundreds of thousands of Jewish writings that have survived because they didn’t throw things in the garbage.

Wow.

So that’s why there’s no H at the end of my name, God’s name is too holy to throw away.

What a way to start the podcast. I was just curious. And it got us to this rich history. So if this is any sign of where the podcast is going, this is going to be a good one. I’m glad that we’re not as strep for time today. So we’re so excited that you’re here. Thank you for coming out.

Thanks for having me

And being here. The invitation for you to come here came because I read one of your books and like I told you earlier, it is my favorite book that I’ve read this year, like hands down. And it was eyeopening, it was fun, it was funny, it was revealing. And so there’s so many things I’d love for you to talk about and hopefully we can have you on other times to talk about things that I know you’re passionate about. But I’d love to just start. Well, I want to talk about your book Hebrew Yeshua versus the Greek Jesus. But before we dive into the specific content, I was telling our team, yeah, NAIA Gordon’s coming. He’s a Karaite Jewish man. And our team, I mean, you would’ve thought I was having a unicorn. Come on the podcast. They were like, what? Are you serious? That’s amazing. Did

They know what that was?

They knew what it was. Yeah. But I’ve heard it described as a minority within a minority. So it’s like,

And I’m even worse, I’m a minority within a minority. Within a minority,

Okay.

Just to make life interesting.

Tell us about the minority within a minority. Within a minority, and explain for our audience who might not know what a karaite Jewish person is and your belief system

And all that. So CARite comes from the Hebrew word rah, which is the ancient Hebrew word for scripture. It actually means scripture. Is that which is written or Mika is that which is read? It’s that which was read in the synagogue. That was the ancient Hebrew word for the Hebrew Bible. And in the Middle Ages, going back to the eighth century, you had a split in Judaism with really the rise of the Talmud. And there were Jews, especially in Persia who, which is in the news now, Iran, right?

Yeah, totally.

But there was a major center of Jews going back to the exile of the northern kingdom who had been taken as captives by the Assyrians and settled were told in the cities of Persia and media. And about, I don’t know, over a thousand years later, when the Talmud started to disseminate throughout the Jewish world, there were people who said, well, this is a bunch of teachings of maybe some very learned rabbis, but they’re teaching us things that we don’t see in the Bible. We just follow the Bible. And so you had a split between those who called themselves the followers of the Talmud and the followers of scripture and followers of scripture. And Hebrew was ka CARite in English. And this was a movement that at one time was 50% of the Jewish people.

Really

Today it’s very, very small to something like 35,000 out of a Jewish population of depending who’s counting between 16 and 20 million. And most CARite are descendants of people who over a thousand years ago made the decision, no, we just follow the Bible. We don’t follow the Talmud. I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. My father thought studying the Talmud was the greatest pursuit that human or certainly a male could carry out. His goal for me in life was to spend all day every day studying the Talmud. And as I was being trained in the Talmud, I said, wait a minute. I said the same thing they said 1300 years ago. Wait a minute, this isn’t scripture. This is just some rabbis who are arguing about what scripture means. We just follow scripture, especially when it seems to me at least that scripture is different than what these rabbis are saying. In some instances, they’re deliberately saying, well, we have more authority than, I mean, there’s a famous story I could tell where they literally say that God has no say in how to interpret scripture. He gave that authority to us. And I said, no, I just want to follow what scripture says. And I was told by my teachers, my rabbis, that’s a dead end. If you do that, you’re going to die. You’ll cease to exist

If you just follow scripture.

Yeah, wow. Because I was told that there were no cites alive anymore in the world. I knew they existed historically. That was maybe the mistake

That

I remember this distinctly, my fourth grade rabbi, who was the homeroom teacher, he told us how once in history there were these people who were so stupid, they only followed what it said in the Bible and not the rabbis.

Oh my goodness.

And he called them the Roim, which is his Eastern European pronunciation. And I said, wait a minute, that makes perfect sense. Why don’t we all do that?

You’re like, I think those guys were onto

Something. Exactly. But I was told, no, you can’t do that. That’s a dead end. You’ll cease to exist just like they did. And I said, well, even if I cease to exist, I have to follow what I believe to be the truth and follow my convictions. This I’m saying at quite a young age. And I was told that one of the things I was told is, you can’t read the Bible. And for me, the Bible was in my community, the Bible was the Old Testament, the Christians called the ak. So I was told, you can’t read the AK without the verse by verse running commentary of rabbis. It’ll lead to heresy. And I like to say, well, I’m living proof. That’s true. I actually believe what the Old Testament, what the AK says, and I do consult the teachings of the rabbis. I think they have a lot of very wise and beautiful things they say.

Yeah, it’s not that it’s not useful, it’s just that it’s not scripture.

It’s not scripture, and it’s not binding. That’s the important

Thing

From my perspective as a CARite Jew. That’s what it means for me to be a CARite Jew, is that I do my best to follow the Tanah.

Yeah. It was interesting. I was having a podcast with a Messianic Jewish woman who’s a scholar, and we were talking about church authority

And

How much emphasis should we give to church authority throughout history now. And we were talking about authority versus this kind of so scriptura Protestant movement, which is very much know what does scripture say? And she said, and in Judaism, you even have this, you have the karaite, and then you have kind of rabbinic Judaism, which is the majority. So it is, at least for our audience, many Christians, it might help to draw parallel, kind of like when we see the Catholic church or maybe Catholic traditions, and you see something like praying the rosary, and you’re like, where in the Bible is that?

Or praying to marry?

Praying to marry. Yeah. Where in the Bible is that? And you say, oh, well, that was tradition that was added on later. And that’s maybe things that people have asked the

Rabbi. There’s a stunning parallel, so much so that during the early days of the Protestant Reformation, and people have historians have written about this, there were Catholics who threw the accusation as an insult against the Protestants saying, you are CARite.

Wow.

And the CARite, or excuse me, the Protestants threw the accusation against the Catholics. You are rabbinites, which is what the term evolved into talus became. The rabbis are the people with authority who then consult the Talmud.

Wow.

And so there was a consciousness in the early days in the 16th century of the Protestant reformation on both sides that, wait, this has played out before in history, people who say we want to follow scripture. And people who say, well, no, scripture is one source of authority that has to be passed through the filter of tradition. So the Talmud essentially was this body of interpretation that, here’s the way I’ve heard it described by rabbis. They’ve said, well, if you went to a university lecture and you heard the professor give his lecture and you wrote down your notes, the Torah is those notes that Moses wrote down. It’s just kind of like an outline.

And

You can’t understand a single thing how to do it without the detailed lecture that was given to Moses, which is the Talmud, or the contents are contained within the Talmud. May be a more accurate way to say it. My response to that was, I think if God wanted me to know something, he would’ve written it down. And we have this beautiful verse in Joshua chapter eight where I read it says, Joshua read all that God commanded Moses. Well, wait a minute, if it wasn’t, and this is one of the claims of the rabbis, is that a lot of it was this oral tradition that wasn’t written down until 2000 years later in the Talmud. Talmud was written down around, or it was completed around the year 500 ad. And the Torah was given around 14 50, 1400 BCE. So that’s almost 2000 years later. So it was oral for many centuries, and then they eventually wrote it down. They probably actually didn’t write it down until the ninth century.

Wasn’t the understanding from the rabbinic perspective, God gave two Torahs the oral and written hundred percent, and that we were never supposed to write the oral down. Wasn’t

That it was forbidden to write it down, but eventually they were being persecuted. And again, in the news as the Iranians, they were being persecuted by the Iranians, particularly by the Zoroastrian priests who Zoroastrianism was the official religion of the Persian empire. And around the year 500, there are these horrible persecutions by the Persian empire, and they say, we got to write it down or it’s going to be forgotten.

Got it.

And once it was written down, now that’s authoritative. It’s not discussion so much anymore as well. We can discuss what they said.

It’s binding, it’s more binding. When it was written,

It was binding to some extent even before that. So there’s a story in the Talmud about a gentile who comes to these two rabbis. And this is the first century, b, CE, about a generation and a half, two generations before Jesus. So you go to Shama and Hillel, these two famous rabbis, of course, first they go to Shama, and Shama was known as a hothead. And the Gentile says, I want be a Jew, so teach me the written Torah, but don’t teach me the oral Torah. The oral Torah is later, was written down as the Talmud. That’s the term that’s used there in that story from around 30 BCE, the to the oral Torah. And Shami takes his builder staff because he was by profession of builder, and he beats him over the head and chases him away. He then goes to Hillel, who is Shamis competitor,
And the Gentile says, teach me the written Torah, but don’t teach me the oral Taurus to make me a Jew. And he teaches him. He says, okay, today’s first lesson is I’m going to teach you the Hebrew alphabet, Beck Gimel. He says, come back tomorrow, I’ll do the next lesson. And the next day he says, gibe Olive and the Gentile who wants to convert to Judaism is stunned. He says, yesterday, you taught me the order was Alf bemal. Now it’s gibe olive. And hill says, well, if you rely on me for just knowing the meaning of the words, then you have to rely on me or even actually what the alphabet is. You have to rely on me to understand what the words mean. And look, this was something that in a form was presented to me when I was growing up, which was, you’re descended from all these great rabbis, and you can’t even read their writings. Right? They’re written in Hebrew, and I knew some Hebrew, but they were frankly quite advanced writing some of the things they wrote, and they were right.

And

So I made it my life’s mission that I was going to study and be able to read those writings, and at least when it came to the Bible, the ach, that I know more about it than they did. So now I have a PhD in biblical studies, and I’m not saying that to brag, I didn’t do it for anybody else, but for myself so that I could in a clear conscience say, you know what? I did read the Bible and I’ve used the most advanced tools that are available to me. And I still think that we should just follow the word God in the ach.

Yeah, that’s amazing. I’d love for you to maybe just touch briefly. I think it’s interesting, especially for our audience, some of the major different interpretations. I know it’s like the binding,

I’ll give you the easiest example here. So it says in three places in the Torah, don’t kid in its mother’s milk. It’s an Exodus 23, Exodus three, four in Deuteronomy 14, three times. And there were ancient even rabbis who said, well, what a strange thing, boy, a kid is a young goat just linguistically. So don’t a young, why would you even do that? Why would you boil a young goat?

I wasn’t planning on it.

Right. Why would you do that? So archeologists in the 20th century excavated this site on the coast of Syria called Ross Shara about

This,

And there they found documents that describe boiling a goat in milk. And it seems from the context there that this was some sort of a fertility, right?

Yeah. Like an ancient practice they would’ve been familiar

With. So absolutely. So it was an ancient fertility. It was a sort of sacrifice. Like Paul talks in the New Testament about not eating food sacrifice to animals

And

Relationship talks about that idol to idols and animals sacrifice to idols. So this was something that they did. They would boil young goats in the milk of their mother as a fertility to one of their goddesses, it seems. And so it wasn’t even about eating, and it doesn’t actually say, don’t eat it. It says, don’t boil it because the fertility, the rabbis come along and they say, well, what it means is don’t eat meat and milk together. It doesn’t matter if it’s meat from a cow or it doesn’t even have to be a young goat, even a chicken. Don’t eat that. No

Chicken parm.

So don’t eat that together with any dairy products and the ramifications of that. So how does that apply in daily life? So what that means is growing up as an orthodox Jew, we had two sets of dishes, those for dairy products and those for meat products. And I had to explain this all to my wife who wasn’t raised Jewish. And she’s like, wait, eggs, what are those? No eggs are considered parvo, which is neither meat nor dairy. So there’s a third category. So this is all kinds of profound applications to daily living. And I just read, don’t boil LA kid and it’s mother’s milk and say, well, it means don’t boil LA kid’s mother’s milk. And whether it is right historically that this was a fertility or maybe God has some other reason, well, he didn’t say so. It doesn’t necessarily matter. What’s important is he said, don’t boil lakin’s mother’s milk. And it didn’t say anywhere. Don’t eat meat and milk together. There’s the famous story in Genesis where Abraham serves butter, which might’ve been some kind of a dairy product other than butter, but the word later meant butter might’ve been some kind of a yogurt, or Lena or something.
It says, so he serves them a dairy product, the three angels, and he brings the meat. And the rabbi struggled with this. What’s going on here? We know we’re not allowed to eat meat and milk together, but apparently Abraham served it. And their answer is, well, they were angels. They only appeared to eat. So it is just, they don’t actually have stomachs or mouths. They just were kind of apparitions that, well, why did he serve it then? And so they have to do these, I call them exegetical acrobatics. So in other words, they’re interpreting the text and they’re trying to figure out what’s going on here. We got to come up with all kinds of theories because it doesn’t fit what we believe to be the interpretation. And to me, it’s just like, it’s simple. Don’t boil looking ATS mother’s milk. The Torah is just so simple if you don’t make it hard.

Yeah, I’ve heard a CARite Jewish man explain that the rabbis will want to interpret something literally, but we want to interpret something plainly plain. That’s

That’s a really important distinction. I’ll talk to a lot of Christians who will, Protestants especially, who will tell me, they say, well, we don’t interpret the Bible. We just read it. And from a Jewish perspective, that’s incoherent.

Yeah. What do you mean?

Every time you read any text, you’re interpreting it. What we want to do is we want to interpret it according to what we call the shot. That’s a concept in Hebrew. Shot is the plain meaning. Plain meaning is the interpretation based in the language and the context using common sense. In other words, if just a normal person 3,500 years ago heard the Torah read, what would they understand?

Because

They didn’t usually have a copy of the Torah. They were hearing it in a public reading.

Totally.

What would they understand? That’s called the shot. Now, the rabbis distinguish between shot and dro. Dro is anything that’s not the plain meaning. So it’s anything where

Miro, where we get that word.

So Miro comes from that, although Miro can have a lot of different meanings. Miro can just be we sit down and we study, or it’s a place where study takes place, but mid then came to also mean anything that wasn’t the shot. And there’s an interesting statement in the Talmud that says, scripture never loses its shot. What that means is yes, it’s true that you’re not allowed to boil a kid in mother’s milk, but the Dro interpretation, which is that you can’t eat meat and milk together is also true according to them.

Meaning

Both things can be true at once in the rabbinical way of looking at it. And they have a famous saying that scripture has 70 true meanings, which is sort of hyperbole. What are those? Maybe it’s not literally 70, but it can have multiple meanings. It’s like

Jesus, forgive him 70 times seven. He’s

Right. Well, those are what we call typological numbers, right? We’ll say a gazillion, right? Well, that’s not a real number. So they would say 40, 70, right? Does 40 literally mean 40? Not necessarily in biblical Hebrew. It’s like a big nice round number. Wow. Right. So yes. And the original one, by the way, I wrote my master’s thesis on this. The original one wasn’t 70, it was 49.

Which one? When Jesus, no,

No, where the rabbi

Said, oh, the Rabbi said,

In other words, the rabbis. Every Jew today knows that there’s 70 meanings of scripture.

The

Original rabbinical saying, I uncovered it was 49 true meanings.

Wow.

And later they made it 70, because that’s maybe a nice

Good round number.

It’s easier. It’s divisible by 10, whereas 49 is seven times seven. Right. So it’s another sort of typological number.

Wow.

So I say, let’s just try to follow, I just want to follow what’s in scripture and do my best. That’s sort of what I ended up writing the book about the Hebrew Shu versus the Greek Jesus. I was approached by these folks in Israel who were engaging with some Messianic Jews who were reading Matthew chapter 23 verses one through three. And there it seems just from the plain meaning

That

Jesus is saying, you shouldn’t, you have to obey what the Pharisee say, even if they don’t do it themselves. Now, Pharisee in the church, I was surprised when I learned this. Pharisee in the church means hypocrite,

Which

Is bizarre to me because Pharisee in Hebrew means holy ones. It literally means those who have separated themselves, and the word holy as well, which is Kosh, is something that’s been separated apart. They say, set apart and above. That’s what holy is. Right. And so Pharisee was those who have separated themselves from certain forms of ritual impurity that were observed during temple times that nobody thinks today can even be observed because we don’t have a temple. So Pharisee was not an insult. It was a sort of dedication that many Jews who believed in the oral Torah took upon. Not every rabbinical Jew was a Pharisee,

But

Many of them took this dedication upon themselves that they wouldn’t eat certain things that the multitudes ate, and they wouldn’t touch certain things that the multitudes touched. And it’s interesting, Herod puts a tax on the Pharisees according to Josephus. And if I remember there was, I don’t remember the exact number, I read this decades ago, but it was like 1500 or 15,000 or something at a time when there were over a million and a half Jews in Israel. So not every Jew was a Pharisee, but there was sort of like an intellectual elite who considered themselves the intellectual elite for sure. Who had a lot of influence, who were called Pharisees. And in Matthew 23, let’s read it if we can. Yeah,

No, totally.

So this is the Bible you had here that you gave me here. Oh, I didn’t bring my reading glasses. Alright. So in your translation here, it says, then Yeshua spoke to the crowds and to his disciples saying the tourist scholars, that’s how your translation, this is the

The TLV. Yeah.

Okay. The tourist scholars and Pharisees, there’s actually two groups of people there sit on the seat of Moses. So whatever they tell you, do and observe, but don’t do what they do for they say for what they say they do not do. So it really sounds like he’s saying obey with the Pharisees and these other tourist scholars tell you to do.

Yeah. Just don’t mimic them.

Well, no. Even if they don’t do it themselves,

I

Mean that I think that would be the Jewish reading, right? They don’t always fulfill their own rules. And that’s true growing up. So I grew up as a modern day Pharisee, meaning my father didn’t take on the laws of ritual purity because those are only from Temple times. But the rabbis see themselves as a direct continuation of Shamai and Hillel who were ancient Pharisees when the temple was destroyed. They just continued as rabbis. They weren’t called Pharisees anymore. And they continued that legacy. So to the point where every ordained rabbi makes the claim that he was, and this is another parallel to Catholics, that they had this line of ordination that goes back to Moses. Moses ordained Joshua and Joshua. This is the way it’s described in the Mishna.

Joshua

Ordained the elders and the elders, the prophets and the prophets, the men of the great assembly, and ordained literally means in Hebrew, smi that they took his hands. This is ascribed in, so this one’s actually true. Numbers 27 says, he put his hands and he transferred his authority by laying his hands on Joshua’s head. And that’s the Hebrew word for ordination, smha,

Right?

So they say, well, I’m a rabbi today. I was ordained by my rabbi who was ordained by his rabbi going back to Moses. And yes, the chain was slightly broken, but that’s some historical details. But basically, when you have a rabbi today, he has this line of ordination going back to Moses. That’s the claim. And so modern rabbis are the continuation of the ancient Pharisees. You can’t really dispute that. So I was dealing with these messianic Jews who were reading this and saying, okay, I’m Jewish. I believe in Yeshua. That’s what they were saying. And I have to follow what the Pharisee say. Well, what do they say? They say, don’t eat meat and milk together. They say,

Wash your hands before you eat.

Wash your hands before you eat. When you observe the Sabbath, you can’t, and this is not a joke.

You

Can’t tear toilet paper on the Sabbath because that violates when it says do not work. That the Pharisees interpret that as these 39 sort of actions, which then cascade down into all kinds of other actions.

And

One of those is tearing. You can’t tear a piece of paper, and therefore you can’t even tear a piece of toilet paper. That’s not a joke. Literally, if you’re a devout Orthodox Jew, you’ll have pre torn toilet paper on the Sabbath. I think in America they usually tear it themselves or cut it. In Israel, you can buy little packs of pre torn toilet paper.

Got it.

So I was meeting people who were doing that, who were saying, in order to be obedient to Yeshua, they felt they needed to follow all of these rules and regulations. And I was approached by some other Messianic folks who said, it sounds like they’re right. Do you have any insight here? At the time I was working on my master’s degree, I had a bachelor’s degree from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in biblical studies. And I said, well, I’m not a Christian or a Messianic Jew, but I can approach this as a textual problem and see if I can come up with an answer. And I don’t know that I can,

But

Let’s see what I find. And I ended up finding this medieval version of the gospel of Matthew in Hebrew

Where

It had a difference of one single letter and a

Difference to the Greek or difference to the Hebrew.

Now, most people, most scholars are going to say, well, that was just translated from the Greek. Okay, let’s stipulate that for the moment. Let’s assume that’s true. What did Jesus actually say? Did he say that? And again, it says, the Pharisee sit in the seat of Moses all for therefore that they bid you command, you observe that. Observe and do.

And

I found four medieval Hebrew manuscripts of the gospel of Matthew and Hebrew copied by rabbis that had a difference of one single letter.

Oh, you mean the Hebrew ones that were in circulation have one letter,

One letter difference. And in those four manuscripts, instead of all that they, the Pharisees, did you observe it was all that he command you to observe?

Did one say he or did three say he

One what

Of those four?

No. So there were 28 manuscripts. Not all of them were preserved in that passage, but for the manuscripts had all that he commands you to observe. So there in the context would be Moses, the Pharisee, sit in the seat of Moses, therefore all that he Moses commands you to observe that observe and do so. In other words, if that’s right, and look, I don’t know that it’s right. I’m proposing it as a possibility based on, look, this is what scholars do. They find something difficult in the scripture and there’s, there’s three ways to approach it. You can interpret it away, which is what most Christians do. You can offer what’s called an inundation. That’s a technical term in textual criticism. That means I think the text is corrupt here, and we’re going to read a slightly different text.

Got it.

And then there is textual criticism based on sources. So it’s called a textual variant. And here I wasn’t making up, this is what I think it might’ve said. I was saying, here are four manuscripts that say which one is original. I think if you’re a Christian, you have to decide that for yourself. And most Christians will say, no, no. Well, all the Greek manuscripts, have they not he. Okay, then you’ve got to come up with an exegetical explanation, and maybe those messianic Jews are right, and you shouldn’t eat meat and milk together. I’m not ruling that out as a possibility. That could be the explanation, right?

Or the layman’s response, which you just read over it and act like it wasn’t there.

Just ignore it. Let’s be honest, what most Christians do, they ignore it. What’s interesting is what the Catholics do, so what the Catholics do is they say, no, Jesus meant you have to obey the Pharisees. And the church has replaced a replacement theology, supersessionism, the church has replaced Israel. Now every ordained Catholic priest culminating with the Pope is the new Pharisees, is the new Pharisees and sages

A lot of

Hoop through, have to obey

Through.

What’s that?

It’s a lot of hoops you got to jump through.

And here’s the really fascinating thing, and this is one of the things I learned while doing this research on this, and this is like 25 years ago I did this research. So I hope I get all the details right. Guys read my book. I’m sure I’m saying wrong things

Here. Yes, read the book. It’s amazing.

Yeah. What I wrote there is certainly more accurate than what I’m saying today. I don’t know what I remember from 25 years ago, and I probably haven’t read the book in 20 years. So every bishop throughout the Catholic world has a cathedral. What’s an interesting word, cathedral. What’s the origin of the word cathedral? It comes from the Greek word cathedra, which means seat. And in the cathedral is a chair that the bishop sits in, and there’s this concept from the Vatican one council, right? You have Vatican one and Vatican two, where when the Pope speaks X cathedra from the chair, they consider that to be infallible. So not everything the Pope says is infallible according to modern Catholics. But when he says, I’m speaking from the chair that’s considered infallible,

Is that the seat of Moses?

That is literally the seat of Moses? Oh my goodness. It’s not a coincidence. They say it’s the seat of Moses. In other words, why do they call it a cathedral? They say, well, you have to obey the people sitting in the chair according to Jesus himself. And the word in Greek is cathedra. That’s the word in the Greek manuscripts of the gospel of Matthew, chapter 23, the cathedra of Moses. So they say, we today, the Catholic church sit in the seat of Moses. You have to obey us. Jesus himself said, you have to obey us. So you could say your so of s scriptura, but scripture in their case, Matthew 23

Says,

Obey the people in the seat. That’s us. We have the cathedrals.

Wow. This is fascinating.

So look, I was really dealing really with Jews who believed in Jesus, who were reading the words of Jesus and Matthew and saying, okay, well, we know how to apply this today, right? Maybe Jesus did he meat and milk, but he said, obey the people who sit in the seat of Moses. We know who those people are. They’re the rabbis. What I didn’t know until I did a lot more research was, wow, this has echoes even in modern Christianity. Who would know that when you go to a cathedral that represents the seed of Moses?

Wow.

And it’s a claim to authority based on Matthew 23.

Geez. Wow. That’s amazing. It’s pretty cool. This is interesting. Okay, so pause for a second. I want to go back to Hebrew, Matthew, just in general.

Yeah.

So we have early writings. I want to say, was it Justin Martyr? I know you said you read the book, wrote the book

25 years ago, and here we don’t have the original. We have somebody quoting a man named Paps, who

What, second century End of first century.

Yeah, early second century, if I remember correctly. And he mentions that the gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew.

I’ve read that

Passage before. Now let me rephrase that. He mentions that Matthew wrote the words in

Hebrew.

And so what most New Testament scholars will say is that the gospel of Mark was based on a number of sources. And you’ve probably heard of Q,

Right? Yeah.

So one of the sources was, and look, this is getting into the realm of hypothetical stuff where we don’t have, I’ve had people say, well, we have this manuscript that the gospels are based on. No, we don’t.

Nobody

Has the Q manuscript. That’s a scholarly reconstruction. Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s not. It’s speculation.

And it’s one of the reasons why scholars will say that Mark or Matthew are so similar, Luke, they’re all using the

Same, so the three synoptic gospels are using common sources, and their claim is when Paps says Matthew wrote the words in the Hebrew language, he doesn’t mean the gospel of Matthew. That’s what they’re saying. He means one of the sources of Mark, which was also maybe used by Matthew, or maybe Matthew used Mark, whatever. There’s all kinds of arguments about it.

Got it.

So that’s what Papias, he mentions the words later, Christian, what they call church fathers, right? These are early Christian writers, and one of them, I forget who it is, I wrote it in my book, says he saw a copy of this Hebrew gospel of Matthew in the library in Cesare. I want to say it was CEUs, but I might be getting that wrong. So that would seem to contradict what the mainstream Christian scholarship is saying.

That is

Not the gospel. It’s not that Matthew was written Hebrew and then translated into Greek. It’s that there was some kind of source. In other words, the mainstream scholarly reconstruction is Jesus spoke some words. They were written down at some point in Hebrew, and then when they went to compile an early gospel, they said, oh, here’s this scroll with all these words in Hebrew. Let’s translate those into Greek. That’s their claim. It seems from what this church fathers believed the early Christian authors is that no, Matthew was actually written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. And we could argue about that. Literally, there have been whole books written about was Matthew written? And the mainstream view is that Mark is the earliest gospel, Matthew and Luke Mark as a source. Other scholars say No, Matthew is earlier. And there’s literally entire books that are written about this, right? It’s not a problem we’re going to solve here.

Totally. Well, and I think even from a layman’s perspective, I look at Matthew, and Matthew is for sure written to a Jewish context.

He’s to a Jewish

Jewish audience.

So

It would make sense. When I first read that line that you mentioned about Papist and Matthew written in Hebrew, my first thought was like, that makes perfect sense. I mean, it literally starts with Son of Abraham, son of

David. It’s like, here’s a beautiful example of that. So in Matthew 15, there’s this scene where the disciples of Jesus are eating bread, and the Pharisees go to Jesus and say, why do your disciples transgress the commandment of God? By not, or the tradition of the elders were actually more importantly, and Jesus responds, that you transgress the commandment of God by your tradition. So what happened is the Pharisees had this tradition that you have to wash your hands before you eat bread. And that had to do with this whole thing of separation from impurity, that the Pharisees kind of just made up even

That you might’ve touched something impure and that you needed to.

Exactly. And it has nothing to do with the Torah. The Torah doesn’t say that you have to wash your hands before you bread. That’s the tradition of the elders. And Jesus says, you transgress the commandment of God by your tradition, because the commandment of God says, don’t add rules to the Torah, says in Deuteronomy four, two, and Deuteronomy 12 32, 13, 1 in some translations don’t add and don’t take away to the commandments of Moses. So the Pharisees said, no, well, we’re allowed to add things. God gave us that authority. And one of those things they added was washing the hands before you eat bread. So Jesus calls them on the carpet for that and saying, no, you don’t have the authority to add these rules. You transgress the commandment of God by your tradition. And that’s why my disciples don’t wash their hands, because God didn’t say so, and I don’t make them do that. If you want to wash your hands, great, but don’t make it a ritual that’s binding. So in Mark, when that story is told, it says The Jews wash their hands before they bread, which is true in Matthew. It says the Pharisees. And why is that? My interpretation of that is that the audience of Mark doesn’t know what a Pharisee is.
And if you say the Pharisees, they’ll be like who? Right? Whereas in Matthew, the audience is Jewish and they know the difference between the Pharisee and non Pharisee.

So

It’s more precise, more specific, because the audience will understand that specificity. And so there’s an example where I would ask the question to Mark and Prim assist. That’s what they’re called. So how did Matthew get that more precise information if he didn’t get it from Mark? Because Mark doesn’t have it. And there’s an example where, yes, he’s writing to a Jewish audience and that’s why he quotes scripture so much. There are all these passages where Mark will just say something and then Matthew will then have an Old Testament reference.

It’s an offer reference. It is written. It is written, is written.

Right. Why is he saying that his audience is interested in that?

Yeah, they know that. Well,

Not just they know it. They care more about it. You say that to a Greek, the Greek will be like, well, I never even heard of Isaiah, so why do I care that he said that?

Yeah, man.

Whereas the jewel say, oh, Isaiah said that. Okay, let’s at least look that up.

Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about, I know you mentioned it in the book, and I know I feel bad now. I’m like, I’m making you pull back information from 25 years ago’s on page 17. No, some reasons why you were convinced. And in the book, I think you were very convincing that the she’s translation of the Hebrew gospel of Matthew, why you could make the argument that it is legit, that it was actually a translation of the original Hebrew Matthew, or a translation of a translation or

A transmission

Transmission.

So we have these statements by early church fathers that Matthew was written in Hebrew. That doesn’t mean that we have that Hebrew text.

Totally.

I could say Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but maybe every copy was burned by the British in 1812. And we don’t have the declaration. I mean, we happen to, one guy went in Washington DC and took the original copy in 1812 when the British burned Washington DC.

Really?

Yeah. Otherwise, we would not have the original.

Wow.

Now we would’ve copies of it, but imagine maybe we don’t even have copies of copies of copies. That can happen. It happens all the time in history. We have an example of this in the AK in the Old Testament where there was this evil king named Manasha, and he ruled for 55 years. Then he had a son named Amon who ruled for two years, and then he has a grandson named Josiah. And Josiah is this young king and the time of Josiah, they had lost the Torah. The five books of Moses were lost. And he goes to renovate the temple, and one of his men finds a copy of the Torah in the temple. I mean, you could say it’s divine intervention, or you could say they got lucky

That

All the other copies were lost, and there was one single copy and all our copies of the Torah with maybe some exception, but that’s kind of complicated descend from the copy that Josiah found. You could say the Samaritan Torah doesn’t, because they split off earlier, at least according to Second King 17.

But

All the Jewish copies of the Torah descend from that one scroll that Hilah, the high priest found in the temple and brought, was eventually brought to King Josiah. So the question is, do we have that Hebrew version of Matthew that Papias mentions, whether it’s the original words or it’s the full gospel of Matthew or a version of Matthew? Do we have the one that you see you saw in the library in Cesar, in Israel? So we have the earliest Hebrew version of any New Testament book that we have was copied by a Jewish rabbi named Sherut around the year 1380 in Spain. This was a time when Jews were being forced to enter into these debates with Catholics. The Catholics said like this, look, we tried to force the Jews to convert to Christianity. They refused. But we have some Jews who are coming to us and saying, look, I want to convert, but my wife or my kids need some convincing. So they say, well, how can we convince people? We’ll make the rabbis debate our priests, and we’ll tie the rabbis hands. There’s no freedom of speech in the Catholic world back then,
And we’ll win every debate. And the people who are on the fence, they’ll hear these arguments and they’ll be convinced.

Yeah, it’s like the modern day YouTube. I’m going to clip only my side and we’re going to have a

Destruction. So the most famous one of these debates was in 1263 between Pablo Christianity and Hamdi

Rabbi. Is that Maimonides?

No, no. So it’s another Rabbi Maimonides is Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon. This is Rabbi Moses Ben Nachman. Long story short, Hamdi wins, but then Pablo Christianity lies about it, and Hamdi writes a rebuttal, and then he gets sentenced to death because he was given freedom to say whatever he wanted, but he wasn’t given freedom to write. Oh my gosh. The sentence eventually commuted. Anyway, this rabbi in around 1380 writes down the gospel of Matthew and he says, look, I’m including all these critical remarks to refute Catholicism. Don’t ever copy this without the critical remarks. You might end up reading this and believing it. And it’s interesting. In the 1980s, there was a scholar named George Howard who copied it without the critical remarks. So the critical remarks have never been published. And they always begin

With, do they exist?

Yeah, they exist. I read them.

MTOs still

Exists. I read them. They’re fascinating.

Wow.

They say things like, well, you Christians say you believe in Jesus, but you don’t actually do what Jesus said. Those are some of the remarks. Anyway, his argument was, if we’re forced to engage in these debates, we have to read the New Testament, and we’ll start with Matthew so we know what they’re talking about.

Got

It. So he has this Hebrew version of Matthew. It was assumed this was a translation from Latin or from Greek. What George Howard in the 1980s shows is there are things in it that it’s hard to explain as translations from Greek.

Yeah. That’s what I want you to get into. This is fascinating,

And I don’t know if we have time in this segment to

Do it. We do. Yeah, we have time.

Okay. So Howard, who discovered this, no, he didn’t discover this Hebrew version of Matthew. He was studying it. He studied it, and actually there were two different versions that people were, scholars were confusing. There was one that was discovered by this bishop named Munster, and people thought that the Munster version from 200 years later was the same as Mov, and they weren’t. They’re completely different. So he transcribed the text without the critical remarks, and he published it with a translation, and he found nine manuscripts. Later I found out there were 28 manuscripts, although nine’s pretty good as a start, but there were more. And even in his version, some of the manuscripts have that difference. In Matthew 23, not all of them do, by the way, and it’s a very kind of complicated, but one of the things he found is that there were these word puns. Word puns are part of the fabric of ancient Hebrew writing.

Words that are repeated or that are single

Words that are repeated are often they’ll choose a specific word because it’s connected to another word in the context. The first man’s called Adam, Adam, and because he’s taken from Adamah, which means earth, right? So you right, could say the man, right? So the name Adam means something like ground or earthy, and it’s also related to the word, which is red related to the word dom blood. So you have these chain of word puns

Where if you read it in the Hebrew, you’re like, wow, they’re really,

You see it, it jumps out.

Yeah. They’re really using this term

Lot. It’s than just coincidence. There are coincidences in the world. In English, we have, well, in Hebrew, you have the woman is called Isha because she’s taken from ish. Isha is woman, and ish is man. Well, in English it works too. We have a woman and man, so there are coincidences, but in Hebrew, there’s too many to be a coincidence. And often it’s stated explicitly. It’s like a literary technique. It’s a literary technique. Scholars call it paranoia. Just word puns is plain English. So Hebrew, Matthew has a whole lot of word puns, more than what you would expect from a translation from Greek. Some of those would be inevitable because, so let’s think of what the mainstream approach is here. So Jesus spoke either Arama or Hebrew. Most scholars today will say Aramaic. Some will say Hebrew.

We say Hebrew.

Okay. And he’s teaching in Arama or Hebrew, and maybe sometimes he’s teaching Aramaic, sometimes

Hebrew. Hebrew. There’s probably both.

Maybe if he’s in Judea, he’s speaking Hebrew, and in certain parts of Galia or May, depending who his audience are,

Totally white.

Just like today, you could have somebody in Texas who freely switches, not me, unfortunately, but who freely switches between English and

Spanish.

Or actually, you know what, if you know, the third most spoken language in Texas is Vietnamese.

Really?

Yeah. When you go to vote here in Texas, you have the ballot in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Wow.

So yeah, Jesus undoubtedly spoke Arama and Hebrew and Greek. And when he’s speaking in Hebrew or Aramaic, he has these Semitic word puns, because Hebrew, Aramaic have a lot of overlap. And then those, let’s say were translated into Greek, let’s say by Matthew himself, if you believe as a traditional Christian would say, Matthew wrote the gospel, and then it’s translated back into Hebrew. So yeah, the word pun is there, because in some cases it’s sort of inevitable. But there’s other ones where it’s not only not inevitable, but you don’t have the word pun in the Greek at all. So an example that Howard brings, and I’ve shared this example, is Jesus says to Peter, Peter reads rock, and he says, on this rock, I will build my church. So wow, that’s a word punt in Greek. So that kind of proves that the gospel not only was written in Greek, but Jesus spoke Greek. Except when you look at Hebrew, Matthew, he says, you are an Evan, a stone, and E, I will build my house of prayer, which is what translate in Greek is church upon you. So there’s a word pun in the Hebrew.

Yeah, that’s not in the Greek. It’s not Greek. That’s not in the

Greek. So it’s the word in Hebrews, we have three words in English I will build and Hebrew one single word. And that’s the basis of the word pun.

Yeah,

Exactly. And so is that just a really skilled translator who said, oh, there’s a word pun in the Greek. Let me find a word. Pun in Hebrew. Could be. But then there’s a whole lot in Hebrew that it’s really hard to argue. There’s a lot in Hebrew, Matthew where there’s no hint even that there’s any sort of word pun in the Greek. In other words, if I’m reading the Greek and I see Petros, which is Peter and on this rock, okay, that’s a word pun. Let me try to make up a word pun in Hebrew.

Petra,

Right? Yeah. I think it’s been a while,

But it’s like Petra. Petra, essentially

The word pun, right? So the word rock and the name Peter both have the same word in Greek or same route,

Right? Yeah.

Okay, let me try to find one in Hebrew. But there’s ones that, there’s nothing in Greek. So where’d those come from? And so what is the claim here? There was this rabbi in 1380 who wants to translate Matthew for use in debates with Catholics. So he’s going to beautify the text by making up all these word puns. That seems, I mean, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. Howard argued, no, this is a transmission. And here was Howard’s big discovery. All the rest of what Howard says you could agree with, or I mean even this you could disagree with. But his big discovery was that the word that mov uses for himself is the Hebrew word ma. And everybody assumed that word meant copyist. And Howard shows that that word, no, it means translator. And he uses it as I said, that backwards. So that meant translator is what everybody assumed. And Howard proved, and this, I think he proved quite definitively that mov uses the word in the sense of copyist. In other words,

He’s not translating Greek, he’s copying

Hebrew, he’s copying it. Now, maybe somebody else translated it. And there’s been scholars who came along who said, okay, no problem. Mov is the Copas. We accept that. And some Jew who converted to Catholicism was the one who translated it, because it doesn’t seem like a Jewish rabbi is going to make the text so beautiful by inventing word puns that didn’t exist in the Greek. So maybe it was some Jew who translated it. And yes, it doesn’t look like it was translated always from the Greek. So maybe it was translated. There was a scholar named William Berry, great scholar of New Testament studies who argued that, well, it was translated from an old lain version that we don’t have anymore, or we have little fragments of it here and there. And so it wasn’t translated from the Greek, right? That’s kind of like, how do we explain that? It doesn’t look like it came from the Greek, at least in some passages. Okay, well, maybe it’s preserving some early original traditions, textual traditions, or maybe it was translated from some alternative textual tradition like the old Latin in the Middle Ages. That’s Berry’s explanation. I find it fascinating that we have this problem in Matthew 23, which outright contradicts Matthew 15
And Matthew 15, the way it reads in the Greek, and again, I know most Christians will either ignore it or they’ll say, well,

Variant.

Well, they won’t say variant. They’ll say, well, come with some clever way to interpret this away. Some maybe non shot way, non-planned meaning way to make sense of this. But if you take it at face value, it seems to contradict Matthew 15, which is a Matthew 15. The Pharisees are undoing the commandment of God by their tradition. And then in Matthew 23 says, well obey what they save. And if they don’t do it themselves,

Which would mean obey the traditions,

That means you’d have to wash your hands, even if they don’t always wash their

Hands.

So which one is it? And then we have a difference of one single letter, so elegant and beautiful about this, in my view as a textual scholar, meaning you don’t have to rewrite the whole text.

It’s

A single letter, which is a single stroke of the pen, the letter V, which is literally a single stroke of the pen. And that difference changes it from obeying the Pharisees to obeying Moses. And which one did Jesus actually say? Well, I wasn’t there. I don’t know. But both are preserved in manuscripts.

Yes,

The Greek manuscripts uniformly and unanimously have they say, but there are four Hebrew manuscripts that have, he said, were those translated from old Latin or from something in Greek? Maybe there was a Greek text that had he said, and we don’t have, right? That’s another possibility I look at today as a scholar. I want to consider all the possibilities.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s really good. You’re on a podcast called The Covenant in Conflict, and we always talk about, it’s wrestling. We need to embrace this tension. Not everything is so black and white, even though we desire it. We want just yes or no. Just tell me what it is. Tell me the translation. You’re like, well, and you’re doing a great job of wrestling and saying, I could be wrong. And is that a possibility? Sure, it’s a possibility. But here’s another

Understanding. So this is what Jews do when they read scripture. When Jews read scripture, I mean, it’s probably where you got your name. Israel is he who wrestles with God, right?

Yeah, totally.

Okay. So when we read scripture, I think a lot of Christians here, there’s a contradiction between numbers and Deuteronomy. I’m just going to throw the Bible out. Jews hear that, and they say, this is amazing because now I can get an insight in the Bible that maybe I wouldn’t have had if I didn’t realize numbers presents it this way. And Deuteronomy presents it a different way. And you have the thesis and the anti, and together you get a synthesis. You bring them together and you get this beautiful three dimensional picture. So Jews love that.

We

Yearn for that. We look for those seeming what we call, we call them apparent contradictions. That’s not a dirty term in Judaism. That’s not something we’re afraid of. We don’t need the atheist to bring those to me because I those, or I was shown those by the rabbi when I was six years old. And we get insight into that.

That’s not rocking your faith like it does for many Christians.

No, we want to know what those are, I want to know what the differences between the gospel are because between the four gospels, because then I can get this three dimensional picture, which I didn’t have before. I only had like, oh, well, here’s how it’s presented in Matthew and here’s how it’s presented in Mark. What if you believe both are true? What does that say about what actually happened? Right? You’re getting it from different perspectives and you’re getting a three dimensional picture. So when I was looking at this in Matthew, I wasn’t like, oh, let me undermine Christianity. No, I have no interest in doing that. I believe what I believe, and I respect that Christians believe what they believe. What can we understand as, and look, could it be that Matthew said, obey the Pharisees? Absolutely. It could be that, right? In which case you got your work cut out for you.

We got a lot of things that got to change.

And then maybe it is the Catholic priest today who, I mean, that’s ultimately a question of faith. As a textual scholar, I can’t tell you what to believe, nor should I have a problem when textual scholars come along to Christians and Jews and say, well, you’re so silly for believing this because we know that that’s not true. We know what we know means in academic circles is me and my friends all agree. That’s what it means. We’ve all come to a consensus.

Okay,

Well, a hundred years ago you had a different consensus, and a hundred years from now, you’ll have a different consensus. My faith is eternal. I’m not subject to your consensus. Your consensus may change. Scripture is eternal. And how we understand that that can change. We have to do our best to understand it and do, and look, there’s a passage in Deuteronomy where Moses is, he’s about to die, and he says, you must not say someone needs to go across the sea and bring me the Torah, and you must not say someone needs to go up into heaven and bring me the Torah because it’s in your heart and in your mouth. What that means is what you have access to. That’s what you are bound by. And if you get access to more, if someone does bring it from across the sea, great. But I’m not going to wait for that. I’m going to do the best I can now with what I have. If all I know is just the faith in my heart, I don’t even, what if I’m illiterate and I can’t even read? Well, that’s what you’re bound by and that’s what God’s going to hold you accountable to.

Yeah. Paul talks about that. He is like the Torah inside you, the Torah in your heart. Even those who have not been told this message yet, there is like Ecclesiastes echoes. There’s this eternity in people’s hearts.

We know, and he gets that from Jeremiah 31. And I’ve seen Jews who are like, oh, well, it says there, it says Bri, Jeremiah 31. New Covenant.

Yeah, new covenant.

And it says, it’s a beautiful passage. And I hope it’s, from my perspective, hope it’s completely fulfilled soon. And I think Christians would say maybe in the second coming

Where

You won’t need to teach your fellow to know God. Everyone will know God from the smallest to the greatest, and that day will come, I believe. And there it’ll be written in our heart. We won’t have to even read it in a book. We’ll just know it.

Yeah. Praise the Lord.

So we just have to do the best we can with what we have. And if we get more knowledge, we should pursue more knowledge. We should search out the truth and do the best we can with what we have

And wrestle, wrestle through those

Things continue to wrestle. Make

Sense?

And it’s interesting, sometimes you’ll hear, and again, we call them in Judaism apparent contradictions. You’ll hear these and you’re like, oh no, the Bible got it wrong. And then you hear the answer, you’re like, wait. That’s what we made the big fuss about. This is one of the things, and I hope this isn’t too controversial for your audience.

I mean, we get pretty controversial.

So what the atheists like to do is they’ll ask innocent, just asking innocent questions, a child’s question, who killed Goliath? Well, everybody knows who killed Goliath. It was David. Well, when you’re reading Chronicles and Samuel second Chronicles and Issa, I think it’s First Chronicles and second Samuel,

You

Hear that there was a man named, what is his name?

Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. I forget.

Azar Benya or something like that. I forget his exact name. And it says that he killed Goliath. And the other book, it says he killed the brother of Goliath. And you’re like, oh, wow. Samuel and Chronicles can’t get it straight. We can’t trust the Bible. And I, as a textual scholar hear that. And I laugh because the difference between he killed Goliath and he killed the brother of Goliath is less than that single letter in Hebrew. Matthew, what is it? So there’s a Hebrew letter, hu, which kind of looks like an upside down U. And there’s a Hebrew letter, Tav, which is is an upside down U with a little foot next to it, like tiny stroke of the

Pen.

And one of them has ET and the other has Ahi or ach. And literally a copyist missed a tiny speck of ink. And so he did kill the brother of Goliath. It was David who killed Goliath, and one of David’s warriors killed Goliath’s brother. And there’s no question textually as a textual scholar, it’s saying that he killed the brother of Goliath and the atheist who tries to confuse the layman by saying, well, it says he killed Goliath. Either you don’t know as either this atheist, is that ignorant that he doesn’t know, or he’s holding something back from you that he doesn’t want you to know and hoping you don’t go investigate it and check it out again. It’s an apparent contradiction based on the most trivial, literally, it’s a dot of ink

Is the

Difference.

Yeah, totally.

And we’re going to destroy our faith over a dot of ink, not me.

It reminds me too, I can’t remember his name off the top of my head, but he was a cold case detective by trade for years, and he somehow got into studying the gospels as a cold case
With that same mentality and that same desire to see are they being forthright? Are they accurate? Can we trust them? He’s like, I go into evidence from hundreds of years ago to solve cases. And he said, people would come to me saying, well, these don’t agree, Matthew and Mark don’t agree. Or Luke says this, Matthew says this, there’s one blind man here. There’s two blind men here. And he says, as a cold case detective, if I see four different stories that all sound the exact same, I throw ’em out. I know they’re not reliable because they’re

Clearly, they’re colluding with each

Other. Yeah, they’re a hundred percent colluding. And so what is often brought to the layman as a reason to mistrust the Bible is actually the reason as a cold case detective, I actually believe that they’re accurate because they have to have differences, different perspectives, different opinions, different people, and they’re writing their experience. Or in Luke’s case, he’s gathering stories from people

At

The time. So yeah, it’s really interesting. The things that are initially causing us unrest are actually sometimes the greatest evidence.

Look, and we’re all one Google search away from the 50 reasons. You shouldn’t believe the Bible. Every one of us is, so you could hear this from someone who believes in scripture and gives you the answer or a possible answer. Or you could hear it from the atheist who’s like, oh, let me go through the reasons why you should deny scripture.

Yeah, totally.

I think you should find it out for yourself before you read it from the atheist and hear what are the reasons to, despite all this, or maybe because of all this, you still believe

It. Yeah. That’s so good. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me spending time. This has been an amazing conversation as someone who’s a history buff and as well, loves the Bible, loves God. It’s been enlightening for me, and I know it will be for our audience as well. Hopefully we can have you back and talk about Yohe, Vahe, the Tetragrammaton.

That’s one of my favorite topics.

I know. I’m hoping we get you back to talk about that soon. But again, thank you so much for coming, and we’ll make sure to link your books so that people can find them starting with Hebrew Yeshua versus the Greek Jesus, as well as some other ones that you’ve put out there. Anything else that you just want us to know about?

Well, so I’ve got a website, nehemiah as wall.com. In the Bible, Nehemiah built the wall. Amen. So that’s the name of the website. Love it. I’m the man who built the wall, and I have a podcast, Hebrew Voices, where I talk to people from all kinds of backgrounds, all walks of life. You can get it wherever you listen to podcasts.

That’s great. Awesome. Well, thank you for tuning in to another episode of Covenant Conflict. We will see you next time.