Getting to Gnow the Gnostics
Sometimes on this show, big ten-dollar words show up like apotropaic or etiology or deuterocanonical, where, unless you're pretty well-versed in this stuff, you may not know what we're talking about (ok fine- you may not know what Dan M is talking about). This week we're tackling two ten-dollar concepts in one show, so buckle in and bust out twenty bucks! First, we're diving into Gnosticism. We've glanced off this topic several times, but never stopped to talk about what it is. Who were the Gnostics? Where did they come from? What did they believe? Did they know that that's what we would end up calling them? What's with the spelling? Next we're taking a look at a very important manuscript. Codex Sinaiticus--a Latin name for a Greek book about Hebrew people--is a very important manuscript. But why? Where did it come from? What is it? What makes it so vital?
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Dan McClellan Screw dust covers.
Dan Beecher Says the man whose book is about to come out guaranteed with dust covers on it.
Dan McClellan That was not my choice.
Dan Beecher When you get Dan's book, the first thing you are required to do, by Dan's own edict, is burn the dust cover.
Dan McClellan Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.
Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.
Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?
Dan Beecher Things are good.
Dan McClellan Good to hear.
Dan Beecher We got some fun heresy coming up. We got some good stuff going on. It's the new year. It's hot boys winter. I don't know what I'm talking about. New year, new us or something. New year, new us. All of those things. And I think we're going to have some fun with today's show.
Dan McClellan Awesome.
Dan Beecher Our first segment is going to be a History's Heresies, because we likes to get heretical up in here. That's going to be fun. We're going to talk about Gnosticism, and I'm excited about that.
Dan McClellan And then- Yeah ...
Dan Beecher in the second half of the show, we are going to talk, we're going to do a What Is That? About a thing that you have mentioned many times- Mm-hmm ... on this show and in your various other social media, Codex Sinaiticus, which probably it sounds like a disease, question mark.
Dan McClellan Bless you.
Dan Beecher I don't know.
Dan McClellan Yeah, something like that. Or something you'd see a commercial on that says, "May result in anal bleeding," or something like that.
Dan Beecher Do not take Codex Sinaiticus if you've experienced any... Yeah, exactly.
Dan McClellan All right.
Dan Beecher Well, let's just launch in with History's Heresies. All right, so I said it. We're talking about Gnosticism. I personally am agnostic. I am agnostic.
Dan McClellan Agnostic, yes. Easy to get those two confused.
Dan Beecher But I would like to learn more about... Here's the thing. For all of the things on this show, usually when we decide on what we're going to talk about, I dive in and do a little bit of research to sort of figure out what the heck we're, so that I have anything at all of value to offer to the conversation. But this time, I actually opted out of doing too much. I wanted to do some surface stuff, but I figure I'm just going to be the guy learning with the rest of the audience on this one, because it just seemed like that would be a useful thing, and I'll ask questions because I don't know anything about Gnosticism.
Dan McClellan Okay.
Dan Beecher Yeah. All right, well- So dive in. What have we got?
Dan McClellan Yeah. First off, the word begins with a G.
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan Gnosticism is what we're talking about, which comes from the Greek gnosis, which means knowledge.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And so Gnosticism would seem on the surface to have something to do with knowledge, and really it's a kind of a blanket term that is used by scholars, and there's a debate regarding how accurate a term it is- Okay ... for a handful of different movements that we primarily see within early Christianity, but are theorized to come from perhaps a pre-Christian Jewish movement.
Dan Beecher Oh.
Dan McClellan We're actually not totally sure about that, but it is related to a philosophical movement known as Middle Platonism, which is kind of where one way that Platonism was getting its kicks in the first and early second century CE.
Dan Beecher And- Is that related to Plato? Is that what we're talking about?
Dan McClellan Yes, it would be related- Okay ...
Dan Beecher to Plato.
Dan McClellan So, Plato was all about the fleshly material world versus the spiritual divine.
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan And never the twain shall meet. These are two diametrically opposed categories. And this influenced the cosmology of perhaps some early Jewish folks who saw the material world as corrupt and evil, and saw salvation and the goal of what we're all doing here being related to overcoming the flesh and escaping the fleshly prisons of our bodies.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And that was not done through animal sacrifices, it's not done through penance, it's not done through payment, it's not done through all these things. It's done through accessing knowledge, and specifically kind of secret knowledge- Mm ... about the hidden main god. And so yeah, you go back to Plato's cave. You're familiar with this, the allegory of Plato's cave, where we're all just... You're not recalling this?
Dan Beecher Okay. Yes, I'm definitely 100% familiar with it. But for the other people- But for the listeners, yes ... maybe it'd be a good idea to talk about it.
Dan McClellan So there was this idea that's called the allegory of Plato's cave, where what we experience of reality can be compared to a shadow puppet show. We're all kind of chained up, forced to watch this screen or this wall of a cave, where somebody behind us has a light source, and they're kind of putting on a puppet show, and all we're seeing is the shadows dancing on the walls. We're not experiencing reality directly.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan We're seeing this kind of projection of reality. And what philosophy does is help you escape from the cave and actually directly engage with reality and experience it as it is rather than as these puppet masters behind us are wanting us to experience it. But this is related to the idea that the world is an illusion, and we're trapped in these bodies, and we want to try to escape them so that we can return to the pleroma, the fullness. Our spirits can anyway, because the reality is that our selves are these divine sparks, these spirits that are within us that want out. And then all of the trappings of the flesh are literally that, trappings of the flesh that keep us here. And so the idea is through, Jesus is supposed to be one of the offspring of one of the... Barbelo is the name of the first emanation of the main god, and Jesus is the son of Barbelo according to one of these traditions, and Barbelo is kind of androgynous. We're not sure if it's male or female, but in one of the traditions, that's kind of the root of all of this. And then we get Jesus as the son who has come to try to help the people who are interested in gaining this secret knowledge do so, so they realize their own divinity within them, realize that the fleshly world is a prison, and then try to gain the knowledge, the secret knowledge, to finally unlock the door and escape back to the world of the divine, to the pleroma.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And that's like a 900,000-foot view of what- Right ... we have been able to reconstruct because we don't have much directly from Gnostics.
Dan Beecher Oh, really?
Dan McClellan Overwhelmingly, yeah. Our information about Gnosticism primarily comes from the writings of Christian leaders who hated Gnostics.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And so they quoted things, and they talked about leaders and things like that, and they talked about their texts, but we didn't know much at all about them until we discovered the Nag Hammadi codices, which are a bunch of texts that it appears are somewhere around 400 CE. Somebody out in the desert seems to have stuffed all these texts in some leather folio things and buried them, and we didn't find them until about 75 or 80 years ago.
Dan Beecher Oh, wow.
Dan McClellan And we found a bunch of texts that generally are categorized as Gnostic, including some that we have known about, like "The Lost Gospel of Thomas," for instance. And there was also a "Gospel of Judas" that was recently, not recently, gosh, probably, what, 20 years ago almost? The "Gospel of Judas" was discovered. That's another example of something that's generally identified as Gnostic. But there are a bunch of branches of Gnosticism.
Dan Beecher You have Valentinianism.
Dan McClellan You have the followers of Basilides. You have the Sethian Gnosticism. And there are a couple of later branches.
Dan Beecher Manichaeism.
Dan McClellan Have you ever heard of Manichaeism?
Dan Beecher I've heard you say that word before.
Dan McClellan So it's generally considered a branch of Gnostic Christianity. It was started by a prophet named Mani or Mani, who was born- I like Mani.
Dan Beecher Mani, yeah. We can- I want to feel like he's a prophet, but he also runs the corner store down the street. The little bodega.
Dan McClellan "Hey, Mani." And he was born in the early 3rd century CE. He's Iranian, so is kind of taking a little bit from here, a little bit from there, a little Zoroastrianism, a little Christianity, a little Gnosticism. But his was kind of a conflation of a bunch of different movements, and was propped up by some followers as the fulfillment and the overcoming of all the different traditions.
Dan Beecher I feel like one of the points that we need to remember in looking at any of these things is that the second you try to nail something down as like, "Here's the central philosophy of this," it forgets the fact that all of these things, Christianity, Judaism, all of these things modify wildly over time.
Dan McClellan It doesn't take long for something to go from one thing to another, to another, to another.
Dan Beecher Yeah. We see that all the time in modern history as well. It's very easy to look at modern Christianity and point to, well, the Catholic Church believed this, and then the Protestantism, and then the this and the this.
Dan McClellan But in the space of 100 years, things change fairly dramatically sometimes.
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher So yes, to say when I ask you, "Hey, what's Gnosticism?" It's like, well, if it's lasted any amount of time, it's not one thing.
Dan McClellan Yeah. It has to be able to adjust to circumstances and things like that. And so, yeah. And it didn't last much. Most Gnostic movements died out by around the end of the 4th, beginning of the 5th century CE, because this is- Hmm ... we have the Edict of Thessalonica, I think, in 380 CE. This is when not only did Christianity become the official religion of the Roman Empire, but they specified specifically Nicene Christianity.
Dan Beecher And so- Right ...
Dan McClellan all of the other traditions became religio non grata in the Roman Empire, and that's why somewhere around 400 CE, some people went out in the desert and went, "Bury that crap." And there's an argument to make that monasteries got their start in association with Gnosticism. That they were out in the desert with their sacred texts, doing whatever it is they wanted to do on their own, leaving everybody else alone, similar to like the Essenes at Qumran and things like that. And they may have been the ones who preserved some of the Gnostic texts because the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered near some monasteries in the desert in Egypt, which is precisely where you had all these people out there just basically saying, "Don't hassle me, man." And getting hassled.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And ultimately being brought under the arm of the Catholic Church, mainly because of Athanasius of Alexandria. But we do have a branch that survives down to today.
Dan Beecher Oh.
Dan McClellan And we've talked about them before on our channel, and they are the Mandaeans.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan So you'll recall, we talked with James McGrath about his book on John the Baptist- Yes ... and the Mandaeans. There may or may not be a genetic link between the following of John the Baptist and the Mandaean movement. I think traditionally, they claim that they go all the way back to John the Baptist. Whether they do or they do not, Mandaeism postures itself or is describable as a Gnostic movement. And so maybe not as bizarre and out there as some of the Gnosticism that people who study the patristic authors and the early church fathers would think of Gnosticism, but it is a Gnostic movement that has survived down to this day.
Dan Beecher I'm still not 100% clear. Are we still holding that the thing that makes something Gnostic in nature is that duality between material and immaterial world? Is that the main identifier or what?
Dan McClellan I think that's one of the main identifiers. This is one of the reasons people debate things like the Gospel of Mary. Is that Gnostic or is it not? Because it seems to be talking about all this, you've got to have the right knowledge, and there's mockery going on of people who don't have the right knowledge, but completely absent is any reference to a traditional Gnostic cosmology about the Yaldabaoth is the JV squad deity that creates the natural world to try to imprison all these spirits, and that's who Jesus is coming to save everybody from. And this is where Gnosticism can run into some anti-Semitism. There are certainly movements that have emphasized this more than others, but when you look at the Hebrew Bible, you see Adonai, the God of Israel, is creating the material world. And that makes Adonai the bad guy in some Gnostic perspectives.
Dan Beecher Hmm.
Dan McClellan And the name they use is Yaldabaoth. And so Jesus is coming to save his followers from Adonai, the God of Israel, who's out to make sure they stay imprisoned.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan So getting back to the Gospel of Mary, some people say, "Well, we can't really say it's Gnostic because there's nothing about that cosmology or no references to Yaldabaoth or anything like that." So for some people, that is diagnostic of Gnosticism. A lot of other scholars would say we can't really identify a necessary and sufficient feature of Gnosticism. And some scholars would argue that anciently, there's nobody who would've said, "Oh, yeah, I'm a Gnostic."
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan That wasn't an identity that had any currency back then. Perhaps the closest analog that we could talk about is paganism because paganism just becomes a catchall term for everything that's not us- Right ... is paganism, and it becomes a byword and this kind of thing. And then now we have neo-paganism where folks are trying to restore, to the degree that they can, what was going on with some of the non-Christian European traditions that were around before.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So it is pretty squishy. It is egg to the wall problematic- Yeah ... the categorization. Another interesting movement that I think some people have called pseudo-Gnostic is the Cathars.
Dan Beecher Catharism.
Dan McClellan Okay. And this is not just somebody who can't pronounce Catholicism. This is a specific movement that starts up probably around the 12th century. It's a little fuzzy where it's coming from. Some people think that there is a movement called Paulicianism that might come from the Byzantine Empire, come through Armenia into Bulgaria, and then further west into Europe and become Catharism. But they seem to have incorporated some Docetism into their ideas about Jesus.
Dan Beecher I don't know what that is.
Dan McClellan What's Docetism? Docetism is the idea that Jesus wasn't a flesh and blood human- Oh ... and that Jesus didn't actually die on the cross, but was like, "Peace out, suckers," and left, either replaced him with someone else or it was just an illusion or something like that. And this is something that Marcion is accused of promoting with his version of the scriptures, the- Okay ... Pauline writings and his version of Luke, and so that may be why- The first two chapters of Luke were added at some point later as a way to confront and counteract Marcion's Docetism. But we see that in Catharism, where they're treating Jesus as not a flesh and blood human. They had a rite. It was kind of like baptism, only it was called consolidamentum. It's kind of an interesting thing. It was very similar to baptism in that you shook some holy water over someone's head- Okay ... but you had to do a lot more of it. It was like a very thorough rinsing- Okay ... so that not just a sprinkling, but you had to get thoroughly wet. And this is the idea that you're being- This is a full Super Soaker- Yeah ...
Dan Beecher treatment.
Dan McClellan Yeah. This is the supersize me version of this where you know you have been consolidamentumed. But the idea is that temporal pleasure is sinful because it is the trappings of the flesh, and once you have reached the point where you're like, "I'm ready. I'm going to do my best to completely overcome all the trappings of the flesh," you would go through this process, and then afterwards, you were supposed to be a pescatarian. So, no meat, just the fishies. You're supposed to be celibate- Okay ... and you dedicate the rest of your life to itinerant missionary work, traveling around teaching Cathar doctrines. And evidently, from what we've been able to reconstruct of this rite, the overwhelming majority of the people who went through it, and after you went through it, you were called a parfait. Not a parfait, but a parfait- Okay ... which was related to the idea of being perfect. And evidently, the overwhelming majority of the Cathars who went through this process did so right before they died. So, this was like a deathbed thing.
Dan Beecher Sure.
Dan McClellan Because- Sure.
Dan Beecher That is the best time. Anything that requires of you that you give up all of your earthly pleasures, and also sex and all that sort of stuff, you kind of want to do that right before you die.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher No. That is the best time by far.
Dan McClellan The guy who's like, "Well, I'm allergic to fish," so- So it's like, "Well, then let's do this on the way out the door."
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And so that seems to be what happened, and I don't know if that accelerated the process of getting out the door, but- Is the word Catharism, is that related to cathartic or to...
Dan Beecher I mean- Do we know?
Dan McClellan Cathari. It has to do with purity.
Dan Beecher Oh, okay.
Dan McClellan From Greek. And I imagine that cathartic probably has to do with cleansing- Yeah, catharsis of some sort ... because yeah, that's got to come from the Greek. Let me just pull up Jan Etymological Dictionary.
Dan Beecher Gotta love it.
Dan McClellan Cathartic.
Dan Beecher I highly recommend- From catharsis, purging ... listeners that you get yourself an expert in things- ... so that when you get curious about a thing, you can just ask them, and then they can look up for you.
Dan McClellan Yeah. That comes from the Greek. Catharsis, purging or cleansing from the stem catharin, to purify, purge from catharos, pure, clean of dirt, clean, spotless, open, free- Okay ... clear of shame or guilt, purified. So yes, it is related to that.
Dan Beecher But they were- And when did Catharism, what was the timeframe of that? 12th to 14th century.
Dan McClellan So- Okay ... 1100s is when we first start seeing people thumping their chest and goes, "I'm a Cathar." And then we have very quickly the Albigensian Crusade. They were actually like, "Let's spin up a crusade against these dorks." And- And pretty heavily brutalized them.
Dan Beecher And then by- I do love the idea of the Crusades as a hazing ritual. That is a, "Hey, nerds, get over here."
Dan McClellan But I think they were viewed as trying to restore one of the great ancient heresies.
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan And so they were like, "We're going to leave the Turks to the Holy Land for a little bit, because we got some nerds over here that need some noogies."
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan And then they were a part of the medieval Inquisition, and they were pretty much gone by 1400.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Towns would be run through. They would hang people. They would burn them at the stake. Men, women, children.
Dan Beecher Wow.
Dan McClellan They were really upset about the Cathars.
Dan Beecher Yeah, I guess.
Dan McClellan But they were also non-Trinitarian. It's a little fuzzy, and probably because these movements, there tends to be diachronic as well as synchronic variability, and those are some $2 words. Diachronic means through time.
Dan Beecher Uh-huh.
Dan McClellan Synchronic means with time. So, think of variation as we move through time, and then variation at one time, but as we- Okay ... move through space.
Dan Beecher Yes.
Dan McClellan And so some of them were adoptionists, so that Jesus was adopted by God at his baptism- Oh ... as Son of God, and the others took a more modalist route, where it was that Jesus was one of the modes of God. And then you press a button, and they spin, and then bam, there's another one that's in front. And then you press a button- ... they spin, and then bam, there's the third one that's in front. But that was a heresy that was condemned by Nicaea as well. So these were The Nicenes were not friendly to these heretics.
Dan Beecher No. The whole purpose of Nicaea was basically to narrow things down so that we know who we're okay with and who we want to hate.
Dan McClellan Who's in and who's out, yeah. I get a lot of pushback from folks who are like, "No, this was about salvation. These people thought that you had to believe the right thing to be saved." I see where they're coming from, but overwhelmingly, this is about power.
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan And that's what Nicaea was, because if there had been no Constantine, they would've continued to bicker about this because nobody would've had the authority to say, "Well, I got an army," or, "I got a whole nation or empire, and I'm going to exile you." No, it would've just been a bunch of cities just slap fighting each other for centuries. But once Constantine came in and said, "All right, we're playing with the big boys. We need to get some unity here. Figure it out. I'm giving you the authority to figure out how to do this. And yes, I will exile the people." And Constantine was actually pretty sympathetic toward the Arians for a while. In fact, there was not an Arian Constantine, an Arian emperor in the fifth century, or late fourth, early fifth century. I think late fourth century CE. So it wasn't a smooth transition, but ultimately, the ones who had the crown were able to enforce their will. And the Cathars started up in Southern France, and the crown enforced their will, with prejudice, upon them to ensure that they didn't make it past 1400. Certainly weren't going to see Columbus sail the ocean blue.
Dan Beecher Uh-huh.
Dan McClellan So yeah. They never got to know that the Earth was round.
Dan Beecher Yes. Because that's what Columbus figured out.
Dan McClellan Yet nobody knew it before then.
Dan Beecher Nobody figured that out beforehand.
Dan McClellan Interesting.
Dan Beecher Okay. So this thread of Gnosticism, it feels like it's in conflict with everything that I know about Christianity. Do we think that the Gnostics-- It doesn't even seem related to what I know of Christianity. Well- It seems so outside of it. But they did honor, or they liked the Christian ideals. They liked the character of Jesus.
Dan McClellan At least how they represented him- Right ... in their literature, because not all of the New Testament writings jived with the Gnostics, which is why they came up with a lot of their own. When people talk about non-canonical Christian literature, like the Gnostics in the second century, they're the main purveyors of other texts.
Dan Beecher So these gospels of, who did you say, Judas, and what were the- Yeah, and Thomas, and Gospel of Mary, and there are a bunch of others.
Dan McClellan The Apocryphon of John, and you have a bunch of these.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And so they're coming in the second century. And yeah, what we understand of Christianity today, it seems like they stand diametrically opposed, but they're coming in at a time when not all of that is nailed down.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And so it's a bunch of different Christians who are like-- And I always go back to "Talladega Nights." I picture Jesus, with big old wings like an eagle, and they got a bunch of different people running around with a bunch of different ideas, and one of those streams of tradition would ultimately take over and would be the one to characterize what Christianity was going to be ever after.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan But, in the time period when Gnosticism was popular, it was just one of the other variations.
Dan Beecher One of the competing philosophical ideas surrounding- Yeah ... Jesus and his legacy.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And a lot of scholars reconstruct the earliest periods, even before Gnosticism, as pretty full of pluriformity and even conflict.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Where maybe James has got one thing going over here, and Peter's got one thing going over here, and Mary Magdalene has something going on over here, and Paul's got something going on over here, and maybe they didn't really like each other very much, which a lot of people theorize this is why Mary Magdalene gets the shaft in a lot of ways regarding her own authority, and perhaps at the hand of Peter or followers of Peter, and this is why Paul and James didn't seem to get along.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And so I think as time goes on, you go from greater pluriformity to more consistency. And so we're looking back through a stack of historical interpretive lenses that compels us to view Christianity a certain way, when if we could get rid of all of them, and go back to the first century, I don't think Christianity would be recognizable to anyone who is experiencing it today.
Dan Beecher I think that makes a lot of sense. The only analog that I have in my mind for that timeframe is, I was raised in the Latter-day Saint tradition, which you know well.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher And just thinking about- Heard of it.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Aware of it, yes.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan I know of the tradition.
Dan Beecher You're familiar.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher As I grew up in the Latter-day Saint, I didn't hear any of this, but there were so many Moments where it fractured off and there were so many diasporic uprisings and schisms and things where this guy just had a different take, this Strang guy, and so he took a bunch of followers, and they all went and lived on an island. That literally happened.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher And there were literally hundreds of people who considered themselves the rightful sort of lineage of Joseph Smith's work. So many different, and several of these offshoot variant versions of the Latter-day Saint movement, which so many people think of Mormonism as being a single thing, but there's been literally hundreds of Mormon religions, and that's just in the past 150, 180 years or whatever.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher So I just think that it's interesting to think of that first century, first and maybe second century CE as being that for Christianity, of being just- Oh, yeah ... a time of wild disagreement. And it wasn't certain, and it wasn't easy, and things weren't obvious in any way.
Dan McClellan Yeah. And I imagine it was doubly hard because they were all having to do this while trying to scurry away from Roman powers who were- Yeah ... persecuting and prosecuting them along the way.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Yeah. It must've been a trip.
Dan Beecher Indeed.
Dan McClellan All right. Well, I think we're going to have to revisit Gnosticism at some point.
Dan Beecher Yes. We may have to tuck into an actual Gnostic book and just see what it's all about at some point.
Dan McClellan And I've got a couple of friends who are chomping at the bit to come on the show.
Dan Beecher Love it.
Dan McClellan One of them, one of the leading authorities on Gnosticism, April DeConick, that I had dinner with at SBL, who's a wonderful scholar of early Christianity and Gnosticism.
Dan Beecher Love it.
Dan McClellan She's eager to come on and correct any and all misinformation that I've spread.
Dan Beecher That we've just poured out into the world.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher All right.
Dan McClellan Excellent.
Dan Beecher Looking forward to that. Well, let's move on to What Is That?
Dan McClellan Did you ever watch the very first episode of Saturday Night Live?
Dan Beecher I don't think so, no.
Dan McClellan There's a skit where they're just showing the stage, and Bill Murray walks out into the middle of the stage and looks off in the distance and goes, "What is that?"
Dan Beecher "What is that?
Dan McClellan Oh, wait, no.
Dan Beecher What is that?"
Dan McClellan And then by the end of the skit, half the cast is out there going looking- "What is that?"
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan "What is that?" And then they're all like, "Oh.
Dan Beecher Oh, okay."
Dan McClellan And that's the end of the skit. It was weird, but every time you say, "What is that?" I think of the very first episode of Saturday Night Live.
Dan Beecher We'll have Bill come on and do it for us at some point.
Dan McClellan That would be excellent.
Dan Beecher All right. So today's What Is That? The thing that we're looking off into the middle distance at is the Codex Sinaiticus.
Dan McClellan Bless you.
Dan Beecher Exactly. As you and I sort of started talking before we launched into recording, I mentioned that I was busy looking up the definition of the word codex even, so- ... maybe we should just start with that- Oh, yeah ... and then move on from there. I know you love definitions, so that's what we're very excited about.
Dan McClellan Yeah. It's related to the Latin word for book.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan So, yeah, manuscript volume. And anciently, this is interesting, anciently, you didn't keep your important books on codices. You only kept one page or just a few-page documents that you didn't really need on codices. The important stuff you kept on scrolls.
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan And there is a theory that Christianity innovated this shift towards thinking of the codex as the transmitter of sacred literature. And so they were like, "Those Jewish folks have their scrolls. We have our codices."
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Because nobody prior to the late first century CE was doing anything important with codices.
Dan Beecher But- And when we say that, we're just talking about the form of multiple leafs of paper- Yes ... stacked together and bound on one side sort of thing.
Dan McClellan Right, so that you can-- And one of the things this does is it makes it easier to go from one part of the text to another, because with a scroll, you've got to sit there and go roll, roll, roll.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan Roll, roll, roll. Roll back. And you've got to find what you're looking for with a codex you flip.
Dan Beecher Like the days of microfiche or something.
Dan McClellan Yeah. But with a codex, you can just flip over, and- Yeah ... it also takes up less space.
Dan Beecher Yeah. And you can number the pages even.
Dan McClellan Number the pages, yeah.
Dan Beecher Makes it that much easier.
Dan McClellan And in a lot of ways, Christian scriptures, the technology for the utility of Christian scriptures has been aimed at facilitating the public consumption of the text. Because if you look at all the technological innovations, every step seems to make it easier for someone who has the text to be able to find a specific part in the text quicker.
Dan Beecher Yeah. It's funny to think of a book as a new technology, as high tech.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher But, it kind of was.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher That makes sense that that would be a really useful, handy-dandy new tool.
Dan McClellan 100%. And, if only they had thought of versification anciently. So the versification of the Hebrew Bible happened in the 1300s. There was a rabbi who was responsible for being like, "I'm dividing them up." And then, in 1551, we had, Robertus Stephanus, who took the Textus Receptus and published an edition of the Textus Receptus with versification of the New Testament, and then published his own edition of the Latin Vulgate with everything versified. And so that's where that comes from.
Dan Beecher And you're just talking about numbering out- Dividing the verse ... chapter and verses.
Dan McClellan Well, yeah. There had been chapter divisions for a while, but- Oh, okay ... to divide sentences and sense units and things like that into individual verses, yeah, that's when that happens.
Dan Beecher Is that the guy that I can complain to when it looks dumb where the verse- ... break is? Because there's so many moments where I'm like, "Why is that the verse and not-" "... shift it over four words and it makes so much more sense.
Dan McClellan Yeah. There are obviously some shortcomings to the way it was done, but it has become so ingrained in the tradition that we cannot violate it, which is why we now have, and this is actually directly relevant and relevant at the same time to Codex Sinaiticus, but we have over a dozen passages from the New Testament that we know are later additions to the manuscripts and not original to the text, and so we've taken them out. But guess what we haven't done?
Dan Beecher Changed the versification.
Dan McClellan Right. We just skip over the verse. We just go 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, and we just leave 21 out of it- Right ... because it's so deeply ingrained in the tradition.
Dan Beecher So. Well, and it makes sense. So many writings about the Bible up until now have direct references to chapter and verse.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher And then it's just like, if we change the versification for any reason, even if it's like, "Oh, this would be a much smarter division into a much better verse," you'd just mess up- Pandemonium.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher Yeah. You're messing up hundreds of years of writings and et cetera.
Dan McClellan Yes. That go back to the 4th century CE.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan That takes us back to the production of Codex Sinaiticus. We don't know exactly when to date it, but it's probably somewhere close to the middle of the 4th century CE to the end of the 4th century CE. So I'm going to say Q2 through Q4- ... of the 4th century CE. Somewhere in there, somebody put- I'm just going to plop it at 350. We're just going to call it in.
Dan Beecher 350?
Dan McClellan All right. Well, if we need a line, if we're going to draw a line in the sand here, it's going to be at 350 CE. And it is a manuscript across hundreds of pages that has the text written in four columns. It is a majuscule. It is one of the great uncials, as they're known.
Dan Beecher And I have- I have no idea what that means.
Dan McClellan I have always hated the word uncial. It's literally U-N-C-I-A-L.
Dan Beecher Uh-huh. The Sinaiticus is uncial one.
Dan McClellan Okay. And this is a reference to the fact that it is written in majuscule. Majuscule means all capital letters.
Dan Beecher Oh, okay.
Dan McClellan And it is written in a form they call a continuous form, meaning there are no breaks between words.
Dan Beecher No spaces.
Dan McClellan No spaces. So- Oh my gosh.
Dan Beecher That is infuriating.
Dan McClellan And additionally, line breaks occur in the middle of words.
Dan Beecher Oh my gosh.
Dan McClellan Yeah.
Dan Beecher You write until you run out of space, and then you just take the next letter and move it down.
Dan McClellan You just keep going.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And they developed some shorthand to squeeze stuff in. If a word ended in an N and you got to the end of the line, but you couldn't put the nu on the end there, what you did was you just wrote a little bar, a little horizontal line that started around the middle of the letter before and just jutted out a little bit into the margin.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan And that indicated this word has an N on the end of it.
Dan Beecher I just pulled up a copy or an image of the text.
Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.
Dan Beecher Oh my gosh, it's impossible. It's in four columns.
Dan McClellan Four columns.
Dan Beecher It's columnar, and then it's- Columnar, yeah ... and then it's just letters. Just so many letters. There are so many letters.
Dan McClellan And there have been a bunch of correctors, later hands that have come through to revise things.
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan I think they've identified somewhere between five and seven, I think, different corrective hands. And you got stuff written in the margins.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan You got symbols occurring here and there. They use a lot of what is called nomina sacra. This was a practice within early Christianity where certain words, and mainly the names and titles of deity, they're abbreviated, where you take anywhere from two to maybe sometimes five or six letters from a longer word, and so you'll take the first letter and the last letter of Jesus. Instead of writing out Iesous- Oh, yeah ... you would have iota sigma, and then there would be a line over the top of it. And that would indicate, "I'm talking about the you know who."
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan But they would use that for Jesus, for Christ, for God, for son, for man, heaven, David, Jerusalem, mother, father, savior, spirit.
Dan Beecher That's a lot of them.
Dan McClellan There are a lot of abbreviations, yeah. And there are a bunch of fascinating things about Codex Sinaiticus. It is in Greek, so it contains the New Testament in Greek, as well as the Septuagint, or the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Including the books of the Apocrypha. And it also has two New Testament texts that are no longer in the canon, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Which are both probably early second-century compositions, but they're in there as well. This is the earliest copy of the full New Testament that exists, and the earliest copy of the full Bible that exists as a single document.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So this is phenomenally important. But if you take your handy Bible, whichever one you have today, or probably whichever one you have today, and you start comparing it to Codex Sinaiticus, you're going to find a lot of differences. For instance, you're not going to find the last 12 verses of Mark.
Dan Beecher Oh. Your version of Mark is going to end at 16, verse eight, which is where everybody is terrified.
Dan McClellan And verses nine through 20 are they go tell everybody, and Jesus appears to some of them, and they go to Galilee and blah, blah, blah. And you have your post-resurrection appearance and stuff like that. That's not in Sinaiticus.
Dan Beecher Oh, okay.
Dan McClellan Those dozen plus, usually about 16 passages that most modern translations of the New Testament omit, those are not in Sinaiticus. The story of the woman taken in adultery from the end of John chapter seven and the beginning of John chapter eight, just not in Sinaiticus. One of the passages that many modern translations of the New Testament omit is the first one canonically. If you start Matthew and you go through, the first time where you actually skip a verse where you go, "What the heck? It went from 20 to 22." Matthew 17:21 is omitted. It's not in Sinaiticus. The text just blazes on through perfectly happy without noticing. But you have somebody who wrote a little divider mark, the line with the dot above and below.
Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.
Dan McClellan Somebody wrote something in there and then put another one in the margins, and then up at the top of the manuscript you have, in a later hand, so in the centuries after the original transcription of this manuscript, somebody went in there and wrote what is now verse 21 up in the margins.
Dan Beecher Oh, weird.
Dan McClellan And it seems to have been taken probably from a passage in Mark. The idea being, they're like, "Hey, it's the same story, but they didn't repeat this one detail that I really like, so I'm just going to-" Is it a useful detail? What is the- It talks about fasting, and this kind doesn't come out except by much fasting and prayer.
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan So this is when the disciples have been sent out, and they've been deputized with Jesus's agency, and they come back, and they go, "We couldn't cast the demons out of this one guy." And he goes, "Ah, yeah. I know this guy." And in Mark chapter eight, he says, "This kind doesn't come out except with fasting." And what is written in the margin is, "This kind doesn't come out except by much fasting and prayer." And that's what you now have at Matthew 17:21. But every time somebody stumbles upon this, they're immediately like, "Fasting is the most important thing in the world, and the devil doesn't want you to know about it, so they took it out of the Bible." And it's still in Mark 8 in all of the Bibles, so- ... the devil didn't do that good a job if- Right ... that's what yon devil was trying to do. But yeah, it's not because the devil is trying to stop people from fasting. It's just because that wasn't originally in the Gospel of Matthew, and somebody later on added it.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And there are a bunch of examples like that where Sinaiticus just doesn't have those things.
Dan Beecher And we're assuming that that's because those things were later additions. Is that why we assume that Sinaiticus doesn't have those?
Dan McClellan Most of them. Now, there are places where Sinaiticus omits things that most scholars today would say that was probably an accident. And there are a number of reasons for this. With instances like Matthew 17:21, we don't have it in a few manuscripts, the earliest manuscripts. And there's not a good reason why it would fall out.
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan There's not a good reason why. Usually when scribes accidentally omit stuff, we can see why. Usually it's because they stopped at a word, and they're like, "Oh, okay, I stopped at that word." And they move over to the text, and they write what they're going to write, and then they come back and they're like, "All right, where's that word? Okay, there it is." And sometimes there's another occurrence of that word nearby- Right ... and you accidentally go to that one, and that either means you repeat stuff or you skip stuff.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan And so repeating stuff is called dittography. Skipping stuff is called haplography. And so there are a bunch of, not a bunch, but there are some instances where scholars are like, "Ah, that's what happened. That's why it's been omitted from this manuscript." And in cases like this, that doesn't account for how it could've fallen out. Sometimes things are taken out because of ideological problems. Somebody doesn't like something. That's an explanation for why something might come out. There's not really a good explanation for why this would come out. We do have a good explanation for why it would be added in. And so scholars are like, "Okay, everybody agrees it's more likely that this was added in than it was taken out." And so every time you have one of those text critical questions, you basically go through that process of figuring out what's most likely here. Is there some reason this could have fallen out? Is there some reason this would've been added in? What do all the other manuscripts say? And, you come together and you agree on something. And so most- Yes.
Dan Beecher If there's one thing that we know Bible scholars do, is that they come together and they agree.
Dan McClellan We're very good at it. We've had a lot of practice. And so there are these normally 16 or so passages that the overwhelming majority of Bible scholars are in agreement. These are probably not original to the text, and we're so sure that we're just going to leave it out.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And, it gets left in. Most translations will relegate it to a footnote where it'll say, "Some ancient authorities include this," and then they'll quote it. Or they'll say, "Some later manuscripts include this," and then they'll quote it. Or if it's too important, like the ending of Mark, or like the story of the woman taken in adultery, they'll leave it in the main body of text, but they'll put some double brackets around it.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Just as a warning.
Dan Beecher I don't know, though. I saw a TikToker in a cowboy hat who was pretty convinced- ... that it was the devil that took it out, and that's why- Yeah ... you can't trust modern translations of the Christian- Yeah.
Dan McClellan He's the one who thinks that CERN is- ... trying to open a portal to hell.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan And what's funny about all these people is I want to see if they're still doing this in 50 years when not a single prediction of theirs ever came true.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan It will not be the end of the world in 50 years. But they're like, "Guess what? CERN is going to start the end of the world. It happened in April 8th." And- Yeah ... yeah, it didn't happen.
Dan Beecher Yeah, well- Like you- ... the world might end anyway, and then what? Then we'll be like, "Yeah, but not because of your thing."
Dan McClellan It is, of all the grifts, to make money off of batting zero- ... is like, good night.
Dan Beecher Well, the nice thing about making predictions on the internet is that you don't have to revisit them. You just make more of them- ... and then move on to the next ones. If they don't come true, you don't have to- Yeah ... cop to that. You can just- Move on ...
Dan McClellan move on.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan We have short memories in that industry.
Dan Beecher Yeah. So I want to get back to Sinaiticus, in part because we have not discussed why it's called-- Like, we discussed what a codex is, but- Oh, yeah.
Dan McClellan We didn't discuss that, did we?
Dan Beecher ... not why it's called Sinaiticus.
Dan McClellan It's called Sinaiticus because the first time the wider world of scholarship became aware of it was when a bunch of the leaves, and it would be nice if it always was kept as a single volume within two, bound very neatly and cleanly and with a nice little drawing on the cover.
Dan Beecher And- Yeah, that does sound nice ...
Dan McClellan screw dust covers. Screw dust covers.
Dan Beecher Says the man whose book is about to come out guaranteed with dust covers on it.
Dan McClellan Oh, yeah. That was not my choice. I was like, "What about the dust cover?"
Dan Beecher And I was- Everyone, when you get Dan's book, the first thing you are required to do, by Dan's own edict, is burn the dust cover.
Dan McClellan Not burn it. That could probably release some harmful gases of some kind or another, or maybe not. I don't know what kind of chemicals are going in there. But no, I've never liked dust covers. And yeah, they were like, "We don't care." So in case you're wondering how publishers respond to certain idiosyncrasies of authors, they don't care.
Dan Beecher They don't care.
Dan McClellan Well, at least with your first book, anyway.
Dan Beecher Right.
Dan McClellan So, there's long been a monastery at the top of the traditional site of Mount Sinai called Saint Catherine's Monastery. And in the- You say traditional because we don't actually know where.
Dan Beecher Oh, yeah.
Dan McClellan Yeah. No, we don't. We have no idea.
Dan Beecher And- Meaning the Sinai referred to in the Book of Exodus is the place that we don't- Right ... really know where it was.
Dan McClellan Yeah. Horeb, Sinai, whatever you want to call it. The traditional location in the Sinai Peninsula, there's no reason to think that's the actual location.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan But there's a monastery up there. And my old doctoral supervisor, I don't know if she still does it, but for a time, she would lead a tour that would start in Cairo, and you would ride camels across the Sinai Peninsula, and then hike up to Saint Catherine's Monastery at the top of Mount, quote, Sinai, unquote. And then she would talk about artwork and artifacts and architecture and stuff of Saint Catherine's Monastery, which I think would just be so much fun. But I digress.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan 1844-ish, you have a guy named Tischendorf who is there in Saint Catherine's Monastery, and notices some, among the piles of stuff is like, "Hey, what's that over there?" And notices some Greek and reads through it and is like, "This looks like the Septuagint." And he was like, "Can I have this?" And then they were like, "Why do you want it?" "No reason." And they were like, "We kind of feel like this is important now, so you can take 43 pages." And he goes off with 43 pages which contained 1 Chronicles, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Esther. And he ends up coming back to me like, "So, you got any more of them manuscript pages?"
Dan Beecher He's got-- He's- Yeah.
Dan McClellan ...
Dan Beecher rubbing his hands.
Dan McClellan Rubbing his hands.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan Twirling his- His mustache ... his mustache. And over time, they gather the majority of this codex from St. Catherine's Monastery, and some of it has made its way to other places. But they gather most of it together and are like, "Holy crap. This is big time." And realize this is a very, very early text. And here's the interesting thing. They find this codex, and based on paleography, which means the letters, how the letters are written- Yeah ... that's kind of like pottery, where it is so precise, but also changes so much, that you can frequently date it with a relatively high degree of accuracy by comparing it to other known texts. So, they're like, "This is fourth century." And, somebody was like, "Hey, y'all remember when Eusebius got a request from the Emperor Constantine to create 50 copies of the Bible for use in Constantinople? And, it said they should be of three or four columns each, and they should be on vellum and all this stuff." And if you look through the description that Constantine repeats of the request that he got from the Emperor Constantine to create these copies of the scriptures, it sounds an awful lot like Sinaiticus, as well as- Wow ... another very important fourth-century manuscript known as Vaticanus. Vaticanus is three columns. Sinaiticus is four columns. And so I think, if I recall, Tischendorf was like, "We found one of Constantine's 50 Bibles." And, I think probably the majority of scholars these days are like, "Sit down. No, we didn't." But there are some scholars who still argue that- Mm ... which would mean they would date to somewhere in the 330s CE.
Dan Beecher Okay.
Dan McClellan Which is possible. That is Q2- Yeah ... of the fourth century.
Dan Beecher So, it's certainly possible- But a little ways before the actual date of 350- Of 350.
Dan McClellan Yes ...
Dan Beecher which I already gave.
Dan McClellan January the 1st- ...
Dan Beecher of 350.
Dan McClellan They did it real quick because they wanted to- On the button.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan They're like, "We don't want this to cross over into another day."
Dan Beecher They're like, "Oh, a new codex just dropped. It's January 1st."
Dan McClellan "Hey, it's your boy, Eusebius." "Welcome back to my YouTube channel." And so Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important Bible manuscripts on Earth, and I stumbled across it in the British Museum. Oh, no.
Dan Beecher Oh.
Dan McClellan British Library.
Dan Beecher British Library.
Dan McClellan Museum?
Dan Beecher Yeah. No, it's in the British Library in London, right?
Dan McClellan Yeah, it was the British Library. I was there, oh, gosh. I don't even remember how long ago it was. Was it two years? It was in October of a recent year.
Dan Beecher I don't know.
Dan McClellan But anyway, I was there with my family, and we're like, "We're going to go to the British Library," and they're like, "Oh, my God." But they went. And as you walk in, you come up these stairs, and you got stairs going in all different directions and everything. And on the left, it was like, "The Book," and it was an exhibition on the book as a technology.
Dan Beecher And- Oh ...
Dan McClellan it's a very cool exhibition. It's one-ish big room with a couple of little rooms that split off from it. But it starts with the earliest books from societies all around the world. They've got the first edition of Shakespeare's complete works, and they've got- Mm ... the piece of paper that Paul McCartney wrote "Yesterday" on, and- ... they got the Magna Carta off in one of these other rooms.
Dan Beecher Sure. Sure, why not?
Dan McClellan I was like, "Yawn. Let me see some Bibles." As one might expect. And so I was just kind of trolling through, looking at all these Bibles, admiring them, as is my wont, and then I was like, "Hey, that looks familiar. Holy crap, it's Codex Sinaiticus." And then I looked right next to it, and it was Codex Alexandrinus, and I was like, "Ahhh," and- ... went to tell my family, who could not have cared any less if I had paid them money.
Dan Beecher No, they're like, "Can we now walk two blocks and see platform nine and three-quarters at King's Cross Station, please?"
Dan McClellan Well, they weren't excited about nine and three-quarters because they were like, "Ugh, it's always so crowded." I don't know when the last time you were there was. There was a time when it was just that little cart thing embedded in the brick. Now there's like- Yeah. Oh, you were just there.
Dan Beecher I've never been to there.
Dan McClellan Oh, you've never been. Okay, well- I just know that- Anyway, you used to be able to just walk up to it and be like, "Hey, take my picture. " And now it's roped off, and you have to wait in line.
Dan Beecher Oh, my gosh.
Dan McClellan It's like an hour line sometimes that you have to wait in. However, they have built an entire Harry Potter store into the platform next to it. And so my kids- Oh, cute ... were all about that.
Dan Beecher Yeah.
Dan McClellan It's a very cool store. But again, I digress. And it was incredible to be able to see it up close, and it was incredible how faded it is.
Dan Beecher Mm.
Dan McClellan Because I was like, "I can barely make out some of these letters." Parts of the manuscript are very, very faded. But it was an experience. It was a spiritual experience for me to suddenly be like, "I am a foot away from one of the single most important manuscripts of the Bible that has ever existed." So yeah, if you find yourself near platform nine and three-quarters- Yeah ... that means you have found yourself near the British Library, and a lot of very cool stuff, including... Well, again, I don't know how long ago this was, so the exhibition might not be there anymore. But Sinaiticus is in the British Library.
Dan Beecher Nice.
Dan McClellan Check it out.
Dan Beecher Yes.
Dan McClellan All right.
Dan Beecher Well, that's it for today's show, folks. Thank you so much. If you would like to become a part of making this show possible, as well as gain access to an early and ad-free version of every episode, and potentially also gain access to the after-party where Dan and I spill our guts and spill the beans all over on each other all the time, you can go over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and just kick a couple coins our way. Really helps us out. You get some cool stuff. Everybody's happy in that. If you would like to reach out to us, it's contact@dataoverdogmapod.com, and we'll talk to you again next week.
Dan McClellan Bye, everybody.
