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'''Chris Sims:''' "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you, ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.'" The Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 8 through 14.

[Music "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" by Darlene Love]

'''C:'''Hello friends and neighbors and welcome to Apocrypals. This is the podcast where two non-believers read through the bible and we try not to be jerks about it. My name is Chris Sims, and with me, as always, the other half of the Sons of Thunder, the other set of footprints himself, Mr. Benito Cereno. Benito, how are you this week?

'''B:'''I'm great, Chris. Merry Christmas.

'''C:'''Merry Christmas! It's Christmas time, everybody!

'''B:'''Yeah, ahhhh. Merry Christmas, everybody.

'''C:'''I haven't missed it!

'''B:'''Yeah. You boy, go get the turkey that I saw in the store.

'''C:'''The one as big as me?

'''B:'''That is a ludicrously large turkey, Chris.

'''C:'''That would be an insanely large turkey.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''How big is that boy?

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Do you think?

'''B:'''He's roughly turkey size, I'm guessing.

'''C:'''Do you think we should start measuring boys in units of turkey?

'''B:'''I think we should. How big is that boy? Oh, he's about 1.8 turkey. Yeah. That's probably, that was probably an actual measurement in the British Empire at some point.

'''C:'''You're like 3.2 turkey, I think.

'''B:'''Easily. Easily 3.2 turkey. Actually, today that we're recording this is actually the eve of the Feast of St. John the Baptist, which in a way is like – it's like summer Christmas. So appropriate. It's summer Christmas Eve. Summer's Eve. Nope. Nope, that's not it.

'''C:'''Swing again, buddy.

'''B:'''Summer Christmas Eve. We're fine. But yeah, you know, anyone who knows you would not at all be surprised by the music drop we had here at the beginning of this episode.

'''C:'''Yeah, I mean, it's the best song.

'''B:'''Yeah, right.

'''C:'''Of all the song, it's the best one.

'''B:'''Yeah, sure. And I've known you for many years at this point. We've been friends for a long time. And yet there was a brief moment when we were preparing for this episode where I was like, "oh, maybe I'll suggest to Chris a song that we could have." Like I was going to like even waste my time and yours by suggesting a different song that might be the opening of this episode. I was like– I was going to suggest a Christmas song I enjoy very much called "Joseph Who Understood" by the New Pornographers is actually about, you know, Joseph and Mary, et cetera. But I was like, no, what am I even doing?

'''C:'''First of all, how dare you?

'''B:'''Yeah, well.

'''C:'''How dare you bring inferior Christmas songs into my life? No, look, that was, of course, Miss Darlene Love singing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), the best of all Christmas songs. And that was sung because we are going into the Gospel of Luke, which is, of course, the Christmassy-est of all Gospels. Both in the ways that you expect and in one way that I found very surprising because there's a part that doesn't get read out at Christmas time that turns out to be extremely Christmassy in retrospect.

'''C:'''I did consider going with Christmas time is here because as you heard at the top of the show, I did go full Linus by reading the whole thing that he says on the stage, because that's what Christmas is really about, Charlie Brown.

'''B:'''Yeah, it is. It's about shepherds, etc.

'''C:'''Well, I mean, it's about peace on earth and goodwill towards men.

'''B:'''Goodwill.

'''C:'''Yeah.

'''B:'''And shepherds.

'''C:'''And shepherds. And being sore afraid.

'''B:'''Sore afraid.

'''C:'''Sore afraid. Okay. If you've been paying attention, you know that we're reading the HCSB, the Holman Christian Standard Bible. I made several notes in my copy about, "I gotta get out the KJV." Because it doesn't say sore afraid in here which I found very upsetting.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''And there's– You get the bit about the stone that the builder refused which is not as poetic as that. You gotta get the KJV for the Christmas story

'''B:'''Sure man. Might as well start at the top like we do. The good news is: don't have to go that much into detail about the history of Luke and stuff, because we already did that in episode one of this very show that you guys are listening to right now. Yeah, our first episode of this show was The Acts of the Apostles, which is the sequel to this book that we're doing right now. There is basically unanimous consensus that those two books were written by the same person, and that Acts is absolutely part two of the story started in this gospel. So if you want to go back to that, You can listen to reasoning for why it's attributed to Luke, who Luke is, right? He's one of Paul's buddies. He was due to the evidence of some first person sections of narrative in the Acts, we believe he was a friend and follower of Paul. And so you can go back and listen to that and hear who he is.

'''B:'''But yeah, we got Luke. It's the longest gospel, longest of the four gospels, four canonical gospels. It is also subsequently the longest book in the New Testament. And so Luke and Acts together, if you take them as a unit, they comprise over 25% of the New Testament as a whole. And so there is more material by Luke in the New Testament than anyone else if you go word for word. Obviously, if you're going book for book, Paul has more. But word for word, chapter for chapter, Luke is the heavyweight of the New Testament.

'''B:'''So this would have been written probably somewhere between 80 and 110 CE. We talked about that dating as well in the episode on Acts and how you could date it as early as the mid-60s, but most scholars would push for a date after 80 CE. There's also, due to some discrepancies in different manuscripts and things, it's easy to suggest that Luke was probably being revised and edited well into the second century.

'''B:'''Another good thing that we don't have to talk about, because we already talked about it at considerable length in the first part of our Matthew episode, we talked about it at such length we had to break our Matthew episode into two halves. We don't have to talk about the sources of Luke, right? We know that there is controversy about that. And so you should go back to our Matthew episode if you haven't heard it and listen to us talk about the synoptic problem where we talk about what are the sources for Matthew and Luke and is one the source for the other and so on.

'''C:'''Yeah, because this is the third and final synoptic gospel.

'''B:'''Yes. Yeah, we are wrapping up.

'''C:'''John is a different animal entirely.

'''B:'''He is a horse of a different color. Yes.

'''C:'''An eagle of a different color, perhaps.

'''B:'''An eagle of a different color if your prediction is correct. We'll see! We'll open up the Guess-o-tron 5000 in a few seconds and we'll find out if you're right.

'''B:'''But yeah, we know there's little controversy about the fact that Mark is a source for both Matthew and Luke and the question is where does the rest of that stuff come from. Here's the actual breakdown by percentages of the material contained in Luke: 41% of Luke is what's called the triple tradition which is the stuff where Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap, where all three have parallel passages. 41% of that is Luke. 23% of Luke is the double tradition, which is the stuff where Matthew and Luke overlap, but Mark does not. That's the stuff that if you follow the two source hypothesis, that's the stuff that would come from Q. And then 1% of Luke is material where Mark and Luke overlap, but not Matthew. So that's pretty slim, but we talked about that, you know, back when we discussed the synoptics that it is pretty slim that there are bits where Mark and Luke overlap or Matthew and Mark overlap, but not the other book.

'''B:'''But then a whopping 35% of Luke is special Lukan material. That is stuff that is only in Luke and not anywhere else, which if you follow the four source hypothesis that would be the stuff from L or special Luke which would be some other possibly document or more likely oral tradition that Luke would have been pulling from, and so that 35 and a lot of the stuff in that special Lukan material is really famous stuff you know if we had been keeping track as we've been going through Matthew and Mark and saying, well what would we have expected to see so far that we haven't seen so far, some of that stuff pops up in Luke.

'''B:'''So for example, obviously the one we've talked about the most is the nativity narrative, but also the conception and birth of John the Baptist. Honestly, the connecting of Jesus and John the Baptist as relatives happens here. But Luke also includes, special Luke includes Mary and Martha, the story of the 10 lepers, story of Zacchaeus, the wee little man, the parable of two debtors, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, like those are ones I feel like would have stood out, like for those who are listening along, being like, why haven't those guys mentioned the Prodigal Son yet? Well, it's only in Luke. And also the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, not to be confused with the more famous Lazarus, who notably we haven't seen at all in the three Gospels we've done so far.

'''B:'''So, yeah, so Special Luke is a pretty beefy section. It's over a third of the whole Gospel's material that's unique to Luke. And it includes a lot of really famous stuff. On the flip side, Luke also omits a number of things from Matthew and Mark that are notable. There's a passage that is known as the Great Omission, which is a section of about 75 verses from Mark that have no parallel in Luke at all. And the boundaries of it are debatable, but it's roughly from chapter 6, verse 45 to about chapter 8, verse 26 of Mark. And so this would include passages like the feeding of the 4,000, which we've discussed as being the kind of redundant doubling of the story that follows the feeding of the 5,000.

'''C:'''It's the second night. It's the second show.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''They sold out that first miracle and added a second show to the calendar.

'''B:'''Yeah, it's the matinee.

'''B:'''And also the bits of Jesus doing spit magic where he spits in people's eyes and gives them wet willies and heals them that way. So it would be – if you were looking at Luke, you could go, well, obviously he cut this out. The 4,000 is redundant. And then he doesn't want to show Jesus as a weird, gross spitting guy.

'''C:'''Well, he certainly doesn't want to show Jesus as a wizard.

'''B:'''Right. He hates wizards. Luke...

'''C:'''My dude hates wizards.

'''B:'''My dude hates wizards. Okay, so Chris, I hope you're ready for it this time because we've done it twice so far. You know what question...

'''C:'''I've got some ideas. I've got some ideas.

'''B:'''It should be a little bit easier since we've literally already discussed Luke and his audience on this show I realized it was nine episodes ago so maybe a little fuzzy, but all right, who is Luke? Who is he writing for? Like who's the audience of Luke?

'''C:'''It's obviously Theophilus because this one's addressed.

'''B:'''Yeah, it's true. It is handy that he's got a specific name of the guy that this is addressed to. Yeah. And of course we talked about the mystery of Theophilus in our Acts episode. We don't know who that is and possibly it's a code name or a nickname. It does just mean friend of God or lover of God. And that's why it's become our very good nickname for Friends of this show because Apocryphinos, I guess, doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

'''C:'''Stay sexy and don't get crucified.

'''B:'''There you go. You're so pleased with yourself on that one. And you should be. All right. So, I mean, who is Theophilus? Who does he represent? What kind of guy? So we already talked about Mark is a Jewish writer writing for a Gentile Roman audience. Matthew is a Jewish writer for a Jewish audience, trying to persuade them away from the burgeoning rabbinic tradition. What do we have now?

'''C:'''I think that Luke comes in so much later. Like, Luke is coming in at least 50 years later, right?

'''B:'''Well, 50 years later than what? Than Jesus or than...

'''C:'''Well, 50 years later than Jesus.

'''B:'''Okay, okay. He would only be about 10, 20 years after Mark and then maybe Matthew.

'''C:'''I feel like Luke, based on what we know about him, in that he's a friend of Paul's. He's a guy who comes in after the crucifixion. He's not a dude who was around at the time, much like Paul. I feel like he is probably our first Christian writer, in that he probably does not consider himself, like no longer considers this to be a splinter of Judaism, writing for that audience as well. That's my guess.

'''B:'''Yeah, yeah. Well, let me ask you this. Luke, Jewish or Gentile? Jewish or Greek, would you say?

'''C:'''I feel like Greek, but I mean, he does talk about like specific Jewish things. Like he specifically brings up the circumcision of Jesus, which is something else that does not usually get read at Christmas time at the church.

'''B:'''True. But yeah, you're right. Yeah, Luke is Gentile, and we did discuss this in the episode of Acts. Like, he has a Greek name for one thing. His Greek is very polished. And in fact, in some of the bits where he's, you know, borrowing from Mark, he kind of polishes up Mark's grammar quite a bit.

'''C:'''Right. And even Theophilus is a Greek word.

'''B:'''Exactly. Exactly right. And if you remember, we talked about the thesis of the book of Acts being that Jesus brought his message to the Jewish people and they rejected it. And now it's a universal church, it's a church for the world. And so, Luke is absolutely addressing this Gentile slash universalist audience. And in fact, it's very likely that these books would have been written kind of as letters, I guess, you know, that he's sending to Theophilus. And the idea is whoever Theophilus is would receive this and then probably read it out loud in front of a group, probably a dinner party or something of Gentile Christians. Yeah, some of the evidence that we have. Again, go back to our episode to hear us talk about who Luke is and why we think he's probably a Gentile besides his Greek name and such.

'''C:'''Well, let's go through that. Just let's hit the high points of that. We know that Luke is a physician.

'''B:'''Yes. The Luke that is the friend of Paul is a physician. Yes. He would be educated, and that reflects the educated Greek of the gospel here. He would also not have been a working class kind of person. But also when Paul in one of his letters, don't remember which one, but he lists off his companions who are circumcised, that is Jewish, Luke is not listed among those. And so that's another piece of evidence for why Luke was probably a Gentile. And that's more evidence for that matches up with the idea of Luke, the friend of Paul, being Luke the evangelist, if you're looking for evidence of that.

'''B:'''But if you don't want to accept Luke, friend of Paul, as Luke the Evangelist, evidence that the person who wrote this gospel as Greek abounds. Besides the very polished Greek language, there's also the fact that when he does reference Aramaic, he usually translates it, but he often omits it from places where Mark or Matthew would have used it. He also omits stories that might have been offensive to Gentiles, most notably the one about the Syrophoenician woman, which if you remember, that's the one where she comes up and says to Jesus, like, even the master throws scraps to the dogs. Right. You remember that one? So Luke leaves that out because it calls Gentiles dogs. And so that's probably not what his audience wants to hear. It features the Israelites as the chosen people, which is not something he would want to highlight if he's writing to a more universalist audience.

'''B:'''Another thing is that he establishes the story very much in a historical context, right, in ways that the other Gospels don't do. He lists off a large number of incredibly Caesar real people to provide a date and context for when these things were happening. And he does it in a way that would be intelligible to Greco-Romans. He's following the pattern of established historians like Dionysius and Josephus.

'''B:'''And notably, even though he does call Jesus the Messiah, he doesn't focus on that the same way that Mark and Matthew do. And instead, he's actually the only one of the evangelists to call Jesus "the Savior." Right. That's there right there at the beginning. Talkin' about the Savior being born in that term, Savior, Soter. That's a Hellenistic title for a divine deliverer. And so that would be a term that would be familiar to a Greek audience.

'''B:'''So, you know, overall, Luke and Acts is a two-part document, serves as a blueprint for a universal church that's not just Jewish, not just Gentile, but a mix, but focusing on Gentile, because at the time of Luke's life, the church would have been almost overwhelmingly Gentile. And so it's a blueprint for this church to be in it for the long haul. And we'll look at why that is, why that's different from the previous two Gospels. and how they should model their lives on the teaching of Jesus and that they should be led by the Holy Spirit. That's the big part of part two, the Acts, right? How do you live? Well, you're powered by the Holy Spirit.

'''B:'''Before we get into the text, one last bit that we've been doing each time is looking at the art history symbols of each of the evangelists. And in, well, I guess it would have been two episodes ago now. And so in episode eight, first part one of Matthew, you predicted that Luke would be the winged ox and John would be the eagle. Is that correct?

'''C:'''That is correct because, and I think I gave this reasoning then, but just so we're all up to speed, Luke has the Christmas story. We have been talking about things that we have and things that we don't have about the life of Jesus and the gospels. And we should have mentioned this last week because I was talking to you about it in the intervening time. We have yet to get anything about Jesus dying for the sins of man. I feel like that's coming in John. In fact, I know it is. There's a particular verse I've heard quite a few times.

'''B:'''It's pretty famous. Yeah. The idea of Jesus's death being an atonement for our sins has not, yeah, it's not really a focus of...

'''C:'''Does not show up at all in the first three gospels. But in this one, we actually do get something that I didn't even realize was missing. And it was in the reading at the top of the show. It's the manger. It's "there's no room at the inn." We do not get, I mean, obviously we don't get the nativity at all in Mark and we get very little of it in Matthew. But yeah, there's no, Jesus was born in a manger. There's no humble beginnings. And that is my entire reason for believing it's the ox. Because as we all know, I'm going to say it the nice way. I'm not giving it to your sailor mouth.

'''B:'''All right.

'''C:'''It's the ox and lamb kept time.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''That is in the famous documentary, The Little Drummer Boy.

'''B:'''Little Drummer Boy, yeah.

'''C:'''So Luke is Luke is the ox. And if he's not, he should be.

'''B:'''Okay. Good news. Euangelion! You did it. Peeking into the Guess-o-tron 5000. You're correct. You're correct. Luke is the ox. The reasoning is a smidge different. The ox would be a symbol of sacrifice, right? He would have been the prime animal sacrifice for a major thing. And so, you know, one thing we talked about with these art history symbols, these symbols of the different evangelists, usually you look at the opening, right? Mark is the lion because it opens with the voice in the wilderness. Matthew starts with the genealogy. So Matthew is the man because it's about the incarnation. Luke, before we even get to the nativity in chapter two, opens with Zechariah in the temple making a sacrifice. And so with Zechariah and the temple ox as a symbol of sacrifice. So yeah, we talked about Mark, the lion, resurrection, Matthew, the man, the incarnation. Now we have Luke, the ox, the passion is the main theme that they look at there. Because I haven't looked at the numbers. I assume Luke's passion narrative is a little bit longer and more developed than the others. So, and yes, by process of elimination, that leaves John, the evangelist, as the eagle. We'll talk about that next time.

'''B:'''That's it for context that I have. I'm ready to get into the text. And I actually, I want to start right, literally right at the beginning. So looking at this dedication, chapter one, verse one: "Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed them down to us. It also seemed good to me, since I have carefully investigated everything from the very first to write to you in an orderly sequence, most honorable Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things about which you have been instructed."

'''B:'''So one parallel we've been drawing as we've been doing this series on the Gospels is we looked at Mark as the golden age Jesus, because he's full of action. He's still kind of a rough sketch. There's not a lot of the mythos that you come to expect. He doesn't have X-ray vision yet. We looked at Matthew as the Silver Age Jesus. He's the refinement of the kind of roughly sketched Golden Age version. We see more of the mythos added. We get the Magi in there. We get a more peaceful Jesus. He's not the brusque social warrior of Mark. He's a little more genteel.

'''C:'''In case you have not listened to our previous episodes, I do not want anyone getting their hopes up: There is no bottle city of tiny Jesuses involved. It's not Silver Age Jesus in the way that I was hoping, I guess.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''But I get your point. I get your point.

'''B:'''Okay. Yes.

'''B:'''So this passage right here, the very opening of the book of Luke is the strongest argument and the clearest bit to reveal that Luke is Bronze Age Jesus, which does not mean that he does Kung Fu. He does not fight a legion of monsters. I mean, he does a little bit.

'''C:'''He literally fights a legion.

'''B:'''Yeah, he does fight a legion.

'''C:'''That literally happens.

'''B:'''It's true. I retract that statement. He does fight a legion of monsters. So there we go. No evidence of Kung Fu, however. But we can see this as a Bronze Age Jesus because Luke has a very, and we're talking Bronze Age of comics, I should say, anybody who's like an archeologist who's very confused by what I'm saying. It's a very Bronze Age of comics sensibility because Luke is like, "yeah, there's all these other people who've done gospels and they're okay, I guess, but they've made some errors and I'm going to sit down and clear up this continuity quite a bit." So like in this regard, friend of the show, Ben Rowe has pointed out that Luke the evangelist is pretty much the Roy-the-boy of the evangelists. He's Roy Thomas. He's coming in...

'''C:'''Okay. Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That means that makes Mark Stan Lee.

'''B:'''No, I don't think it does. And actually, here's the argument that someone, that I've been holding onto this from our Tumblr inbox for a while. This is an anonymous message. He says, "So, if Paul simply gave an outline of his letters to somebody else, injected himself into the finished work here and there, and then took most, if not all of the credit for the finished work, is Paul the Stan Lee?" I think yes. And that makes sense, right? Paul is the mentor of Luke. And then...

'''C:'''He's the bombastic one.

'''B:'''Yeah. And he's the famous one. He's the one everybody knows, right? So I think Paul is the Stan Lee.

'''C:'''Well, that makes– okay, let's follow this to its logical conclusion.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''That makes Peter: Artie Simek. 'Cause he's the one who's always getting made fun of on the title page.

'''B:'''Yeah, I think so. So here's the question. I have in mind an answer to this, but I want to see what your thoughts are. Who's the Jack Kirby? Because I don't think, we can't say, I mean, although the idea is Paul is dictating his stuff to his scribes and the scribes are writing it down and Paul's taking the credit. I don't think the scribes can be the Kirby, right? Because they don't have that influence. We only know the name of one scribe. Like I don't think we can fairly say that the scribes are the Kirby, even though they do fit that element of it. I think there's someone else who is the person who deserves the credit, doesn't get the credit compared to Paul.

'''C:'''Following that logic, the Kirby would be James the Just.

'''B:'''Exactly.

'''C:'''But if you want to talk about who's the one coming up with the stuff and handing it down and getting it filtered by the others, then Jack Kirby's Jesus.

'''B:'''Yeah. There's a little Jack Kirby inside us all.

'''C:'''That also makes Phoebe Flo Steinberg, by the way.

'''B:'''Yeah, it sure does. Wow.

'''B:'''But yeah, so the funny thing is we can – I mean we see if we look at Luke and compare them – if we were to do like a real like synoptic comparison, meaning a side-by-side comparison, we can see where Luke does a lot of editing to try to move things around and make them make more sense in terms of chronology and that kind of stuff. But the thing is he ends up making a number of continuity errors himself within the text. A prime example of this, but not by any stretch the only example, is in chapter four, verse 23, where he says to the people, "Then He said to them, 'No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: "Doctor, heal yourself. So all we’ve heard that took place in Capernaum, do here in Your hometown also."'"

'''B:'''And the thing is, he in the text of Luke has not been to Capernaum yet. He goes to Capernaum next and so there's a little chronological flub there, and if you're following the Farrer hypothesis which is the one that says that Q doesn't exist and Luke is just using Matthew as a source...

'''C:'''The Farrer-Goulder-Goodacre Hypothesis. Come on.

'''B:'''Yes, that's the one.

'''C:'''The dude's following me on Twitter now, get it right.

'''B:'''He is following us both – I still I do not expect that he is listening to the podcast. However, just in case...

'''C:'''If he is, he probably tuned out  since we brought up Roy Thomas.

'''B:'''Yeah, yeah. He was like, "who is that? I don't know." Yeah, but Professor Goodacre would actually argue that the reason for these small continuity flubs are what he calls editorial fatigue. He actually has a blog post that I read where he compares it to like small continuity errors within an episode of Columbo. He's apparently a big Columbo fan. So come on our show and talk about Columbo. And Jesus. But so like things where it's like, you know, his cigar is lit to a different degree from one shot to another or something like that, right? But I think I think probably the comparison that came to my mind for editorial fatigue is that episode of the Office where Michael writes a screenplay and the main character is clearly himself. His name is like Michael Starn or whatever is like the smooth...

'''C:'''His name is Agent Michael Scarn.

'''B:'''Yeah, there you go. There you go. And he's got this really incompetent sidekick, right? And...

'''C:'''Samuel L. Chang.

'''B:'''There we go. But then when they're going through, one time, his name is written as Dwight and they realized that what happened was the stupid sidekick was originally Dwight, and he just did a find and replace. And except for one time he misspelled Dwight and so that one didn't get replaced. That's kind of what it is, right? Like you're going through and you're making changes, and then you miss some spots. That's editorial fatigue. You're editing and then you just get lazy with it or you miss some things here or there.

'''B:'''Like an example of that is the story of the slaves that get the money from their master who gives them the money and they're supposed to invest it. Matthew has that story. Luke has a variation on that story. And Matthew's version, which I think is the more famous version, is the story of the talents. He gives five talents, three talents, one talent, which is an amount of money. And they're supposed to invest it. And it's three slaves. In Luke's version it's 10 slaves and each one is given a hundred silver coins. And then later when the master comes back, he only talks to three slaves instead of 10 slaves. And the amount of money they invested doesn't match up with the amount of money that's there at the beginning. So, you know, Professor Goodacre says "this is Luke trying to one up Matthew." But then his editing and revising of the story is not consistent. He doesn't go all the way through. He misses that Dwight in there. You know what I mean?

'''B:'''So that's something that Professor Goodacre uses as an argument in favor of Farrer. So just throwing that out there.

'''C:'''I like how you felt like you had to explain continuity errors on a podcast where we have mentioned Roy Thomas, Artie Simek, and Flo Steinberg without bothering to explain who they are.

'''B:'''Yeah, well, you know, people have Google. But I think my goal was more to explain the concept of editorial fatigue rather than the concept of continuity errors. But anyway, my point is that even though Luke's thesis is in a way to create a more cohesive, tight narrative of the life of Jesus, he himself makes small continuity errors. So while he's very concerned with the macro continuity, he makes a number of errors with the micro continuity, if that makes sense.

'''C:'''So I do like that Luke comes in and he's like, "hey, don't worry, everybody. I'm the best writer around. I got this." Like, "I'm going to clear all this up."

'''B:'''He's definitely opening with shade on Matthew and Mark. 100%.

'''C:'''Yeah. And he literally says, this is the true one. Don't worry. I got you.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''There's another way that he's like Roy Thomas, though, in that he goes back to the Golden Age and really, really goes hard. This Golden Age character who was much more minor in previous versions of this story.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''The first note I wrote in my margins, which was three pages in to the Gospel of Luke, was, "this is more John the Baptist content than I expected." And then I wrote in parentheses, "John-tent."

'''B:'''John-tent. Yeah.

'''C:'''Yeah. That's John the Baptist content.

'''B:'''Yeah. So we get that connection, which that feels very Bronze Age-y as well, right? To draw a connection between two previously unrelated characters. Suddenly Jesus and John the Baptist.

'''C:'''Yeah, it turns out they're cousins.

'''B:'''They're cousins, actually.

'''C:'''The only way this could be more Bronze Age comics is if it was Hank the Baptist.

'''B:'''Yes. If Howard the Duck pops up somewhere. We don't know he's not there. He could be – trapped in a gospel he never made.

'''C:'''We start with not a prediction of Jesus' birth. We get a completely different prophecy. Because as you might have heard, the angels of the Lord coming down and saying unto a child is born. That's chapter two.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Chapter one is angels coming down and talking to Zechariah about how John the Baptist is about to be born.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''And he gets a whole prophecy from an angel of the Lord, which as we already know, are weird six winged dudes covered in eyes. And this is Zechariah's response. "'How can I know this,' Zechariah asked the angel," and this is great because the angel goes "I'm Gabriel who stands in the presence of God and I was sent to speak to you and tell you this good news." Like "yeah, I got six wings and I'm covered with eyes, do you really do you really need to ask me why you should believe this?" Then he curses Zechariah to not be able to speak yeah anymore.

'''B:'''Yeah. Yeah.

'''C:'''Ask a stupid question, get cursed to never speak again.

'''B:'''Look, I wish we could do that.

'''C:'''It would be wonderful.

'''B:'''It would be good. This might be...

'''C:'''He literally mutes him! He literally mutes him.

'''B:'''He mutes him. Yeah.

'''C:'''He hits that mute button IRL on Zechariah.

'''B:'''It's a handy power to have. I think this is our first named angel, like I know in Daniel we have implications of Gabriel and Michael and there they are traditionally associated with the angels that we saw in Daniel, but I think this is the first time we actually see the name Gabriel in text. So, for those who are keeping track of that kind of stuff here he is Gabriel he's not because he's not mentioned by name in Matthew or Mark so here he is here so.

'''C:'''I don't have an Angel Watch drop.

'''B:'''No.

'''C:'''And I'm not gonna put calling all you angels into this show.

'''B:'''No, please don't. Yeah, so, I mean we're only going to get two named angels in the, in the primary canon. We will get a few more in deuterocanon, but yeah, here's Gabriel. Here he is.

'''C:'''So traditionally speaking, is Gabriel also the angel who appears to the shepherds and to Mary?

'''B:'''To Mary? Yes. He's, he does, he is named there: "In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth." So yes, definitely to Mary. Generally not, as far as I'm aware, considered to also be the angel before the shepherds. Cause I mean, that's more than one angel. It's a whole army of angels that appears to the shepherds, but...

'''C:'''Well, there's one angel that shows up and then there's a lot of angels that then, right.

'''B:'''Sure. I am not familiar with that being associated with Gabriel, but maybe I'm sure, I'm sure somebody out there has, has said that.

'''C:'''We then get the connection between Mary and Elizabeth, who's Zechariah's wife. that Elizabeth is a relative, which you have said before is traditionally interpreted as Jesus and John the Baptist being cousins, which is going to come up pretty hard when we get to some of these apocryphal gospels.

'''B:'''They're not necessarily... I don't think Elizabeth and Mary are considered to be sisters. I think they're generally considered to be cousins, which would make Jesus and John first cousins once removed or something.

'''C:'''But they're related.

'''B:'''Right, right, right.

'''C:'''Who are my cousins?

'''B:'''Everyone. We're all cousins.

'''C:'''We're all cousins.

'''B:'''Identical cousins.

'''C:'''Please don't bother me at work again. So then we get a really great bit where Elizabeth does in fact get pregnant, even though she is advanced in age. And she gives birth to a child. And Zechariah, of course, has been cursed to not be able to speak.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''And so the relatives are like, "We're going to name this kid Zechariah, right? Like after his dad, he's going to be Zechariah Jr." And Elizabeth is like, "No, an angel told me his name is going to be John." And so they're like, "all right, you don't know what you're talking about." They go ask Zechariah and Zechariah pulls up like a chalkboard on which he has written "his name is John." Because he knows. He knows what's up. He's not getting on any more angels' bad sides.

'''B:'''Yeah, he's just like awesome Andy. He writes it down. And then the curse goes away. He gets unmuted. Good times for Zechariah.

'''C:'''So then we get chapter two. That is the birth of Jesus. You've heard chapter two, verses one through 20, several times in your life, most likely. If you grew up a Christian, then you're familiar with this bit.

'''B:'''Yeah, this definitely gets read every year. This is one of like four or five verses that gets read every year at the Christmas Eve service at my family's church. Yeah, so I mean, that very famous opening. "In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus." "It came to pass," right? "It came to pass that in those days, decree went out from Caesar Augustus." Here we are with Luke providing some of that historical context that we're talking about, like setting it in a place and time. We get a couple of names here, Caesar Augustus, Quirinius. We're going to get a few later. Earlier in chapter one, we had Herod, Herod the Great. "In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest of Abijah’s division named Zechariah" right at the very beginning.

'''B:'''This creates a little bit of a problem in that Herod the Great ruled from 37 BCE to 4 BCE. And so it is for this reason that you'll typically now, if you were to look up when was Jesus born, like it's not 1 AD. Instead, most places will say Jesus was born around 4 BCE. And why is that? Well, because Herod the Great died in 4 BCE. And so if Herod the Great is going to massacre all those innocents, Jesus has to be born before Herod dies.

'''C:'''Yeah, and traditionally I heard 6 BCE because that gives us the two-year gap.

'''B:'''There you go.

'''C:'''So that Herod can order the deaths of what you thought was a perfectly acceptable number of infants.

'''B:'''That's definitely what I said. I definitely did not six or seven times say that zero babies is the acceptable number of babies to kill. Yeah.

'''C:'''Well, I edit the show.

'''B:'''Yeah. Anyway, so Herod is Caesar real. Caesar Augustus is, by definition, Caesar real.

'''C:'''Very Caesar real.

'''B:'''Yeah, he's as Caesar real as it gets. Quirinius, this governor of Syria, also Caesar real. The problem is Quirinius was governor of Syria from 6 to 7 CE. So there is a gap of about 10 years between the death of Herod and Quirinius' term as the governor of Syria. So, however you guys want to reconcile that, that's fine, but there is a gap there. There is this just a problem that's difficult to reconcile and then we also have a good a couple of other names later when Jesus starts his ministry. We get Annas and Caiaphas who are the high priests those guys are Caesar real, although they were not in office at the same time. And then Tiberius, of course, also by definition, Caesar real. So Jesus' ministry is starting, it says, in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, which would put it around 28 or 29 CE. Then we get this guy named Lysanias. That guy is Robin Hood real in the extent that he is not attested to anywhere else in history.

'''B:'''So we've got Luke really using these historical figures to try and set things in a time and place. However, he does have to tweak things in order to make them fit his vision, right? He adds this thing about the census where Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth, but they have to go to Bethlehem in order to be counted. No, no, no. That's not how a census worked then. It's not how a census works now. But it is handy for Luke in order to get them down to Bethlehem. Of course, we saw in Matthew, they just lived in Bethlehem at the beginning and then moved to Nazareth after Jesus is born. That's how Matthew deals with that. But Luke has to get him down, has to make Jesus a Nazarene and has to get them down to Bethlehem in order for Jesus to be born. So he adds this stipulation in the census, which doesn't match anything that we have from the historical record.

'''C:'''So I mentioned that we get something that is very well known Christmassy, right?

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''That's verses 1 through 20.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''Of chapter 2.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''That's Angel of the Lord. That's the manger. That's Mary. That's "unto you a child is born," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We get something else I was unprepared for.

'''B:'''All right.

'''C:'''At the end of chapter two. Benito.

'''B:'''Yes.

'''C:'''Do you know what is offered up as a sacrifice when Jesus is circumcised and dedicated to the Lord?

'''B:'''Oh, yeah. Two turtle doves.

'''C:'''Two turtle doves.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''I did not know that was mentioned in the Bible in the gospel of Luke.

'''B:'''There it is. Yeah, man.

'''C:'''Great. Delightful.

'''B:'''Very delightful.

'''C:'''I do now get why that song has so many birds, because there's a lot of birds in this.

'''B:'''There are many– a high level of bird content.

'''C:'''We have encountered doves, turtle doves, pigeons, screech owls. There's a lot of birds in the Bible, everybody. Eagles coming up soon.

'''B:'''Yep, they're everywhere.

'''C:'''Once we get that, we actually get one of the only, I believe, canonical references to the time between the nativity and Jesus starting up his ministry after being baptized by John the Baptist. Which is we get one brief story, two paragraphs, chapter 2, verses 41 through 49, that take place when Jesus is 12.

'''B:'''Yep.

'''C:'''This is it. This is all of Jesus's childhood and early life that we're ever going to see in the Bible.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''Not that we're going to see on this show.

'''B:'''No. No. So, early Christians were not really concerned that much about, you know, what Jesus did prior to his ministry. That's why the first two gospels don't even bother with the birth narrative. I mean, Matthew has a little bit, you know what I mean? Yeah, not by any stretch is that the last time we'll see the childhood of Jesus. The most famous example of that is the infancy gospel of Thomas, which we will get to. It fills in a large number of blanks and has Jesus doing a large number of murders. So that'll be a fun one.

'''C:'''I do like this cool teen attitude Jesus has here.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Tween attitude, I guess, which is that after his family celebrates Passover, they're going home and they lose track of him. And it turns out Jesus has gone to the temple where he's basically schooling everybody with how good he is at Bible knowledge. And Mary and Joseph are like, "Hey, what are you doing here? We thought you were coming home." And he's like, "I don't know why you didn't know where I was. I'm in my father's house." And then it says that Joseph and Mary did not understand what he meant by that. Joseph and Mary know he's the son of God. Angels have appeared. They should be able to get that.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Because this isn't even a metaphor. This is literal.

'''B:'''People are constantly surprised by things they should not be surprised by at this point. The denial is strong, I think, with some of these people. To be fair, we do have the benefit of hindsight.

'''C:'''That's true. That's true. But I also feel like I wouldn't forget an angel showing up and telling me my child was the son of God.

'''B:'''True. Very true.

'''C:'''That would probably be on my mind pretty frequently.

'''B:'''Yeah. All right. Let's jump into chapter three. Let's browse through a couple of these things. We've got– here's a bit that's interesting. We've got Johnny Bapto. He's back. Here he is featured. We don't get his beheading in this one. But he does get arrested. But interestingly, he gets arrested before Jesus gets baptized and so so you can ask yourself like is this another micro continuity error? Is it implying that Jesus was baptized by somebody else? Like they set up the best baptist whoever was and then they have someone else baptize Jesus? I don't know about that, but I think probably what's happening here is Luke is trying to make an intentional break between the the ministries of John and Jesus, but yeah he does definitely have good old Jean Baptiste in prison while Jesus is getting baptized which is a little weird.

'''C:'''We also get a completely different genealogy.

'''B:'''Yeah! We sure do. you mentioned this a little bit in Matthew, the genealogies do not line up at all, and in fact–

'''C:'''There's a couple that match up. Joseph's in there.

'''B:'''Yeah

'''C:'''Also? Another genealogy that goes to Joseph.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''Who is not Jesus's biological father.

'''B:'''Right. I'll address that in just one second, but yeah, in fact the names don't match up at all, and in fact all the names between Joseph and Zerubbabel in verse 26 of this chapter, those names are not attested to anywhere else. Those names don't exist anywhere else, and strangely Matthew's genealogy has the lineage of Jesus going through Solomon. Obviously he's the good son of David, the famous one, the rich one the wise one with magic powers.

'''C:'''Demon fighter.

'''B:'''Demon fighter. Demon tamer. Here we've got Jesus coming through Nathan, and why would you do that? Nathan famous for hot dogs. Cool. I guess. But, anyway, here's how some people would address the issues between Matthew and Luke's genealogies not matching up. This one, it says, as he began his ministry, Jesus was about 30 years old and he was thought to be the son of Joseph. And so some people say what we're getting here is not actually the genealogy of Joseph, but the genealogy of Mary. So some people would argue that's why they're different. And it shows then that Joseph and Mary are both of the line of David just through different sons. Joseph is descended through Solomon. Mary is descended through Nathan. And then that way, what you get is in Matthew, you see Jesus as the legal inheritor of the royal line, right? And it also is tied to a legal idea because Joseph legally adopts Jesus, right? So it's a legal connection, whereas this genealogy is a physical connection through Mary. Do I think the actual text supports this?

'''C:'''I mean it definitely doesn't say Mary. It definitely says Joseph.

'''B:'''It definitely says Joseph. But this is an interpretation that some people offer to explain the discrepancy between the two genealogies. Another thing that's interesting about this genealogy that you might have noticed, Chris, is this one's a little bit longer.

'''C:'''Yeah I actually marked that out, because at the end of it we go back– Abraham is where it stops in Matthew. This one goes back further this one keeps going past Abraham and we get all the way down to "son of Shem, son of Noah, son of Lamech, son of Methuselah, son of Enoch, son of Jared, son of Mahalaleel, son of Cainan, son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God."

'''B:'''Yeah

'''C:'''First of all, that sounds very impressive, except that it's the part that – according to this book we're reading, are we to engage with the text – everyone has that part. Everyone. Everyone is descended from Noah because everyone else was wiped out.

'''B:'''Right. And that's the point. That's why Luke does it, right? Who is Luke's audience? A Gentile audience. Who is Matthew's audience? A Jewish audience. And so Matthew only needs to prove that Jesus goes back to Abraham, that he is a legitimate successor of the Jewish patriarchs, right? That's, that's all that Matthew needs to prove. But Luke wants to prove that Jesus has commonality with each and every person on the planet. Right? That makes sense, right? The difference between their audiences and the purposes of the messages of the two different Gospels.

'''C:'''Here's the thing, though. We've talked before, specifically in Mark, and me a little bit in Matthew, about how the Gospels– like, Luke's the closest thing we've had to an editor so far, right?

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''The Gospels did not have an editor. Here's the thing about this entire section.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''You cut out verses 24 to 38 and you can just put, "as he began his ministry, Jesus was about 30 years old and was thought to be the Son of God." Like you don't need Adam through Joseph/Mary. He's the son of God. Like that's kind of the important part, right?

'''B:'''Yeah. But it's there to prove it. It's there to prove his legitimacy as the king and his legitimacy as the heir of the nation of Israel it's–

'''C:'''Okay. Okay, but I feel like "Son of God" is pretty– like that's something that has some authority.

'''B:'''Sure.

'''C:'''I would say, if you were to tell me, "hey he's descended from Abraham" I'd be like "all right that sounds good," and then if you tell me, "no he is the direct descendant/incarnation of God" I'd be like, "oh that's a little more impressive."

'''B:'''What can I say? Different priorities, man.

'''B:'''All right, I feel like for a little bit here we can skim a little bit because we're hitting a lot of the same notes that we saw in Mark and Matthew. As we know, there's a large amount of overlap. We've got Jesus's temptation in the desert by Satan. We discussed that in Matthew? "Yeah, what just jump? Just jump."

'''C:'''Yeah, we've talked about most of this up through... in chapter six we get one of the things we talked about before we started recording, which is that while the gospel of Matthew includes a lot more stuff about helping refugees and immigrants and treating other people as you would yourself. Luke hates rich people as much as he hates wizards. Maybe more because he doesn't go in here saying like, "hey, wizards are terrible." He does go in here saying rich people are terrible.

'''B:'''Yeah, he's really clear on it. And we can see that. And well, here's an interesting passage to discuss. In chapter six, we get the equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount. Although, notably, this is chapter six, verse 17, "After coming down with him, he stood on a level place with a large crowd of his disciples and a great number of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon." So this is a Sermon on the Plain, which to me, that's a weird, completely arbitrary change to make, from Matthew if Farrer is correct, right? Like there are a number of arguments that Professor Goodacre makes that I find convincing like Luke hates wizards. I believe that with my whole heart. Like, and you could say, well, "and also the genealogies are different because of this and that." And well, okay, even though that seems like weird arbitrary changes to make. Like if I were cribbing off of Matthew and Matthew had already written that genealogy out, I'd just be like, "oh, thank God. I can just copy this bit. I don't have to research this myself." And yet he makes considerable changes to the genealogy.

'''B:'''So this is the thing, this to me is the most nagging detail. This specific verse, this is the bit that makes me go, "is Farrer right though?" Why is it on a plain instead of on a mount? That is such an arbitrary change to make. And also Luke clearly does not know the geology or geography and topography of Judea and Galilee at all because he definitely describes like "oh let's throw Jesus off a cliff face" and there's no cliffs there, you know?

'''B:'''Brief tangent there, but yeah notably in his version of the Beatitudes he says, "you who are poor are blessed," or as the scholars would say, "congratulations you poor," and of course Matthew has blessed are the poor in spirit. And so some arguments against the Farrer hypothesis are that Luke will often have what they call the more primitive version of a proverb, where Matthew will have the more refined version. And this would be a prime example of that, the idea that the original saying would have been "blessed are the poor," but Matthew refines that and makes it a little bit more metaphorical to say "blessed are the poor in spirit," right? Whereas Luke has "blessed are the poor," but Professor Goodacre argues, "no, Luke changed that because Luke cares about the poor and being concerned with the poor is in fact, his primary social message throughout this book," like Luke is very much like "help the poor, throw the rich people into a pit."

'''C:'''Yeah. We literally get a chapter six, verse 20. Then looking at his disciples, "He said, you who are poor are blessed because the kingdom of God is yours." Chapter six, verse 24. "But woe to you who are rich for you have received your comfort."

'''B:'''Yeah, man, you already got it. Your belly is full. You're done.

'''C:'''Yeah. Like you said, we've seen most of this jumping ahead to chapter eight. This is something that we've also seen before, but it still bugs me here. This is in the section, it's a brief aside about, "oh yeah, some ladies were there too." And we get in chapter eight, verse two, "also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and sicknesses. Mary called Magdalene, parentheses, seven demons had come out of her, close parentheses, the end."

'''B:'''Yeah, you know, just a cool aside, you know.

'''C:'''I would very much like to know more details. I mean, presumably she's like, we've already seen a guy who had enough demons in him to get a whole, what do you call a group of pigs? A flock?

'''B:'''Herd of pigs.

'''C:'''A herd?

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''A little herd of pigs. But like Mary Magdalene is a big character extra canonically.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''To say the least.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''And I would really like to know more about how Jesus showed up and got them seven demons out of her. Do you think they were the seven deadly enemies of man?

'''B:'''Could be. Yeah. They flew out of her and went straight up to the rock of eternity. Absolutely. I believe it. Canon. Mark it down.

'''C:'''In chapter nine, this is another verse we've already talked about because we were talking about our good pals. This is when Jesus goes into Jerusalem, "but they did not welcome him because he determined to journey to Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they said, 'Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?' But he turned and rebuked them and they went to another village." Jesus told these dudes to get some chill.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Guys, I did not give you Holy Spirit powers so that you could firebomb the city of Jerusalem.

'''B:'''Just a bad Yelp review. That's all. Give them a bad Yelp, one star, and get out. You don't need to bring down fire from heaven.

'''B:'''Chapter nine, beginning in about the middle of chapter nine, or actually near the nearish the end of chapter nine, we get the beginning of what's called the travel narrative, the travelogue of Jesus. This is Jesus beginning his trip to Jerusalem. And this is where the majority of special Lucan material comes from. This stuff lasts until about the middle of chapter 19. And so for 10 or 11 chapters here, we've got Luke interjecting a bunch of new teaching that does not exist in the other gospels. And that's where we get a lot of fresh and famous parables. And then like the bits with Mary and Martha and so on. So all that stuff comes during this travel narrative as Jesus is making his way to Jerusalem.

'''C:'''Then we get a bit in chapter 10 that I'm pretty stoked about.

'''B:'''Yeah. All right.

[Music: "Runnin' with the Devil" by Van Halen]

'''C:'''Hey Benito, have you ever seen the movie Street Fighter starring Raul Julia and Jean-Claude Van Damme?

'''B:'''Uh-huh!

'''C:'''Do you know what one of my favorite parts of that movie is?

'''B:'''I know exactly what it is but our listeners might not, although if they know you they do.

'''C:'''It's the part where Raul Julia as M. Bison says, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven!"

'''B:'''Yeah! And there it is. "He said to them, ' I watched Satan fall from heaven like a lightning flash. Look, I have given you the authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy. Nothing will ever harm you.'"

'''C:'''Okay, a couple things about that. Again, this is... We haven't gotten a lot of what would later become pretty accepted tradition. Which is that Satan was an angel who fell from heaven, landed in hell, then turned the key over to Morpheus and went to go live in Los Angeles.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''That's how it works, right? That's basically it.

'''B:'''Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And this, I mean, this is a big piece for providing that bit of information about Satan that he fell from heaven. Yeah.

'''C:'''This also is another passage that lends credence to our major theological theory, which is that Satan's about the size of a kitten because they say they can step on him.

'''B:'''Just like a snake or scorpion.

'''C:'''Yeah, he's little. He's a little guy. He's a little mean guy.

'''B:'''Yeah, he's hot stuff from Harvey Comics.

'''C:'''Yeah, but also, Jesus also tells them, you already read it, but KJV has it as this, "Nothing shall by any means hurt you." Benito.

'''B:'''Yes, Chris.

'''C:'''Can you just run me down a real quick list of how all 12 apostles die?

'''B:'''Uh yeah, I sure can. So Simon, of course we know, Simon Peter, Simon "the Rock" Peter, saw crucified upside down. Andrew: also crucified. James the Great was beheaded by Herod. John: the only good, good boy to escape martyrdom, although there were attempts, and when we read the [[CTRL-Z On A Murder  | Acts of John]] you guys can find out what those were. James the Less was martyred in Egypt, don't know the specific method off the dome. Judas Thaddeus: martyred. Philip also killed. Bartholomew was beheaded. Matthew: martyred. Thomas: killed with a spear. Simon the Zealot was tortured and sawed in half, like our boy Isaiah. And of course, Judas, we know, exploded. So, yeah.

'''C:'''I'll give you Judas.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Because that has to happen. He's the traitor. He kind of gives up apostledom at that point. It certainly seems like something by many means is hurting them.

'''B:'''Yeah, it's a metaphor.

'''C:'''Is it? That's pretty explicit language. He says they can walk on snakes and scorpions and have power over their enemies.

'''B:'''The snakes are metaphors and the harming is to your soul or something. I guess.

'''C:'''I mean if you say so

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Wo we also get a third Mary at this point.

'''B:'''Yeah, at least three.

'''C:'''Who's Martha's sister who has some chores to do and instead decides to just hang out and listen to Jesus.

'''B:'''And Jesus says that's better. Listening to Jesus is more important than chores.

'''C:'''Yeah, so, you know.

'''B:'''Tell that to your mom, kids.

'''C:'''Yeah. If any kids are listening, which you shouldn't be...

'''B:'''Listen to this podcast, and when your mom says clean your room, you go, "no, listening to Apocrypals, that's more important than chores."

'''C:'''We also get another version of the Lord's Prayer with the same heading, "The Model Prayer," but this one's very abbreved.

'''B:'''It is abbreved.

'''C:'''Yeah. It is TLP. It's the Lord's Prayer abbreved. It just stops after do not bring us into temptation. and I feel like Jesus is like, yeah, you got it, right?

'''B:'''You know what the rest is.

'''C:'''Just keep going like that.

'''B:'''You know what the rest is.

'''B:'''There's a really weird, interesting thing about the word that's used to describe the bread that we translate as "daily bread." It's a word that doesn't exist anywhere else in Greek and "daily" is just a guess as to what it means because it's even difficult to identify the elements of the word to try and piecemeal together what it might mean. So that's just a little fun language fact for you. We don't actually know what kind of bread we're actually asking God for all the time. Give us today this Zesty Doritos bread. I'm going to put forth that interpretation.

'''C:'''Ooh, give us this day our Cool Ranch bread.

'''B:'''Our Cool Ranch bread. It could be.

'''C:'''That fits.

'''B:'''It's just as likely as anything else IMHO.

'''C:'''Here's a part. I'm going to pretend to be Peter for a second.

'''B:'''All right.

'''C:'''Hi, what's up? It's me, 16-year-old Peter, the Rock, the apostle.

'''B:'''King Peter from Simon Peter Surf Shop?

'''C:'''Yeah, I don't understand anything.

'''B:'''That tracks.

'''C:'''Particularly Luke chapter 11, verse 24. I actually wrote the word "what" in my margins because I don't get this one. And as we all know, Jesus invented metaphors, so maybe you can help me out with this one. "When an unclean spirit comes out of a man, it roams through waterless places looking for rest. And not finding rest, it then says, 'I'll go back to my house where I came from.' and returning it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself and they enter and settle down there as a result that man's last condition is worse than the first." The house is the dude? Who got exorcised but the exorcism didn't take?

'''B:'''Yeah. Yeah... Well the idea is if you if you exorcise a person, it's incomplete unless the void of the demon is filled with Christ so unless Christ comes in to live there and heal the person there's nothing to prevent the demon to come back. So the idea is you know if you ditch a bad habit but you don't replace it with a good Jesus habit things could just be worse. That.... I don't know.

'''C:'''That tracks, but like, what got me was the demon comes back and the house is all nice and he's like, "sweet! Time to move in."

'''B:'''"With my seven boys."

'''C:'''Yeah, because I feel like the sweeping and the putting the house in order, that's getting your life back on track, right?

'''B:'''Yeah, except–

'''C:'''But I guess Jesus didn't live in there.

'''B:'''Right if the house is still empty, there's nothing to keep them from coming back in.

'''C:'''That's fair.

'''B:'''But this is cool because it gives us a little bit of the idea of what would have been contemporary demonology at the time. The idea that demons are just wandering the world looking for places to live and they might live inside of a person or they might live in a graveyard or whatever. So the idea that demons are just on the earth looking for cozy places to sneak into.

'''C:'''We also get a a little bit in chapter 11 that I marked out as "not all pharisees, m'Jesus," which is where– you might remember this as being one of my favorite verses from Matthew, this is where Jesus is telling people that they are like "tombs full of dead men's bones."

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''"And one of the experts in the law answered him, 'Teacher, when You say these things, You insult us too.' And then he said, 'Woe also to you experts in the law! You load people with burdens that are hard to carry, yet you yourselves don't touch these burdens with one of your fingers.'" So Jesus is like, yes, all Pharisees.

'''B:'''Yes, all Pharisees. #YesAllPharisees.

'''C:'''In chapter 12, we get a very good bit that I would like to talk to you about. Do you want to guess which one I'm talking about?

'''B:'''Where in chapter? Oh...

[Music: "Runnin' with the Devil" by Van Halen]

'''C:'''Chapter 12, verse 4. "And I say to you, My friends, don't fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more, but I will show you the One to fear. Fear Him who has authority to throw people into hell after death."

'''B:'''Mm-hmm. Yeah.

'''C:'''Yeah?

'''B:'''Yeah, we get a little bit of hell in Luke in the way we don't... It's a little bit clearer, a little more refined. We definitely later in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, not to be confused with the more famous Lazarus, but let's see, I think that's in chapter 16? Yeah, the Rich Man and Lazarus. Yeah, there we have definitely the idea of Hades and heaven as very physical places where you can somehow communicate with each other. Some kind of walkie-talkie, perhaps? But there's a great chasm in between. And we see definitely Hades as a place where people go to be punished. And there's burning flames and things. I would say a little bit more refinement of the idea of hell and Luke, although it's still very kind of obliquely referenced.

'''C:'''We also get it in chapter 13 where he says, "Get away from me, all you workers of unrighteousness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth in that place when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves are thrown out." And also back in chapter 12, he says, "I came to bring fire on the earth and how I wish it were already set ablaze." This's a little bit of that golden age Jesus still around.

'''B:'''Yeah, a little bit. And definitely, I think we can all agree with that sentiment. Right? I think we're all ready for that fire, right?

'''C:'''Now, this might date our show a little bit. This might pin it directly to a time in which we are recording it. But I did see some no-account fool up on the internet. Some bright-eyed titan of filth.

'''B:'''Yes.

'''C:'''Some hypocrite who's like an unwashed tomb full of dead men's bones.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Talking about how you can't hang out with chickens and expect to be an eagle.

'''B:'''Oh, yeah, okay.

'''C:'''Do you see that jabroni?

'''B:'''I did. I sure did.

'''C:'''That's really weird because in Luke chapter 15, verse seven, it says, "I tell you in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who don't need repentance."

'''B:'''He does say that.

'''C:'''Yeah. He also literally talks about why he hangs out with sinners and tax collectors. It was the verse I read at the top of the show like three weeks ago.

'''B:'''Yeah, it sure was. Yeah. Jesus was pretty much, who needs the doctor? Not well people.

'''C:'''And you know what? You know what? That dude, that dude needs Jesus. That dude needs Jesus.

'''B:'''That whitewashed tomb.

'''C:'''Full of dead men's bones. In chapter 20, we get a reprise of a piece of scripture that I have heard a couple times recently because I've been watching Netflix's Luke Cage season two.

'''B:'''Okay. Yeah.

'''C:'''Which is, there is a reference here to "the stone that the builders rejected that has become the cornerstone."

'''B:'''Yeah, I think all of the gospels have quoted that bad boy.

'''C:'''Have they?

'''B:'''I think so.

'''C:'''"Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces. And if it falls on anyone, it will grind him to powder." It's almost like rejecting people and refusing them entrance into your ministry and refusing to acknowledge them with your love will cause you to be ground into dust.

'''B:'''It does seem that way, doesn't it? It sure does. I do want to jump back a hair before that because I want to look at chapter 19, verse 11, and I'm going to totally bypass some of the stranger parables that Jesus drops on us, like the Unjust Steward. If you guys figure that one out, good on you.

'''B:'''I'd like to look at chapter 19 verse 11, because this, well, here it is, the Parable of the 10 Minas, which we mentioned briefly, but the introduction is what I want to look at. "As they were listening to this, He went on to tell a parable because He was near Jerusalem, and they thought the kingdom of God was going to appear right away." And we see this sentiment repeated as well in 21:8, where Jesus says, "Watch out that you are not deceived. For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am He,’ and, ‘The time is near.’ Don’t follow them." This is a very different eschatology than what we got in Mark and Matthew. And eschatology, if you guys forgot, is study of the end times. Right? It's philosophy of the end times. In Mark literally the first words that we hear from the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark is "what's up nerds, the kingdom of god is at hand." I'm paraphrasing but he's literally saying like, it's coming. And then Matthew is all like, "not even a generation will pass away before I ghost ride my cloud whip in here and it's judgment o'clock on the nation of Israel." And then Luke is like, "Uh... maybe not right away. And in fact, anyone who says that probably is a liar. So nope, let's be in this one for the long haul, you guys. "let's look at, let's set out a series of praxis for the future. Cause we're going to have one, even though Matthew and Mark said we wouldn't, probably."

'''B:'''Yeah. For Matthew and Mark, the end times were very very nigh and Luke is like "perhaps not."

'''C:'''I have a question for you.

'''B:'''Yes.

'''C:'''Since you're always asking me questions.

'''B:'''Yes.

'''C:'''In chapter 22 verse 3, Judas isn't just a bad guy in the book of Luke.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''Like, previously in Matthew and Mark we have seen Judas just be like, "yeah I could really go for some pieces of silver I'm gonna betray Jesus." But in Luke, "then Satan entered Judas called Iscariot who was numbered among the twelve." Is this metaphorical Satan or is this a little kitty cat? A little bad guy kitty cat?

'''B:'''Yeah, I mean, I don't think he's literally like shrinking down and flying into his ear like the Fantastic Voyage, but I do think we're supposed to understand this, that literally Satan is influencing Judas, that Satan's hand is at play here. We can see this kind of refers back to chapter four after the temptation of Jesus, chapter 4, verse 13, "After the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from Him for a time." And now he's back. Chapter 22: Satan's back baby in Judas form.

'''C:'''Okay. So, it's for real Satan.

'''B:'''I think so. I think that's a fair interpretation of this. I mean, if you want to take it as just like Judas got real evil.

'''C:'''I mean, it does really take a lot of agency away from Judas.

'''B:'''It does.

'''C:'''It makes him much less of a betrayer that you would want to explode in the field of blood?

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''And more of a guy who, you know, had a demon up inside him, like, say, Mary Magdalene.

'''B:'''Yeah. I mean, that's true. It does remove a lot of culpability from Judas. And I don't know, maybe somebody would prefer that and maybe someone wouldn't. I mean, especially, it does actually seem odd if you take the interpretation that the reason Judas betrays Jesus is because Jesus is not the kind of Messiah that he wanted, that he wanted the more rabbinical view of a political Messiah who was going to come and overthrow the Romans. The idea that Luke, who is our most pro-Gentile boy, that he would soften arguably the most Jewish of the apostles who was then the betrayer. That does seem interesting. I don't know. Just something to think about. I'm just musing out loud, you guys.

'''C:'''In chapter 23, we get, you know, you mentioned the passion at the beginning. And we do get an expanded version of it.

'''B:'''We do.

'''C:'''Specifically, I mean, it follows the same beats that you would expect. You know, Pilate's there. Barabbas is there. But we get a return of a Herod, who– this has got to be Herod 4.

'''B:'''No, this is Herod 2. This is Herod 2.

'''C:'''This is Herod 2.

'''B:'''This is Herod Antipas. This is the second one. Because Herod 3 and 4 are both in the period of Acts. And so this is Herod 2.

'''C:'''Instead of just Pilate's men torturing Jesus, he sends them a little field trip. He sends them to Herod. And it's a weird little trip because at first Herod is like, "sweet. I've been wanting to meet this Messiah for so long."

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''And then Jesus is like, "I'm not gonna do any miracles for you." And that's when he really starts getting it.

'''B:'''"Then Herod, with his soldiers, treated Him with contempt, mocked Him, dressed Him in a brilliant robe, and sent Him back to Pilate. That very day Herod and Pilate became friends. Previously, they had been hostile toward each other."

'''C:'''Which is, look, look, not to mock the suffering of the Lord. That's pretty great. That's pretty hilarious.

'''B:'''They finally had something in common, you guys.

'''C:'''Yeah. But, Pilate, like this is the most we've seen of Pilate really trying to get Jesus off of his charges. Like Pilate specifically tells everybody, "hey we're just gonna whip him a little bit and let him go," and the crowd's like, "nope."

'''B:'''Yeah. And I mean, again, if your goal is to make Gentiles look good removing culpability from the Roman governor is a good idea.

'''C:'''Yeah, so this time we get Golgotha/Calvary literally just called, "the skull"–

'''B:'''The skull!

'''C:'''...in the in the text here.

'''B:'''Yeah and we get again a different inscription above him this is the king of the jews and so I don't I can't remember if I explained this before, but some people justify the fact that it's different in each gospel as saying that it was written in like four different languages and so that's why. But yeah, we get that, but also here's where we get the penitent thief who is later known as Saint Dismas AKA "San Dimas High School Football Rules. Here he is, he's the one. He says you know, "'Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.' And He said to him, 'I assure you: Today you will be with Me in paradise.'" That's where that story comes from. We didn't get that in Matthew. We didn't get that in Mark. Luke is our source for that guy.

'''C:'''Now, is he just the patron saint of thieves?

'''B:'''Besides being the patron of repentant thieves, Dismas is also the patron of condemned prisoners, makes sense, funeral directors, that one's a little bit more of a stretch, but I'm sure there's some reason behind that. He's also the patron of Merizo, Guam and San Dimas, Mexico. So there's your boy Dismas.

'''C:'''So Jesus dies on the cross as you might have heard. We get another evolution of the centurion because at this point there is no sarcasm.

'''B:'''Oh definitely.

'''C:'''If there was sarcasm present in Mark, it is gone now, because Luke tells us that, "When the centurion saw what happened, he began to glorify God, saying, 'This man really was righteous!'" We also don't get zombies this time around.

'''B:'''No zombies.

'''C:'''We don't get the saints rising from their tombs.

'''B:'''And also we don't get that that good kind of "God forsakenness." We've got a different last words of  Jesus. We have, "Father into Your hands I entrust My spirit," which is from a different psalm. That's from Psalm 31. It seems a little less despairing, but we all know it was a secret victory cry. Anyway, we get that, but yeah, we don't get zombies. We do get an eclipse. "Darkness came over the whole land until three, because the sun’s light failed." So, I just want to point this out just because like, obviously this is a miraculous thing. This is a sign from God, right? We do not need to bring science into this, Neil deGrasse Tyson. But, if we were to say, "oh, there just happened to be an eclipse at the moment of the crucifixion," I just want to point out that it's physically impossible because the crucifixion happened during the Passover season. And by definition, the Passover happens during a full moon. You cannot have a full moon and a solar eclipse at the same time. That's the exact opposite of what is true. So just want to point that out in case anyone was concerned.

'''C:'''So as you may have heard, I have some good news for you.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''The stone was rolled away. The tomb is empty. But, well, the tomb is not empty this time.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''How many angels do we have now?

'''B:'''We got two. Luke is like, one angel?

'''C:'''We got two angels.

'''B:'''One angel? No, thank you. Two angels. He's got that Drake face. One angel? No, thank you. Two angels, Drake face.

'''C:'''We also have Mary Magdalene, who had seven demons thrown out of her by Jesus. We have a different Mary. We have Mary, the mother of James.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''Who may or may not be Mary, the mother of Jesus.

'''B:'''Right. Mm-hmm.

'''C:'''And we have Joanna.

'''B:'''Joanna not present in the other one.

'''C:'''Not explained

'''B:'''Joanna seems to be Luke's OC do not steal. We saw her mentioned before but she doesn't–

'''C:'''She has lavender eyes

'''B:'''Yes. She doesn't really...

'''C:'''She has one angel hand and one devil hand.

'''B:'''Exactly. Exactly. We'll have to do a breakdown for John. We'll do a breakdown of the different combinations of women who went to the tomb and who they are who are these Marys who might they be. We'll do that breakdown next time when we can compare all four gospels. But yes, suffice to say it has been a different combination of women each time.

'''C:'''All right then. This is one of my favorite Jesuses.

'''B:'''Uh-huh

'''C:'''This is a real good Jesus. Rather than just like showing up with the apostles and being like, you know, "hey it's me Jesus. I have risen again. I'm gonna hang out for a little bit and then ascend to heaven." Jesus is Matches Malone for a little bit.

'''B:'''Oh yeah. All right.

'''C:'''Jesus disguises himself and then goes and appears before two of his followers and they're like, really, you know, obviously they're upset. Jesus has been crucified. And Jesus is like, "Hey guys, what's wrong?" And then he hears what they've got to say and he's like, "Hmm, cool, cool." Then he teleports.

'''B:'''Uh-huh.

'''C:'''Then he teleports back in when they're at dinner. And he just shows up at the table eats some bread and goes, "hey what's up it's actually me Jesus." Then he teleports again!

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Then he teleports back as they're trying to eat another meal and goes, "y'all got anything to eat?" I love hungry teleporting Jesus

'''B:'''Yeah, very good fish-eating prank Jesus.

'''C:'''I love teleporting hungry Jesus. He's very good.

'''B:'''Yeah. Yep.

'''C:'''He's been dead for three days!

'''B:'''They gave him a piece of fish! "He took it and He ate it in their presence," which is important. It shows that we know that he was resurrected bodily that's what that's about right?

'''C:'''Yeah, he specifically says, "i'm not a ghost."

'''B:'''"I'm not a ghost."

'''C:'''"You guys know what ghosts are like, right?" Which I really love because he goes, "you know what ghosts are like right," and everybody's like, "we're familiar with ghosts."

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''"They're transparent and they got no bones."

'''B:'''"Have you ever seen a ghost eat fish? Well look at this." And he just eats some fish.

'''C:'''It's, uh, very good. So we don't really get the great commission here, which is kind of surprising to me.

'''B:'''Yeah his version is definitely a little different and abridged.

'''C:'''Which which makes sense, because if Acts is the direct sequel to the gospel of Luke, then Acts pretty much is where everybody gets together and decides what they're going to do now that Jesus has ascended to heaven. Like they're going to recruit Steven and Matthias. They're going to, you know, have to deal with Paul. Eventually Paul's going to join up and they're going to go to Rome. There is not a need for Jesus to tell them what to do at this point.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''But it is kind of surprising by its absence because it is, you know, the cornerstone of the evangelical church is that you have to go evangelize.

'''B:'''The entire world.

'''C:'''Yeah. And so that missing from Luke after it appears in Matthew is pretty surprising to me.

'''B:'''Yeah. I mean, he does, he does recap and expand on the Ascension, of course, in the opening chapters of Acts. So maybe he was anticipating what he was going to do in part two. I don't know.

'''C:'''Yeah. And then, then he ascends to heaven. He congratulates everybody.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''And then he is carried up into heaven and we do not get any specifics about that.

'''B:'''Right.

'''C:'''So are you picturing like a Neo at the end of the Matrix thing? Are you picturing like angels coming down and flying up to heaven?

'''B:'''What if it's just giant hands that he rides up like an elevator?

'''C:'''Can he ride up like an elevator? I mean, surely he knows the password. Of course he does.

'''B:'''He does. Jesus got, he's got that elevator key.

'''C:'''Tosses Peter the keys. "Hey kid, here you go." And then he's out.

'''B:'''"You know, those elevator keys they told you about when you were a freshman? They're real. Here they are."

'''C:'''And that's the gospel of Luke.

'''B:'''Yeah, it is. First, let me ask this. If we're ranking them, where is Luke? Because I believe the standings are currently Mark number one, Matthew number two. Where does Luke go in your estimation?

'''C:'''I feel like Luke's number three.

'''B:'''Really? I mean, because you were pretty mad at Matthew.

'''C:'''I'm not quite sure where to rank it. But the more I think about it, the more I think it should rank pretty high. Mark's quick. Mark is in and out. It starts with the ministry, ends with the crucifixion, and the presumed resurrection. Matthew kind of fills all that out, but goes on for a while. Luke's much longer, but even in the HCSB translation, I can tell that there is a more fluency of language with Luke. Plus it has the Christmas stuff, although it does not have the Magi.

'''B:'''True. Because he hates wizards.

'''C:'''It goes hard at the rich, which I like.

'''B:'''Yeah, I like that too. So Luke could possibly be in that one spot, you think?

'''C:'''I'm going to reserve judgment until we've gotten through John and then I'll, and then I'll give you a definitive.

'''B:'''That's fine.

'''C:'''Ranking of all four.

'''B:'''That's fine. Cool. Two other questions. Number one, did you solve the synoptic problem? Now that we're at the end of the synoptics, have you solved it?

'''C:'''Oh yeah. I'm with Professor Goodacre.

'''B:'''Yeah?

'''C:'''On this one.

'''B:'''Okay. So you're fully in the Farrer bag, that you think that Luke just cribbed off of Matthew.

'''C:'''Yes.

'''B:'''Okay. Interesting. Very interesting. I was definitely, when we were covering Matthew, I was starting to lean that way more, but now that I look at Luke I feel like some of the some of the changes, the differences between Matthew and Luke seem– they feel so arbitrary. Like honestly, the Sermon on the Plain like that's so arbitrary to me that it makes me wonder.

'''C:'''I mean, look, surely the only things written down about Jesus were not Matthew and Mark.

'''B:'''Oh, yeah.

'''C:'''It's like there would have been other like– you can't just photocopy it. There would have been people writing it down, maybe changing some things to distribute them. There had to have been other things that we have since lost, but I don't feel like there is... I don't think that there is a source document in the way that we think. I think it's much more likely that Luke is doing what he says in the beginning and that he's talking to people.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''I think he's really trying to get everything. And so he's hearing oral traditions. He's reading Matthew. He's reading Mark. He's cutting stuff out that he doesn't think is probable or possible. Like he clearly doesn't like wizards.

'''B:'''Sure.

'''C:'''Clearly down with Paul.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''And Peter. Luke does not have nearly as much of Peter being an idiot.

'''B:'''That's true.

'''C:'''Like Peter is totally like Peter denies Jesus. And that's a big thing in this.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''But he is not always going, what do you mean Jesus?

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Like there's definitely, there's definitely a Peter, Paul, Luke connection.

'''B:'''Okay.

'''C:'''Here.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''Where he makes Peter look better than he is in Matthew. He cuts that stuff out.

'''B:'''That's true. That's a good point. All right.

'''C:'''So I definitely think it's Luke doing some editorializing, but I think it's also Luke trying to make things more accessible. I feel like the reasoning behind the sermon on the plain is maybe that he just did not like the imagery of Jesus literally putting himself above other people.

'''B:'''Hey.

'''C:'''It reinforces the idea of him being the common person that he's down on the ground surrounded rather than being in a literal higher position, handing down wisdom.

'''B:'''That's real good. I'm going to see if Professor Goodacre'll send you a gold star for that one. That's real nice.

'''B:'''Okay. Well, so here's my one last question. What are some things that you are surprised that we haven't seen yet? Stuff that you've expected to see that has not come up yet.

'''C:'''I'm very surprised that we are three out of four and there is nothing about the redemption of sins

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''There's nothing about Jesus being sacrificed for our sins

'''B:'''Right. Okay.

'''C:'''It is not here. I'm very surprised that this was the first mention of the manger because I feel like that's the the key metaphor, like it's the most humanizing thing about him that he comes from like literal nothing. Like he's not even born in a house. I'm very surprised that this is the first time we've gotten to that and that it's not really emphasized at all.

'''B:'''Yeah, sure.

'''C:'''Just like, "hey there's kid in a manger. Go find it." Those are what are very surprising.

'''B:'''Okay. I mean, any stories you thought would have been covered in more than one gospel? Because obviously anything that you know of that we haven't hit yet, is obviously only going to be in John. Anything you would have thought would have been in like every one of them one of them? You thought was like one of the greatest hits that should have been?

'''C:'''I don't know. I don't know what I'm drawing– what am I drawing a blank on here, Benito?

'''B:'''You know, water into wine or Lazarus, Nicodemus.

'''C:'''Okay. Well, okay. You say Lazarus, but I am of the school of thought that Secret Mark is about Lazarus.

'''B:'''Okay. I mean, it could be.

'''C:'''I think that's Golden Age Lazarus.

'''B:'''I definitely have some more ideas about Secret Mark that we'll discuss when we get to John.

'''C:'''Yeah. No water into wine. Which is weird because that seems like a much more wizardy trick, you know, that would have come up in an earlier gospel.

'''B:'''What we're going to see when we get to John is that John is much more concerned with miracles than with teaching. It's all about Jesus performing signs to prove who he is. And that's really what the whole book of John is structured around. So a lot of famous miracles happen in John.

'''B:'''Do you have a favorite verse that you wanted to point out this time?

'''C:'''Yeah, I did. I mean, the actual one is I beheld Satan as he felt like lightning.

'''B:'''That's a good one.

'''C:'''Because honestly, the other one I quite like when Gabriel appears to Mary. This is chapter one, verses 29 through 32. "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Now listen, you will conceive and give birth to a son and you will call his name Jesus. He will be great."

'''B:'''He'll be great.

'''C:'''That's as good as the line... Jesus is good as– Jesus does everything well. "Yeah, listen, you're going to have a kid. He's going to be great. He's just he's great."

'''B:'''He's good at everything.

'''C:'''"You know that Messiah you've been looking for? You might not be ready for it, but your kids are going to love it."

'''C:'''What about you? Did you have a verse that caught your eye?

'''B:'''Yeah, one that I picked is actually– it's a sentiment that we've already seen. It overlaps with Matthew a little bit, but I do like it. And I considered it last time. But this is from chapter six. It's from the Sermon on the Plain. He says, "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. If you do what is good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do what is good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is gracious to the ungrateful and evil. Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful."

'''B:'''I like it. That's a good philosophy in my opinion.

'''C:'''Basically what we're getting in the gospels, like a through line throughout what Jesus says is, "hey, if you're doing good on earth, you're fine. But there are people out there who aren't that you need to take care of."

'''B:'''Yeah, it's really been lost. Absolutely been lost in the face of the prosperity gospel.

'''C:'''Yeah, I am turning out to be kind of a big fan of a grumpy, teleporting, hungry textual Jesus.

'''B:'''Yeah,

'''C:'''It turns out.

'''B:'''He's way better than supply side Jesus.

'''C:'''No wonder the Holy Ghost enforces full socialism.

'''C:'''So that's the Gospel of Luke. We're almost done with our now five part series on the Gospels, at least. Hey, because guess what? We went another two hours. Good job.

'''B:'''Yeah, yeah. We're right at it. So yeah, we've covered Golden Age Action Jesus. Refined Silver Age Jesus. Continuity Picky Bronze Age Jesus. And so you know what that means next week, coming up, we got spooky, mystical, 90s Vertigo Jesus in the Gospel of John.

'''C:'''As always, you can read along if you would like. We are reading specifically the Holman Christian Standard Bible, the HCSB, which you can find at your local bookstore or online at Bible Gateway. You can also read along in the King James Version or the New International Version or any version of your choice, all of which are available online, and which also you can find by going to a hotel or going outside and asking if anybody has the Gospel of John. You can also find segments of the Gospel of John on so many t-shirts, so many signs.

'''B:'''Yeah, it's true. Go to a football game, look at the end zone. You might see it.

'''C:'''Not anymore. That guy had a bad ending.

'''B:'''Yeah.

'''C:'''So, Benito.

'''B:'''Yes.

'''C:'''If people like this show, if you like this show and you would buy us, say, a cup of coffee while we said these things to you, if we were in your town. If we entered your town and had shaken the dust off our sandals, and you want to support the show, and you want to support the show monetarily, where can you go to make a love offering?

'''B:'''Well, you can go to ko-fi.com slash apocrypals, drop your widow's mites in there, in increments of $3, roughly the amount of a cup of coffee at apparently a very cheap coffee place.

'''C:'''I mean, that's about halfway between a regular cup of coffee and a latte.

'''B:'''That's true. If you were getting a tall, you're going to get a tall for about $3. But yeah, if you want to tip us a cup of coffee or multiple cups of coffee, you can do that there. It's very easy. It goes directly to PayPal. Yeah, just increments of $3. It really helps us out. It's just a tip. It's not a recurring payment like you'd have at Patreon. It's just as much as you want to give. But you can come back as often as you like. If you think we did a good job, drop us another $3, whatever. And thank you so much to everyone who has donated so far through the ko-fi ko-fi coffee page I don't know through this page. Thank you to everyone who has donated most of you have been anonymous, but we do appreciate it very much

'''C:'''That's right it is ko-fi... k o - f i dot com slash apocrypals

'''C:'''That does it I think it's time for us to get out of here. Anything else Benito? Any final words on the gospel of Luke?

'''B:'''Nope.

'''C:'''Alright then. Until next time For Benito Cereno, I've been Chris Sims. Benito, peace be with you.

'''B:'''And also, with you.

[Music "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" by Darlene Love]