#24 Where Religions Come From | @MythVisionPodcast & @GnosticInformant

[Music] Jews already had a pagan daddy. Yeah. Centuries prior to Christianity, the Jews were already hugging Dianisis. That's the big that's the big red pill is when you find out that you first you think the question is, is the New Testament drawing from pure Jewish or is it drawing from Greek and Jewish? Then you find out that there is no pure Jewish. that the Jewish writers of the time period were already going to the Greeks, borrowing from the Greeks, borrowing from the Hittites, borrowing from the Egyptians, borrowing from the Romans, borrowing from whoever, and they're all kind of borrowing from each other. It's fear is in acknowledging uh let's say that you guys are right and that they did borrow from pagan and the Jews were helenized. What is wrong with that? Because it takes away the sacredness of the story that Moses was handed these from God. Welcome to a campfire episode with Mythvision and the Gnostic Informant. We're talking to Derek Lambert and Neil Sendlac. We're talking all things ancient Christianity and ancient texts. Uh this is the third installment. Uh we talked to each of them individually in the last two episodes. And then this third one, we got us all together and we just started peppering them with questions asking them about uh old versions of Christianity and YouTubers and things like that. So, if you've ever heard of Wes Huff, Billy Carson, Aman Hillman, some of those guys, they know them and have had a lot of dramatic interactions with them and it's just some of the coolest stories. So, we got to talk to them about being on YouTube and building up their channels and then also some of some extra things. So, these episodes are all standalone. You don't have to go back and listen to the other two, but if you like these guys, this is such a fun conversation. They're really good friends. they hang out on a regular basis and so we just got to kind of be flies on the wall and keep asking him stuff. Um, thanks for listening. If you if you're liking the content, you're liking the guests, please like and subscribe below. We're still very young as a channel and it really helps us with the algorithm and we really appreciate it. All right, on to the show. Welcome to the Austin and Matt podcast. Derek, Neil, thanks for being here. Thanks for having us. This has been so fun. Absolutely, man. Thank you. So you guys um Neil, you moved down here and Derek was partially part of the reason. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because you're down here, Danny's down here. I have a few other friends are down here. Uh and then obviously the weather, you know, get I got to get out of the cold and if I'm doing YouTube, I can be I could be anywhere I want. So I figured let's go where go to where I have friends and where the weather is nice. So I moved down to Florida. He actually visited before he moved and he saw it and was like, "Bro, this is better than where I'm where I live now." Yep. I was on the one time I was on Danny Jones and then I went and I went on to your house and then I was like, "Okay, let's do it. I like it here. I'm staying." That's awesome. How often you guys get to hang out? Pretty often. We could whenever we want, but we're so freaking busy. Yeah. Really? At least once or twice a month. Yeah. At least once or twice a month. That's about right. How often are you guys filming right now? I would say depends. Sometimes more often. Like lately, I've been I moved into my house. We haven't had time. But once I get that studio set up, we'll probably We'll be doing a lot of stuff there. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that, too. Is it going to be two-seater? Like, so he can come into your studio. At least two seats. And I'd like to be able to add a third if we had, you know, that kind of stuff. It' be nice to do a table talk like this or something, right? You can fit it. I don't know if it'll be big. This is too big. Probably. Yeah. You'll see. How are you designing it? The background will probably have stone. I sent you a picture of what I want, but I'm not sure it's going to be exactly that. Yeah. Stone, good coloring. I want some flat lights coming down, giving the, you know, professional feel. Yeah. And um really just I want it to feel and look good, but really what's going to matter is that we're getting deep in the weeds as we usually do. And the quality of the cameras getting it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, cuz me and Neil, we we really do get lost in the weeds and we know we're going deep when PhDs who are like Harvard 40 years deep in this [ __ ] reading and eating Greek text all day look at us and go, I never thought about that. That's a good point, Neil. Good connection. We We're in there with them. That's crazy. Clearly, we're not PhDs ourselves, but they always try and we have to humbly go, "No, no, no." They go, "Nah, you've earned like some type of PhD by now with everything you've learned." But, you know, I don't accept that because I don't have the languages under my belt thoroughly. I'd rather have that before I go. But I He's much closer to I would I if I would I would be okay with a master's level, but I wouldn't know about I wouldn't call myself a PhD. You know what I'm talking about. You have to do a a dissertation for that. Of course. Well, we I would confidently say that I can probably hang with M's level stuff. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. We all's content is so uh deep and diverse and like it is. Plus, I do run into people with master's degrees who I look at and go, how did they get that? So, I'm just saying. So, it's not like that's not that great. I'm not saying I think it just depends. It's a bit subjective because one school a master might be better than a PhD or two PhDs at some less school. There's masters of divinity. We we Me and Derek found this out. There's there's theological schools that that are Christian schools and they give out master's degrees, but they're really masters of divinity and all they're learning is just biblical stuff. Yeah. They're not getting they're not learning like ancient Greek language or going that deep into Hebrew. They're not learning about like, you know, historical methodology. They're learning like they're being fed theologian. They're being fooed the theology stuff. Yeah. And they these people get their masters of divinities and then they go take that and get a PhD with it. So they're like they have like a shortcut. Well, this it's the same problem in the Muslim. Yes. You're not Muslim scholars. Oh yeah. Are just theologians for Yeah. Right. And then they they have animosity towards secular critical scholarship in the West. Yeah. And I imagine in other places of the world, but they do not they're not fans of what's going on because we do not treat their book the way their tradition expects that treatment. Yeah. They have a job and their job is to uphold the sacredness of the Quran. Y they're not going in looking to find the truth of did was this really said by Muhammad or they're not they're not looking at it critically. They're going in there with their preconceived notion of this is divinely inspired. Now, let me look for the evidence that I can cherrypick to make it so I can argue for this case. Well, and to say it another way, there are certain questions they're not allowed to ask. Yep. Exactly. That's it. Exactly. That's it. And if they do, they can't they're going to get fired or in trouble. And in fact, Mike Lakona, for anyone who knows who Michael Lakona is for years, apologist, he was under William Lane Craig and been in the same vein of the what me and him grew up on. We chewed on this kind of material. I met him in person when I was a Christian apologist. Now I'm a skeptic, atheist. interviewing the guy. He's my friend. Definitely apologist. Okay. But he's one of the better ones in my opinion. Yeah. And he he got fired for suggesting that what we call the zombie apocalypse at the end of Matthew when all the dead saints came out of the graves. Yeah. He said that's a metaphor that didn't historically happen. Well, their Baptist, whatever they were, fired him and said, "No, that happened. You're messing with scripture." Yeah. over thinking that was a metaphor. He holds all the same beliefs and resurrection everything simply a metaphor. Boom. Fired because of a doctrinal difference. We we also discovered through talking to a lot of you scholars that some of these schools still to this day not every school does this but a lot of schools do have statements of faith which is we know that McMasters University Yeah. If you get a de if you get a master's at McMasters for for theology, you have to sign a statement of faith or you don't get your master's degree saying that I will uphold that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin, died, was resurrected in three days and is as the son of God the father. You have to sign it. It's called a statement of faith. And there's tons of colleges that are doing it still today. You're not allowed. You see what I'm saying? Not in your education. Steven Boyce who we know well he got he mentions this and I'm not trying to speak too much in case he comes across this and I'm wrong. He changed his denomination. Yeah. And in the process of becoming I don't know where he is now Anglican. Yeah. And he was part of like a Baptist type or something. When he changed to Anglican they saw him as a traitor. Yeah. He got in trouble as a Christian. He almost lost his credentials. Um but here's what here's what gets me about this. It's not that they do this. It's that nobody takes this as big deal. It seems like aside from a few scholars that we know, uh, Richard C. Miller is is talking about this non-stop, but like we've talked to scholars who are like, "Come on, Derek. It's not that big of a deal. They can sign it. They don't have to follow it." Then it's like, "Okay, you're now you're co-signing liars. You just signed a document." And then you're you're just expecting them to be honest now after they just signed this document. Like, no. I don't care if they're following or not following it. The problem that the the fact that they're doing it is a problem. People should not be signing statements of faith to get credentials in a in a in any field. Any field unless unless you give them a different title. Give them a PhD instead of a PhD. Give them something different that's makes them stand out. No offense. Make them a theologian. Yes. Simple as that. A doctor. If you're a doctor, you're you're considered society looks at you as someone with authority. You're a doc. I have a PhD. I'm a I'm Dr. Derek Lambert. I'm an expert. But you signed a statement of faith. No, you should not be given that authority. You should be considered a PhD, which is what they used to do back in the day. They used to give out PhDs to separate them from real PhDs. And now it seems like that everyone just gets a PhD now. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. It's this is an ongoing feud that we deal with and it's like okay so I I look we can bring that up and we do um but I mean I interview people who do come out of those kind of more conservative schools to hear their take and I find that they're it's like they're seeing like my recent interview that I did on the sons of God which you're going to interview the same guy Daniel B Glover his book uh uh sons of God I can't remember the title off the top of my head Jesus and other sons of God Bro, good book. That book literally goes in the same vein of Robin Walsh, Richard C. Miller, except I think at the end of the day that he believes it in some way. Not Yeah. Not like a fundamentalist maybe, but he's so close to this. And I'm like, this is coming from someone who's clearly coming out of a much more negotiating with faith kind of guy, and he's coming to where we're at. And it's like, dude, we've been saying this for years now. I know. It's finally good to see an actual mainstream academic put out another book that co-signs what we've been saying for years. I was so happy to see that. What is it that you guys are saying in regards to coming out? Derrick and I's main Derrick and I's main program on both of our channels is to show you that not only are the gospels sort of fulfilling Old Testament motifs, but it's also drawing from the great Greco Roman world. M it's also drawing from the Dianesian, from the Appalonian, from the Eloinian, from the Or it's going out of its way to be more Greek and Roman. And you probably went, okay, I was still lost. I don't know what you're talking about. So, let me help you, right? Yeah, this we might as well get into some weeds, but I want to take you on this journey. It's a good segue. Yeah, we all understand what the Gospels seem to be saying, right? All of us have read them and have heard them. We know, right, at this panel. Hopefully the viewers can keep up. It has been long understood and we all agree that the gospels quote scripture and say thus sayaith the Lord or the prophet so and so and it's fulfilling the scripture. It goes beyond explicit quotes of scripture. Sometimes it's alluding to scripture without quoting it and rewriting a passage about Jesus modeled after an Old Testament character like Moses or Elijah or Elisha. This has been long known and understood. what hasn't been accepted ubiquitous in the field cuz everyone's like that's kosher, pun intended, it's Jewish, so it's okay. As soon as you touch Greek or Roman, that's pagan and they're allergic to pagan. They're be modeled after any pagan. Yeah. Because the the idea that is that Christians and Jews are are part of the tradition that goes back to Moses, but the pagans are the heathen polytheist. They're Yeah. they they worship demons and if there's no way that these great Christians would ever draw from those guys. But Paul's the letter from Titus for example literally quotes word for word that stuff that you find in um calis um epime no um calamakimicus and which goes back to epimentities they both they both do it which also goes back to a homeriic story quoting media which is a pagan myth about media being judged it's media Aphrodite Venus the goddess and Helen Um, I'm sorry, not not Helen's not not here. It's Badia, Aphrodite, and um, Hera. And they're being judged by Paris to see who's the most beautiful, who's the fairest. Who's the fairest of them all? Who's the hottest? Everyone's heard this myth before. Who's the hottest? Yeah. And um, and when Media loses, she goes, "Cretins are always liars." And it starts this this famous phrase, and then it's we find that in the epistles of the New Testament. Cretins are always liars. That right there is a prime example of an objective. There is no opinion on if I think it's drawing from paganism. It is clearly and then you have in revelation. Revelation makes site makes references to Hades, Thanos, the Apollo, Tardus, Tarderus, all constantly referencing pagan gods and they go scholars go well it's just being kind of allegorical. It's like yeah that's the point of paganism. It's always allegorical. That's the point. It's pagan. So, I just think it's funny how they they'll they'll go you'll get these New Testament scholars who kind of have a bias and you'll bring this up and you'll go they'll go, "Well, I don't I think that the New Testament authors are they're not drawing from the pagan myths. They're drawing from the philosophers of the Greeks and they twist it. They they want to they want to like clean it out a little bit. It's philosophy. They're drawing from the philosophy, not the dirty pagan stuff. This is the philosophy." Well, the pagan philosophers are pagans. That's the point. They're philos like you cannot separate philosophy from pagan theology. They're the same people. So a little history in the scholarship as to why that is. In the early 19th 18th to 19th century, many scholars specifically Germans were even up to the 20th early 20th century too. Early 20 they were the cutting edge scholars. Germans were ahead of everyone literally. And even to this day, it's arguably this still the case in some situations. Now the Germans took it Bruno those guys these guys were gangster okay they went into the weeds like there's books the German German biblical scholarship was cutting edge way before cutting edge what they did though is they went fullon like let's explain everything from pagan Roman sources and Greek sources okay and when we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and a lot of Jewish literature that we went hold on some of these elements that we thought were exclusively pagan are actually in Jewish sources Enoch and other things that we we discovered in the early 1900s and like Ethiopic church had it, but we like made this a thing, right? And made it in origins of Christian studies, we started realizing maybe there's something to this and some of this Dead Sea Scroll material. So then the pendulum swung as we talked about in the earlier episode. I constantly talk about pendulums, right? Well, the pendulum swung and conservatives grabbed a hold of this and said, "We can explain everything through Jewish anticedants, right? Jewish prior examples. You don't need the pagan." Well, that's going too far, too. So, we found, you know what we found out? That Jews were heavily and thoroughly Exactly. already helanized. So, the best way to put it is Jews already had a pagan daddy. Yeah. Centuries prior to Christianity, the Jews were already hugging Dianisis. That's the big red pill is when you find out that you first you think the question is, is the New Testament drawing from pure Jewish or is it drawing from Greek and Jewish? Then you find out that there is no pure Jewish. That the Jewish writers of the time period were already going to the Greeks and borrowing from the Greeks, borrowing from the Hittites, borrowing from the Egyptians, borrowing from the Romans, borrowing from whoever. And they're all kind of borrowing from each other. It's not like we had this idea in our head that Judaism was like this special offshoot in its own category. Like there's these Jews over here in Judea and then the rest of the world's pagan. And the pagans are all like borrowing from each other. They're all sharing. Yeah. Except for these people right here in this little they're like they have a force field around them and they're special and they're completely blocked off from everyone else. It's like no, they're part of the same Mediterranean world as everyone else. What do you think the um fear is in acknowledging uh let's say that you guys are right and that they did borrow from pagan and the Jews were helenized. What is wrong with that? Because it takes away the sacredness of the story that Moses was handed these from God. Remember you and I talked about earlier how Plato mentions if you want a republic to operate well. You want everyone to obey. You don't want corruption. You need the people in the republic to believe that these gods are hand these gods were given the the laws I'm sorry that the laws were handed down from antiquity by the gods themselves to the heroes. And so with Judaism, the idea is Moses got these laws from God on Mount Si and they were given from God to man. No intermediary. That's it. And these these are they follow these traditions perfectly. They never let any outside any outside influence come in and they kept their traditions completely intact all the way down to the first century. That's why they resist any idea of bringing up Helenism. They go, "No, look at Mcabes. Mcabes is a story about rejecting Hellenism. It's like yeah well uh in Roman the Roman period we can talk about how the Roman imperial cult also rejected Helenism at times. There also were they had the outlaw of the Bakanalas in 186 B.CE which is the same time period as the Mcabes 2nd century B.CE. So you have you can you can have both can be true. You can have instances of rejection of borrowing like for example the Mcabes fighting the Seucid Greeks and taking away the temple of Zeus and replacing it with Yahweh. But you can still that can be true at the same time as they're also adopting these other things that they like about Greek culture. It doesn't have to be black and white. The example I would give to make it easy for you to understand coming from your perspective is this. There was an angel named Gabriel and he met a sacred holy man named Muhammad in a cave and he dictated directly from Allah the special words that were divine from God to the prophet. The prophet uttered these words to people who kept them in their memory and God retained it when he was no longer around. They constructed the Quran out of the sacred words that were directly dictated from God to Gabriel the angel to the prophet Muhammad as the final prophet and the last words that everyone on earth should obey. This came from God. And there's a story about sleepers in a cave. And when they went to sleep in this cave, hundreds of years later, they wake up and they don't even realize that they've been asleep that long. And the whole world has turned Muslim when it was once polytheistic, pagan. Well, that story is actually found in an earlier Christian story about the sleepers of Ephesus. Exact same story. And in that case, it's a story about Christians going to sleep under pagan times waking up. Same seven people too. Same amount of people. They go into a cave. They wake up 300 years later and it's now it's under the reign of Constantine. It's Christian or Theodocious. Now, this story is borrowed from a story or there's two stories that I know that I've documented. Epimenities, the same guy that gets mentioned like this older poet that t that Paul is mentioning. And Epimenities in this writing, a guy goes to a cave. I can't remember the exact journey he's on, but he goes and falls asleep in a cave for 57 years, but he thought he only took a quick nap. He wakes up and it's a Zeus of ca uh Zeus's cave. What I'm saying is these stories pass along. Yeah, sure. Human thumbrint. Well, what does it do if I told you that your neighbors already telling this story and you're telling me God told an angel in a cave to a man and you think you're the one? Bro, they were telling this kind of story 300, 400 years ago. Did Did God really tell this guy or did they say that to give their guy the credit and the clout? Well, if I can show that Christianity like that is built in that fashion based on prior antecedants from Greek, Roman, and Jewish folklore, legend, and myth, then why do you think this is really divinely inspired? If it is, then you should be consistent. And this is my whole I've been saying this from day one. If you think the Christian one is is divine, then you should think that Dionis and Eskeipius and Heracles and Addis and all of them are also divine. Because the same walking like a duck and talking like a duck and looking like a duck, quacking like a duck, flying like a duck, it does all of that. Now, you can disagree with the elements of it, but if you have that belief, then you're being inconsistent. And me and Nil are trying to point this out. You got a supernatural worldview. Cool. I can show you supernatural texts that even outperform the New Testament. Why not believe those? Why are we limiting our scope? Yeah. And they and they become great skeptics for those texts. all all of a sudden they you can go that doesn't sound right that defies science and they're like wait a minute you look at listen to how you sound when you're talking about this particular text but then when it's your own all of a sudden it's like you're thinking of ways to Another example of that though that I think is the most like obvious borrowing from Greek that we find in the in Genesis the the the original myth of the Jewish foundation is the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac and everyone thinks this story is that's this Jewish history, ancient going back to, you know, Ur, Sumer or whatever, uh, Babylon. But like then once you start finding out that there's a Homer, there's a version of Homer, 8th century poet, 8th century poet where he talks about Agamemnon, who's this the king of the Aayans who fights the Trojans in the Trojan War. Proto has a daughter uh a daughter named um Ephen um Ephagenia. Yep. and uh his daughter or he he gets an omen from the priest that says in order to attack the Trojans. This is right before the Trojan War in the Iliad. In order to attack the Trojans, you must sacrifice your only daughter to get the good green light from the gods cuz the winds they would the winds would not pick up their cells to leave the port. Yeah. And that's that's exactly the point is though he takes his daughter brings her up on a mountain ties her up to a py and he's about to take the knife and sacrifice her and then Artemis or in some versions a messenger of art an angel angelos which means messenger in Greek of Artemis comes and stops him transports Ephagenia to another place she becomes either a goddess in some versions or a priest of Artemis and then replaces it with a deer. In the in the story of Genesis, you have Abraham being told that he needs to sacrifice his only son Isaac to God to show his willingness to follow God. He brings her up on he brings him up on a mountain, ties him up to a p is about to sacrifice him and then an angel stops him and then replaces Isaac not with a deer with a ram and a thicket. And it's like, okay, this is the same story with a few details. One of them is a ram. One of them is a deer. There's reasons why. There's theological reasons why. But how do we know which one's first? Well, we find that story in Greek sources well into the fifth, 6th, 7th century BCE being being um Herodus makes mention of it. The the the book of Genesis is not cited by anybody ever. Not a single person mentions Genesis in any of the Greek sources, any of the Egyptian sources, any Judean sources, any any sources anywhere until right around like the 3rd century BC Hellenistic period. Yeah. So, this is like a telltale sign that we already have Greek influences on the Old Testament in Genesis or at least a common myth that is so similar that they're lifting a similar trope and idea. And I like to go to the other Greek example from Jason and the Argonauts. Oh yeah. In that example, it it it even has like more overlap with Abraham in my opinion in the overall scheme because he's promised a land. Abraham is pro the promised land. Okay. He's promised a land and four generations later they get it. Okay. But in the myth there's also a stutterer like Aaron is stutters or Moses stutters and Aaron is a spokesperson. So in this Jason and the Argonaut myth, one of them is a stutterer. Um there's elements that you see that like where this come from. The other interesting thing is the animal in this case. So the king Aamus, he ends up divorcing his wife. I think the the cloud goddess or one of these the new wife is jealous. Doesn't like the kids. Okay. He has twins. He has um Heli, which is where we get Hell's Pont from. And you'll find out about the sea of Hell's Pont in just a minute. And then you have um so Aamos and Heli. So there's twins, right? Well, the new wife doesn't like them. So the wife tells the messengers to say that the oracle at Delelfi said that Apollo said in order to get rid of this drought, they're going through a famine right now. You need to sacrifice your children. And so that is what the message of God sent to the king. And the king is faithful to the God. Faithfulness plays a significant role with Abraham and in this myth. And what happens is he takes his kids up. He puts the py together and he's getting ready to sacrifice them on the altar. And as he begins to do so, a golden fleeced ram flies in. Same animal that gets caught in a thicket with Abraham. Flies in, picks up both the kids. Heli falls off over the ocean and that's why they named it Hell's Pont. But the son makes it to the end, and in honor of the god for saving him, Apollo the god catches the whole thing. He sacrifices the ram and then hangs the golden fleece on a thicket on a tree. So the order of events are different, but the elements are similar. You can see that there's some sort of sacrifice myth that was floating around the Mediterranean about being faithful to God and even being even if you had to sacrifice your child, you would do it. Yep. And that find that makes its way into the Old Testament. But you can see it all over the place in all these other pagan myths. Did did anyone ever write about these commonalities? Yes. And were they just academics? Academics? Very few. Yeah, we didn't we didn't but we didn't discover this. But no, like church fathers. No one. No. No. Church fathers stay away from this. Uh, actually no. Ucious. Ucious does have a preparation for the gospel. He wrote a book called the preparation for the gospel. This one's good. 4th century AD. And the entire text is about pointing to different myths. Genetician myths, Egyptian myths, Greek myths, uh, Babylonian myths. And basically what he's doing is he's going, look, even outside of the Old Testament, even outside of the Hebrew Bible, there are instances where the pagans were pro were being divinely inspired and that their pagan myths were pointing to Jesus. And he uses examples of this idea of the god L who the god L is is the god of the Hebrew Bible in the Hebrew Bible. Like that's the name Lronos. And but he goes this God who the Greeks call Kronos Y or Saturn sacrifices his only begotten son Yadude. And after that day he circumcised himself and made it a custom among the Phoenicians to do that. And then a couple paragraphs later, he goes, "And this very myth of the God sacrificing his only begotten son was important for Jesus being the only begotten son sacrificed for mankind." And so you can see that church fathers were going around and looking at these myths and going, "Oh, it's everywhere. Divinely divine inspiration is found in all these places." But you also asked about other scholars have talked about this and you said not many but actually if you go back to before early you know early 20th century James Frasier and then uh like like uh Kyle Kareni and those guys Kenneth Guthrie they were big into pointing this stuff out. This was this was a this was a big popular thing in scholarship in English, German and even American circles from the 19th to the 20th century. And then there was like a big push back against it in the around 1950s to 70s for some reason. I think it was post Holocaust sympathies as well. So there was a combination. There was a lot of a lot of cultural things happening where all of a sudden people stopped looking at pagan stuff and comparing it. And then James Frasier got a bad rap. He did a lot of James Frasier came up with the term dying and rising God. That became taboo. But then Bruce Louden, Thomas L. Thompson, those guys and the Copenhagen school recently in the last 20 years have started to come back and bring this back. Dennis McDonald. Yep. They wrote the Diane Gospel. Uh Homer and the go Homer Luke and Homer and Virgil. So in the last 15 to 20 years, there's been a new re resurgence of scholars pointing out, wait a minute, we got to go, we got to start looking at the pagan myths again. Bruce Lden wrote about the whole Ephagenia being sacrificed. We talk to scholars all the time who who point out that middle platonism is all in the New Testament. Robin Faith Walsh says this. You mentioned the the book the the the latest book that just came out. He's talking about epiphany and chapter three of that book how there's different epiphies of gods that are similar to Jesus. Yep. So, it's coming back big time. What's y'all's comment section like? It's pretty wild. Pretty wild. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of theological wars going on. Oh my god, dude. We do a live stream. It doesn't matter what we're talking about. Like they're having their own battles and arguments and they're sometimes their baits debates are more interesting than what we're talking about. That's Oh, look at this. They're talking about in the comments. Well, he mentioned Yay Dude, and that went probably over your head because you probably never heard of this. Never heard of Yay. This is Yahweh. Okay. Uh but what's interesting is and this was identified by like Giovani Garbini and others but he's like mid1900 scholar and um Yadude is the son of L in this Phoenician myth. He's the only begotten son. This is Yahweh. L is Yahweh. No no dude becomes in the Hebrew Bible not in this Phoenician myth. In this Phoenician myth which is older. Yeah, it's older. And hearkens back to an older thing. There's my King James coming ahead of me. Okay. Yeah. And he's finding this where L is the father of Yahweh. Yahweh has a dad. And his dad in this Phoenician myth actually dies. You can tell that he was a king who passed away. It mentions him being passed away. But it was also something that is interesting in that story that that Ucius points out. He's using a scholar named Phoos. And Boilos has depended on another earlier source that Sony and this priest from Phoenicia, an ancient source he's working on. And it turns out that scholars have compared the Ugaritic myths to this Phoenician myth. And it checks out. It checks out. Yeah. And what at the end of this, by the way, ugeritic means bronze age Canaanite. That's what it means. Yeah. Just the Canaanites right there in like Shamro. Yeah. From like 10,000 BC to 2,000 BC in that period. Yeah. And in that eczeus quote at the end he says that he dressed him in royal apparel and then sacrificed his only begotten son which is interesting. That's what happened to Jesus in the gospels. That's the point. Jesus has put on purple and put on a crown of thorns and it calls him the king the king of the Jews. It's like a mockery of that whole um of this whole idea of the king being sacrificed. But there's even even in Babylon, they had this weird human sacrifice ritual they used to do in Babylon where they would take a false king if they had a if the if the prophet got a bad portant in the sky or something like there's a shooting star that went in the wrong direction and it's like oh no this is bad. What they would do was they would take the king whoever's king of Babylon and they would take him out of power and he would be exiled. But he this was all part of the plan. He would go and live in another city and they would put in a new king from the lower classes of society. They would take some poor slave and they, hey, you're the new king now. And they would dress him up in purple. They would put a crown on his head. They would give him all the women and all the money for a few weeks and he would live like a king and then they'd sacrifice him. No. And that was how you got rid of this is a Babylonian tradition. Did the guy who gets promoted to king know? Yeah. Going out on a Going out on a high note. I don't I don't know what the primary sources actually say though. I don't know either, but I would imagine but it's I mean after that's a really good question after the first guy you see it happen right the question that comes to my mind I don't know if this is a question that would come to yours but this is the logical question that comes to my mind and that is if you find a story a thousand years before your God where he is the only begotten he is a chosen son of a god he dies on behalf of the people in order to save them from whatever it's a famine it's a drought out. It's a it it could be sin. It could be whatever. You find the same thing happening in a much much older story. Thousand years earlier at least. And then you're sitting here going, "Okay, can you see how that might the same area of the world all in the Middle East right there in the eastern Mediterranean all the way up into the Aian and the Roman area even into uh Egypt all the way here in Mesopotamia which is just it's in the same area of the world. And the question is, why do you think yours is true but not these? And this is the question I had to ask and Neil's had to ask. And we go, you know, we fell in love with these things after studying them long enough cuz at first I had a chip on my shoulder. You know, I told my story and it was like fundamentalist and you're like, oh, Derek, you just did this cool thing. No, there was a moment where I'm like, I'm going to tell these apologists why they're lying. I'm going to let them know why they're full of [ __ ] and I want them to see the [ __ ] I want them to be like a dog pooped on the carpet, put his nose in it, let him see the [ __ ] Do you feel betrayed? In a sense, you are not told the truth. And in a sense, you're kind of a prisoner of these thoughts. They tell you what is and what isn't. And there are scholars that me and Neil interview. They don't tell us what to think. They just tell us how to think. We make up our own minds. And I want others to have that freedom. That alone is worth a million shekels. If you have the freedom to explore, that can be your religious experience. There's a famous debate that happened between a scholar named Paula Frederickson and a rabbi over the Talmud and Mishna. And the rabbi is going on. He's just fully passionate, extremely emotional about how you are misinterpreting the Mishna and Talmud. You want to know the who, what, when, where, why, and how. You want all this historical facts and data that that's not what it's for. It's meant for your application in how to live and improve a spiritual life toward God. when she got up, she cooked the [ __ ] out of it. She let him know, "Rabbi, listen. I respect your decision to read this material that way. And you have your religious experience through that. My religious experience is to know why in the seventh century a rabbi there would be a story of a rabbi where a young man thinks his wife has been unfaithful." And he really thinks that she has slept with someone before him and she's not a virgin on the night they're going to get married. She he brings her to the rabbi and says, "Rabbi, I need to know if she's been faithful." And so they had a custom. She'd sit on a barrel of wine and the rabbi would test it and he'd go to smell her breath and if the smell of wine came from her breath then her hyman has been removed therefore she's lost her virginity. Then all of a sudden she sits the rabbi goes I smell no wine my my young man she's been faithful and they go home he marries her happily ever after. Now, many scholars who've studied the who, what, when, where, and why, right, find out the rabbis actually looking out for the young girl. Sure, he's doing a good deed because even if she wasn't a virgin, he would have still done it so that the man would have been thinking that she was a virgin, but also that their lives would have been good. He was a good in that case, he was a good person to help in their custom. He had their life in his hands. That's like a noble lie. Like a noble lie. Totally. And but she said to this rabbi she's debating my friend that's my religious experience. Don't take it from me. Don't take what my experience is. So me and Neil have our own we go through the muse. There are moments where I'm listening to a story of Dianisis that I feel like I'm listening to Jesus. How how as a Christian I felt you don't like being denied that. I want I want everyone to be able to experience that. Right. That's the unfortunate sad part because we have walls. Our faith causes walls between us and the other. And I'm like, dude, if you just knew how much they are indebted to the earlier Greeks that you so are ready to be allergic to, they are indebted to these Greeks. They are indebted to these other ideas and they pretend that this dropped out of the sky and God just spoke and therefore like the Muslims do with Muhammad, with Gabriel in the cave. Little do you know that actually these stories come from earlier stories and they're indebted. So that's Are you saying that then it doesn't make those stories any less true or important or uh uh meaningful in interpreting your faith? It's just that it doesn't have to rely on the uniqueness of the story. It's more that there's a meaning behind that story. Is that kind of how you feel? How would you feel if I told you at the end of the day that Lord of the Rings never really happened? Would it hurt your feelings? No. What if you were raised to believe it did? Right. Okay. That's kind of you would feel betrayed. I would feel betrayed. Now, someone will mock that and I actually had a Muslim when I compared Quran to like using Lord of the Rings or art like that. And I had and I finally was thinking Virgil's Aniid. Let's give a real life example of an origin myth that's trying to actually say how Rome came to be. Yeah. And it takes like realistic places and things. It's not Lord of the Rings. It's a fiction. It's not Earth. Yeah. It's a fiction. It's on Earth. There probably were Romans who heard this and believed it. Probably not. Oh yeah. Not higher educated ones, but people in the Roman Empire believed this story. But the higher ones knew what they were dealing with. And they knew that the power was truly in this thing you're describing. It's in the story, man. If we can get past the BS that this happened. Santa Claus did not go down your chimney. Great story to tell children. I think it's still useful to tell. And St. Nick's a real person. St. Nick's a real dude. We talked about this earlier. Yeah. He's done more than that about Staint Nick. Did you know St. Nicholas punched a dude in the face. No, at the council of Nika. He was at the council of Nika. Now, some people doubt he punched him. But wait, St. Nicholas was at the council of the council and Santa Claus slapped Bishop. Apparently, one one of the sources says he slapped Bishop Aras in the face, who was the non-trinitarian. Yeah. So, Santa's gangster. Don't take his cookies and milk. You know what I'm saying? Shoot, dude. There's also later stories about him throwing money into people's houses through the window, like the chimney thing. So, there's like you can see the legends forming getting more and more grand as time goes on. And then eventually, by the time you get to the 20th century, you have a full-blown magic man flying in the sky with reindeer. Like, it's funny how that works. Absolutely, man. It's it's like saying Jesus can be real without being real though in a way because like this thought this experience because the question is Santa Claus real. How do you answer that? You can say no and be that's true. Santa Claus is not real. Is Santa Claus a real person that it's based on? That's true too. Yeah. So maybe the thing maybe Jesus is similar to that, you know, it could be and I think me and him tend to lean there was a guy. Um but the the St. Nicholas is irrelevant to our practice of Christmas, right? So if there was a historical Jesus, we've lost that guy in faith. The the the Superman is no longer Clark Clark Kent. Okay, Jesus is Superman now. We have lost the normal news station Clark Kent a long time ago, right at its origins with him seated at the right hand and walking on water. Once you wrote those stories, you've kind of lost the historical dude and he's irrelevant. What's powerful is the myths, the stories about Avatar, the Avatar. And that's exactly what Richard Miller calls him in his book Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity when he points out Jesus becomes a philosophical tool to the cult. And like you said, you know, he's not real, but he's real. That's why there's four gospels. There's four gospels because they don't have the same mission or mindset of what they're actually portraying. They have overlap. There's similarities. Synoptic. They're seeing the same eye. They're similar, but they're not the same. They contradict on purpose. Their intentions and goals are different. And the way they view Jesus is radically different in many ways, especially in the Gospel of John. So, me and Neil have been looking at this going, "Okay, how do we've kind of come full circle and we can dig this stuff and go, man, this is deep. There's some good stuff there. I can do it with Islam and I can get in, believe it or not, you like Westerners don't really like Muslims or Islam or whatever." No, dude. Like I can dig some of this stuff. Yeah. I can also call the [ __ ] Six-year-olds marrying and and active at nine. We can call that out. We can call out the nonsense that we find in Islam the same way we can call it out in Christianity. And we have that freedom, the liberty that our founding fathers were fighting for, dude. That's really what they were fighting for all along. Religious freedom to be able to do this. And if your religion is making you feel like you couldn't or shouldn't, you might need to check your religion at the door and say, "No, no, no, no, no. Maybe God is in me, okay? It's beyond the book. It's beyond the thing. It's a living thing. I am the temple. I am the one that needs to live this thing out." If you're person of faith, that's my recommendation. I mean, we've been down the religious fundamentalist route. I mean, yeah. I I think I think religion as a as a force is ultimately good. I do. I don't think atheism under I think a lot of atheists tend to forget what religion can do for people. It when people when loved ones die, what do you people what do people turn to? They turn to religion. They go to a church. They bury their dead within a church thing. They do all this stuff and they and they they they hope that their loved ones have passed on to a better place. That is something that you can't take away from people. I I just don't think atheists think about that enough. Yeah. What religion can do for people in tough times, burying their loved ones, marriage, all these things that people appeal to their different faiths to. And I think there I just don't think there's a strong argument against that at all. I don't think you could ever there's nothing that will ever be able to give you the placebo you need or whatever it might be in that. And I remember my best friend overdosed. His name's Al. He died of fentanyl. Uh brain dead after 30 minutes. They finally got him and he was done. His brain was done. He hadn't had oxygen. His sister called me the next day. I'm already in the skeptic zone in my life and she's like crying. I could barely understand what she's saying. And she's like, "You know what? He was such a good person that God took him. So she's rationalizing. She's trying to understand how why my brother. He was so good. God took him from the earth before he suffered anymore. That was her way of understanding it. And she said, "And now he's in heaven." And you know what I did? I had to explain to her why she's incorrect. And I had to correct her [ __ ] and tell her, "No." You're right. Right. You're right. What do you person Why would you ever go into that situation and say, "Well, actually, that's that's irrational what you just said." Exactly. No, it's actually very rational. It's very rational to think that way. Yeah. Even though it's not even though it might not be scientifically accurate orable. It's irrational thing to do as far as getting people to just kind of calm themselves and console themselves. And also, you know, we don't know. It could be true. We don't you better you better be careful saying I'm 100% right. Let me take my mask off, bro. You know you better be careful. I agree. And I And I do have I do hope that there's something after this. I do. I do, too. You know, and I've said that earlier to them. I'm like, dude, I am not that kind of guy who's like, when it ends, it ends. Now, I'm not going to say I mean, I I I'm alive, so I want to be present for the party and I will hate to say goodbye. At the same time, I won't if I'm right, I'm not going to be worried about it anyway, cuz you're not going to know. It's over. Yeah, but at the end of the day, you know, I do want there to be a party after this and we actually can go, you know what, this is this is great. There's something cool about that and you can't give that that's what the Epicurans taught that if there's nothing after this, who cares? You won't know that you're dead. Yeah. If there is something after this, great. I tend to think they're right. That's kind of a it's a it's an interesting paradox because you don't have to worry either way. There's a funny standup if you've never you know Dane Cook, the standup comedian. Okay, dude. there. One of his favorite in my opinion was the vicious circle. Okay. He did this awesome skit and in one of the scenes he said, "I was at the airport and uh I sneezed." And he's just like, "Oh no, this guy sneezed. This guy next to him sneezes." He's like, "What's up?" And he's like, "Ax example is like debris." And he's just so funny how he does a stand up and it's all over me and I just look at him and I like say, "God bless you." And really what I was saying is is like, you know, what dude, you know, like he's just being blunt, right? And all of a sudden, um, the guy's like, I don't believe in God. Like some response, right? He's mocking the guy's answer and he's like, dude, like, now we get into this like debate over whether God exists or not. You just sneeze your snot all over me, you [ __ ] So they're arguing, right? And the guy's like, and he's like, "Oh, yeah." He what do you believe? And he's like, "Well, I'm a Catholic. I think, you know, when I die, I'm gonna go to heaven. And he's doing all these funny little actions and he's like, I'm going to see my family. Hey, what's up? And and the guy's like, that's so stupid. And he's like, well, what do you believe? And Dane Cook's asking the atheist. And atheist is like, when I die, oh, I know what's going to happen to me when I die. When I die, I'm going to become one with the earth, becoming fertilizer, and I'm actually going to grow into a pretty tree. Right? And he's like laughing back at him like, "That's what you're going to be? You You think that's it? Finally, he walks away and he just said, "You know what? I do hope he becomes a tree." Some grizzly ass crazy ass northern like jackhammer guy walks in the wood with an axe, pissed the grabs that tree, starts hacking the hell out of it, drags it down to the wood mine, they grind it down, and they stamp a Bible on it. And it was like I was like, "Yeah." You know what I'm saying? I was laughing so hard, man. It was so good. universe powered by irony. Yeah. Right. How uh how much research do you guys do on a weekly basis? How much reading are you doing? Every day. How many hours a week do you think you guys are watching something educational, reading a text, reading, if you had to estimate, dude? I think you and me have slowed down on watching and got more into reading over these years. Yeah. You know, YouTube videos were cool and we could still get into them once in a while, but like dude, at this point it's like we're reading primary sources, we're reading the scholarship, we're like we're into reading more now than ever. It's definitely every night when I'm laying down. It is definitely you think at least 10 hours a week, 20 hours a 10 hours a week. Yeah, something like that. Consistently. That's a lot of a lot, man. That's a lot. At least every day we're reading somehow some way in some function, whether it's to edit a documentary or a video or something in relation to an upcoming interview, whatever. I'm at least reading an hour or two a day at least of material and then editing and then I'm checking on the kids. I'm doing stuff, multitasking. But I'd say we at least do that. I mean, he sometimes is sending me pictures at night of screenshots of moments in these books, and I'm like, dude, we like I don't even know where any scholars sometimes find some of this stuff. Like, this we're digging up old fossils of really good information that nobody's talking about. No one is knows about this on YouTube. And you would think, this is my little criticism of atheists online. All the atheists want to debunk religion. Yeah, dude. I feel like they don't they don't I get it. It's easy. It's easy what they do. Just prove prove that your god exists, dude. They put the onus on the other. You're not doing any research. It's incumbent upon you to prove your case, dude. Like prove that Jesus walked out of that tomb alive. Huh. Yeah. It gets it gets it gets played out after a while. It's so repetitive. And at some point, and another thing they want to do is they want to a lot of these channels, they just want to throw an expert on on screen and go tell us why it's fake. And then they just want to let like, you know, it's just kind of what you see a lot, you know, they're outsourcing it. Yeah. like just want to like Bart Arman's here. Bart Arman, tell us why Christianity is fake. I win. And it's like, all right, we've seen this happen a million times. You know what I mean? And at the end of the day, I think what we're doing is a much harder path that they don't want to take. That is a historical, you know, research of like we want to know the nuts and bolts of this religion. And he's gotten into the languages more than I have. Eventually, I'll get into them more, but like when you get to this level of what a word means and how a word is lifted from an earlier word, I'll give you an example. In the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, it says that Jesus was wrapped in swaddling cloth. What's that mean? No idea. Think about what is that what in a piece of cloth. Yeah, he is right. Swaddled. Swaddling cloth, right? Like a baby's wrapping something for baby. A swaddle. Yeah. Well, that Greek word, and I don't know the Greek word off the top of my head, but Mark G. Bilby sent me an article and it was like a 50page article on this one word in Luke. You will not believe how deep this goes. It goes right back to the place of Escilis and Uripides. And they this is the only other place that that Greek word is used for a god that is born as an infant, a god man that is wrapped in swaddling cloth. One Greek word takes you down a rabbit trail. If atheists really wanted to show that this material isn't true and Christians should doubt it, the approach I think is a really good one is to show that this is fictive. It's fictive like the plays of Uripides, like you know, Escilis and others who've written these fantastic stories about these gods and heroes and you don't believe those. So when they're applying the same language, the same rules, the same tropes and themes and elements that you do in all these fictions, one of them is like an omnicient author. So h if you read the gospels, there's material in there. You go, how did this writer even know that? No one was there. Remember Jesus goes and prays in the garden. All the disciples are asleep. The author says he prays and these are the words that Jesus said. Well, hold on. If you read the story on, he's immediately captured by Roman soldiers taken or Jewish Roman soldiers who take him to a little like he's being trial. He never had time to tell anybody. No one knows, right? How does the author know what Jesus said in the garden? That is fiction. It's called omnisient author. It's placing you as God as the reader as if you are seeing stuff and movies do it all the time. TV show you can read and nails like Tacitus wrote in an nails and he also wrote a history. The history is more you can see him coming out with legends and coming up with stories and side little stories. But when you read his enals it's just in the third year of Tiberius this person was console. This person became the uh you know the leader of the 13th legion. This person did this. That person did that. That end of entry next year in the fourth year of Tiberius. This happened. This happened. It's just little one Lord said. It's not there. Yeah. It's just there's no narrative. When you read the gospels, you're taken you get conversations between an angel and Satan or something. Yep. Like that. Who was there to watch that? No one. So it's like you know these are you the there's signs and ways you can tell that this is a narrative that someone's constructed. They're trying to tell a story. It's not a history book. They didn't write it with the intention of it being literal. Yeah. They're not walking around following Jesus and writing down what's going on. They're not documentaries. It's not a documentary. The problem with that assessment is second Peter. Someone in the name of Peter. Scholars think Peter did not write this. wrote in the name of Peter. And in second Peter chapter 1, they say, "We beheld his glory. We touched him. We saw him resurrected. We saw his glory." And they said, "We do not." These are not cleverly devised myths as some would suppose, but we have beheld him ourselves. So someone lied pretending to be Peter and said that they saw this [ __ ] This is true. Trust me. Yeah. Trust me. This is true. Trust me. That's basically what it comes down to. That's the old where in that early church someone is pretending to be Peter and to sell you the the Christian reader uh that this happened and that's where you get into trouble because if Christians didn't pawn this off as if dude you better believe this stuff happened. Yeah. Justin Martyr's not playing that game. Justin Martyr says we believe nothing different from what you do about the sons of Zeus. And he lists them the logos who's Hermes and Dionis who's Tor and and Lea. He's drawing analogies to the other beliefs. Y not just analogies. He's really wanting to tell you like why am I being persecuted when we believe what about Jesus what you believe about them. It's the same thing, right? Yep. He's literally analy apologists trying to bring criticism to this and they try to go come on man. He's under threat of his life. Of course, he's just trying to make analogies. Why is it that other fathers who aren't martyrs were doing the same thing, right? So they they don't realize they have no clue what's actually happening here in this material. Yep. So, I gotta change a change a question a little bit. What do you guys think of uh Aman Hillman? Oh, wow. I was friends with him for a long time. Actually, I was the first person to promote his you I I told him to start a YouTube channel. I helped I helped him start his channel. Well, he he learned Greek from like he started I was I was taking Greek lessons from him. Learned the basics. Then I went somewhere else for more Greek. But uh I he had zero subscribers and I was live with him and I showed everyone subscribed to Almond Hillman and he had 200 subscrib subscribers that night. First 200 subscribers of Lady Babylon was from my channel. You asked them to. Yeah. And so I was friends with him and I promoted him and then after a while because he started getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then he went on Danny Jones and he exploded. He was getting all his attention and his theories and his his wild theories were getting a lot of attention. Now, I've always disagreed with him on a lot of his theories and he was fine with it up until when he started getting really famous. And then when people started asking me, "What do you think about Almond saying this?" And I would go, "Well, I don't think he's right about this. I think he's I think he's right about this part, but I think he's wrong about that part." And then he started getting sick of me doing that and he totally distanced stopped talking to me really stop being my friend because I didn't believe everything he said. Yeah. About him. What's what's one of the more incendiary things that he is saying that you believe is right that I uh I think he's right about drug use in antiquity being more prevalent than people give it credit for. Okay. So I do think like in the a lot of these ancient mystery rights there was psychedelics being used. I think that gets kind of like people kind of roll their eyes at that because they think of our society as being the same as it was back then and it's not. People did do people were more o I think I think we look at drugs more taboo than they did. I think he's right about that and I think he's right about a lot of these sources having some pretty wild stuff in them. Um, there's a lot of examples I can bring up, but anyways, the thing that I think he's wrong about is he he totally throw like he he thinks in Mark 14 the that there's a young pre-puberty child. Be careful. Being Yeah. being basically essayed by Jesus and being his body is being used to extract venoms from it. You know what he's talking about. And none of that's there. What he does is he gaslights his audience. He puts the Greek on the screen and pretends that he's translating it and he's not. He's lying about the trick. Really? Yes. Yeah. But he does know Greek, but but he's intentionally. That's why I thought he was lying. It's not that it's not that he's dumb or wrong. I didn't think he was lying. I thought he was wrong and dumb when I was on with Stephen. He knows what he's doing, but he's just dishonest. Now we Now like Neil's convinced me that this guy is deceptive. He's deceptive. He's smarter than people give him credit for. Yeah, he knows Greek. He knows Greek very well, dude. He's a literal philologist. He's an actual and I didn't even think he knew what he was talking about when me and Stephen, my buddy Steven did like a 5 hour hit piece and then it was like for me, dude, he's cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Okay. Like just personally, he's just too much for me, right? Um and and it's really going to boil down to the fact of Mark. It's the gospel. It's it's like all the other [ __ ] I'm like Greeks were wild, bro. Like if you read some of the stuff they did, there was some wild stuff. But when you get to the New Testament, you have this crazy concocted hypothesis irrelevant of religion. I mean, I'm coming at you from a skeptical angle. Sure. And I'm open to certain things like the secret gospel of Mark. There's some strange going on with the initiation and the nakedness and all that. Um, Morton Smith had this like you could go down a path of suggesting that. I think the closest we could get and the guy brought this up on the Facebook group and you and I were responding, Neil, was the the using this nod with the naked boy running away or the naked young man. He's a young man running with his tunic, if you will, his his loin cloth um is imitating Joseph running away from Piper's wife and that he's running away nude. Well, at most I would say that could be a scriptural illusion, but the context she is intentionally attempting to do something to him. Whereas there is nothing of the sort in the gospels. The guy's trying to run from the from the soldier who brought knives. And one of the problems in that case is they're assuming he's violent when he's saying, "Look, why'd you bring knives?" Like, "Dude, I'm not violent. What's up?" and they he's running technically from the people who are bringing blades to the party to get Jesus. So what they call this is recon recontextualization the big word but it simply means often times a New Testament author is doing pesher or midrash and they quote scripture for their own intention stripping of it its original message. Sure they just kind of mid-sentence sometimes will take you know a sentence and boom and apply it. They ignore the previous three paragraphs and the next three paragraphs and relevant of the data and they just go like Jacob I loved, Esau I hated. Like you get the whole story over here. Paul just rips it out and he uses it for his analogy and it's stripped out of its original Hebraic context and this happens often like in taking things out of context is a very normal thing for a lot of people to do. First Corinthians 7, Paul talks about getting paid and then he uses an example. He goes, you know, it is written, thou shalt not muzzle an oxen that threshest. You don't put on a muzzle when the oxen is in the ground tilling your ground. Don't starve the oxen. That's the original Hebrew meaning. He goes, "We know that this isn't talking about oxen. It's talking about us." So notice he's literally reading the Hebrew law. That's how Pho was, too. Exactly. They spiritualize. And so I see no problem with nodding to a Joseph story since Joseph has so much in common with Jesus from the Old Testament. 12 brothers. He He's betrayed by a Judah. Mhm. Literally Judah wanted to sell him off. Judas sells him in the New Testament. Bro, fiction. Telling you, bro. The more you get into this, you're like, "Okay, what are the odds? What are the what are the chances that all this lines up to these older stories?" So, and he's just just a bunch of stuff that he really he needs to be central to his worldview that he refuses to actually acknowledge. Like, he'll tell people the Old Testament was written in Greek first and then translated into Hebrew. And all the evidence, all the experts, all the people who know Hebrew and know Greek, who study this stuff, all say this is wrong. In fact, he'll tell people that the Septuagent that we have today, which is a which is a published version from 1865. It's the Septuagent that the the current Septuagent that everyone looks up online. He tells him it's the original from 300 BC. No. Yes, he does. And I and I've I've when I was still friends with him, I showed him that the Septuagent that he thinks is the original is not only that's it's not only is from 1865, but I've showed him physical Greek manuscripts that you can look up online. You can look at them. We can look at the Greek. And in those Greek manuscripts, there's five of them that have the words Yao in Greek. And the new versions, they change it from Yao, the name of God, to the Lord. That's why our Bible say the Lord. the Lord, the Lord. Curios is the Greek word. And I've showed him that this was a change that happened around the fourth or fifth century AD from the church. He's acknowledged this to me, saw that I was right, objectively correct, and then went on went on with his life like it never happened. So that's how I know that he knows things, doesn't care. If it doesn't if it doesn't help his his sort of worldview, he just discards it. He's a zealot. He's kind of a narcissist, too. like in in the sense that it's all about him and he wants he's gotten to this place where he needs to be right and it's mockery for everyone else and any criticisms he's trying to get rid of. Whereas like someone like me and Neil, we might make a claim and we might be wrong. And guess what? If we're wrong, you're going to catch us admit or somehow to that exception and move the hell on. He cannot be wrong. It's impossible. He cannot. He's the He knows everything about everything. He's the greatest scholar that ever lived. Even though he's doesn't publish anything, he's barely taught as a professor. He's not no one's taking him seriously. I'm just being real. Like, he's just not really an ex he's not really an academic anymore. He's just some random guy at this point. That's why I felt bad when you introduced this podcast with me and you said he moved down here for you and Danny and I was like, I'm I'm more his bro than Danny at my opinion because Danny is cooped up with damn Almond in my opinion. And I wish he would kind of back off of that because Almond is definitely not the guy that I would want to be too tight with. Yeah. But no, he he he he's willing to admit that doesn't think Almond's right about everything. But the thing about Almond is he's just so like he will he's got this mind this childish mindset. For example, he cannot make money. He's on he's he told me this. He's on section 8. He's a what? He's on section 8 housing welfare. He told me this. Oh. Oh. section 8. He can't. He's He's in so much debt from his colleges that he never paid. I think it's like insane. Like a hundred He's like $60,000 in debt, I think, at least. Might be more than that. It's a crazy amount of debt that he has that he hanging over his head. He got fired when he was a professor, so he never paid off his debt. And then he never worked again. And then um now he can't he can only make a certain amount of money per week that he does teaching Greek. He has to max up how much he can make or else he'll lose his benefits. He told me this when I was friends with him because I asked him when I was helping him with his YouTube channel. I was his editor. I said, "Why don't you, Dude, you have enough to monetize now?" I go, "You you've cross the limit. You can now monetize your channel." You know what he told me? I can't cuz I'll lose my benefits. And I said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah." I go, "What about putting it in your daughter's name?" He said, "No, they'll catch me." So, he didn't want to put he didn't want to monetize because of that. That was his reason and because of his debt. Then I then later on he starts pointing the finger at me and Derek and everyone else except for Danny Jones who has like 10 placed ads in his videos just for being monetized and making money. Calling us the brothel. The brothel because we make money online. Saying that we're liars and we're just making money and we're all liars. And he doesn't make money online. So look, you could tell that I'm honest. Oh, right. But really, and he says the reason why is cuz I'll never make a penny off this. I'm doing this because it's my contract with the devil and I'm doing it all for this reason. He's lying. He told me that he can't make money because he'll have to lose his benefits and have to pay off his debt. So, he's literally he's literally acting like a child. It's basically because he's jealous people make money online. He can't. How long did you guys each have your YouTube channel before it built up so much that you could do it full-time? For me, about a year, two years. Whoa. Somewhere between that, dude. He was working off at a tire building place and uh I think I was monetized within a year. He would, Dude, he would work 12-hour shift, sometimes 14, get a Red Bull, pop a Red Bull, come back, and then do recordings on his YouTube. He was about it. And you you could go full-time YouTube in one to two years. Yep. Wouldn't you say 30 40,000 subs at the time you were able to make enough to do? I was able to make enough to jump ship and be on my own. That's incredible. Now that's consistent work though. So videos he's pumping out content. You got to work your ass off. So yeah. Yeah. I think for me it was less than that in terms of uh it was roughly around the same that you know that that that I was able to go full-time one to two years. It was I don't know the time because I started Myth Vision like while I was working a construction job. never with the intention necessarily to go full-time. Well, and now I know cuz when you're first starting it and you have a job, I mean, you know, it's going to go however it's going to go cuz you have other responsibilities. There were months I wouldn't do a recording too when I started the channel. So, I'd say the first two years were like I wasn't really doing but like once in a while an internet interview with Joseph Atwell or something and then eventually when I left that job and I was interviewing Bob Price a lot, COVID hit. So, we're talking around 2019. Yeah. Is when I was able to spend more time at home. I worked for a rehab at the time. So, I was getting paid to help people online, get into a rehab, and it started putting all my eggs and doing this. And um eventually late, I got first time ever got unemployment in my life when COVID hit. Took nine months for them to finally pay me because everyone on under the sun in America was getting unemployment. That's right. And um I started making enough and then had fans support me through Patreon. Oh, cool. That was it. Yeah. And I started a brothel where strippers on a pole. Well, we can't talk about that on air, you know, but uh you and Yeah. But that that's the thing that that's what really got me pissed when he started to lie about his own reasoning for not making money and then pointing the finger that anyone else that makes money online is somehow Yeah. like a liar. Except for the people that support me like Danny. For some reason, Danny has I'm not even making fun of Danny for making money. Good. I am so proud of Yeah. Rock out. make put on 10 placed ads per video, monetize, throw a bunch of uh ads in there. That's fine. That doesn't mean you're compromised. It just means you're making money. And then the fact that he won't he can go on Danny Jones and have 10 ads running on his own videos that he that benefits him. But then when someone criticizes him, he points the finger for them. That to me was like, dude, now I can't respect it any more angry about it, I wouldn't give a [ __ ] what Almond said. It's when you have 300 nut jobs in your comment section literally regurgitating these sickle fans that are obsessed. They literally are worse than him even in fighting his cause about the brothel and making an income online. And little do they have a clue that the whole reason he can't and won't is because he can't. Not because he wouldn't want to. Yeah. He would want to make bank, I'm sure, and be able to live large. Instead, it's easy when technically all this could go to hell in a hand basket and he's still provided for by our tax paying dollars. Every one of us is providing for him to have a place to live right now. He gets to chill at home for free, do his YouTube for fun, like a little kid. That's it. He basically has no responsibilities. He has no bills. He's like a little kid in his little play world and he get and he's now he's famous and it's like cool, you have a little comfortable life over there. Good. But don't turn that around and act like you're this you're doing it because of some sort of virtue or dignity that you have. Like bro, you're doing it because you don't want to pay off your debt and you don't want to lose your your apartment. Fine. That's it. He told me that. Like I whatever. You know, look, I used to get food stamps and so did you. Yeah. I've been there. I'm not making fun of that. We were low income, didn't make money. We were struggling. There's a point when you make enough money, you can't get none of that. And there's a kind of a leap off spot where when you're especially when you're in addiction like me and you were where you don't want to make more money so you can keep making the crazy threshold and then you lose. But the crazy part about it is he actually was making money behind the scenes off of his fans doing little special Greek classes with them. So he was telling the he was telling the public world, I don't make any money off this. Meanwhile, you come to find out he was actually pulling 20 of his fans aside every week, twice a week to do these special paid classes. So, he was making money. It was all under the table. So, he's just full of [ __ ] He's just he's just kind of a fraud if you think about it. Yeah. Now, sounds dishonest. I don't Oh, I don't I don't really wish him the worst. I hope he's f I hope he continues to flourish and has fans. I don't really care about his like success, but I just it'd be nice if he would, you know, chill out a little bit. Chill out a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. It is It is cool if he's pushing people to learn Greek. I mean, that's that's cool. That's fine. I I I hope his whole entire corner of the internet keeps doing their thing. I don't care. Yeah. But like they need to like just like stay in their own lane a little bit and and recognize like we have real academics doing real academic work and you guys are off in another place doing other things. Not coming after you guys. That's stupid, right? I want to throw a different name out there because uh I've I've been so curious. I'm not in the space very much. Wes Huff. Yeah. Any any thoughts? You guys know anything about Wes? I have a lot to say on him. Uh I I think he's he's one of these Divinity School types who's over overconfident about what he knows. I've caught him a few times talking about Greek stuff and getting it wrong. Um that's a whole another I'm not going to bore you with that. But there was another time where me and Dan he he found a clip of me me on Danny Jones, saying some stuff about Mark's gospel, the long ending. He did a video response to it, criticizing it, completely dropped the ball on his criticism of me and Danny to the point that I made a response, pointed out all of his mistakes, and it was so bad. He took the video down, issued an apology, but not publicly, through someone else. He told his friend Steven to apologize to me for him. I never got an actual apology from him, but he did take the video down and he just kind of quietly accepted his defeat and no one knew about it. He was on the rise, but then the internet found out and caught caught wind to it and so he got kind of got beat up for that a little bit by some, but he had sick of fans too. He had he had like these Christians lost their minds. He was there. He was telling Joe Rogan that the Isaiah scroll is word for word the same as this Isaiah we have today, which is absolutely wrong. So when you say the book of Isaiah is intact, how similar is it to the book of Isaiah that's in the Bible? That one is fascinating. So this isn't true for all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but when we discovered the great Isaiah scroll previous to that, the earliest copy of Isaiah that we had was in the Maseretic text, which is in the Middle Ages. Whoa. Yeah. We literally pushed back our understanding of Isaiah a thousand years. And the thing that really shocked scholars was that it was word for word identical to the Maseretic text. Word for word. Word for word. Wow. Yeah. He told Joe Rogan that the Gospel of John, the physical oldest manuscript that we have, dates to the time of the eyewitnesses. Yeah. Completely wrong. It's second century, late second century. Well, sometime during the second century. Yeah. But the fact that he told Joe that and it's just he's way over his head with this dude. These Divinity School students are all like that. They get their degrees and they go, "I just did four years of Divinity School. Now I know everything." Let me pop up the one. He's the most Dunning Krueger mother. Sorry before I dude. So I think look I imagine if we me and Neil met him in real life he might be a chill dude. We don't know him personally but I'll say this. You guys have never met him. Oh no. He wouldn't interview. Actually, I'm starting to doubt that at this point because recently he tweeted out, just so you guys know, when you reply to my tweets, I don't read them. Haha. I'm like, he he literally just wrote that on his Twitter. What kind of fool how full of you are? Who does that? Yeah. So, I don't think he's that's that comes off. He sounds like a little himself. Okay. Well, really, I think another example is the Billy Carson stuff where he that's where that's where he that there was his moment. I feel like, look, I don't want this to come off like envy or something like jealousy or something. Dude, he's got an audience. They want a fa they want a hero and he's got all the reason and clout to climb the ladder. Especially when I got on Joe Rogan and everybody's pushing this kind of right-wing conservative Christian stuff going on right now in America. There's a lot of it. Yeah, even Joe seems to be looking at Christianity. Joe's definitely tapping in. And if he only had a conversation with me or Neil, I I kid you not, if he only understood a little bit more, he might actually go, "Okay, you know, I'm going to balance out my understanding. I'll have respect for these things, but like they bring a really obvious logical reason here." But he brought up [ __ ] in his debate with Billy Carson that Billy goes too far. Okay. Billy goes too far for me. I know Billy. We interviewed Billy. Yeah. Right. He was awesome. Great guy. Great guy. I mean, dude goes out there in left field to me on some stuff, okay, that I would not. But he's not wrong about everything. He's not wrong about everything. So when he was There were things wrong about some things. There were things I'm wrong about that Wes Huff called him out for that Wes was actually wrong about the internet did not notice. They all went, "H Wes, you beat him." And dude, you know how he said the word for word thing about the book of Isaiah? Um, in this debate, Billy Carson practically uses a similar kind of jargon and he caught [ __ ] from the audience. Yeah. He said, you know, um, the Anuma Elish and Genesis are like practically or almost, he says word for word. He doesn't say they are word for word, right? And then Joe goes word for word. He goes word for word, right? He says like it's almost word for word practically from the anumish. when you read and it's not like that but it's so overlapping scholars say there's no doubt that Genesis would not exist if the enumalish wasn't written okay that goes for ducalion and other myths like these myths are dependent on earlier Mesopotamian eastern mythologies of blood stories right there's some dependence going on well word for word can be literal or it could just be a way to communicate like yeah the same obvious what happened in that conversation was that Joe took it as a miracle. Yeah. He literally took it as a miracle as if Isaiah literally is word for word the exact same text. And it's not. Yeah. And if his point was, "No, I meant it. The meaning is practically the word for word meaning." Joe didn't go, "Wow, the meaning is the same. Well, no [ __ ] Sherlock. I can read something from the Rick Vadas. It carries the same meaning, therefore miracle." Like, you can apply this to the Quran who's been preserved for 1400 years. They have the original. They have the original. And guess what? That's exactly what Muslims do is they say our Quran is preserved from the prophet's list. It is word for word. Right? So he said that but I think the problems were even in his assessment of Genesis and its dependence on earlier mythology. Dude, Billy's right. The there is some earlier dependence that goes into the Middle East period. The the Mesopotamian world and the Anumalition and the Gilgamesh epic are good candidates for that. Sure. potentially atrahasis as well. But I say that to say when he came in and acted like Genesis is unique in every sense like man is made in the image of God and all of these aspects that he believes are only unique to Genesis. When you pick this [ __ ] apart and you get into the weeds, you realize how wrong he is. Yeah. You just find out he's he's just full of it. And he's regurgitating what apologetics does. Wes's whole project is to make the Bible right. And he's going to do it at all costs. He's not being objective. He's not being honest. He's trying to make people think the Bible was right. That's it. Man, that was my gut feeling when I first saw him speaking. Um, I think it's obvious, but it's it surprises me how much he gets people to think that it's true. He really he really he doesn't have to make them think it's true. That's the be true. There's an audience that's already hungry and desperate for someone to give them what they're looking for. What's happening is the work that you guys do is very hard and very time consuming and you have to put a lot of brain power into it. You think about it when you're not thinking about it. And sometimes it's nice when when you believe something and someone else seems to have done all that hard work and they get to say stuff and you get to go, "H, okay, they're right. I don't have to think about it." And so that's true. Appeal to authority. A different authority. you appeal to a different authority cuz now I don't have to go look it all up. It's hard. It's hard to dig. It also helps you feel good. Warm and fuzzy. Yeah, that's the point. They get their warm and fuzzies from it and they get to walk away. Whereas me and Neil not do any work are like we just want the date of the facts. And more than the warm and fuzzies, nothing gives you a spine like dogma. If you have the right dogma, man, you're the rightest person in the world. You're on a divine mission that I need this is my mission and I'm sent from God blah blah blah. Yeah, that's that that's what Dogman does to people. Puts him in this state of being a main character. Like I think Wes probably thinks in the back of his mind that he's like fighting for the good for good. Like he he's doing the right thing. Yeah, he absolutely does. I think he thinks that in the front of his mind. He probably would say that straight to you. Yeah. I'm doing the Lord's work. And guess what? He thinks he's supposed to think the same damn thing. And so does Neil. That's right. We think the same exact thing. And we think we're on the We believe firmly we're on the side of fact. Okay. And at the end of the day, I think once you recognize the data and are being honest with the data, then negotiate your truth from there. You don't need to make up data and then try to come up with, well, I believe this, this is true. Now, let me make it fit that. Let's get straight to the fact, bro. What is this actually saying? Let's be real and honest with it. And then I can't answer after death. I don't know if there's something beyond this. Guess what? All of that can still happen and you can still say, "Yeah, Genesis is clearly inspired by earlier mythologies likely from the east, potentially by Ducallon and the Greek myths. There are other myths that it's clearly inspired from and it's a new version that's inverting some of that older material, doing its own theological thing." Whoopdedoo. Guess what? Many Christian scholars who are like Catholics, they're not as conservative as him. He's pushing an apologetics. I know scholars who go, "Yeah, Genesis 1 and 2 contradict. This is mythology. It never happened." and they're Christians at the end of the day. Now, I would disagree with them because we would talk about Jesus. They might go, I think he rose from the dead or something, but dude, he's not just being honest with the data like we're trying to be honest with the data. There is an agenda that's so warped in apologetics and we know what that's like that it skews the perception of someone who's investigating it and you would you would immediately call it out if you saw a Mormon do it for Joseph Smith or if I showed you how a Muslim's behaving. You'd go, "Yep, I see it." Then I go, "Look in the mirror, bro." They can't. They're blind to their reflection. They can't see it. And that's cognitive dissonance. And in fact, the sad part about cognitive dissonance is sometimes even more data that falsifies the narrative makes them even more certain of their own delusion. That's the sad part is that if you can confirm with even stronger proof that they're wrong, they actually are more convinced that they're right. Yeah. Yeah, that's how powerful the tool of cognitive dissonance is. And I mean, we're I think there's a extreme level of that that's going on. Absolutely. You guys are on a crash course with each other. It feels like to me like eventually you're going to have to sit down with them and have the internet will I've been I've been trying to do this for since he's since that happened to us, bro. No. Why? Cuz he has nothing to gain. Oh, yeah. Everything to lose. He has everything to lose if he ends up in Nothing to gain from from him sitting in front of me. Yeah. Nothing. I mean, we he already challenged him publicly. Yeah. He already said, "He won't debate me. He's scared." And then guess what? A few days later, he's on the rise to Joe Rogan's fame. And he never mentions Neil. He hides it. And he's on this video. Even when he apologized, it wasn't to me. It was through someone. Oh, this was definitely talking about you. I He didn't give a [ __ ] about anyone else. We did a damn hit piece video calling out his crap on Christmas and all this stuff. Two days later, he drops a video saying, "I won't debate you." He's like, "Look, I've been getting all these debates about you." That was about bro. came out 2 days after my video. He said like I get 10 debate challenges a week and so I just I can't do that. But the funny part about that is he was willing to jump on with Billy Carson without any prep. Jump on get do a drive by in front of Billy. Billy didn't didn't know he was debating. But for him, this is what he told Danny Jones behind the scenes. If I want to talk to Neil, I'm going to need about six months of prep. And that's what he told Jones. Yes. But but Bill, what? Wait a minute. You're willing to You can jump in front of Billy Carson with no problem at all. Well, that's a compliment to you. That's a compliment. All I said was I just want to have a conversation. Yeah, but yeah, you came in hard, homie. And here's the thing, when that Yeah, he's complimenting you, I guess. Yeah, that is You should You should be flattered. Well, I don't think he's intentionally complimenting him. I don't You're the expert, not me, right? I mean, I don't you know, yeah, but you don't fight the fighters that you know are Don't listen to the words that are said. Look at the actions, right? And if if I'm going to go in a fight and I'm gonna go fight somebody in the in the octagon, but I need to I'll go fight one guy one day on a on an empty stomach and one other guy I go, well, I got to go train for 6 months. Like, what am I actually saying? Yeah, but then then it's like, okay, then don't debate at all. Then Billy's clearly not as Billy Carson should have got Billy's not Billy's not as his expertise is in the same area as deep as you guys are. Like Billy research is a lot of things, but it's not the same. I made claims where he he claimed to be like an expert and this and that. I didn't know about all these claims, but he did make claims that he was. Yeah. Now, we're guys, okay? Um, you know, we all need nothing else in the podcast, right? But we I'll tell you this. I'm I'm smirking, bro, because when he did that video and he's like, "Listen, I've been getting requests to debate." This was two or three days after we got a 100,000 views on a video. 150,000 going straight for his jugular. Okay, I'll send you that. Do we really think Do we really think Wes is talking about a church pastor or a skeptic online, send him an email and that's really what he's addressing? Or is he really addressing someone who's literally getting so much attention that I had more dislikes on my video than likes by Christians? This [ __ ] was so viral amongst his audience that I had more hate in the comments and they had nothing to say about what we said. There was no comments. At 3 minutes in you said this and I think this nothing there was not a single comment like that. They were parrots echoing the same you guys are lost. You're just some of them you can tell they didn't even watch the video because they would go you won't debate Wes Huff even though in the video five minutes in the video I say I want to debate Huff. Listen, this brings Alex O' Conor into the mix. And this brings another interesting aspect about this. Alex Connor did a video about this. Alex Okconor contacted me. In fact, we hadn't spoke ever. I've been a fan of his work for a long time. He wrote me on WhatsApp. We got connected. He he wanted to ask me what is going on cuz he did a video with Wes Huff in it, right? Or a response to Wes. Dude, he said, "Are these bots? Is this real? What's going on? The comments aren't right and the dislike and all this stuff." He was it was eerie. He didn't know what was going on. It was a viral to his video. It happened to his video like us. The same way it happened to us, it happened to him. And the weirdest part was they weren't watching the content. And then three or four days or a week later, me and him met with Steven Voice to talk about this issue. And he won't show up. Wes won't come there. And we asked him to, even though him and Steve are like private messaging all day long, and he's talking about this stuff. Steven jumps on and I we had to get that cat out of the bag kind of thing right off the gate. And I said, "Listen, we need to have you because your whole groupies are losing their mind in our comment section confess that Wes was wrong. He made a massive blunder and we caught him on it." And you know what Steven said? He goes, "He was wrong. The Christians in that chat didn't listen. They still did the dumbassory." And I'm sitting there going, "Okay, guess what? We know, we now realize the delusion is strong in this one. And they just want him to be right." It's funny. It's funny. It's not about the truth. He's the white horse. He's the defender of the faith. That's it. He has the look that they're looking. They He's got the leaner mentality, I guess. I I can see the confidence. That's all they need. That they need a night, a white knight, you know, and Neil is the dark knight who's coming in going, "Nah." Yeah. I mean, let's keep it real, bro. You coming in, you know, you're wearing that dark arm. The one that lost his faith at his baptism, dude. Me and him, like, we got baptized in the Jordan River. Oh, yeah. in the in the name of Gnostic informant. And remember what happened? We had Oh, bro, this is so weird. We had no idea this was going to happen. We go to Israel, go to the Jordan River, we put on our weight, we go in there, we do a fake baptism of each other. Well, I I I kind of felt I was like, you know what? Let's do a fake baptism in Yeah. Yeah. Good intentions. While we're in the water, was it a partial eclipse? It was like a It was a solar eclipse, but it was not full. Like, we weren't on the line where we live. Shady. All of a sudden, I go, "Why is it so shady out all of a sudden?" We get out of the car, we get out of the water, we go back to our van, and then we find out from one of the people in the van. Hey, there was just an eclipse that just happened. Did you guys know? It was like almost a total eclipse. It was 99. The point we got baptized that happened. No way. While we're in the water, it was like a weird sign. And the little fishies nibbling at our feet and all that. Wait, did you did you go get baptized by someone who could have planned that or did you just do it yourself? I baptized him. He baptized. He had no idea there was a crystal activity until after we got out. And it was while we're in the water. No way. Cuz I remember I remember thinking to myself, did it just get dark out? And it was like for and then a few minutes later it's light out again. If by the way, speaking of which, before we forget, if you ever want to go on a tour and we actually go see these sites, I'm telling you, it's life-changing. It's It's unbelievable. You ever want to go on a tour with me and ill, we're planning on doing a tour in the future. You guys should come. We'll get some footage. Man, you know what I want to see is Tala Mom. We interviewed Steve Collins who was looking at Sodom and Gomorrah, the real sites. He believes he found them in Jordan instead of Israel where mainstream Well, Jordan on the Dead Sea is like right there. It's across the river. Yeah, it's literally there. He puts it on the northeast and man, he's been excavating it for like 16 dig season. 16 dig seasons. I mean, it's his his evidence is unreal. I would talk to you want to talk to someone. They've been on the History Channel. Uh Robert u uh Bob Cargill. Robert Cargill. Oh yeah. He has a book called Cities that Built the Bible. Oh yeah, that's right. You should He talks with Sodom Gomorrah in depth. That's cool. That guy, dude, you know Jerusalem's name literally Aru Aru Salem. Salem's a god. Jerusalem. No, no, I thought Yu is the god. Uh Salem. Oh, okay. I've heard Yeruk means moon in No, the the the children of Salem's one of the sons of Asher and the other So, there's a moon and the solar son. I can't remember the name of the other son, but there are figurines of them both suckling from the breast of Asher. And that Salem was the city of Jerusalem was named off after the god Salem. And we still have it in the name. Yeah, but I think that word yuk means like moon too. It's uh he said that the inscription was eru. So maybe moon is inu. Yeah, you are you or something like that. But uh we now call it jeru salam. But dude, there's so much to learn and get into guys. We love this stuff. Again, that's some of the drama. What other drama have we had? I don't know. That's Oh, I I I'm cool now. Me and Michael Jones are cool. Inspiring Philosophy. I'm actually tight with him. We We text on a regular basis now. Like, just check on my video today on critiquing Islam. He's like, "Good video. I'm sharing it on Twitter." He's just being cool with me, man. And we should Oh, I need you to I need you to ask him if he's down to do a debate on Christmas. A fun debate. Not a but not a let's have let's have a good to talk about a debate about origins of Christmas. Okay. Because he's strong on that one, right? He like he's good at that. That's why I think it'd be a good debate. Yeah, I would like that. Let's make things cool with Let's make a call with him after this. Yeah. Yeah. So, he uh me and him had it out on Dianisis. Water into wine. Okay. I don't know if you heard about that drama. Oh. So, we like it was really over the idea of like Jesus turning water into wine. Where's this come from? Yeah. And he made he went to this co this this conference an apologetics conference and he said have you heard skeptics say you know like uh Dianisis turned water into wine centuries before Christianity and he says that's he's like that's not true um it comes from a second century or no third century text common era and he goes shut up you know and it's totally wrong so we we found like five to seven at least primary sources of water turning into wine miracles or like a spring of water changes into wine. Yeah. For seven days and stuff like that byis by the god Dionis and it's his epiphany his presence the same thing and one of them happens on the same day the same day of the epiphany which was according to the church the same day that Jesus turned water into wine. So we found a pagan source same day. Pagan source on January 5th which is predates the gospels saying that the water turning into wine by Dionis happened on January 5th in the church he have the same day. It's called Theodosia. God's gift. Incredible. So and I think he just totally hand waved that away. It was like doesn't count. It's not exactly the same. Yeah. We we went back and forth. We had video responses and we went back pretty heated and then me and Neil we just went gloves off dude and we went kind of cutthroat a little over I mean we really went hard on him and he got so offended that he did a video and he caught me on make a few mistakes and it became a you're liars you know that kind of thing and it got to sour real fast. So we like broke up you know what I mean and then then I I I reached out to him when all this crap hit the fan that was recent about people dictating who I can interview and all that [ __ ] Oh yeah, we had we had this there's a corner of the internet very far-left atheist. They like know-it-alls like moralities we determine morality type Puritans trying to tell me and Derek that we shouldn't have certain people on our channel because they're Nazis and they're not Nazis. They just they just call them that. And so me and Derek like struck back against these people. finally took a stand cuz I had had a good friend that I feel like I betrayed and in a sense I did but I felt betrayed too because how things went down just the pressure that be they should have never been on my back and down my throat about this whole issue to begin with me trying to have Bob Price Robert Price who's a friend of mine and he's got two PhDs he's a Bible scholar this guy's awesome yeah and they they it's a long story but when all that went down and you go through a little bit you've suffered quite a bit in your life already. You realize you're like, "Dude, I was petty." Like, we're arguing over something that I think he's wrong about. He thinks I'm wrong about. Whoopde-doo. He's never been a bad guy to me in terms of Michael Jones. And I reached out and I was like, "Dude, I'm sorry that it got sour and I treated you that way publicly. Hope you'll accept my apology, man. I think that you're a chill dude. I imagine if I still drank beer, we'd hang out and have a beer at the bar. I don't drink, so I can't have a beer with you, but like if we ever meet up, we'll be cool." And I guarantee you the same is for for Neil. I think these are down to earth people. Some of these people though, bro, that are just nut jobs. And Neil caught some of these people with their pants down so bad in a video response. I was just like, I didn't even know what to expect. And the video was insane. I mean, it's beyond anything we're talking about with all the beef and dramas that have happened here. This video was just on a whole another level. You know what I'm saying? Which one? Uh, the one that you did where you're like Ricky and all those people like, dude. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the like you went into the sewer and just took a light and wanted to show everyone this [ __ ] hole and then just like came back out. It was like really really dark. No one did a response to that though. No one No one touched it. Why would they? That was Was it that good? You think? Dude, you just like Well, the point of the video is to show cuz they have these like if you have someone on your channel, you are co-signing everything they believe and you're basically saying it's okay that they said something online 10 years ago and we don't like it and you have them on your channel, then you cosign everything. I'm like, and they must apologize for that thing. So, the point was I showed them that they themselves have hosted people on their channels who have done atrocious [ __ ] The one dude who hosted the video that was attacking me and Derek had a video where he was had this girl on the screen, this very extremely nice old girl calling her a what was he calling her? He's calling her raggedy. Let me let me give her my BBD. My big black D. He said, "If I give her my BBD, she'll be good now." Yeah. And I played that clip. I go, "This is the person you hosted or who hosted you guys. You guys are the pure do your video, right? Condemning. The whole video is just me kind of going through their content, showing how they don't really have any morality. Uh, the standard of morality, as long as they're on the left, they're good. As long as you're The one girl, the one girl, um, I don't remember her name. I hate her so much. Was her Twi her whole Twitter. It was so easy to find this. Oh, Jessica. I just went to her Facebook, went to her photos, Jessica weirdo. And uh I went to her Facebook photos and I just started scrolling through and it's just complete. It's her making fun of people for being on minimum wage. Her making fun of people for being bald, making fun of people for being fat, calling talking to a rap a black person saying, "Are you going to be a rapper?" And I'm like, "Whoa, this is horrible." And I showed that on there like, and they're like, "These people don't have any really morality standard. They just don't they just if you're on the left, you're good. If you're on the right, you're bad." And you guys get into the sauce a lot. We tried. Look, I'm But you're in this subject matter that has kind of morality attached to it. So, you get a lot of people passionate about their I don't care about people's politics at all. I'll have I'll have anyone on as long as the top if if you could be a far rightwing. I don't care as long as you if you're studying some subject that I'm interested. I want to have a talk. I want to have a conversation with you. That's just how I am. And I and I let people people know that about me upfront. You can take it or leave it. I don't care if you don't want to watch me. Fine. Right. But just don't try to tell me what to do with my own channel. I don't tell you what to do with your channel. And that's what ultimately happens. They have a community rule internally that you need permission that it's a safe space for everybody involved. You're not going to host someone on there that may offend a particular minority group, whether it be trans, whether it be African-American, whether it be Latino, whatever it might be. Females, because there's a lot of that as well. And then the one friend that me and Dererick had for years that we've been promoting on our channel. I got him on Danny Jones. You promoted him, did courses with him. We basically were friends with him, let him stay with us when he came to Florida. He was on this panel with them against me, attacking me and Derek after all these years, after being friends with him all these years. And then he puts on this show going, "Guys, I just want to let everyone know that up until right now, I had no idea how much white privilege I had until, and I need you guys to to remind me so I don't get caught up in this stuff ever again." Basically like putting us under the bus, saying, "Oh, all the stuff they did, don't attack me for it cuz I was their friend. I'm not going to talk to them anymore. Uh, white privilege, white privilege, please help me." It is culty on a different level. so cringe that I just was like, "Okay, this is all for show. These people are just doing everything basically. It's all like what do you what's the word? It's all performative. It's not real and it's all it's not everyone is like that. I think some of them here's the thing. Those people on that panel, they don't get a lot of view. I don't I'm not making people not getting views. It's hard to get views. My views are down right now." Yeah. But the point is is like you can see that they're people are just not interested in their message that the the way they carry themselves, the performative politics and all that [ __ ] People are just not they're not these are not people with big numbers behind them. Well, a lot of people who are performative I think are performing for themselves. Yeah. And so people pick on pick up on it, right? People the the normies who watch who watch all of our channels, they know who's real and who's not. And if you're being performative and fake, it's going to reflect. You know, I tend to look at negative comments as a as a sign that that you're doing great. That's true, though. That's true. We sort of tend to see the more negative comments we get, I like try and actually get excited about it because it means, oh, it means people are paying attention and they're they care. They're touching on something. You're You made them stop what they're doing to type something for you. It's incredible. It really is. And I realized that there's no one in no one in the world that has any sort of fame or no or notoriety or following where 30% of the people at least hate you. Like it doesn't matter where you are on the side of any subject matter where even the middle anything 30% of the people are going to hate you at least. And so it's a sign that you're doing great and it's not personal. You can't stop this guy, dude. Yeah. I try to beat him down. He's going to take it as good, right? You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you don't You're an ugly piece of I'm just kidding. Dude loves it. Just keep it coming. Here we go. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe to not this [ __ ] No, I'm kidding. Are you Have you guys ever considered writing a book? It feels I have. I have. Me, too. To cut out like I don't know what I can focus on and make it because I have so much that textbook. Yeah. It'll it'll probably end up being something related to like, you know, the whole epiphany Diane aspect of something like that. I'm actually helping co-author a book right now and I've been putting a little work into it compared to the scholar who's actively doing it, Mark G. Bilby. Um, he has written an article on the book of Acts. We know the story, right? The origins of the Christian church. In the book of Acts, he's done this interesting observation where he parallels it to the old plays of ifa and arrestes and Paul is a new arrest. Mhm. Like anyway, we're going to go into this together. Um, I'm going to help make his academic stuff more popular level sounding and I want to uh co-author it with him. I actually was going to want to bring you in on the project if you if you would like to be part of that. Maybe. Um, you heard it here first. Yeah. This is literally the first first time I'm bringing this up to him. That's awesome. But I'd like to co-author with I'm sure Neil and me will we'll have our names on stuff together even. We want to do an article about the epiphany stuff, but we might want to write a book and make a popular level book cuz do we really need to get I mean we could do the academic uh peer review as well as a popular level version. You could do both. Yeah. Yeah, of course. It feels inevitable eventually you're going to write a book. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You guys got to get this stuff down. I you're already doing it visually and on YouTube, but then to get it down in print. That's true. That's true. Just to get just to get the credibility, the Yeah. And for the people follow the credential. Yeah. Not everyone that gets published in peer review has a PhD. And you can become a legitimate scholar like Russell Gerkin was a scholar. Didn't get a PhD, but he was a bonafide scholar because he got published peerreview all the time. That's what scholars do. You get your Ph.D. PhD to do that, right? So, if you can kind of skip the whole thing and just start publishing peer review, what's the difference? You're Yeah. It's It's like It's like a walk-on un non-graduate football player. It makes the pros. That's right. Same thing. Yeah. And we they're on the team. Yeah. As long as you're hit scoring touchdowns and you're you're a player. No one cares. Yeah. And we can't allow knowledge to be gated by credentials. That's that's ridiculous. And I noticed I noticed the really bad scholars like the one we were just talking about who turned his back on us. He's the quickest type to to go that person doesn't have a PhD so their work isn't good. And it's because he's really it's kind of it's him being nervous that other he's insecure that cuz he got a PhD and his stuff's not that good and other people's work is better without a PhD. You're right. It it's threatening to him. That's what it is. Yeah. Man, this has been awesome, guys. I think this is it. Yeah, thanks for letting us uh talk to you guys and meet you in person. This has been so fun. You guys have You guys strike me as the realest dudes that you could find just for for the people who who aren't here hanging out and didn't get, you know, behind the scenes. You guys seem real to me as it is. I appreciate that. Likewise. Thanks for all the work you guys are doing for real. Your content, I love both of your contents on your channels, respective channels, and I think you guys got to keep going. So, you know, I appreciate Yeah, we are. Yeah. Yeah, we we appreciate you and to the moon, man. Like, keep going. Don't stop. You guys are awesome. We can tell. And you keep doing this. Perfect the craft. Keep going. Get more names and enjoy these conversations. It's going somewhere, bro. Roger that. Appreciate that, man. Cool. Later, everybody. See you guys.