I Knew a Guy Who Was SO OLD...

Dan McClellan The first point to make is that these ages are just fictional. People were not living this long anciently,

Dan Beecher and- Wait a minute. You are saying that Methuselah did not live 969 years?

Dan McClellan Absolutely not.

Dan Beecher Having fathered Lamech at 187.

Dan McClellan Right. Yes. That's a

Dan Beecher solid... If they did pull that off, that's impressive.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we seek to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Things are great. We're going to have a fun show. I think- Mm-hmm ... I've been looking forward to this one. You're going to explain some stuff to me that I've been wanting to understand. So I'm excited. I'm giddy. Positively giddy.

Dan McClellan Excellent. The two segments today are questions that I get all the time on my- Mm ... social media channels. So hopefully, this will be a great resource for folks.

Dan Beecher Exactly. That's great. Yeah. So should we just jump right in?

Dan McClellan Let's just dive right in with our-

Dan Beecher Let's go by the numbers. By the numbers.

Dan McClellan Let's talk about some of the ages of the patriarchs from the primeval history, Genesis 1 through 11.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I did some digging on this, just because I didn't want to come into this completely a neophyte, and I don't know if you know this, Dan, these fellows lived a kind of a long time.

Dan McClellan That's the rumor.

Dan Beecher I read an article recently that was about a woman down in the South, I think, who's 114 years old, and the thing that stood out to me is that she has a granddaughter who's 75 or something crazy like that. Yeah. Which just feels funny to know that there's a woman out there who's- ... in her 70s and can go visit her grandma. But that's nothing. Nothing. Compared to what we're about to get into.

Dan McClellan Doesn't hold a candle.

Dan Beecher We are about to delve into some crazy stuff. Yeah. And it starts, we're launching basically from Genesis 5, is that right?

Dan McClellan Genesis 5, although in the process, we're going to talk a little bit about Genesis 4 as well.

Dan Beecher Okay. So- And I know, yeah. And I was digging into other stuff. You have to jump around a little bit to get- Mm-hmm ... all of the people, because- Sure ... the patriarchal age kind of gets... Abraham's considered one of the patriarchs, right? Yeah. Or not. So, we're going

Dan McClellan from Noah, or rather

Dan Beecher from Adam to Noah to Abraham, and it does not take that many steps to get to these guys. No. Although it takes many years.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher So how do we start this conversation?

Dan McClellan Let's do this. I want to talk about the differences between Genesis 4 and Genesis 5. Okay. And then we'll hop into what's going on in Genesis 5, because in Genesis 4 and Genesis 5, we have two different genealogies, and this is one of the things that tipped scholars off to the fact that we may be dealing with separate traditions that were brought together at some point in the past.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Because in Genesis 4, you have genealogies for Cain and Seth, two separate lines. And did I say Genesis 5 or 4? You said 4. Okay. You said 4. In Genesis 4, we have a line for Seth and a line for Cain, and they are different. And-

Dan Beecher And both of these are sons of Adam.

Dan McClellan Right. So you have the wicked son of Adam, the first murderer, and then Seth is the righteous son of Adam. And Seth's line goes down all the way to Noah. And Cain had a son named Enoch, and he built a city and named it Enoch after his son, Enoch. And then Enoch had a son named Irad. Okay. And then, Irad had a son named Mehujael, who had a son named Methushael, who had a son- Oh ... named Lamech, and then-

Dan Beecher Oh. I'm starting to see some parallels happening.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, let's see. Lamech had... Oh, yeah. In Genesis 4:23, Lamech says, Adah and Zillah, his wives, "Hear my voice, you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say," because he's into equality. "I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech, seventy-sevenfold." So the conclusion of Cain's line is basically Lamech is following in the footsteps. In my household, you can't say footsteps without going foot steps, foot steps, foot steps, from young Frankenstein. You lost me on that one. That's young Frankenstein. Oh, okay. Right. So anyway, this is basically the wicked line. You start with Cain- Okay. Right ... the first murderer, you end with Lamech, who's also a murderer, and the idea is everybody in between is probably not falling very far from the tree. And then- You got,

Dan Beecher that's a lot of murder.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's the wicked line. And then it says- Yeah ... Adam knew his wife again and had Seth. And so Seth gave birth to Enosh, and you don't really get much after that. Where does Seth go? And that was the time that people began to invoke the name of the Lord. So- When we get into Genesis 5, we do not have the lineage of Cain. We just have the lineage of Seth. But as you noticed, some of these names sound familiar.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So Seth has Enosh, and then Enosh has Kenan. It's spelled K-E-N-A-N or C-A-I-N-A-N. It seems to be riffing on Cain somehow. Okay. And then Kenan had Mahalalel.

Dan Beecher Yes. Which sounds like a Hawaiian greeting, but that's fine.

Dan McClellan And then Mahalalel had Jared. Now, the interesting thing about Jared is this name is spelled, it should just be yod, resh, dalet. Let me just make sure that that is how that is spelled. Yes, yod, resh, dalet, and that's based on the root to go down. Now Irad, the name we had in Genesis 4, that's ain, yod, resh, dalet. It's just one letter different. Oh. And so Jared has Enoch, who's the son of Cain in Genesis 4. Right. And then, Enoch has Methuselah, who's very similar to Methushael- Right ... that we had previously. And then from Methuselah, we have Lamech, who's the very end of the wicked line of Cain.

Dan Beecher Another Lamech.

Dan McClellan Another Lamech. And then after Lamech, we have Noah. Right. So there are a handful of people that seem to be parallel here. And so when we get into Genesis 5, however, we have all these ages that are listed. Yeah. And this is where things get even stickier.

Dan Beecher It gets spicy-

Dan McClellan Yeah ...

Dan Beecher with the ages.

Dan McClellan And some people think, "Well, they use a base 60 counting system, and so it's different from a base 10." And it's like, that doesn't really change the number of years that we have here. Some people say, "Well, they're referring to months and not years." But if you do that, the ages it gives for when they beget children kind of has them being children themselves. Yeah. So it causes problems, and some people are like, "Oh, you just divide by 10 across the board, and then you have it." And it still doesn't work. Yeah. The first point to make is that these ages are just fictional. People were not living this long anciently.

Dan Beecher And- Wait a minute. You're saying that Methuselah did not live 969 years?

Dan McClellan Absolutely not.

Dan Beecher Having fathered Lamech at 187.

Dan McClellan Right, yes.

Dan Beecher That's- It's- ... solid, man. If they did pull that off, that's impressive. But it does seem possibly a little bit of a stretch.

Dan McClellan And this is not the only time in all of ancient history where we have stretches like this. This is actually following in a much older tradition that goes back to around 2000 BCE, where we have the Sumerian King Lists. And this is where we actually have the tradition of the flood developing in ancient Sumerian and Akkadian literature. But they have these king lists where kings are reigning from 38,000 to 43,000 years each- ... before the flood. And then you have the Great Flood, and afterwards it's like puny little 300 to 1,500 year reigns. Right. So that's something that goes back to around 2000 BCE. Around the middle to the end of the first millennium BCE, so when these versions of Genesis are kind of getting situated where we now find them in the Pentateuch, where they're getting formalized and finalized, there are versions of these Sumerian King Lists that do things that are very close to what's going on in Genesis 5. For instance, they have five kings ruling up to the Great Flood, or 10, excuse me. 10 kings, because I have two hands with five each. 10 kings ruling- ... up till the flood. Genesis 5 lists 10 patriarchs up to the flood. The person in the seventh position is significant, and they ascend to the divine realm, and they have an audience with the sun god. Cain is in the seventh... Not Cain. I'm having a great day. Enoch is in the seventh position in Genesis 5. Right. "And Enoch walked with God and was taken, so he did not die. And Enoch lived to be 365 years," which is the number- Yeah ... of days in a solar year back then. And so a lot of scholars would say, what's going on in Genesis 5 is probably kind of reflecting traditions that are being borrowed from these Akkadian, probably Babylonian traditions, about the ages of ancient kings. So the patriarchs are kind of reflecting this idea about the reigns of kings. But the traditional Masoretic Text, and we've talked before about this, but in short, the Masoretic Text is the version of the Hebrew Bible that is considered the traditional authoritative version that was formalized in the medieval period. The Masoretes were these scribes who lived in and around Tiberias, in Galilee. They were the ones who came up with the vocalization tradition, added the notes that are in there, and basically solidified the text as we know it.

Dan Beecher So our translations would be based on the Masoretic Text.

Dan McClellan Most translations. Traditionally, translations are based on the Masoretic Text. However, we do have some earlier traditions. For instance, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have ... texts that are a thousand years older and more. We have the Samaritan Pentateuch, which is a version of the Pentateuch that kind of diverges from the tradition that would become the Masoretic Text. We have the Septuagint, which is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was probably executed somewhere between the 3rd and the 1st century BCE. So we have some manuscripts that go back to the time of Jesus, of the Septuagint, and oddly enough, the three main ones that we're talking about here, the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Septuagint, many of these ages are different in those other manuscript traditions. And so scholars have been debating for a while which of these likely came first, and what were the rationales for the changes that they introduced. If we look in the Masoretic Text, Methuselah dies the same year as the flood. Hmm. Now, most people would say, well, it's not suggesting Methuselah died in the flood, because that would suggest that Methuselah were wicked, that this was part of the violence and the evil that God wanted to wipe from the earth.

Dan Beecher That Noah just didn't want to invite Grandpa on the boat.

Dan McClellan Yeah. He was probably a Trump supporter that they just- ... not totally comfortable having around.

Dan Beecher Noah's like, "Okay, Boomer, you're not on the boat."

Dan McClellan But there's an interpretation of the name Methuselah. It's interpreted to mean something like, "He dies, he sends out." The idea being as soon as Methuselah dies, that's kind of the trigger for destroying the earth. So that's how a lot of people interpret what's going on there with the name Methuselah and the fact that he dies the same year as the flood. Hmm. However, Methuselah doesn't mean that. It probably means something more like "man of the spear" or something like that, which suggests there could be some violence going on in Methuselah's life. And in Genesis 4, Methuselah's counterpart is Methushael, along with Enoch, a variant spelling of Jared, and Lamech, and remember, they're part of the evil line. Right. And so some scholars look at the Samaritan Pentateuch and notice that Jared, Methuselah, and Enoch all die the same year as the flood, according to the Samaritan Pentateuch.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow. Okay.

Dan McClellan And they die prematurely. Everybody else is living to be at least 895 years or longer, but the three of them are 847, 720, and 653. So to die prematurely the year of the flood suggested they were killed by the flood. Yeah. Which would mean these are part of a wicked generation, which would align a little more closely with Genesis 4, which has these folks in the wicked generation. So there is a scholar named David Carr who argues that the Samaritan Pentateuch is probably the earliest version of this story, and what happened is, as they're kind of negotiating this tradition in Genesis 5, they don't want to have these three be killed in the flood. Enoch is spared because he's taken by God. He's the righteous one. But the other three, which are taken from the line of Cain, they're like, "Maybe we don't want to do this because Seth to Noah, we want this to be all righteous." And so they change the ages so that those three patriarchs die earlier than the flood at a ripe old age. So in the Masoretic Text, Jared dies at 962, Methuselah dies at 969, Lamech at 777, and then Enoch again, 365. So according to one theory, we have three of these patriarchs who are evil, and then we have editors coming along saying, "We don't want anybody in Genesis 5's lineage or genealogy to be evil, so we're going to tweak the years, but we're also going to tweak the years they were born, when they had their kids, and so everything is different."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then we have, in the Septuagint's version, these three don't die the year of the flood. Two of them die much earlier than the flood. The problem with the Septuagint's lineage is that Methuselah actually lives for 14 years past the flood.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I did notice that. I thought that maybe he had a raft.

Dan McClellan Yeah, because he's not among the eight. He's not listed. Right. You would think Noah's grandfather is going to be named, but it's just Noah, his sons, their wives, Noah's own wife, and so we've got kind of a continuity error here with this.

Dan Beecher They've got him in the dinghy back behind the ark.

Dan McClellan Yeah. This is another situation where maybe this is the racist grandfather on Facebook that they're like- ... "We got a mother-in-law apartment in the back. We don't want to think about him." So the Septuagint has an issue as well. And so there's another theory that the original version had all three of these patriarchs, Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech, all living through the flood. Oh, wow. So one theory is that the most problematic version of this story is probably the earliest version. And so the Masoretic Text editor, their solution is to have only Methuselah die the year of the flood. The others die earlier, and so they have to fiddle with everybody's ages and when they had kids and everything, and this contributes to the Methuselah dies, that's the year the flood's going to come. And then According to this logic, the Samaritan Pentateuch editor is like, "Meh, let's have the three of them die the same year as the flood." And this theory doesn't necessarily say they're dying in the flood, but they're dying the same year of the flood. But I actually think it makes more sense if they're dying prematurely the year of the flood, that it was probably intended to suggest they died in the flood. And then the logic of the Septuagint editor is 100 years are getting added to the age of begetting of each patriarch, which moves the flood back by 1,000 years. Oh, wow. Which kind of helps them get around the problem, except for Methuselah, who survives for several years after the flood. So any way you dice it, it's not clear exactly what's going on, but we definitely have folks fiddling with these ages in order to make sense of the relationship of the deaths of these patriarchs to the flood.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And these ages are, no matter which version you look at, the ages are astonishing.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Adam lives to 930, Seth lives to 912, Enosh lives to 905, and they're fathering these kids. Adam fathers Seth at 130, Seth fathers Enosh at 105. This is a heck of a tradition. Yeah. I'll tell you one thing. When I was looking it up and I was pushing all the way through to Abraham, and then I sort of checked back in with the Abraham story, and he's 100, and he's like, "How am I going to have a kid now?" And I'm like, "Just look at your ancestors, for crying out loud." Yeah. You don't have to go back too far to see people 182 years old having kids.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the people are like, "Well, divide by 10." It's like, okay, well, that works. Well, it doesn't really work. Adam is 130 when he has his first son. So what? He's 13? Right. Mahalalel and Enoch are 65 when they beget. So what? They're six and a half.

Dan Beecher Six and a half.

Dan McClellan Yeah. There are problems with any attempt to historicize this and make this actually fit a plausible history, runs into all kinds of problems, I think. Yeah. The data as we have them indicate two things. One, these ages are fictional, most likely riffing on what's going on with the Sumerian King Lists in their Akkadian versions. And two, they're being fiddled with in order to try to come up with an acceptable relationship between the deaths of these patriarchs and the flood.

Dan Beecher I do like that in the, what is it, the Syrian Pentateuch? Is that

Dan McClellan what it was? Samaritan.

Dan Beecher The Samaritan Pentateuch. I think I'm looking at the numbers right, and if I'm reading it right, I think in that version, Adam actually gets to meet Noah. Theoretically, his life was long enough that Noah is born in Adam's lifetime. I think that's kind of interesting.

Dan McClellan Date of death, 930. The Samaritan Pentateuch, I think it has Noah being born 20 years after Adam's death. Oh, man. Yeah.

Dan Beecher I know when I did the numbers on the Masoretic text, Adam did live long enough to meet Noah's dad, Lamech- Yes ... but not to meet Noah. Yeah. But it's still an impressive- Yeah ... to meet nine generations deep. That's pretty impressive. Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think across all of them, Adam had more than a century, up to almost 300 years alongside Lamech.

Dan Beecher That's crazy.

Dan McClellan Who, depending on which story you're going with, may or may not have been a murderer.

Dan Beecher Right. Sure. Depending on which... It could just be a coincidence that Cain's line came up. There's not that many names by that point. Yeah. They could've just named each other. The names could've just lined up.

Dan McClellan Yeah. There are eight people on the Earth. We've got to stick with these names where our hands are tied. So we've got to name you after the murderer, Lamech. Yeah. So I think this is more strong evidence that the genealogies in Genesis 4 and 5 are from different traditions as well, and that they've been brought together incidentally one after the other, and it's been every later generation's job, if they choose to accept it, to try to make sense of it in a way that preserves the traditional understanding of these texts. And when you look at the flood story that's going to come up, you find what source critics refer to as couplets, which are the same part of the story being told in two different ways. Mm-hmm. Like the every animal two by two versus some animals two by two, some animals in sevens. And then you have- Right ... two beginnings, you have two middles, you have two ends. We see this in the creation account. We see this in the genealogies. We see this in the flood. We see this in Joseph being sold into Egypt. We see this in Abimelech and, "That's not my wife, that's my sister." We see it in a bunch of different ways, and there are attempts to make it seem like, well, it's possible that this is harmonious, that this can be reconciled. But for anyone who's not prioritizing ... the unity of the text and is at least even willing to just accept the fact that maybe these things come from different traditions. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence points in that direction.

Dan Beecher There you go. You got to love when you tell the same story twice. For people repeating themselves, it's just bad storytelling. Yeah. Unless you're trying to do something else other than just tell the story.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And for instance, I saw someone who's not even a biblical scholar, they're an Egyptologist trying to argue that Joseph being sold into Egypt, it's the Ishmaelites, but now it's the Midianites, and now it's the Ishmaelites, and the argument was, "Well, they're the same people." So ignore it all.

Dan Beecher Ignore

Dan McClellan it. Just,

Dan Beecher it's fine.

Dan McClellan Yeah. "Don't pay any attention to that information behind the curtain," is an oft-repeated refrain. Indeed.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, maybe we should take 150 years or so and have a break, and then we'll come back with

Dan McClellan a- Do some begetting.

Dan Beecher Yeah. We'll beget a few thousand generations, and then we'll come back with a What Does

Dan McClellan That Mean? Hey, everybody. If you enjoy what you're hearing on the Data Over Dogma podcast and you want to help us ensure that we're able to continue to create this content that hopefully you think is great and that we think is great, you can help us by subscribing to our Patreon.

Dan Beecher That's right. If you go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, you can choose what level you want to join up at. You'll get usually early access to the show every week. You'll get access to our patrons-only content, which is we talk about each week's show, but we go off into different directions. We sometimes just have fun conversations. It's just a behind-the-scenes look. Go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. Thanks.

Dan McClellan Thanks, everybody.

Dan Beecher All right. So Dan, we've mentioned what we're about to talk about on several episodes. Mm-hmm. I like that we're getting into it now. Let's talk Apocrypha.

Dan McClellan That sounds good. Apocrypha, isn't that a light chicken gravy that you-

Dan Beecher It's delicious. I don't know if you've had it with rice, but that's how I prefer it.

Dan McClellan So Apocrypha, a lot of people understand the Apocrypha to be a mysterious collection of books that are part of the Bible, but not part of the Bible.

Dan Beecher The rejects.

Dan McClellan The reject. And a lot of people don't know exactly where they come from, how they became part of the Bible, at what point were they removed, if they were removed from the Bible. A lot of mystery surrounding this, but there's actually a wonderful book that just came out a couple of years ago that I just want to plug real quick. If you want to learn more about the Apocrypha, "Introduction to the Apocrypha: Jewish Books in Christian Bibles" by Lawrence Wills is- Okay ... is a great discussion, and that is within Yale University Press' they have great series on biblical studies. But let's start with the name Apocrypha. I responded to a TikTok video the other day that said Apocrypha means wrong.

Dan Beecher I like it.

Dan McClellan And if that were accurate, then that would be very apocryphal in that it is entirely wrong. Apocrypha means things hidden. Mm. And the idea here is that there are a couple different ways to understand that, but we're not exactly sure who wrote these things, so the authorship is hidden. And then another sense could be that these are texts that were treated as kind of unsure legitimacy, and so people who used them kind of hid them away a little bit. There are a few different ways to understand that name, but Apocrypha is a name that goes back into antiquity, but anciently, it was used to refer to a handful of different types of things, and it wasn't a technical term that referred to the books that we now understand as the Apocrypha.

Dan Beecher It sounds like a Greek word. Is that correct?

Dan McClellan It is a Greek word, yes. Okay. And to understand what's going on here, we got to go all the way back to the canonization of the Bible and understand the difference between the Jewish canon and the Christian canon, both of these developing well after the texts of the Bible had been completed and their authors were long dead. The Jewish canon kind of firms up between the second and third centuries CE. Now, the Christian canon is firming up in the third to fifth centuries CE, so afterwards, and they're having a lot more heated debates about exactly what gets to go into the canon. And the first we can really talk about a Bible is when we've transitioned from using scrolls into using codices. As for the Jewish scriptures, everything was written on scrolls, and it was usually one book to a scroll, or if you had really short books that belonged to a larger collection, you could get the whole collection on a single scroll. But all of the books of the Hebrew Bible would have been stored as a collection of scrolls within the Jewish world. Around the end of the first century CE, you have the codex Taking over, particularly within Christian circles. And this is where everything is written on the front and the back of individual leaves, individual pages. And this is what Christianity begins to use for its sacred texts, and this facilitates the bringing together of all these different texts into one artifact.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so the oldest actual Bibles of which we know are texts like the Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and texts like that. These can-

Dan Beecher So codex basically just means book. More or less,

Dan McClellan yeah.

Dan Beecher When we see the word- Are they bound papers, or are they just sort of loose?

Dan McClellan They're bound in some way. Okay. And yeah, usually when we see the word book in the Bible, that's a translation of a word for scroll.

Dan Beecher Oh. Right. Okay.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so it's not until Christianity that this kind of shifts toward the preference for the codex. And this actually marks a pretty important distinction between the way early Christians understood Jewish scriptures and the way they would understand Christian scriptures, because these were not exactly the same thing. In 2 Timothy 3:16, where it says, "All scripture is theopneustos," that's a reference to Jewish scripture. That's not a reference to Christian scriptures. In the earliest periods of Christianity, the gospel was the words of Jesus, and a text was a particular kind of materialization of the message. But the authority resided in the message itself, not in its textualization. And so this is what made Jesus's words more authoritative than the Jewish scriptures, because the Jewish scriptures were dead letters that were materialized on text, but the words of Jesus are words that are carried on the sound waves through the air. And it's not until we get a couple generations down the road, and we've talked about this before, we're starting to not really have plausible cases to make to have actually heard Jesus speak or hear his disciples speak. So now we have to begin to write stuff down. And by this time, Christians have codices, so Christian scriptures are written on codices, and the whole concept of Christian scripture isn't even really salient until into the second and third century CE. Now, one of the interesting things about scripture in this time period is there was a much larger corpus of scriptures. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, we've found a lot more texts than just what we now consider biblical. Even in early Christianity, there were a lot of texts that were considered authoritative for a long time that are no longer considered authoritative, that didn't make it into the Bible.

Dan Beecher What are some of those texts?

Dan McClellan Some examples, for Jewish texts, for instance, the Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Enoch. There are both apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts that were in circulation. Apocryphal means things hidden, so the texts that we're talking about. Pseudepigraphical means false writings, so that would be those texts that are attributed to famous figures, like the Testament of Abraham and other texts like that, that are very clearly not written by those ancient figures. Within early Christianity, we have the Shepherd of Hermas, and Barnabas, and we have the Didache, and we have 1 Clement, and texts like these that are considered authoritative for many groups, but for whatever reason or another, fell out of favor by the time of the late fourth century CE and into the fifth century, where we're starting to say, "This is our text. These are the boundaries of this text. Only these texts get to be part of the Bible." Now, the Jewish scriptures that were being adopted for this Christian Bible that was beginning to take shape had some expansions on them, and had some other texts that were included in them. The Book of Daniel is a little bit different in the Greek versions of these scriptures that are being adopted by Christians. And so our Apocrypha actually originates in many Christian versions of texts that were preserved in different forms within the Jewish canon, as it would become known. But we also have some of these other texts, like 1 and 2 Maccabees, which are historical texts that tell the story of the Maccabean Revolt, the origins of the celebration of Hanukkah. We have the Prayer of Manasseh, the Idol Bel and the Dragon, which are part of the Book of Daniel in the Latin Vulgate. The story of Susanna. Song of the Three Children. These are all expansions on Daniel. We have Epistle of Jeremy. We have Baruch. Baruch was the scribe of Jeremiah. Ben Sirach. The Wisdom of Solomon. Judith. Tobit. And then 1 and 2 Esdras. These are texts that were considered authoritative within early Judaism and are adopted into the Christian concept of scripture, but then the Jewish canon omits them when it becomes solidified. And some of that has to do with where they think they came from, what languages they were written in. There's not a really clear case for a single set of criteria that determined what was left in and left out. But when the Christians began compiling texts together for their Bible, their Hebrew Bible, the Jewish scriptures that they used differed from the Jewish canon. And it's these differences that will later ... become known as deuterocanon and then become separated out as the Apocrypha. But it gets kind of messy when you get into the details of each of these individual books. But basically, Christianity is gathering its texts together, and when it's beginning to form its Bible, the versions of the text that they have are not the exact same versions that the Jewish communities end up deciding are going to be their Bible. Now, as you get past the Vulgate, so you have Jerome translates all the texts of the Christian Bible into Latin for a more authoritative Latin version. And he was one of the first advocates for what he called the Hebraica Veritas, which was basically, "Hey, we should be returning to the Hebrew versions of these texts because that's more faithful." For early Christianity, the Greek was considered the authoritative version, which is why Jesus is always quoting from the Septuagint in the New Testament, which, oopsie, is the authors of the gospels not thinking too hard about the fact that they're having their Aramaic speaker quote from Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible.

Dan Beecher Right. That's interesting.

Dan McClellan It's fascinating in a lot of ways, and there's a new book that just came out, and I'm going to blank on the name, but it has something to do with, I think it's Israel's scriptures in the New Testament or something like that. And it's basically an edited volume filled with discussions of the Old Testament and the New Testament, basically. Israel's Scriptures in Early Christian Writings: The Use of the Old Testament in the New. Brand new, just came out. I would highly recommend that text. So by the time of Jerome, we do have a realization that, hey, the Jewish folks over there and the Hebrew, the oldest Hebrew versions of these texts differ from what we have in our text. And so starting around 400 CE, we know there are differences. And by the time of Wycliffe's version of the Bible into English at the end of the 14th century CE, that has turned into these texts are not authoritative. These texts are not inspired. So as we get into the Reformation, there is a prioritization of the Hebrew canon, which means whatever differs from that Hebrew canon that is currently a part of our Old Testament is probably not original and probably not authoritative or inspired. And so we have the reformers, and particularly Martin Luther, who take the differences out and put them in their own section. And Martin Luther was the one to say, "This is the Apocrypha." And so it's a result of relying on different versions of the texts of the Old Testament, and by the time of the Reformation, there's a decision made, particularly by Martin Luther, to say, "All the differences I'm taking out, and I'm putting in their own little section." So we had Old Testament, Apocrypha, New

Dan Beecher Testament. Man, that Luther guy, he had some opinions about how stuff

Dan McClellan was supposed to go. Yeah, he had a lot of opinions, and that was one of the ones that stuck. But interestingly enough, Martin Luther also took out some New Testament texts like James, like Revelation, like Hebrews, and some others, and stuck them in the back and said, "These also don't belong." And the rest of the Protestants went, "Nah, we're not doing that." So he got away with moving the Apocrypha out and naming it the Apocrypha, but he didn't get away with getting rid of things like the Book of Revelation or the Epistle of James.

Dan Beecher That's a shame.

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's a mixed bag, basically. And this is when you also have the Catholic Church pushing back against the Reformation's claims about what texts are inspired and which are not. And so this is when we have the Council of Trent, which is the first council that is an ecumenical council, is all of the Catholic Church getting together and saying, "This is the canon." Because previously you had smaller councils that were not the whole church that said, "This is the canon." But that was not considered infallible because they did not represent the entire church. And so the Council of Trent in the middle of the 16th century is the first time we actually have the whole church formally and officially saying, "This is the canon." So a lot of people don't know that. We do have kind of a de facto canon going all the way back to between 400 and 500 CE, but we don't get the church's infallible stamp of approval until after Luther has already

Dan Beecher muddied the waters. Until people are already breaking away and saying, "No, we're doing it this way."

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this was an attempt to shore up the boundaries of the church in light of everything falling apart.

Dan Beecher I was shockingly old when I realized that Catholics were using a different Bible than I had been using my whole life. I had no idea. I was much older than I would think I would've been.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this is when you have the idea of deuterocanon. So the Protestant Reformation did influence how Catholics think about the canon. So everything's still there, and to this day, if you go buy a Catholic edition of the Bible, it will include the Apocrypha. They won't call it the Apocrypha. It will be called the deuterocanon. But they did recognize, okay, there's a difference between these books. And so you have the canon and the second canon, the deuterocanon, which Protestants call the Apocrypha.

Dan Beecher Is there an easy way to sort of differentiate why these books? What was it about them That made the difference for Luther and for others

Dan McClellan There's not an easy way. And when you look at the debates going on in early Christianity, and even within early Judaism, you have some fuzzy edges. So the text of Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus, that was considered authoritative by some Jewish people and not by others. The text of Wisdom of Solomon was considered scripture by some early Jewish folks and not by others. When you get into Athanasius of Alexandria, who's the first one to hammer out the biblical canon for Christianity more or less as we understand it today, included Baruch but omitted Esther. And later that would be swapped out. And within Christianity, you had different debates as well. And so some people have said, "Well, there was a stronger tradition of the authority of these texts," but that doesn't hold across the board. Others say, "Well, these were written in Greek, and so the Jewish folks only wanted to preserve the texts that were written in Hebrew." Again, doesn't hold across the board. Some of these texts were originally written in Hebrew. So it's really just an accident of history which ones ultimately were included and which ones were left out. It's convenient for us, and we like to think of these things as taking place around a big table where a bunch of dudes sat down and kind of made the decision once and for all. But the reality is, it's all kinds of little different contingent historical events and relationships and circumstances that just over time kind of resulted in things shaking out the way they shook out. But you'll get more details if you look at that book by Wills, "Introduction to the Apocrypha." You'll get a lot more details about each of these texts and what specific events may have contributed to their inclusion or their exclusion. And also you'll hear me frequently recommend the New Oxford Annotated Bible as the translation that if somebody wants a Hebrew Bible and a New Testament together, that's going to be one of the best. There's also an Oxford Annotated Apocrypha. The Apocrypha is included in the other one, but if you just want the Apocrypha and notes about the Apocrypha and thematic essays about the Apocrypha, I would also recommend that. That's also a wonderful book to have because it just isolates the Apocrypha and lets you kind of read it on its own terms and standing alone. And then we know what happened after Luther. After everything gets translated into English, the 1611 King James Version included the Apocrypha. So did the 1769 Blayney edition, which is the edition that has been the source text for almost all publications of the King James Version since then. In the 19th century, we had the American Bible Society, and we had the British & Foreign Bible Society begin to publish editions that omitted the Apocrypha in order to save space, to save costs, to make distribution easier. And by the end of that century, preferences, the market, costs, whatever, all contributed to everybody on the Protestant ends of things just saying, "You know what? Our Bible doesn't include an Apocrypha." And so today it's fairly rare for a devotional edition of the Bible for a Protestant audience to include the Apocrypha.

Dan Beecher Well, and now the word apocryphal is used sort of in common parlance to just mean something that was once thought to be true or once thought to be correct or whatever, and now we know it's not. So that's an interesting thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And people also use the word to mean kind of obscure, hidden. Oh, yeah. We're not exactly sure where it comes from, but usually when people say apocryphal, they mean that's not true. Yeah. So the sense of the word is evolving as well.

Dan Beecher That particular Yogi Berra story is apocryphal. It didn't actually happen.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We don't know where it comes from, is in my experience what folks should be intending to say when they say apocryphal. But usually what they mean is it's a myth, it's fake, it's not real. And so yeah, the Apocrypha was an authoritative, formative part of the development of the Bible for early Judaism and for early Christianity. And over time, things settle so that the Apocrypha is considered less than the rest of the text. And then Christians decide we're going to separate it out, we're going to keep it in its own little category, and then later go, "We don't even need that category anymore." And now people speak rather negatively of the Apocrypha. But in addition to the fact... And we haven't even really talked about First Enoch, which was very influential on early Judaism and early Christianity, and isn't really included in most editions of the Apocrypha except for the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which still includes it in their canon, a version of it, and which is why our most complete copies, our most complete manuscripts of the Book of Enoch are preserved in an Ethiopic language. But that was omitted from the canon by the time of Athanasius in the late fourth century.

Dan Beecher A while back, you talked about how one of the reasons that these books were singled out was questionable authorship. Mm-hmm. But isn't that something that could be said about a lot of the books of the Bible, the non-apocryphal books?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We have no idea who wrote most of these things, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah. And the reason that some books escaped scrutiny while others did not is because there were longstanding traditions of authorship that were largely not questioned. Whereas some of these texts, because they had not been around as long, they did not have embedded traditions regarding authorship. Some of these texts had only been written a few decades up to maybe one or two centuries before these discussions began to happen. So, like the book of Enoch, escaped scrutiny for a while, but then people began to think, "You know what? In order for this book to be authentic, means it would have had to have been preserved through the flood, would have had to have come from before the flood, and been preserved and come all the way down to us." And then it has some pretty significant internal contradictions because it's actually a collection of five different sets of stories that are independent for the most part, and when they're brought together, we see some big-time contradictions. And so the tradition regarding the Pentateuch is that this had all been revealed to Moses. And so we had an authorship that was firmly established that dates to after the flood, and so we don't have a lot of the same problems that a text like 1 Enoch does. So in the third century or fourth century, so after Syrian missionaries had probably taken versions of the Septuagint that included Enoch down to Ethiopia, after that, but before Athanasius in 367, you probably had Christian authorities saying, "Eh, maybe not so much 1 Enoch. Maybe let's leave that behind." And so that becomes marginalized, and that is omitted as one of the texts that was considered authoritative. Now-

Dan Beecher And in so doing, they eliminated all of the contradictions in the Bible.

Dan McClellan Most of them, yeah. We'll give them some of that. But then you have issues like Ecclesiasticus, Ben Sira, which most scholars think the authorship seems secure, like the way the text describes itself is probably historically accurate. It was probably written by a dude who is collecting information from his father writing all this, and then that dude's grandson translates it into Greek. And so that would've been something that was probably originally composed in Hebrew or Aramaic and then translated into Greek. That was something where the authorship was probably authoritative. And so the closest we can get to a good reason for why it would've been omitted is that maybe this person just wasn't an authority figure within ancient Jewish tradition. But you still have it quoted in a number of places, and you still have early Jewish people considering it, and early Christian people considering it authoritative. And it also contains one of the earliest references to the idea of a canon. And so a lot of scholars consider it to be invaluable data regarding the development of the concept of a canon. And so how Ecclesiasticus got omitted is a mystery to a lot of people. And things like 1 and 2 Maccabees, I think those are some of the most important historical texts. And they obviously have what could be called legend within them, but like you said, so does Genesis, but it has not been around for nearly as long.