Dunking on Satan (Transcript)

Chris Sims: "And while all the saints were rejoicing, behold Satan, the prince and chief of death, said unto Hell, 'Make thyself ready to receive Jesus, who boasteth himself that he is the Son of God.'" The Gospel of Nicodemus, chapter 20, verse 1.

[Music "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC]

C: Hello everybody and welcome to Apocrypals. It's the podcast where two non-believers read through the Bible and we try not to be jerks about it. My name is Chris Sims. With me as always, the other set of footprints, Benito Cereno. Benito! How are you today?

Benito Cereno: I'm very good here in part one of our Spook-tober-fest Spook-tacular Boo-nanza.

C: Yeah, it's a scary one today.

B: I was terrified to my very marrow while reading this chilling story.

C: Spoiler warning, at the end of this show, you're gonna turn around and you're gonna have thriller eyes.

B: Everyone's got thriller eyes at the end of this one.

C: That's the trick: everyone has thriller eyes.

B: Yeah.

C: Except one person who doesn't. Because if everybody has thriller eyes then what's scarier than a person who has regular person eyes?

B: Exactly. Yeah, we're reading this week the Gospel of Nicodemus, aka The Acts of Pilate. AKA the Harrowing of Hell, the Descent to Hell. Yeah, as part one of our two-part Spooktoberfest. I don't know Chris, did you find it particularly spooky? Were you spooked with this one?

C: I did not.

B: Yeah.

C: I mean you and I have had the conversation before about how I have a very specific idea of Halloween monsters.

B: Sure. Yeah.

C: Dracula: Halloween monster.

B: Yeah.

C: Wolfman: Halloween monster. Godzilla: not a Halloween monster.

B: Right.

C: Satan? Debatable.

B: Yeah.

C: But we don't really get any... Here's the thing I've noticed about the Bible is that there's very rarely any suspense about who's gonna win that would make... that is necessary for horror.

B: Right.

C: Because it's mostly spoiler warning, this book's mostly Satan getting owned hard by Jesus.

B: Yeah, that's kind of how it goes. Like, it's not until relatively modern things that people are like, hey, what if Satan had a chance? Because yeah, like, you know, prior to that the idea is like, this guy is a scrub who just gets dunked on by Jesus all the time.

C: Yeah. Jesus humiliates Satan in front of all his boys for like ten chapters.

B: Yeah.

C: Which is pretty great, honestly.

B: And then the other thing is the fact that the actual Harrowing of Hell is honestly it's a thing that's tagged on to the larger work, which is the Acts of Pilate, which is basically an expansion of the trial of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke. It's expanded on to give larger roles to Annas and Caiaphas, to Nicodemus, and to Joseph of Arimathæa. There's a couple of bonus miracles in there, but it's basically like a forensic investigation where it's like step by step going through like debunking any kind of objection someone might have to the miracle of the passion and resurrection and ascension for that matter. There's not a lot of spooky atmosphere despite the fact that a significant portion of the book is set in Hell, wherein Hell itself is a speaking sentient character. You might expect more spookiness out of that, but alas. But this is a significant work that had a lot of influence on especially medieval thought and so we wanted to cover it and since it's a major one about Hell that seemed like a good time for it.

C: This also seems like the next logical step in terms of the rehabilitation and recontextualization of Pilate.

B: Yes.

C: Because we talked about over the course of the four gospels. Pilate becomes a much softer character because the story had to be made palatable to Roman audiences. And so if the chief Roman is the guy who crucifies Jesus, that's pretty tough.

B: Right.

C: But by this point, you know, we see him up to John, where he's like, "I don't really want to do this. I think Jesus is great, actually." And then this is the next like takes that a step further of "what if Pilate had his own gospel?" Which is weird.

B: Yeah, I mean, yes, this is absolutely a major step in the rehabilitation of the character of Pilate, where it's made very clear that he's not the bad guy in this situation, and his hand was forced by the multitudes of the Jewish nation who I will apologize in advance, do not come out looking great in this story. Again, there's not really gonna be a medieval narrative about the resurrection in which Jewish people come out looking good. It's just not gonna happen, so I hope no one has their hopes up about that.

C: Here's the thing about the Harrowing of Hell. We've talked about it for months because the Harrowing of Hell is a thing that I am very familiar with, like an idea that I'm very familiar with. And I had kind of always thought it was just Jesus going down to Hell and kind of like, you know, picking everybody up, you know, putting like getting them in the van. So they can drive up to heaven. Not quite. Instead, what happens is Jesus goes down to Hell and hey, all of the great figures of Jewish history? They're actually Christians. They actually convert to the worship of Jesus and the cross specifically.

B: Yeah, I mean again, you know, from a Christian perspective, it's necessary, but from like a more outside perspective, it's not a great look, you know?

C: Yeah, not the best?

B: Yeah.

C: Not the best.

B: Yeah, so yeah, the Harrowing of Hell is an idea that it's not... Well, it's not in the Bible directly. There are a couple of verses that are considered to be allusions to the idea. For example Ephesians 4:9 says that "Christ descended into the lower parts of the earth." 1 Peter 4:6 says that "good tidings were proclaimed to the dead." And so these were both taken as canonical elements that were seen as proof of the idea that on Saturday, on Holy Saturday, aka Huddlehouse Saturday, Jesus, the ghost of Jesus, descended into Hell, or at least limbo, depending on the particular you know, doctrine that you're believing, or Sheol or the Grave, or Hades, or however you want to think about it, some land of the dead, some waiting room of the dead, where the patriarchs and the other holy people of the Old Testament era, the pre-Jesus era, are being contained. The idea that Jesus went down there and brought them up to heaven is a common idea even though it's not explicitly in the Bible. So that's what when we say the Harrowing of Hell, the word harrowing it's originally a farming term, like digging, tearing up the earth, but it comes to mean just kind of like, you know, the destruction or the looting, I guess you can think of it that way, of Hell. And yeah, I mean it does pop up in serious places despite not being explicitly canon. Including, Chris, you know, you mentioned the Apostles' Creed is a main place where you see it.

C: Yeah, this is where I became familiar with it because as I've mentioned before, when I was a teenager, I was baptized Presbyterian. And one of the things that we did in the church I was a member of was we would say the Apostles' Creed every week. Now you didn't do this.

B: No. No, the church I went to, I went to a Southern Baptist church. Creeds were not really a thing.

C: Let me tell you. Let me tell you, this is not going to go over well in a Southern Baptist church.

B: Right. Yeah.

C: Specifically because part of it includes the line, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.

B: Right. But that's I mean that is lowercase-c Catholic and not Catholic.

C: Sometimes lowercase-c Catholic.

B: Yeah. I mean the word Catholic just means universal, right? So because like the H-O-L in there is the same as in the word like holistic, right? So it means whole or everything. So the word Catholic means the universal church, the Church of Everyone.

C: The Church of Universal Truth.

B: Yeah. Yes. But yeah, it's technically a lowercase-c Catholic when you say the Holy Catholic Church and the Communion of Saints and so on.

C: That was all explained to me in my extremely Protestant confirmation classes.

B: Yeah.

C: But if you're not familiar with it, the Apostles' Creed is used in a variety of churches. I think the version that we had is according to my memory, it's and according to Wikipedia, it's the one from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Because we say you know, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,Born of the Virgin Mary, Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell; The third day he rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven,And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead," a phrase that you have probably heard.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

C: The line about He "Was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell; The third day he rose again from the dead" that was another thing that was explained to me in those confirmation classes as the Harrowing of Hell, as Jesus going down to Hell, getting everybody who... It seems like a very complicated process. That heaven exists. Jacob saw it. Isaiah saw it.

B: Yeah.

C: Allegedly. But Nobody went there until Jesus came down to get 'em. Like he could have just gotten Adam. Could have just gotten Abraham anytime.

B: Yeah.

C: But that was, at least in the church that I grew up in, absolutely doctrine.

B: Right.

C: That was the explanation for that line that we affirmed our belief in literally every week.

B: Right.

C: And I am always fascinated by the idea of stuff that is definitely apocryphal, but also definitely doctrine.

B: Yeah. That's the sweet spot for this show, I think. I really like hitting on that stuff where I'm trying to drive home like, this is apocryphal in the sense that it's not in the canon, but nevertheless people absolutely believe in this thing and or did at least and it has had a major influence on the religion as we know it today. Like that, for me, those moments are the best moments of this show because I like to really show people like the Bible is not just the Bible, right? It's a bunch of things. It's a whole like miasma of texts and traditions and that kind of stuff. So yeah, this is a really nice one. And it is a part of the reason why I wanted to cover this book as early as we have, you know, before we've even done Exodus, you know.

But yeah, so reference to the Harrowing of Hell is also in the Athanasian Creed, which, that's a different one. I don't know the exact quote, but I know it's in there somewhere. It's named after Athanasius of Alexandria.

But yeah, so let's talk a little bit here about the Gospel of Nicodemus, which it's, speaking of, a mishmash of texts, Gospel of Nicodemus is definitely that, because there's not even like consistent versions, because there's some other versions with more and more things tacked on to it, right? The text as a whole, probably written around the fourth, the mid-fourth century CE. The title, Gospel of Nicodemus, it picks up in the Middle Ages somewhere. The whole story is very popular, like we were saying, it influenced legends and ideas of the Passion and the Resurrection. Little details from this get picked up later on. And the popularity of it can be proven by the wide variety of languages that it's available in. That's always a clue. That's something– the more copies of it we have extant and the more languages it's in, a better idea we have of how far and wide it was distributed. And so we have the original of this, which is Greek, in copies there's Coptic, there's version, there's many various Latin versions, which would be the latest ones.

But the book is broken up into at least three distinct sections that almost certainly have different authors. You've got chapters one through eleven, which is the trial part that's very heavily based on Luke chapter 23, which we covered in our Luke episode. Feel free to jump back and listen to that one. Then you've got chapters 12 through 16, which are the bit with the resurrection. And then the part that really got us into it today, the kind of the epilogue, aka the descensus ad infernos, or inferos, the descent to the lower parts, aka the descent into Hell, which is not in the Greek version. You might be able to guess from the Latin title if you can distinguish Latin from Greek. I don't know. I don't know who can do that.

C: I can't. Still.

B: Yeah, well, descensus ad infernos is definitely Latin, so

C: I only know the difference because you have a specific Latin tone of voice that you use.

B: Yeah, sure. That's fair. Yes, I definitely have spent some time workshopping my Latin accent. But even then some Latin texts add an additional story called the Cura sanitatis Tiberii, which means the cure of Tiberias, which is actually not included in the M.R. James version of this book that we posted online and that Chris read and that I read also. So good news, I'll be supplementing this episode with the story of the cure of Tiberias at the end. I have a version. It's not available in a modern English version and I, despite my ability, I did not take the time to translate it myself. I have a different version that is this story, but it's a later version with some extra details added in. So we'll get to that.

C: It's very upsetting to me that you don't put any effort into this show.

B: I know. Don't think I didn't consider it. Don't think I didn't consider like translating this like five page story from Latin that has no modern English version. But I'm sorry. I'm sorry guys, I didn't mean to let you down. Anyway, so the early parts, the pre-Harrowing of Hell parts in the book are generally known as the Acta Pilati, the Acts of Pilate, which is, or in Greek that would be the Proxes Pilatu. And that's a common title for a number of things. In fact, we've already on this show featured another bit of text that is also known as the Acts of Pilate, but that are not the same as this. In the Acts of Peter and Paul episode, in Peter and Paul, there's a bit where it just out of nowhere, someone's like, "by the way, I have this letter from Pilate that he wrote to the Emperor Claudius." And it's just a short little paragraph wherein Pilate is like, "here's what happened." And that's also called the Acts of Pilate. And in fact, the The M.R. James version of this document affixes that to the end of this one as well. But there's other versions of writings known by the name Acts of Pilate, which include ones mentioned, but maybe not extant, but mentioned by church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian... There was apparently a so-called heathen version, that is an anti-Christian version that was distributed during the persecution against Christians during the era of the Emperor Maximin, he would have been one of the last non-Christian emperors described by Eusebius, another important Christian author of the relatively early days. And so there's a couple of different things known as the Acts of Pilate, which are not the same as this one. And this one, in fact, might have been written intentionally in order to refute that the anti-Christian version of the Acts of Pilate that were being distributed.

Otherwise, this one that we have here was written with the purpose of giving Christian audiences, those sweet details about Jesus that they're just hungry for. It's like I need to know more about this. Please tell me more. And so we get we get this expanded version. It also is intended to strengthen faith in the resurrection because, like I said, it's kind of written as almost a forensic investigation where point by point the high priests say, what about this? And then someone whether it's Nicodemus or Joseph or a couple of zombie boys at the end, they'll pop up and they say, "hey, no, here's what really happened." And so the idea is it's supposed to strengthen your faith in the resurrection. Also just general edification. It's like, "Here's another new version of the most important part of the Jesus story." And so yeah, so that's what's going on. That and you can see why it might be popular, because it does take and expand on an important story and adds some additional zazz to it. And then of course you get Hell at the end.

C: So The thing is, I found the first half of this book to be incredibly boring.

B: Sure. I could see that. Because I mean partly because it is a repeat of stuff we've already seen for the most part. There is new stuff and we'll try and focus on that new stuff and the important bits of that. But yes, it will seem very familiar because it is definitely a story we have read four times before now.

C: If you're gonna come in here with a gospel, you need to start up with some new stuff. You need to do it Thomas style.

B: Well we'll see how interested... oh you're talking about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

C: I'm talking about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

B: Okay, I was gonna say like I don't know that you're necessarily going to find the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas less boring to read, but we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, sure. Very much of interest in that book, for sure.

C: Yeah, exactly. Like that's what I'm talking about. I want werewolves. I want Jesus making weird little homunculi. That's the stuff that I want if you're gonna come in here with the gospel. New info.

B: Yeah

C: We don't get anything. We get a lot of new stuff in this one, but we don't get it till halfway through.

B: Yeah.

C: Like, there was a moment reading this where I was like, did Benito get the wrong book?

B: 'Cause you were waiting for the Hell stuff, right? And I kept having to tell you I was like, no man, it's in it's two parts, you have to get to the second part.

C: Yeah. So finally, finally, I got to that second part. But do we know you said this book had likely what three different authors?

B: At least, at least.

C: Do we know anything about them?

B: No. No. And that's not uncommon, right? It's actually way less common for us to know anything about the author the way that we probably know something about the author of the Acts of Paul, the fact that we know that he was a priest who got in trouble for writing his Paul fan fiction. Like assuming that information is true, like it's very unusual for us to know even that much, because usually these things are fully anonymous or pseudonymous or they're assembled from various texts like this one is and they're just different, or they're from oral traditions or whatever and it's just impossible to have any real information because obviously you're trying to– if you want your writing to have any legitimacy or any kind of cachet, you want it to seem like it has apostolic authority, right? That's why books make canon in the New Testament is because they're believed earnestly to have a connection to an apostle either first or second hand, right? That's how you end up in the New Testament canon, is because an apostle wrote you or the friend of an apostle wrote you, right? And so if you want your book to be distributed, you've got to give it that apostolic feeling, which is why this gets associated with Nicodemus. But yes, this was definitely not written by Nicodemus. This would have been written, you know, mid-fourth century at the earliest.

C: Well that's another thing, is like Nicodemus there's nothing in here that implies that Nicodemus wrote it. Like Nicodemus is a character.

B: He is a character. It does say, actually, you're right. The early parts, the framing device says that what is happening here is that this is a translation from Hebrew into Greek of the records of Pontius Pilate. Because it's supposed to be like these are the court records and they were they were held, you know, in among Pilate's papers. And that's what this framing device, which is a probably a later addition, and not every manuscript has this.

But so "Ananias, the Protector, of praetorian rank, learned in the law, did from the divine scriptures recognize our Lord Jesus Christ and came near to him by faith and was accounted worthy of holy baptism: and I sought out the memorials that were made at that season in the time of our master Jesus Christ, which the Jews deposited with Pontius Pilate, and found the memorials in Hebrew, and by the good pleasure of God I translated them into Greek for the informing of all them that call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ: in the reign of our Lord Flavius Theodosius, in the seventeenth year, and of Flavius Valentinianus the sixth, in the ninth indiction," the Latin has "the eighteenth year of Theodosius, when Valentinian was proclaimed Augustus." So that would be that would be 425 AD, so you can see that that frame is definitely a later addition. But there the idea is that these are the actual official records from the trial of Jesus and they were in Hebrew and this is just a Greek translation.

But there is a part somewhere that does attribute at least some of this. Ah, here we go. "These be the things which after the cross and passion of the Lord Nicodemus recorded and delivered unto the high priest and the rest of the Jews: and the same Nicodemus set them forth in Hebrew." So they were the papers of Pilate as written down by Nicodemus. So.

C: Who is a character in them.

B: Who is a character. Yes, he is a character. He pops up a couple different times throughout. Yeah, there's greatly expanded role for him. And for Joseph of Arimathea, both of whom are basically briefly mentioned. Nicodemus, you know, gets the famous scene where he's secretly studying with Jesus at night. And Joseph of Arimathea is basically only mentioned to say that he gave Jesus his tomb. And so they both get expanded roles here.

C: I mean honestly it's like how The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne was actually written by Alan Brennert.

B: Yeah. That's weird. Weird how that happened. I feel like they shouldn't have been able to call it an autobiography then.

C: Also kind of weird how Nicodemus marries Catwoman. In this story as well.

B: Yeah, but it's really great. That was it's Earth 2 Nicodemus though. That's how that's how you're able to get away with it.

So yeah, we start with the trial. We've got the chief priests, we've got the scribes, we got Annas and Caiaphas, who of course we know from Bible. And then we've got a bunch of other guys who are not mentioned in Bible as far as I know. "Somne, Dothaim, Gamaliel, Judas, Levi, Nepthalim, Alexander, Jairus, and the rest of the Jews." Nepthalim, that's just Naphtali, that's one of the twelve sons of Israel and as is Levi of course. Judas is like the John, well, no, John is the John of this time, but Judas is a very common name that everybody has. So yeah, a lot of these would be repeat names for sure.

They come to Pilate and they're like, "hey man, this guy sucks. Can we do something about that?" And Pilate's like, "who is he? What is he doing?" You know this, it's not anything new here, right? Their their main charge is that he heals somebody on the Sabbath. And of course that, you know, that's against the law, but to try and make it to try to sell it to Pilate, they're focusing on the seditious aspect of it, right? He says he's the king and whatever. "What evil deeds does he do?" "He is a sorcerer, and by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils, he casteth out devils, and they're all subject unto him." And Pilate's like, "Hmm, that's what Asclepius does," Asclepius being the Greco-Roman god of healing.

Okay, so here's the first bit that we really get. He's like, alright. The first new bit, and they say, "Go ahead and bring Jesus in." And so they send out a messenger. And when he sees Jesus, he worships him, the messenger, and he takes out his handkerchief. And he lays it on the ground for Jesus to walk on, so Jesus doesn't walk on the ground. And the Jews are like, "what are you doing?" And Pilate's like, "What is this? You're embarrassing me. Like the whole point is that this guy is getting charged for falsely claiming to be a king and here you are, you're laying your handkerchief on the ground for walk on it like he is a king. What are you doing?" And and the messenger's like, "I'm just doing what I saw people do. Like, I got sent out to Jerusalem and I was there and I saw Jesus on the donkey and everybody there was laying down the palm branches for him to walk on and they're all shouting Hosanna and all of this stuff." So he was there on Palm Sunday is the idea. And so he's just replicating what he saw.

And it's got a bit where he actually gives the Hebrew and then he's like, What does that mean in Greek? And then they translate it. So wasn't wasn't expecting that. And yet there are a couple of parts where they actually bust out some Hebrew which feels surprising to me for something from as relatively late a date as this.

And so we got that first bit with the messenger showing reverence to Jesus as if he's a king. But then we get the first actual like miraculous thing when Jesus actually comes in. Jesus comes in and there's there're ensigns, they're called, but these would be the standard bearers, the guys who hold the pole and at the top of the pole would be the standards which would include carvings, images, could be of people, usually an eagle among the Romans, but these are signs of power, especially military power. Like the standard bearer's job is to help rally people during battle, right? You always look to the standard. You would know where your group is, where your legion is, but as long as the standard's moving forward, you know to keep moving forward and so on. So there's gonna be these guys standing around the court of Pilate holding these standards that are going to have carved busts on the top of them. And when Jesus enters in, all of the busts bow in front of Jesus.

C: That's right, it's a new miracle everybody.

B: Yeah, a new miracle. Jot it down in your miracle logs that I assume you're all keeping. Yeah.

C: Exclusive.

B: Yeah. It's a Nicodemus exclusive miracle. None of those other guys have this one.

C: Which also, this is the fanfic part of it, right? Because Pilate sees a miracle. Pilate sees inanimate objects come to life and begin worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ.

B: Right. Well, but the thing is, at first he's like, "Why'd you guys do that? Why'd you guys dip your standards down to Jesus? Like that's not cool. That's not what's happening here right now. Like first the messenger and now this." And they're like, "no man, we didn't do this. We're Greeks? Why would we show reverence to him?" And so he was like, "Let's go get some new standard bears, please. Can we get some that are stronger than these guys who are obviously so weak they just drooped? Drooped their standards."

C: I actually really did like this because Pilate goes, "Hey, you guys did it wrong." Pilate is very skeptical of this miracle. He's like, "hey, you guys did it wrong. I'm gonna get some new dudes who can actually do their jobs. By the way. If Jesus walks by and these dudes in the standards do not bow, I'm going to have you all executed."

B: Yes.

C: Which is a pretty... he runs a tight ship, does old Pontius Pilate.

B: "I have sworn by the safety of Caesar that if the standards bow not when Jesus entereth in, I will cut off your heads." And so, but of course, even with these new burliest possible standard bears, they do bow again and the messenger puts his handkerchief down again, so it's not a great look for either Pilate or the high priest in this case.

Then in the next bit we get a repeat of Pilate's wife, who is mentioned briefly in the Gospels as having premonitions in her dreams about Jesus that he's innocent, and we get we get a repetition of that. Although we get the added detail where Pilate says, "You know that my wife feareth God and favoreth rather the customs of the Jews?" So that's interesting, because it almost seems to– it doesn't quite say that she's Jewish, but that she's very–

C: She's into it.

B: She's into it. She's very into it. And so of course, you know, we've talked about before, Pilate's wife, who later in other works gets the name Procula, is venerated as a saint in some churches. And part of it is because she tries to talk Pilate out of prosecuting Jesus because she has these dreams and she believes that he's innocent, right? And so, but of course, you know, the priests reply, "Didn't we say he's an evil wizard? Who sends people evil dreams? Obviously wizards." And so, "behold, he hath sent a vision of a dream unto thy wife." But yeah, and then we get, you know, some questioning of Jesus a little bit like we've seen in Luke.

Then we've got a new added charge, the specific charge, to try to disprove that Jesus was born of virgin birth, they have the charge that he came of fornication, which in this case, nearly positive they just mean he was born out of wedlock is the idea. And so to counter that charge, there are 12 witnesses who are there to say he couldn't have been born out of wedlock. Mary was married to Joseph when Jesus was born. Which almost seems counterproductive to the point if you're trying to prove that he's God, but I guess in this case they're really just trying to pr disprove this particular criminal charge. And the priests try to say, "we can't listen to these witnesses because they're converts and we don't listen to converts." Pilate was like, "what do you mean converts?" He's like, "they're Greeks. And now they're Jewish. And so we don't like them. Don't care." So we get all these names. We get these twelve guys. Lazarus, Asterius, Antonius, Jacob, Amnes, Zenas, Samuel, Isaac, Phineas, Crispus, Agrippa, and Judas. Are these supposed to be anybody else from any other story? Who knows? These are again very common names all of them. So and they say, "no, we're not converts. We were born Jewish and we definitely were there when we saw Joseph and Mary get engaged and then married, so no." And Pilate was like, "look, we got twelve witnesses. Let them swear." And they're like, "no, we don't swear. That's against the Jewish law to swear. But we you know, pinky promise." So that's an added bit with these witnesses.

But they're like, "no, still please put him unto death." "And Pilate commanded the whole multitude to go out, saving the twelve men, which said he was not born of [fornification... fornic.. fornification...] fornication. And he commanded Jesus to be set apart. Pilate saith unto them, For what cause do they desire to put him to death?" And the twelve guys on Jesus' side, they say, "They have jealousy because he healeth on the Sabbath day." There probably not jealousy as in like they're so jealous of what he... not envy, but rather they have ill will toward him because of him healing on the Sabbath day. "Pilate saith, 'For a good work, do they desire to put him to death?'" And they say, "Yay, yeah." So again, not a good look, not a good look for Annas and Caiaphas and the others. And we get Pilate affirming that what Jesus did was good, actually. And so he comes out, he swears before the sun that he finds no fault in him. And you know more stuff from the trial that we've seen before.

C: Yeah, I feel like if you don't know how this ends... I mean there's, you know, you can go back to our episodes, you can, you know the Bible is always a good place to look. You could just like exist in Western civilization and probably figure out where this one's going.

B: Yeah. So we do eventually get Nicodemus. He does pop up. Chapter five. He's finally here.

C: I do want to say, it is incredibly wild to me that there is no moment of Pilate going "Hey, I did see this guy perform an actual factual miracle. I did see inanimate objects come to life. Are you sure you want Barabbas?"

B: Yeah.

C: 'Cause statues came alive.

B: Sure. Although, you know, of course, if the charge is that he's an evil wizard, then that doesn't necessarily you know, doesn't necessarily acquit him of that particular charge.

C: Well as we all know, being an evil wizard is not illegal in ancient Rome, because Simon Magus was just doing all kinds of evil wizard stuff.

B: Obviously in at least one of those versions, the Emperor was on his side.

C: Yeah.

B: Yeah, chapter five we get Nicodemus come in to testify. He gives you know examples of Moses and his famous wizard battle against Jannes and Jambres, who are... those are the apocryphal, traditional names given to the wizards of Pharaoh. So he talks about that wizard battle, and they're like, "yeah, of course you're defending Jesus because you're his disciple." And Nicodemus is like, "yeah, but is Pilate also his disciple? Because Pilate just said he was innocent," which: pretty good dunk.

C: Also, I love that Nicodemus's strategy here is "Maybe Jesus is a wizard, but as we all know, wizard battles are super dope."

B: Pretty much. Okay, here's one here's one of my favorite lines. Yeah, "the Jews say unto Nicodemus, 'Thou dost become his disciple and thou speakest on his behalf.' Nicodemus saith unto them, 'Is the governor also become his disciple that he speaketh on his behalf? Did not Caesar appoint him unto this dignity?' And the Jews were raging and gnashing their teeth against Nicodemus. Pilate saith unto them, 'Wherefore gnash ye your teeth against him, whereas you have heard the truth?'" So I what I need is for one of our very good listeners who like to do some Photoshops for us, Lucas Brown, Dave Lartigue, one of you guys. Or someone else, I don't care. Someone please take that Hannibal Burris meme. Where he's saying, "why are you booing me? I'm right." And I need you to change it so that it says, "wherefore gnash ye your teeth against me, whereas you have heard the truth." Someone please make that happen because I need it. I laughed very much when I read that line because I was like, it sounds so familiar. It's so familiar.

C: It's very good.

B: Yeah.

C: t's very good.

B: Then we get some witnesses, greatest hits, Jesus' greatest hits, we get the guy who was paralyzed that Jesus raised from his mat, of course. If I recall correctly, he's the one that was healed on the Sabbath, and so he's the one he's getting charged against. Then we get a certain woman named Bernice or Berinique, Veronique, in Latin Veronica. Which is a name that this is another example of something from an apocryphal work that becomes part of real religion. The Veronica story is a major deal.

C: I had this one when I was a kid, because basically her deal is that Jesus took her and Betty out on a date on the same night.

B: And they all shared a milkshake. The name Veronica, yeah, even like one of the stations of the cross has to do with Veronica. This is one of the earliest mentions of her name. Here she's associated with the woman who had the bleeding disease that was healed by touching the hem of Jesus' garment.

C: If you don't recall, this was a woman who bled for twelve years.

B: She was never not on her period, basically, for twelve years.

C: No. No.

B: Yeah. I mean that's what it was. That's not a joke, Chris. That's what it was.

C: Is that what it was?

B: Yeah. That's what it was.

C: I thought it was just like a wound.

B: No, it was no it was menstrual bleeding.

C: Oh. Alright then.

B: That was not a goof.

C: Bible's wild.

B: Yeah, Bible's wild. But anyway, here she gets the name Veronica, which Which yeah, you can see comes from the Greek name Berenike, which it's actually a Macedonian name, I guess. It means the bearer of Nike, victory. And so that form Berenike becomes Beronike, which in Latin becomes Veronica, and that's where that name comes from. Although there's going to be more with the development of the character of Veronica because the station of the cross, does not have to do with the fact that she's the woman with the bleeding disease, but rather famously that she saw Jesus carrying his cross on the way to Skull Mountain and she handed him her handkerchief and he wiped his face and when she took it away it had his face still on it like a perfect image of Jesus' face kind of like the shroud of Turin but a handkerchief. And so there is more of that we'll get back to at the end of the episode. There comes to be a folk etymology of the name Veronica, that it comes from the Latin words vera icon, which would mean a true icon, a true image of the face of Christ and that vera icon becomes Veronica, but it's it's from this Greek name that means bearer of victory. But anyway, so we get her name here, and this is just the first of several names that originate in this particular work.

Let's see. More defense of Jesus, including raising up Lazarus, Nicodemus and the twelve men. Called upon again. Then we get the Barabbas bit, just like in the Gospels, and they say, "Give us Barabbas," and he's like, "I'm giving you this out here." "And Pilate was wroth and said unto the Jews, Your nation is always seditious, and you rebel against your benefactors." And they're like, "what benefactors are you talking about?" And he's like, "Look, I'm not Jewish, but as far as I know, God brought you guys out of slavery in Egypt, and then you repaid him by making a golden calf that you worshipped," and they were like, "Hmm, yeah," and he's saying, "and now you're saying I hate Caesar, so I don't care about what you're saying," basically. And they're like, "we know our king, it's Caesar, not Jesus."

And so... ah, then we get, here's two new names that we get in this one that we've talked about on this show before, Dismas and Gestas, the thieves, the penitent thief and the impenitent thief who were crucified by Jesus' side. Dismas we've talked about, he becomes Saint Dismas or Saint Demas or Sandemas. And Gestas of course is not a saint. Dismas is gonna keep appearing in this one a couple times. He's gonna pop up as a little surprise later. Yeah, he's the penitent thief. He's the reason why on like an Orthodox cross, you've got where the foot... on the cross beam down at the bottom where Jesus' feet would be, that's tilted. It's tilted up towards where Dismas would have been and tilted down towards Gestus where Gestus would have been. Yeah, so Jesus goes forth from the judgment hall, the two malefactors with him. Stripped of his garments, you know, resurrection – or passion stuff, I should say. And then we get we get Dismas saying, "Lord, I'll be with you in your kingdom." And Jesus is like, "Yeah man, I'm going to heaven and I'm going to take you with me." What he doesn't tell him is like, "we have to make a pit stop along the way. But I'm definitely taking you with me to heaven."

C: Look, there's just... wait for me there. I was about to say there's gonna be a guy named St. Peter there, but he will not be there yet. He will not be there for another 30 or so years.

B: And then here in chapter 11 we get Joseph of Arimathea being a counselor of the city of Arimathea, which by the way isn't. That's a Robin Hood real city, we will say. Nobody knows where Arimathea is. It's supposed to be in Judea somewhere, but it's like nobody knows where that is. People of course have their own personal identifications of where it might be, but there's no solid location for Arimathea. Anyway, so he's like, yeah. He can have my tomb, nobody's been buried in that. So they took his body down, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, laid it in a hewn sepulchre wherein was never a man yet laid.

What happens is when the priests find out that Joseph has taken Jesus' body, they have him put on house arrest. They're like, just to make sure that he doesn't do anything with the body, right? So "they took hold on Joseph and commanded him to be put in safeguard until the first day of the week." But yeah, there's not much else they can do because obviously the Sabbath is coming. And so they put him in his house and they put guards around the house. The house is locked up and the doors are sealed. And then what happens is they go back to find him and he's not there, and all the doors are still locked. And Joseph has disappeared. When the council was set, they commanded him to be brought with great dishonor because they were gonna charge him as well. But "and when they opened the door they found him not, and all the people were beside themselves and amazed, because they found the seals closed, and Caiaphas had the key, and they durst not any more lay hands upon them that had spoken on the behalf of Jesus before Pilate." So that's why the other 12 witnesses don't get charged because they're so creeped out by this miraculous disappearance of Joseph of Arimathea from inside his own locked house.

So then they go talk to the guards who were at the tomb and they're like, "what happened here?" And they're like, "yeah, an angel came down and rolled the stone away and took the body," and they're like, "let's not say that. Here's a lot of money. Say literally anything else. Actually, and then to me the funny part is they bribed the guards into saying that the disciples came and stole Jesus' body. And then they spread the rumor, the priests spread the rumor that the disciples bribed the guards into saying that Jesus was resurrected.

Then here in chapter 14, we get a couple of new witnesses, Phinees and Addas and Aggaeus, and they basically come as witnesses to the Great Commission and the Ascension. We know what happens. Jesus says, "go forth and do all these cool things," and then he disappears into heaven, right?

C: Right.

B: The priests are not convinced by that, but then you know Nicodemus is like "Hey, this kind of thing has happened before." It happened with here in this text it says Elias and Eliseus, but this is that's Elijah and Elisha. So Elijah, of course, we know was taken up into heaven in the chariot of fire. [Obvious humming] Anyway, so yeah, he's he's saying there is precedent for someone being taken straight up into heaven.

C: Right. It's happened before.

B: It's happened. It's happened. They go looking for Jesus, they don't find him. Someone eventually says, "I found Joseph though." Joseph of Arimathea, found that guy who'd been missing for a while. And they're like, "okay, we have to figure out what happened. Please send him a very nice letter and convince him to come here and that we're not mad at him or whatever." And he does come and he explains basically that what happened was "on the preparation day," so that's Friday, "about the tenth hour, you did shut me up, and I continued there the whole Sabbath. And at midnight, as I stood and prayed, The house wherein you shut me up was taken up by the four corners. And I saw as it were a flashing of light in mine eyes, and being filled with fear I fell to the earth." Anyway, the ghost of Jesus shows up to him and is like, "Hey man, I'm good." And he's like, "Are you Elijah?" And he's like, "I'm not Elijah. It's me, Jesus. We're friends." And he's like, "Cool, cool, cool, cool." And then Jesus eventually puts him back in the house, but by that point, everyone had looked inside the house and he was gone. And they're all freaked out. And Jesus told him to stay in his house for 40 days. And of course, 40 days until the ascension. So now Jesus has ascended. Now Joseph is free to come out of his house.

C: We know that it's not an evil spirit, too. In case you were wondering if it was like an evil spirit, it's not.

B: Yeah.

C: And we know this because, as we all know, if you are ever confronted by an evil spirit, you just gotta quote the Ten Commandments at it.

B: It's so true. It's so true. It's a very handy thing to have in your back pocket.

C: Yeah, this is dropped on us, in a very casual way that I love. "I looked up and saw Jesus and I trembled and supposed that it was a spirit. And I said the commandments, and he said them with me. And as ye are not ignorant, that a spirit, if it meet any man and hear the commandments, straight away fleeth.""

B: Yeah.

C: Clearly not an evil spirit.

B: You know.

C: Established.

B: You know how it goes. That does remind me, and I think I've told you this story before because I think I wrote it up for Comics Alliance years and years ago. When I was a kid, and I've talked about on this show, I used to spend almost every day at a church that I was convinced was haunted. If I thought that a church ghost was coming after me, I could repel them by closing my eyes and singing the song "My God is an Awesome God." And that was my ghost repellent.

C: I have a lot of questions about this.

B: Yeah, okay.

C: First of all.

B: Yes.

C: Why would you be afraid of a church ghost? Would they not be good ghosts?

B: I don't know that they were. They seemed bad to me. Especially one that I saw a particular time that I wrote about in the story. It looked like a large orangutan being experimented on that I saw through the window of a like a back building on the church grounds and I didn't want anything to do with that. Also like disembodied shadows. I don't want any part of those things. I didn't need it.

C: Alright, well that's that's fair, I guess.

B: Yeah.

C: Church ghost, that's spooky!

B: It is spooky.

C: We're finally getting some spooky stuff in here.

B: It's definitely spookier than this piece-by-piece investigation of the Ascension of Christ.

C: Can we can we talk about the descent of Christ?

B: Yeah, we can get there. Okay, so yeah, when we get if we if we skip this, there's just a lot of questions here. Nothing is really new, right? We again also see Enoch brought up as a defense of the idea of the ascension of someone directly into heaven.

Let's see, here's the end of the first part. "And the people sang a hymn unto the Lord and said, 'Blessed be the Lord who hath given rest unto the people of Israel according to all that he spake. There hath not one word fallen to the ground of all his good saying which he spake unto his servant Moses. The Lord our God be with us as he was with our fathers, let him not forsake us, and let him not destroy us from turning our heart unto him. From walking in all his ways, and keeping his statutes and his judgments, which he commanded our fathers. And the Lord shall be king over all the earth in that day, and it shall be one Lord, and his name one, even the Lord our King, he shall save us. There is none like unto thee,'" etc. So yeah, everyone's glorifying God at the end, which happens a lot.

Oh there is the interesting bit where the priests are totally freaking out and they say, "If his memorial endure until the Jubilee, I know that he'll prevail forever and raise up for himself a new people." So a Jubilee: the idea was, just like there's a Sabbath within the week, there'd also be a Sabbath year. Every seventh year you don't farm, you don't tend your fields basically. And so at the end of seven of seven, so after 49 years, seven Sabbath years, on the 50th year, that's a Jubilee. And that's a big deal. And so basically saying, if this if the reputation of Jesus lasts for fifty years, it's never going away. People are gonna know Jesus forever. And I guess that was true, which I guess is easy to say from the perspective of you know 350 CE or whatever. So anyway, that's the end of part one. The priests are basically defeated. Everyone's worshiping God.

But part two says, what if there's more proof though? What if we had some more proof of the divinity of Jesus? And so what we get here in part two is a descent into Hell. "Joseph arose, said unto Annas and Caiaphas, Simeon," who, we skipped him earlier. Simeon from the Gospels again. I mean, we talked about him during the Gospels, but Simeon who was at the temple and who when he saw the baby Jesus, he was like "Truly, this is the one we've been waiting for. Now I can finally die," right? He's brought up earlier in part of the defense. That's not super important, but here we find out that Simeon had two sons who apparently died before he did or I guess it could have been it could have been after, I guess, but they were two of the Eastertime zombies. They were two of the people who rose from their graves on Good Friday. And their names are Leucius and Karinus, which is weird because Leucius Karinus, you might recall from our previous episode, was the name attributed to the authorship of many of the Acts of the Apostles. And so it's a little bit weird to take the name of like a popular author that would have definitely been known in the Middle Ages, and then turn it into the name of two of your characters. So it's a little bit like, "yes, and then Stephen and King showed up and came to give hard evidence for the divinity of Christ."

But the idea is that these two brothers, they're separated to go write down their testimonies of What happened? And so they go into separate rooms. "Karinus and Leucius had heard this adjuration. They trembled in their body and groaned being troubled in heart, and looking up together into heaven, they made the seal of the cross with their fingers upon their tongues, and forthwith they spake both of them, saying, 'Give us each a volume of paper, and let us write that which we have seen and heard.' And they gave them unto them, And each of them sat down and wrote." And so here we get finally the ascent into Hell, which comes from the testimonies of Leucius and Karinus. And yeah, so basically the idea is following the crucifixion, Jesus is going to head down into Hell or limbo or Hades, I'm sure it's probably Hades if I had to guess in the original Greek. Which is part of the reason why it's so easy to anthropomorphosize Hell as a speaking character, if you already think of Hades as the god of the underworld. Hades is the word that's used in the Greek New Testament to refer to Sheol, the grave, and which is also occasionally personified. But from the perspective of Leucius and Karinus we also see John the Baptist come down first. We see his ghost coming down and this gives great hope.

C: Before we even get into that, there's an intro bit that I am quite a fan of.

B: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

C: It's like, "Hey. You guys know how Jesus came back from the dead. And that's super impressive. But you know what's really impressive? Was that he did all this other stuff that you didn't even know about before now."

B: Yeah.

C: And I like this because I feel like resurrecting from the dead is a fairly impressive feat?

B: Yeah, it's a pretty good one. I cannot say many people have done it.

C: So for this one to be like, "Hey, coming back from the dead, uh-uh, this is the real stuff," that's bold.

B: For sure. And we definitely are gonna get names that we recognize within this, even though in this edition they may be in forms that are not the familiar forms. So for example we get Esaias, which If you guys recall, that's the Greek form of Isaiah. So we get Isaiah as a character here. It's interesting who gets mentioned and who doesn't, right? There's a lot of Adam. There's Seth, there's Isaiah, and then we get some of the minor prophets later on.

C: It's pretty weird to get Seth.

B: Well, it's not that weird, and I'll tell you why, because what happens is when they talk about John the Baptist being killed, and John comes down, and he tells them what's going on, he's like, "Hey, I saw the Lamb of God, I saw the dove descend upon him. I heard a voice of heaven saying, This is my beloved son, and so on." "When father Adam that was first created heard this, even that Jesus was baptized in Jordan, he cried out to Seth his son, saying: Declare unto thy sons the patriarchs and the prophets all that thou didst hear from Michael the archangel, when I sent thee unto the gates of paradise that thou mightest entreat God to send thee his angel," and so on. This is a reference to another popular and yet fully apocryphal story about Adam that comes to us from a book called The Life of Adam and Eve, also known as The Apocalypse of Moses. And that was a book that we almost covered last week when we decided to do Judith instead. And we'll still get it at some point because it's interesting. But in this version of the story, after Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, there's a story where Adam is dying or something, and Seth and Eve go to the garden to get some oil from the Tree of Mercy, as it's called here, which would be the tree of life. And Seth encounters the archangel Michael. And he says, "I'm not going to give you this oil, but I'll give it to you at the end of time when all flesh will be raised up,"" and so on. And that's what's being referred to here.

And it specifically talks about 5,500 years later. And we don't get it here, but later at the end of this, we get a full like mathematical accounting showing that like it's 5,500 years from the creation of the earth until the life of Jesus, basically, which, that does not add up if this is the year 5779. Although it is currently supposed to be 5779 years since the creation of Earth. So that math doesn't come together there. So I don't know. I don't know who's wrong. It's somebody. Somebody's math is wrong.

But anyway, yeah, all the patriarchs hear these things because it's like, oh, it's that year. It's time. It's time. Here comes Jesus. And so they're very excited. Saints were rejoicing, then we get Satan. Finally, finally, here we are, chapter twenty. Prince and chief of death. And here he is, he's having some arguments with Hell. And here's an interesting thing to recognize is that at this point in the story, Satan doesn't live in Hell. He's just chatting with him.

C: Yeah, this is I guess this is like after seasons of Mist.

B: Yeah, he's gone up to be a lounge singer Yeah.

C: Uh-huh.

B: But no, so the idea is that Satan has not yet been cast into the pit of fire, right? And so he's I guess still roaming the earth, but he does talk to Hell, or the grave or you know, limbo, however you guys want to think about this, some realm of the dead.

C: The way that I imagined it

B: Yeah.

C: Was it's all of the satans voice.

B: Yeah.

C: It's all the demons. It's Beelzebub and all them just dunking on him.

B: Yeah.

C: Like, "Hey idiot, you let Jesus come here."

B: Yeah, because yeah, because Hell is not on board with this plan. Satan's like, "yo, get ready, here comes Jesus," and they're like, why? Yeah, why would you do this?

C: And an interesting thing about this is that the idea of Hell being a place for sinners is not yet there.

B: Right.

C: This is this is early in the development or dev-hell-opment of Hell.

B: Dev-hell-opment, yes.

C: Dev-hell-opment. It's just a place for the dead. And so there's this idea of Satan being like, "yeah, of course Jesus is here. He was just a dude, which means he's afraid of death, which means he dies. So where else is he gonna go?" And they're like, "you idiot, he's he's alive."

B: We do get the distinction here. Satan is called the prince of Tartarus, right? Which for the Greeks, Tartarus would have specifically been the portion of the underworld where the evil were punished. Right?

C: The bad place.

B: It's the bad place. Yeah, Tartarus is the bad place for sure. That's where Sisyphus is, that's where Tantalus is, all the famous dead people and their ironic, Rod Serling-esque punishments are all in Tartarus.

C: You've seen it on Xena.

B: Yeah, we all have. We all have. And he's like, no, man, look, "Why doubtest thou and fearest to receive this Jesus which is thine adversary and mine? For I tempted him, and have stirred up mine ancient people of the Jews." Rough. That's real rough. I hate that, and I'm sorry I said that out loud.

C: It's pretty bad.

B: Yeah.

C: It is so weird how next level anti-Semitic things get.

B: Let's move on. "I have sharpened a spear to thrust him through, gall and vinegar have I mingled to give him to drink, and I have prepared a cross to crucify him and nails to pierce him: and his death is nigh at hand, that I may bring him unto thee to be subject unto thee and me."

C: And then they're like, "You brought a cross? And What were you thinking? "It's Satan continually being like, "No no guys, it's totally cool. I brought a cross. He doesn't like those. It's like we're just gonna nail him up."" And they're like, "Oh, Satan, have you never heard of symbolism? You you idiot. You absolute jabroni."

B: And Hell's also like, "Isn't this the guy that has already resurrected the dead? Like Lazarus, for example, like this guy has already taken the dead out of me. So what are you doing?" "And as Satan the prince, and Hell, spoke this together, suddenly there came a voice as of thunder and a spiritual cry: Remove, O princes, your gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in." Yeah, and so Hell is like, "just get out of here, man. Get out of here. If you're a mighty man of war, go fight the King of glory." That is. God, aka Jesus here. And so Hell kicks Satan out. Get out of here. You've ruined it. It's all ruined. But Hell says to his wicked ministers, "Shut hard the gates of brass and put on them the bars of iron and withstand stoutly." That doesn't work, it turns out, Jesus is stronger than some gates. Because basically all the saints hear it and they just start shouting. They're like, "open the gates, open the gates, open the gates,"" until he's finally like, "open the gates.""

C: He's like the opposite of Marc Maron.

B: Yeah. Yes. Exactly, very good. And so Isaiah standing there, like, "didn't I tell you? Didn't I tell you the dead shall arise, and they that are in tomb shall rise again, and they that are in the earth shall rejoice. For the dew which cometh of the Lord is their healing. And again, I also said, O death, where is thy sting? O Hell, where is thy victory? Remember? Remember when I said those things? It's coming true. It's happening. It's me, Isaiah, the fifth evangelist.""

C: Yep, pretty much.

B: Yeah. Yeah, they're all shouting, open the gates, and God's voice comes and says, "Open the gates, please." And so he opens the gates. He's gotta do it.

C: Which it turns out that was the password.

B: Yeah the password.

C: Remember we talked about the password in Isaiah and the Ascension of Isaiah? It was just "please." It's the magic word, everybody.

B: Yeah, but you have to be God when you say it. That's the trick.

C: No, no, that's the thing. You don't have to be God. You just have to be polite.

B: Definitely refer to the princes of Hell as princes. That helps. Give them their proper respect. Yeah.

C: It's never the wrong time to say please. That's all.

B: That's true. It is a magical word. They open the gates and David, we get David here, and so he gets a mention. So we've got Isaiah has gotten several mentions, Adam, Seth, David so far. And yeah, "Hell and death and their wicked ministers saw the Lord of Majesty appearing in his form. They and their cruel officers, at the sight of the brightness of so great light in their own realm, seeing Christ of a sudden in their abode, they cried out, saying, We're overcome by thee." And here's the bit that I really liked. This was some of my favorite language here, their confusion here. "Who art thou that art sent by the Lord for our confusion? Who art thou that without all damage of corruption, and with the signs of thy majesty unblemished, dust and wrath condemn our power? Who art thou that art so great and so small, both humble and exalted, both soldier and commander, a marvelous warrior in the shape of a bondsman, and a king of glory, dead and living, whom the cross bears slain upon it?" Like I really like that bit. I just like the balance of the antithesis there. It's like both so great and so small, which is, I mean, that's the thing. That's the imagery of Jesus, right? He's a king born a slave, basically, right? So

C: He drinks from a cup of a carpenter.

B: Not some gilded chalice. Yeah, so I just like that bit. I thought that was well well constructed.

C: Yeah, it's quite good.

B: Yeah, so a lot of questions there. "The King of Glory and His Majesty trampled upon death and laid hold on Satan the prince and delivered him unto the power of Hell." So there it is. There we get Satan getting cast into Hell there, which doesn't quite line up with Revelation, which also sees him being cast into the pit of fire. But I don't know time is a flat circle or something, so who knows? But now finally we get Jesus, he draws Adam to him unto his own brightness. "Hell receives Satan, with sore reproach says unto him, O Prince of Perdition and Chief of Destruction, Beelzebub, the scorn of the angels and spitting of the righteous, why did you do this?" You worked right into his own into his own hands. You played yourself.

C: You absolute dunce You complete idiot.

B: Yeah, this is what he wanted. This is what he wanted, because now he's here and he's gonna free all these people.

C: And oh, and that cross? And that cross that you brought? Jesus is just gonna be like, "yeah, I'm just gonna put this up right over here. Just gonna put this up. Cause this is mine now. This is mine now."

B: Yeah. Yeah.

C: "I have it. It's Jesus's."

B: Yep. And so and so yeah, with Satan in Hell, truly and forever dunked on, now Jesus is summoning the righteous one. "So he stretches forth his hand. Come forth, all ye saints." Yeah, "Ye that by the tree and the devil and death were condemned. Behold now the devil and death condemned by the tree." Oh that's that's very nice. I like that the parallel there the tree of knowledge of good and evil that condemned them and now they're saved by the tree that is the cross. So very nice parallel imagery there again.

C: Both of which were gonna be Swamp Thing if Rick Veitch hadn't left DC.

B: Yeah, it's true. "He stretched forth his hand, made the sign of the cross over Adam, over all the saints." Who else do we get here? Habakkuk.

C: Yeah.

B: Like out of all the out of all the prophets, we get Habakkuk, we get Micah, who's called Micheas here, but that's Micah. So those are definitely guys that are fully listed among the minor prophets by Jewish and Christian reckoning.

C: Yeah. You might not even remember. We have seen Habakkuk before.

B: That's true.

C: If you don't recall, Habakkuk was the one who made that good stew for Daniel.

B: Mm-hmm.

C: The one who had angels show up and be like, hey, I'm gonna need that stew. That is no longer your dinner. That is Daniel's dinner.

B: Yeah. So he gets he gets another mention on this show. We've now on this show had Habakkuk on twice and Moses zero times.

C: Yeah, we don't get Moses. We don't get Daniel. We get the guy who made the stew. We don't get Daniel. Right?

B: I don't know. I mean that's about it, right? So we've seen Adam, Seth, David, Isaiah gets the most lines, I think. Habakkuk, Micah. And like that's it for now. Because we're about to get a couple more.

C: It's like Jesus has a van And so he's gotta take multiple trips, so this is who lined up first.

B: Yeah, Habakkuk and Micah just managed to get there ahead, and like Ezekiel is like, "I just missed it. I'm a major prophet."

C: Moses is in the back being like, "I walked around for 40 years. I can wait."

B: And so yeah, they go up to heaven, they deliver him to Michael the Archangel, all the saints followed Michael. "He brought them all into the glory and the beauty of paradise."

C: Here's a question that I just thought of, actually.

B: Okay.

C: Do you think like Moses and Abraham were too Jewish?

B: To be mentioned here? Oh man.

C: They're like, you know, that Jews are the people of Moses and Abraham. But like David is Jesus' grandpa.

B: Well, okay. David is incredibly Jewish, right? Like

C: Oh no, he is.

B: Yeah, I don't know.

C: But he's also in the direct lineage, like Jesus is of the house of David.

B: Sure, right. Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. And then of course Isaiah gets heavily Christianized as well. We talked, you know, the fifth gospel and all that, but...

C: It is weird to try and sift– try and CSI our way through the anti-Semitism of these attacks.

B: Like Micah, I could see because also Micah is considered to prophesy the birth of Christ as well. Habakkuk I don't know. I don't know why he gets a mention. They're brought up to paradise and they run into Enoch and Elijah, who are already up there waiting for them, because they're like, "hey guys, God brought us here." Enoch's just "God brought me. We were walking and then suddenly we were in heaven," and Elijah's like, "yeah, I was in a cool flaming chariot that flew in the sky, so a little bit cooler, I think, than probably just walking straight into heaven with God."

But yeah, so we see those guys and then my favorite moment is like, "hey man we've been doing this whole thing and I've been trying not to mention anything, but who is that dude? Who is that guy that's with Jesus when he came down? Like Jesus came down here with a dude. Like who was that guy? Because you look a little sketchy, and I don't know you." "And he answered them and said, 'Ye have rightly said, for I was a robber, doing all manner of evil upon the earth, and the Jews crucified me with Jesus, and I beheld the wonders of the creation which came to pass through the cross of Jesus when he was crucified,'" and so on. It's Dismas. And so in a lot of the art of the Harrowing of Hell, if you find it, Jesus is usually like carrying Dismas, like, in his arm as he comes down. So it's completely like "you will be with me in heaven, but we gotta make a quick stop on the way. Are you cool with that? I promise we can get some combos. And like a specialty Mountain Dew flavor at the gas station." And yeah, so we get we get Dismas there, which wild, but I love it.

And yeah that's about the end of it. We get, "Blessed be the Lord Almighty, the Father of eternal good things, Father of mercies. Thou have given such grace unto thy sinners and hast brought them again into the beauty of paradise and into thy good pastures. For this is the most holy life of the Spirit. Amen." And so that was, it turns out, what was written down by Leucius and Karinus. They both wrote identical word-for-word accounts of this, and that's how you know it's real. We see that exact thing, remember the story of the Septuagint is that the seventy-two rabbis all wrote down their Greek translation and they were all word for word identical, even though they were written in separate rooms. So it's the same idea. Leucius and Karinus in separate rooms write down verbatim versions of this story of the Harrowing of Hell. And then they turn into bright lights and disappear. They're gone. "When they had finished writing all the things in the several volumes of paper, they arose, and Karinus gave that which they had written into the hands of Annas and Caiaphas and Gamaliel, likewise Leucius gave that which he had written into the hands of Nicodemus and Joseph. And suddenly they were transfigured and became white exceedingly, and were seen no more. But their writings were found to be the same, neither more nor less, by one letter." That's it. "These were the things that were spoken by the Jews in their synagogue, did Joseph and Nicodemus forthwith declare unto the governor. And Pilate himself wrote all the things that were done and said concerning Jesus by the Jews, and laid up all the words in the public books of his judgment hall." This bit has another thing that, as I mentioned before, has the math. It does the math of that 5,500 years. They lay out it was this many years. And the thing that they draw, the significance of that number is to the building of the Ark of the Covenant, which is supposed to be five and a half cubits, and so they understand that the five and a half cubits equal five and a half thousand years. And so then they break down that math and they're saying that's why Jesus came in the 5,500th year, which again, if this is 5779, that doesn't work out.

C: It is currently 5779.

B: Feeling fine, 5779. And yeah, then at the very end here of the M.R. James version, we get that letter from Pilate to Claudius, which we've already discussed in our Peter and Paul episode. It's very brief. It's just two paragraphs of Pilate saying, "here's the thing I saw, and we killed him." And like that and that's it, basically. But as I mentioned, a lot of versions of this story add the Cure of Tiberius, the Cura sanitatis Tiberii, which the cure of the health of Tiberius, which is the earliest version of the full Veronica legend with the handkerchief with God's or with Jesus' face perfectly imprinted on it, which that particular relic comes to be known as a Veronica. And so this is the earliest account of that.

C: So this is the earliest account of the Veronica Lodge-end.

B: Yes, the Veronica Lodge-end, yes. So there's that, and then there's also another story called the Mors Pilati, which is the death of Pilate. There's different versions of what happens. And in a lot of versions, Pilate ultimately commits suicide. But here we have a different version. So if you combine the bits from the Cura sanitatis Tiberii and the Mors Pilati, you get the account here from our boy, Jacobus de Voragine, in the Golden Legend. This comes from the section on the Passion of the Lord. And I'm just gonna read it. I'm just gonna read it because it's very good. There's a lot of good things going on here. So.

"When Pilate had handed Jesus over to the Jews to be crucified, he was afraid that his condemnation of innocent blood might offend Tiberius Caesar, and dispatched one of his familiars to make a case for him to the emperor. Meanwhile, it was announced to Tiberius, who was seriously ill, that in Jerusalem there was a physician who cured all diseases by his word alone. Therefore, the emperor, not knowing that Pilate and the Jews had put this physician to death, said to one of his intimates, whose name was Volusian, 'Cross the sea as fast as you can, and tell Pilate to send this healer to me so that he may restore me to health.' Volusian came to Pilate and delivered the emperor's command, but Pilate, terror-stricken, asked for a fortnight's grace. During this time, Volusian made the acquaintance of a woman named Veronica, who had been in Jesus' company, and asked her where he might find Jesus Christ. She answered, 'Alas, he was my Lord and my God, and Pilate, to whom he was handed over through envy, condemned him and commanded that he be crucified.' Volusian was grieved at this and said, 'I am deeply sorry that I cannot carry out the orders my master gave me.' Veronica answered, 'When the teacher was going about preaching, and I, to my regret, could not be with him. I wanted to have his picture painted so that when I was deprived of his presence I could at least have the solace of his image. So one day I was carrying a piece of linen to the painter when I met Jesus, and he asked me where I was going. I told him what my errand was. He asked for the cloth I had in my hand, pressed it to his venerable face, and he left his image on it. If your master looks devoutly upon the image, he will at once be rewarded by being cured.' 'Can this image be bought for gold or silver?' Volusian asked. 'No,' Veronica replied. 'Only true piety can make it effective. Therefore I will go with you and let Caesar look upon the image, after which I will return home.' So Volusian came to Rome with Veronica and told Tiberius, 'The Jesus you have long desired to see was unjustly given over to death by Pilate and the Jews, and by reason of their envy nailed to the gibbet of the cross. However, a lady came to me with a picture of Jesus, and if you look at it devoutly, you will obtain the benefit of your health.' Caesar therefore had the road carpeted with silk cloths and ordered the image brought to him, and the moment he looked at it he won back his pristine health."

And Tiberius, who I can say for a fact was kind of a jerk emperor, is made into a Christian here, which kind of happens to a number of early emperors. It happens to Augustus too. There's a version where baby Jesus appears to Augustus in a dream or something. I haven't read that in like twenty years, so I don't remember the details.

"But Pontius Pilate was then taken prisoner at Caesar's command and shipped to Rome. And when the emperor heard that he had arrived, he was filled with fury and had him brought into his presence. Pilate, however, had taken with him the Lord's seamless tunic, and came before the emperor wearing it. And As soon as Tiberius saw him clothed in the tunic, his anger vanished. He rose to meet Pilate and could not address a harsh word to him. So the emperor, who, when Pilate was absent, seemed so terrible and furious now in his presence, was somehow calmed. As soon as he had given him leave to go, on the other hand, he was again afire with rage, and called himself a wretch for not having showed the culprit the anger that was in his heart." So as long as Pilate is wearing Jesus's clothes, Tiberius can't be angry with him, but as soon as he leaves, he's angry again. "Swearing and protesting that Pilate was a son of death, and that it was not right to let him live on the earth, he at once had him called back. But when he saw him, the emperor greeted him, and his wrath subsided. All wondered, and he himself wondered, that he could be so wrought up against Pilate absent, and could not so much as speak to him harshly when he was present."

"At length, at a sign from God, or perhaps a hint from some Christian, he had the man stripped of that tunic and instantly his previous rage was rekindled. The emperor's astonishment mounted until he was told that the tunic had belonged to the Lord Jesus. He had Pilate remanded to prison until he could consult with a council of wise men about what should be done with the criminal. Pilate was forthwith sentenced to a shameful death, but when he heard of this he killed himself with his own knife, and so ended his life. When Caesar was informed of this, he said, 'Truly he died a most shameful death, and his own hand did not spare him.'"

"The corpse was weighted with a huge stone and thrown into the Tiber, but wicked foul spirits made sport of the wicked foul body, plunging it into the water and snatching it up into the air. This caused awesome floods in the water and lightning, tempests and hailstorms in the air, and a widespread panic broke out among the people. The Romans therefore pulled the body out of the Tiber, and as a gesture of contempt carried it off to Vienne," this is not Vienna, but Vienne, a city in France, "and dumped it into the Rhone. The name of the city comes from Via Gehenne, the road to Hell, because at this time it was a place of malediction. Or more likely, the city was called Vienne or Bienna because it was said to have been built on a biennium. But there again the wicked spirits rallied and stirred up the same disturbances, and the people refusing to put up with so great a plague of demons, removed that vessel of malediction from their midst and consigned it to a burial in the territory of the city of Lausanne. And there the populace, harried by excess, by the aforesaid upheavals, took the body away and sank it in a pit surrounded by mountains, where, according to some accounts, diabolical machinations still make themselves felt." And that area, that real place, that mountain, is actually called Mont Pilatus. Like Pilate, Mount Pilate, except it's actually probably because it was "piletus" it was capped by clouds. But anyway it's got it's called Pilate now. And in some legends it says that on Holy Weekend the undead body of Pilate will climb out of the mountain and sit and contemplate the resurrection.

C: How did you save... I guess that's appropriate for the last little bit of our horror episode. You didn't know there was gonna be a zombie.

B: Yeah, there's a zombie.

C: There's a secret zombie in this episode all this time.

B: There's storm demons. There's some good stuff, yeah, but of course I had to dig into some Golden Legend to get the good-good stuff. But yeah, so that's essentially the story of the Cura Tiberii, sanitatis Tiberii, which is frequently appended in Latin editions of the Gospel of Nicodemus. We skipped over it. This book was also the origin of the name Longinus, as the soldier who drove the sphere. So we talked about the sphere of destiny, the Spear of Longinus, the Lance of Longinus. So that name first appears here, Dismas and Gestas first appear here, Veronica first appears here. So this is an important and influential work that gives us a lot of stuff that gets really thoroughly imbued into Christian thought and legend.

C: Did you have a verse?

B: I did. I already read it though. It was it was the bit with the demons asking about who is this so great and so humble. That was my favorite bit for sure. What about you? Did you have one?

C: Oh yeah, there's a lot of really good stuff in here. Basically anytime Hell is yelling at Satan is good.

B: Yes.

C: But I wanted to talk about Enoch.

B: Okay, yeah.

C: Enoch is the one that you have made big promises about, right?

B: I've definitely been teasing, yes, when we read first Enoch, it is definitely going to be one of the wildest things we have ever covered on this show, for sure. Yeah.

C: Okay. Well this says, this is chapter twenty-five, "I am Enoch, which was translated hither by the word of the Lord, and this that is with me is Elias the Thesbite. which was taken up in a chariot of fire, and up to this day we have not tasted death, but we are received into the coming of Antichrist to fight against him with signs and wonders of God, and to be slain of him in Jerusalem, and after three days and a half to be taken up again alive on the clouds."

B: Yeah.

C: That sounds like a pretty cool story.

B: Yeah, I'll have to dig into that a little bit more to see if there's more to that particular belief that Enoch and Elijah are gonna go fight the Antichrist.

C: I would be very excited to know if that was the case.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see, and if I can find where that gets carried out more, we'll definitely cover that on the show for sure.

C: But but also, yeah, like pretty much any time Satan is just getting dunked on is very good in this. I kinda love all the stuff where it's like, "this was his plan all along." Where Jesus Ocean's 11s everybody into salvation is pretty great.

B: Yeah, it's good. So where do you come down on this, Chris? I know you said you were you found the first part kind of boring. Overall, what would you say about the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Acts of Pilate?

C: I mean it certainly picks up when Jesus descends into Hell to take all of the righteous dead up to heaven. Not great with all the anti-Semitism.

B: Sure, yeah, that part kind of blows. Yeah.

C: Yeah, not my favorite part. In my understanding of it as just Jesus going getting the righteous dead, I find that to be very entertaining.

B: Right.

C: Jesus going and making all of the Jewish patriarchs into Christians, however, like you said, it's one of those things that is by doctrine necessary, but not a great look in retrospect.

B: Yep. But yeah. A pretty interesting one, and again, very important, so I'm glad that we covered it as relatively early as we did, even if it means we haven't covered a lot of very important canonical books. You know, we do a mix of things. That's the show.

C: We'll get to them. Don't get weird about it. We'll get to them.

B: We'll definitely get there. Yeah. I just feel someone is out there like, why haven't you done Nahum yet or something? I don't know.

C: I think we'll be okay.

B: Let me know if you're a Nahum stan, I need to know, give me a shout.

C: As we mentioned, that was the first part of our multi-part Scare-stravaganza.

B: Yes, absolutely. So part two for our very good Halloween special. We're gonna have a mash. We're gonna do the mash. We're gonna do the monster mash. We're gonna go and we're gonna see our boy Solomon tackling all the demons. That's right, we're gonna do the Testament of Solomon next week and I promise you guys will not describe that one as boring in any part. Because it's a very cool story of Solomon. Asmodeus will make a return. Basically, any named demon that we've seen so far is probably going to be showing up. Cool little folktales that were very popular among Jewish people. And I think it'll be very fun. I think you guys will get a real kick out of the Testament of Solomon. And I will provide a link on our Tumblr so you can find it. So don't worry about finding that because it's definitely not gonna be in the HCSB or the NRSV. I'll put a link up. You'll be able to find it.

C: A thing that I like is that next week we're doing a Monster Bash. But I think it's fair to refer to Jesus' triumph over death as a Graveyard Dmash.

B: It w it was. It was the graveyard smash. We did it backwards, I guess.

C: What book is the Transylvania twist in?

B: Ooh. Hmm. I have to think about it.

C: Is that in Enoch?

B: Maybe. It could be.

C: Which apocalypse explains what happened to the Transylvania twist? It's now the mash. Alright everybody! Have a great week. We will be back next time with the Testament of Solomon. We hope you have a scary– nah we don't hope you have a scary time! We hope you have a time that has as many scares as you are comfortable with. Yeah.

B: Hey Chris, why don't we tell people where they can give us some money and some help and stuff. That sounds good, Benito.

C: Where can everybody find us online?

B: Yeah, so if you want to find us online and get supplementary material and things like links to the readings that we do that can't be found in normal people bibles. Go to apocrypals.tumbler.com. This past week I've put up a lot of images of Thecla and also some of the very, very many paintings of Judith and Holofernes. So if you wanted to check out different takes on those from across the years, which is an incredibly popular motif in art, you can check that out. Also we provide links to this show. Links to other resources and things. And we answer questions as well. You can ask us questions. Usually we'll just answer them on the Tumblr, but sometimes we might hit them up on the show. So go there if you're looking for any kind of supplemental material for the show.

If you like the show, you want to help us out, you want to help us keep the show going, pay for hosting and that kind of stuff, go to K O dash F I dot com slash apocrypals, that's kofi dot com slash apocrypals, and there you can basically leave us a tip, buy us a coffee. You can leave any kind of amount of money in increments of three dollars. As much or as little as you are interested in. And unlike a Patreon, it's not a recurring pledge. You can you can leave a tip as often as you feel is appropriate. It can be one time, it could be every week, like some people do, and it could be any amount, it could be three dollars. Some people do $18 because 18 is that number of life. Some people have been doing $21 because it's as many threes as you can have. It's seven threes. And whatever, whatever, how however much. And we were we absolutely appreciate it. We absolutely appreciate everyone who's left donations there.

If you want to help us out and you don't have the money or you don't want to spend the money, you can absolutely help us by leaving us a review on whatever your podcatcher of choice is, especially Apple Podcasts. Just leave us a rating and a quick review. We get some really great reviews that I absolutely appreciate, but don't feel like you have to be super literary. You can just say, "it's very good and I do like it." Like that could be your review and that's fine. But the more reviews and ratings we get, the more likely we are to be featured and the more likely we are to get that very clutch Pontifex retweet. So Yeah, just help us out that way. As for me, you can find me on Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram. Just search for Benito Cereno. You'll find me. What about you, Chris?

C: You can find me by going to T H E dash I S B dot com. That's my homepage that has links to all the things that I do. Hey everybody, this Wednesday, October 24th, if you're listening to this the week that it comes out, we've got a very special project that's finally out in stores.

B: Yeah.

C: The Army of Darkness Halloween special with a lead story by me and Chad Bowers and Owen Marin and a backup story written by Benito with art by...

B: Sam Lotfi.

C: Sam Lotfi.

B: Yeah.

C: That is going to be available in stores. Also, a new issue for the first time in two years. Of my comic Dracula the Unconquered is gonna be released digitally on Comixology. So if you would like to get some more stuff for us Then by all means pick those things up. They are very good and very fun.

B: Yeah, I read that Dracula. I read that Dracula. It's excellent. It's a very good Dracula.

C: Thank you. I think it's my favorite issue I've done of that book so far.

B: Yeah.

C: So that's it. We're gonna be back next week with the Testament of Solomon. Until then, for Benito Cereno, I've been Chris Sims. Benito, peace be with you.

B: And also, with you!

[Music "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC]