I'll make you a STAR! with David A. Burnett

Dan McClellan If we want to understand the Bible and early Judaism and early Christianity on its own terms, rather than on the terms we are imposing, we need to rethink this category. Yes. And talk more about something like one God rhetoric, where we see people talking about the one God the way that I talk about the Denver Broncos in the late '90s. There's no other team. The Oakland Raiders? They're not even a football team. It's the same kind of rhetoric. Yeah. It's not an actual philosophical assertion that the Raiders do not exist as a football team. I wish that were the case, but it's not. And so I think we need to shift to talking about one God rhetoric. 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 try 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's it going today, Dan?

Dan Beecher Doing great. Looking forward to today's show.

Dan McClellan It's going to be fun. All right. Excellent. Me too. We've got a good friend of mine, David A. Bernett. How are you doing, David?

David A. Burnett Hey, guys. I'm doing well. How are you?

Dan McClellan Doing very well, thank you. We are going to briefly introduce David, and then we'll get into things. David is a PhD candidate in New Testament and Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, working with Matthew Novenson. Is that correct?

David A. Burnett That's correct.

Dan McClellan All right. He has completed other doctoral work toward a PhD in religious studies in Judaism and Christianity in antiquity at Marquette University, and served there as a graduate teaching assistant and research assistant, and now teaches full-time at St. Anthony School in Milwaukee. And how's the weather treating you there these days?

David A. Burnett Oh, man. Summers in Milwaukee are paradisiacal, man. Nice. It is fantastic.

Dan McClellan All right. It is. What is it? It's 85 today, which is actually nicer than it's been for the last few weeks around here. But David and I go way back, I think 2010. Yep. And it was in Atlanta, right?

David A. Burnett Man, I can't believe it's been that long,

Dan McClellan but yeah. We met each other at a big geek festival called the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, which happens the weekend before Thanksgiving every year, and it switches cities every year. And you can find north of 10,000 biblical scholars who descend on the hotels and the conference center of this city during this conference. And in Atlanta in 2010, I was presenting a paper on, I think monotheism or the gods or something like that, and I was presenting in the same session as a well-established scholar named Larry Hurtado, who was actually teaching at the University of Edinburgh for a long time. And he and I were kind of going at it a little bit in the session, disagreeing with each other a bit. But Larry and I and David began talking after the session. And maybe you can tell what you were doing there and how we got to know each other.

David A. Burnett Yeah, it was a blast, actually. I saw your paper in the program, and me and my old friend, Mike Heiser, may he rest in peace, were coming to hear your paper and to hear Larry's. And I had always wanted to meet Larry Hurtado, and I had loved his work in college when I had read it and got really into the early high Christology stuff or not. And, yeah, so Hurtado loved Heiser's dissertation and kept trying to get him to publish it on the Divine Council. Which was weird that

Dan McClellan he never published it.

David A. Burnett I got onto Heiser all

Dan McClellan the time about that. He just kind of sold PDFs of the dissertation online and stuff.

David A. Burnett Well, it may be published posthumously.

Dan McClellan Okay. All right.

David A. Burnett We are currently working on that. Okay. Awesome. But that's for another time, yeah. But, yeah, so we went to y'all's session, loved your paper, and it was on Septuagint, Deuteronomy,

Dan McClellan and the gods, something like that. Yeah, conceptualization of God in the Septuagint or something like that. Yeah.

David A. Burnett I remember, because it was good. I was like, "This is a great paper."

Dan McClellan Oh, thank you.

David A. Burnett And I was tracking, and I was writing my master's dissertation at the time, and doing stuff with the gods and stuff we'll talk about today. But, yeah, so Mike introduced me to Larry, and then talked to you, and then we got to talking, and then the other session was starting, so me, you, and Larry had moved out in the hallway and we kept talking. Yeah. And then Larry Hurtado was like, "Y'all want to go for a drink?" And I'm like, "Yes, absolutely." And so, yeah, he takes us all for a drink. Dan had his ginger ale or whatever, and then

Dan McClellan I had my- The guy's Sprite.

David A. Burnett Yeah, a Sprite. There you go. And he bought me a Guinness, and we just went at it and kept debating and talking, and it was a really great memory. We had such a fun time with Larry, and I love having that memory, and that's how our friendship started. Yeah. And we've just kept talking ever since, and would hang out at SBL and just had a great friendship after that.

Dan McClellan And Larry tragically passed away a handful of years ago. Yeah. But you mentioned the early high Christology club, which many of the people listening will probably not know about. But in your words, what was the early high Christology club? Of which Larry, I think, was a founding member.

David A. Burnett Oh, yeah. He was definitely a founding member. So, I first learned about it when I was reading Lord Jesus Christ, his ridiculously epic tome on this. He had dedicated it to EHCC, and I was like, "What is this?" And I had asked him about that, and he's like, "Oh, that's the early high Christology club." And it was a group of scholars that take the view that from the first generation, the authors of the New Testament, for example, already believe that Jesus is divine. He is God or is a god or a divine being of some sort already from the get-go. It's not a late development like later in Christianity, that already they're attributing divinity to Jesus from generation one,

Dan McClellan so. And this is, yeah, this is his mutation idea. Yeah. That this is something that as soon as we have news of the resurrection spreading- Yeah ... this pops up really quick.

David A. Burnett And- He calls it radical evolution of early Jewish monotheism. Yeah. And he qualifies early Jewish monotheism to not really mean monotheism, but it's like, yeah, but yeah, that's-

Dan McClellan And he published a few years ago, Baylor University Press published a collection of essays called "Ancient Jewish Monotheism and Early Christian Jesus Devotion." So he's been one of the most prolific writers on the question of- Yeah ... monotheism and early Judaism and the relationship of Jesus' conceptualization, and the relationship of Jesus to God. But that's pushing back against the idea that was very common and is still common among scholarship, that the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke at least, don't seem to present Jesus as divine in the same sense as the much later Gospel of John seems to. So arguing that there's kind of a development towards a divine Jesus, and Larry and others were saying no. As soon as we have the resurrection and the story of the resurrection, we have whatever this is that treats Jesus as, in some way, divine, a part of God's identity, to pull from Richard Bauckham's theory of divine identity.

Dan Beecher I think that's all very fascinating. But I would like to push us to talk about David's scholarship, because we could go, you two, I'm sure-

David A. Burnett Oh, how kind of you

Dan Beecher ... if we wind you up, you guys could go and talk about other people's scholarship for forever, for eternity.

David A. Burnett So let's- Yeah, you're not lying.

Dan Beecher Let's dive in a little bit to you, David, and talk about a bit what you've been working on.

David A. Burnett Yeah, appreciate that. So basically, this dissertation has been a long time in the making. It's tentatively called, and I had done an episode back on the "Naked Bible" podcast years ago about this, but it's tentatively called "Resurrection and the Death of the Gods." And it's about rival reception of the patriarchal promises of star-like seed that are given to Abraham and the argument of 1 Corinthians 15, which is the most famous chapter in all of the New Testament on resurrection, for your listeners that don't know that. If you want to go anywhere in the New Testament to learn about what the resurrection is all about for these early Jesus people, that is where you would start. Because not only-

Dan Beecher Well, start there then. Let's hear, what does it say in that?

David A. Burnett Yeah. So that chapter is fascinating for a million reasons. It starts out with, "The Gospel is the first, most important thing that I taught you." And this chapter is written in 1 Corinthians to combat supposedly a sort of loss of belief in or misunderstanding of the resurrection of Jesus. Mm-hmm. Because for Paul, he's trying to get the Corinthians to understand that not only is this the most important thing that I taught you guys, but if he didn't raise from the dead, Jesus, then the whole The Resurrection, which he puts capital T on it, it is an event for him. It is an apocalyptic, end time, eschatological, world turnover type of event that he says this is what it's all about. He's like, "If that didn't happen, if Jesus wasn't literally raised from the dead bodily," and we'll talk about what that means for Paul in a little bit, "but then The Resurrection isn't going to happen either, and all of our faith is pointless." So-

Dan Beecher So when you say The Resurrection, you're talking about us, like everybody's- Yes

David A. Burnett ... resurrection,

Dan Beecher as opposed to-

David A. Burnett An epic, yes. This is a huge end of days, righteous resurrected to life. What happens to the unrighteous, the wicked? That's still up for grabs at this point. A lot of folks think destruction of the wicked, annihilation. Some folks think something like what we call hell. But I personally don't think Paul was a universalist. I think that was a later development. There are texts in Paul that lend themselves to be read in that kind of way. Some people take moments-

Dan Beecher What's a universalist? I'm not sure I know what that is.

David A. Burnett A universalist is the idea that everyone eventually, in the end, will be saved. Okay. And some people take some passages in Paul to say that. I definitely don't think historically Paul thought that. Paul was, in one sense, was a run-of-the-mill Jewish apocalypticist of the first century that, as a Pharisee, really believed in this thing we call The Resurrection. And that event that he call, he calls it that four times in 1 Corinthians 14, The Resurrection, and it's always an event. It's always a title for an event. Mm-hmm. And this gets misunderstood sometimes. It might help to mess up the language so we don't take all the Christian baggage with us later. ... that happens in the reception of Paul, but maybe call it something like The Arising or something like that. Mm-hmm. That might be a good way to talk about it. Because there's all kinds of things associated with this big event for him that he talks about in this chapter. And sometimes, especially in Christian theological conversations, especially in apologetic ones, it gets so overrun by this proof that he physically, bodily got up, and that's it. End of conversation. And it's like, there's so many other things going on in this chapter besides that, that he attaches to this event. And so when he describes what's taking place in the event, there's a host of stuff that he talks about. One of those things that he talks about is this judgment and supposed destruction of what he calls the principalities and powers and rulers. This is in 1 Corinthians 20 through 28, this section there, 15:20 through 28. And, this is his little section, kind of like Paul's little apocalypse. If you want to look for a section in Paul's letters where, what does he actually think is happening in this whole resurrection event? What is taking place? Because he talks about resurrection all the time, but he never sort of lays out, "Here is the event. Step one, two, three, four." Well, if you want to know what that is, that's the best place to go. That's the sort of best outline he gives us. And there you have this weird destruction of the powers thing going on.

Dan McClellan Yeah. In

David A. Burnett verse 24,

Dan McClellan "Then comes the end. He hands over the kingdom to God the Father when he has brought to an end all rule and all authority-

David A. Burnett Yeah

Dan McClellan ... and power." And that would be the principalities and every authority and power. These would be divine forces- Yes ... that are affecting the world, that have power within the world. And this is where, in your dissertation, you're going to talk at some length about what this is a reference to, aren't you?

David A. Burnett Exactly. Yeah. This is a huge part of my dissertation is, where is this coming from, first of all, and who are these powers and principalities stuff? There is a great scholar, named Emma Wasserman, who's written a book called "Apocalypse as Holy War," and she has previous articles on this subject as well, and I think she's dead right on this point. Is that traditionally the way, in specifically Christian scholarship, that has read apocalyptic stuff in Paul as this really staunch, bifurcated cosmos. Like, you got the good guys up there, bad guys over here, and it's just black and white, this big battle, good versus evil, and that's it. That's what it's all about. But this language of principalities and powers is used all the time in Greek Jewish literature for the gods of the other nations. So it's used to talk about them all the time.

Dan Beecher So we're not talking about earthly principalities. We're not talking about human lords and leaders and kings and whatever. We're talking about their gods?

David A. Burnett Yeah. So yes, they are talking about the gods of the Gentiles, I think. The gods of the nations specifically, I think, is a category coming from Deuteronomy. But-

Dan McClellan This is a-

David A. Burnett ... to answer your question-

Dan McClellan Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.

David A. Burnett No, it's good. To answer your question, I personally think both are included, and there's a passage in Isaiah, that I would refer to to this that maybe we can talk about. But go ahead, Dan.

Dan McClellan I was going to say this is a vestige of the earlier divine council, which Dan and I- Yes ... talked about in a previous episode. So we see this in Deuteronomy 32. We have references in Psalm 82 and elsewhere, this idea that each nation is ruled by its own patron deity, or by this time period, some kind of angel or some kind of divine being of some kind. And so this is how they account for the different forces, and the different powers that are in play geopolitically around the world.

David A. Burnett Yeah.

Dan Beecher I think a lot of our listeners and I would be a little surprised to hear that these ideas of other gods still persist in the New Testament. It feels like an Old Testament sort of idea. But-

David A. Burnett Yeah

Dan McClellan ...

Dan Beecher to hear that it's still sort of pervading through the New Testament is actually a little surprising to me.

David A. Burnett As it should be. This is great because, for a couple of years, I had been dreaming up this conference on this topic, on monotheism, and hopefully its demise in the study of antiquity. And, finally, it's happening. And so, one of my best friends, Josiah Bisbee, who is dissertating at Brown right now with his PhD at Brown University under Saul Olyan there, a wonderful scholar in this regard as well of the Hebrew Bible. He pitched the idea to Saul. We met, and Saul loved the idea, and we are making this happen. And me and Josiah both said, if Josiah takes the late antiquity, because we're going all the way into late antiquity, after Judaism, Christianity are already a thing. He's going to cover that section. I'm going to cover Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins. But we're like, "We need to get Dan to do the ancient Israel side and A&E side." So we brought Dan on board, and so all three of us are sort of spearheading this conference at Brown that we are calling The Meanings and s of Monotheism, and the S is in parentheses, so The Meanings and End of Monotheism. And this is a play off of a title of a famous Wilfrid Cantwell Smith book called "The Meaning and End of Religion," which was big in the '60s as a paradigmatic shift in religious studies, part of a wider paradigmatic shift to saying, "Can we even talk about religion existing in the ancient world? Was that even a thing?" Because not in the modern sense, the way we talk about religion is like, well, you have your spiritual metaphysical stuff over here, and then you have politics and economics and all that stuff over here. And so that's religion over there, and then you have everything else over here. Smith and others are saying, "No way. This distinction did not exist in the ancient world." And the way scholars talk about, "We're scholars of religion," you'll find out real quick if you've read any primary literature at all from the ancient world, that all of these things are integrated. Yeah. They have no concept, barring some philosophical traditions like Epicureanism and others. But there's no general sense in which politics, what we call religion or religio practices, cultic practices to divinities and all that, economics, social sphere, family sphere, individual thoughts about individuals, all of that is tied to the divine realm. It's all a holistic thing. And so just like that book did to say, "Hey, we need to think about not using this term religion to describe that in the ancient world," we're saying that with monotheism. Yeah. We're saying monotheism was not, surprise, trigger warning, it was not a thing in ancient Israel. It was not a thing in early Judaism, and surprise, it was not a thing in early Christianity either. They believed that these other gods were real. They believed that they were active in the world. They believed that they were active in all sorts of ways in the world. And I did a paper at SBL on this last year, and I'm going to develop this further for the conference. But there are conflicting views on what to do with these gods or what these gods are like in early Judaism. There wasn't just one view. It's not like all Jews agreed on

Dan McClellan this. Yeah. And a problem of taking our modern concept of monotheism, which is something that has developed since the 1700s. Yes. That's when the term was coined in 1760 by a Cambridge platinist named Henry More. We take that framework and we retroject it and impose it upon the Bible, and then the way we try to find ways to make it fit the framework, and then that then becomes a foundation for all kinds of different arguments, even though the categories upon which we're basing these arguments are arbitrarily imposed on the text. And so we're trying to say, if we want to understand the Bible and early Judaism and early Christianity on its own terms, rather than on the terms we are imposing, we need to rethink this category- Yes ... and talk more about something like one god rhetoric, where we see people talking about the one God the way that I talk about the Denver Broncos in the late '90s. There's no other team. The Oakland Raiders, they're not even a football team. It's the same kind of rhetoric. Yeah. It's not an actual philosophical assertion that the Raiders do not exist as a football team. I wish that were the case, but it's not. And so I think we need to shift to talking about one god rhetoric, and because it's serving a specific rhetorical function within the- Yes ... discourse that's going on. It's not coming downstream from this conviction that no other gods exist. It is something that is being used to structure power and values in that world. And so- Yeah ... this is going to take place in May at Brown University. Yep. We're going to start advertising for it at the end of the year. But I'm really looking forward to this conference, too, and I'm really looking forward to, at some point, writing the paper that I'm going to be presenting. Yeah. Which I have not started yet.

Dan Beecher I'm very excited about-

Dan McClellan Yeah, that's good

David A. Burnett ...

Dan Beecher the conference. I think I know somebody who might be able to get me in, but we'll see. We'll see if we can

David A. Burnett make that happen. Well, I think it's going to be open to the public. Yeah. So as soon as the place is full, it's full.

Dan McClellan We're going to stream it, too.

David A. Burnett And we're going to stream it as well. That's right. Awesome. It's going to be live streamed. So there's already, I didn't even know Dan was going to talk about it on his TikTok yet, but it's like there's already a lot of buzz generating about it already, which is really cool. And that's what we want. We want this to be a big rock in the pond in the study of antiquity. And the thing is, for us, for weird people like me and Dan who are way deep into this stuff, this is not new. This is stuff we've been talking about for a very long time. But the problem is, whenever the trickle-down of scholarship actually reaches the public, it's still filtered through all of these monotheistic categories, and we let the modern developed religions determine what we can and can't say about antiquity, and that is a huge problem. And a lot of people don't understand why it's a huge problem, but it has a ton of ramifications. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Talk a little bit about why it is a huge problem.

David A. Burnett Yeah. So for starters, it's just bad history. If we care about the discipline of history at all, if we really want to preserve doing good critical historical work, then, and this ties into one of the reasons why it's so bad, is it misrepresents entire people groups, entire movements, entire religious movements, if you want to call them that, whole people groups that come from these traditions, that millions and millions of people come out of. If you want to understand your history or if someone's telling your story and your history, you don't want to be misrepresented. Right. You don't want people to tell the wrong story because When you start looking at Christian origins in particular, which is my wheelhouse, is early Judaism and Christian origins. When you start looking really carefully and critically at this, you can't help but bump into and run into all the gods. You can't help it, because what do you do in that God-saturated world and this weird thing with Jesus rising from the dead, and he's supposed to what? Is he supposed to just go have party with these guys or is he friends with them? What's going on? Well, according to Paul, no way. It's bad. They are bad. They are not good, and they need to be dealt with. Whereas there were other Jews, sort of maybe in their own day that would've appeared more urbane and sophisticated, part of the Greek Roman polis, that were going to festivals and other temples and places all the time, and it was commonplace for them. And if you want a great scholar to read about this, read Paula Fredriksen. Her work is fantastic on this and you mentioned her- I was going to mention her

Dan McClellan paper, her recent one, "Philo, Herod, Paul, and the Many Gods of Ancient Jewish Monotheism."

David A. Burnett Yes. I love it. Which is a great paper. It's a fantastic paper. Yes. Yeah.

Dan Beecher So, sorry, I wanted to just go back because you were talking about, and I wanted to make sure that I understood. The problem that you're discussing is that if we look at the ancient times through the lens of modern religion, or if we have to make

David A. Burnett our view

Dan Beecher of ancient times comport with our own theology and with our own modern sort of Christianity or religion or whatever it is that we're looking at, excuse me, we're going to miss what was actually going on there. Is that the crux of what you're saying?

David A. Burnett 100%.

Dan McClellan And I think building on

David A. Burnett that- That is exactly what I'm saying ...

Dan McClellan and that can harm things today because the same kinds of people who we're silencing by looking at the Bible and saying it's all monotheistic, we're silencing a ton of people. Those people like that are still around, and so in a sense, it's also giving priority to groups today over and against the groups who might be more closely tied to what was probably a more prevalent view anciently. Yeah. And so even today, even in matters of legal issues, what is or is not a religion or what is or is not Christian? Maybe not in the United States, but around the world, those debates can have significant impact on the quality of people's lives. And so when we try to conceptualize religion as one thing or Christianity as one thing or monotheism as one thing, that can frequently impact who has access to what power and resources. And- Yes ... when we're allowing one group to exercise unilateral control of that discussion and defining things the way they want, and you know how much I hate definitions, Dan.

David A. Burnett Oh, I know too.

Dan McClellan That can cause problems.

David A. Burnett Yeah. He said it great. It bears no repeating. But the point there I think that's important as we look at Paul here is that Paul is one voice among many, but especially as a Pharisee that sees that the gods of the other nations are a problem. They're something that needs to be dealt with. But he's not the only voice in the first century in Judaism on this. And just to show you how stark of a difference it is, in a couple of my publications, I talk about the Deuteronomic sort of cosmology, the Deuteronomic background to a lot of Paul's thinking. And I have a stupidly long title for this book chapter I did called "A Neglected Deuteronomic Scriptural Matrix for the Nature of the Resurrection Body in 1 Corinthians 15:39-42." And what all that means is just when Paul talks about the nature of the resurrection body and what's it like, he compares it to the celestial bodies, the sun, moon, and star, and the stars differ from each other in glory, and so too is the resurrection. He talks about them being glorified beings, and he relates the celestial bodies to the terrestrial bodies under there, which is what you are now. You're human beings, the birds of the heavens, fish of the sea, blah, blah, blah. Those creatures are terrestrial beings. They're called flesh, he calls them. They're perishable, whereas he says these glory beings are imperishable. He says you once bore the image of the terrestrial, but now you're going to bear the image of the celestial. So he actually calls Jesus in that text a pnephma, a pneuma, a spirit. He's a life-giving spirit, whatever that means, and he's not a flesh being. He says flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, period, full stop. Oh, wow. So whatever he means in this nature of the resurrection body, what is it going to be like? Because clearly he's had pushback against, "What do you mean bodily resurrection?" And here's a huge problem here is in some Christian theological hot takes on this chapter, they've sort of framed the conversation in this staunch dichotomy where you can only have one or the other. You can only have one, these people that believe in just raw Platonism, that the body's gross, it's a prison house, you need to get out of it, and the soul needs to escape and go to spirit land where the souls are and where the gods are unbodied. They don't have bodies. All that body stuff is nasty, gross, earthly stuff. It's a prison. The really virtuous soul can ascend to the heights and join the gods, right? And then the other-Other version is Paul's version, where he thinks, "No, you have a body, and it's not like that astral stuff. You have a body. You're going to be on a new earth. You're going to be on the ground. You're going to be eating chicken or whatever." And that's the only options. And that's the way a lot of popular New Testament scholars who are also theologians like to frame the conversation, and I'm sorry to say this, but they're dead wrong. Those are not the only options. There are lots and lots of other options, especially within Greek-speaking and Greek-writing Jews. They have lots of other options to go by. And so you need to really get down into the weeds of what ancient Mediterranean people actually thought about the nature of the gods. What are they like?

Dan McClellan Because- And it's not as simple, you're saying, as the contemporary dichotomy between immaterial and material. That's right. It's not a binary- No ... where you're either 100% immaterial or 100% material. It's more of a spectrum between those two poles. That's right.

David A. Burnett And- Can you explore that a little bit?

Dan Beecher Give us a couple of examples of some other- Oh, yeah ... contemporaneous ideas.

David A. Burnett Yeah, I have a great example for you. And this came up in a recent Catholic Biblical Association meeting where I was debating a popular scholar on this very topic. So, yeah. So an example of not making these false dichotomies. So to frame the example I'm going to give you, and connect it to Paul, is it's very popular, and Dan knows this really well, it's very popular in these debates about, in Paul, who are the stoicheia tou kosmou that he mentions in his letters? This in Greek is like the elements of the world, or the cosmos, or the powers of the world. Is he just talking about the four natural elements that in Greek literature they talk about a lot? Or is he talking about actual beings and powers? And there's this, again, the whole conversation a lot of the time in past scholarship is defined by those dichotomies, by those binaries. And Greek celestial science of the day and philosophy that's all mixed up in ancient Greco-Roman world was you could be all of those at once or neither. So I'll give you a great example of this. So this is from a famous text, one of my favorite texts that people who know me say I talk too much about this text. But Cicero has a text called "De Natura Deorum," and it's on the nature of the gods. And we are really lucky to have this text survive from antiquity because he talks about lots of other books by other Greco-Roman authors before him on the nature of the gods, sometimes like six-volume works or 12-volume works or whatever, that we don't have anymore. And so we have Cicero's, and it's an amazing conversation of an Epicurean, a Stoic, and an Academic, they're the inheritors of Plato's school, and they're all debating with each other on the nature of the gods. And we have the whole conversation as he construes it, and it's brilliant. And so, Varro is the Epicurean, and he says of Chrysippus the Stoic, this is what he says about him. So he's trashing the Stoics. So he wants to go in on Chrysippus, and this is what he says in Book 1. He says, "Chrysippus, who is deemed the most skillful interpreter of the Stoic dreams, musters an enormous mob of unknown gods." So he's just got all these gods that I don't buy. So what does he say are gods? Well, he lists them. Varro lists them for us. He says, "This is what Chrysippus all thinks his gods are divine." He says, "Some of the things he calls gods or divine are, quote, 'fire or ether, all fluid and soluble substances such as water, earth, air.'" So you have the elements there, right? And he keeps going. He says, "Sun, moon, stars, and the all-embracing unity of everything or all things, and even those human beings who have attained immortality." So right there, you have an example of Cicero portraying the Epicurean as getting onto Chrysippus for, "He thinks all these guys are divine. All these guys are gods." So, it's very common in that context. And going along with this, he goes on to talk about the debate between Platonists and Stoics, for example, where Platonists, when they think of the gods, it's like, "No, they are asomaton. They are unbodied. They do not have bodies." And writing in Latin, he even quotes them in Greek to be precise. He's like, "They say this." Well, the Stoic says, "They are wrong." And I'm paraphrasing here, but it's like for any being that has motion, that has will, and determination and all that, we know they have bodies. The gods have bodies. So- Hmm ... so a Stoic and Platonist can argue about that long before Paul and long after. And so when you're a Greek-speaking Jew in that world, an educated one, especially one, a Pharisee, who thinks that, "Oh, the resurrection. We're going to become as the stars," and we're going to talk about this. They thought the stars were gods. Just like this. The Greeks and Romans thought this, many of them. Ancient Israel thought this. And most Jews thought this as well, of the period. All the literature we have seems to suggest this. But if you go and look at the source of this, this is where some of my work comes in, is when you go look at Deuteronomy, and Dan's written about this too. When you go look at Deuteronomy, it's very clear that the celestial bodies are conceived as when they look up and they see literally transcendent, like literally above them, the beings that rule the sub-lunar sphere, and this is stock ancient Mediterranean cosmology right here, is they're all gods up there, little g. They're all divine beings up there, and they're sort of tasked with running everything down here.

Dan Beecher Interesting.

David A. Burnett Yeah. That's the common belief, and Jews did not depart from that common belief. That is a common shared belief. Now, everyone had their own narratives as to how that happened, and they had their own interpretations. Are they good? Are they bad? How do we relate to them as our own people with our own deity? That was the conversation. So if you really want to get into the conversation in the 1st century, that's the level at which the conversation is being had. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Dan McClellan And if I can butt in a little bit. There was a great book published a bit ago by Beate Pfann-Graziadei, and she was the editor. Mm-hmm. It was called "Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism."

David A. Burnett Great book.

Dan McClellan One of those dichotomies that we use a lot is this notion that everybody was just going along okay with the gods, and then suddenly something just stopped it immediately, and everything just did a 180, and we're just going the other way. This idea that monotheism was just a nuclear bomb that just totally revolutionized the world. And there's absolutely no indication that any such thing whatsoever happened. No evidence. It is incremental elaborations, and as we have all this authoritative literature that we still have down to this day, still considered authoritative literature, where we have precisely these ideas. Deuteronomy 4:19, "When you look up to the heavens and you see the sun, the moon, the stars, all the hosts of heaven, do not bow down to them." It says that the Adonai gave these to the nations of the earth. In other words, these are the gods of the nations, and this is reflecting on Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where it says they divided up the nations according to the bene Elohim, the children of God. And even in Judges, when you've got Deborah fighting against Sisera, what does it say in Judges 5? It says, "Even the stars in their courses fought against Sisera." This is another reference to the gods. And so these authoritative texts are still there when 1st-century Jewish people are interpreting this. And they have not just said, "Oh, well, there's a line here, and from here on out, we are understanding this completely differently." They're still looking at this and considering these stars, these divine beings, the host of heaven, as the gods of the nations. And that's a dichotomy that frustrates me, that we think there was one day where everybody just decided they were just going to suddenly believe something entirely differently. Yeah. And everything that our parents and our grandparents and everybody before us believed, we're just going to reject. That's not how ideologies work. It is- That's right ... slowly incremental.

Dan Beecher It's funny that people, we have these vestiges even in our modern lives. We still call a bunch of the heavenly bodies after Roman gods. Yes. They still bear those same names. So it makes sense that at one point, it wasn't just named after gods, those were the gods. That's who that was.

Dan McClellan And they didn't have the benefit of the scientific experimentation and exploration that we have today. So it was a lot more widespread to accept those traditions that Pumbaa couldn't accept in "The Lion King" because he thought they were giant balls of gas burning millions of miles away. But he was corrected on that.

David A. Burnett But we got to remember the social aspect of this, too. When you think about if you're traveling in the ancient world, which only the rich people could do anyways, unless you're just a slave in a trail here. But the point is, when you're traveling in the ancient world, you go to some other city or just some neighboring city, and they have a god of that polis. We call this cosmic geography. The idea is that god is over that little region, and they have their own language, they have their own traditions that are maybe hundreds of years old, and it's totally different than ours over here. We have our deity over here, we have our temple, we have our stories and our traditions. People didn't go around, for the most part, people did not go around the ancient world saying, "Well, our god is the only one, and all of y'all's are fake, and all of y'all's are wrong." That's not how they saw the world. Yeah. When they go into some neighboring territory, and the Bible is full of this, and Dan's talked about it on the podcast. I've heard him talk about this. When you go into some neighboring territory of that some other deity's purview. And so you know that you're in foreign soil was cosmic in their mind. You're going into a place that's watched over and cared for or not by other deities, and you might be afraid. It's like, "Well, oh, wow, are the people going to do horrible things to me because they're under the purview of that deity? Are they going to hate me? Are they going to like me?" And so hospitality's wrapped up into this, too. It's like, "Oh, that god has a good reputation because his people are hospitable when we go in their territory." You see? There's social aspects to this, too, and people want to tell stories. They want to know, "Well, where did their god come from? Where'd their god come from?" So people tell these stories. So when we talk about in religious studies and critical history a lot of the time, when students get introduced in grad school or undergrad to syncretism, religious syncretism, where this religion has pieces glommed on from that religion over there and that religion over here or that philosophy over here. It's such a wooden way of talking about very fluid things in everyday social realia. Yeah. When you're living next to people that have other deities and other temples in your cosmopolitan Greco-Roman city, like Corinth, where you got people from all over the map, quite literally, in the same city. You got a temple on every stinking corner almost. And you're a Jewish people who may have your synagogue, and some of them may be real hard-line conservative fundamentalists who are like, "No, the Torah says we don't go after those gods. We don't worship those gods. That's evil idolatry filth." But then you might have other sort of perceived as urbane, sophisticated folks who are like, "No." And Paula Fredriksen brings this up, is when you're reading the Greek of Exodus in the synagogue and it says, "Don't blaspheme God," in Hebrew, when Elohim is translated into the Greek, it's the gods, the theoi plural. Oh, wow. Like, "Don't blaspheme the gods." Which just meant-

Dan McClellan And you might be in a synagogue that was built through contributions from somebody who worshiped another god.

David A. Burnett Exactly.

Dan McClellan And there might be a dedication on the wall to one of those other gods because they facilitated the building

David A. Burnett of that synagogue. In a synagogue. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So you see how this can destroy people's categories. It's like, "Well, no. They're Jews. When you go in there, they only worship that one god." It's like, well, sure, but it's way more complicated than that. And there's so many variegated positions on that. It's just like with any... It doesn't really take a lot of imagination to understand this. You just look at the religious landscape today. And we think there's these radical evolutions like we're talking about, like, "Oh, we're so different in so many social regards than those weird, dirty, ancient people." It's like, no. Sociologically speaking, we divide over the craziest, silly little things all the time in these religious traditions, and you have these plethora of different positions. And the argument over which one is dogma and which one isn't, it has everything to do with power. It has to do with who's in power, who wants to have power in that place, in that space. So you can never divorce these questions of, like, what's Paul's eschatology or whatever from all of the social and political aspects- Yeah ... that are touching that.

Dan McClellan Okay. Before we get too far adrift, I want to ask the relationship of this to the patriarchal promise to star-like seed, because that's, I think, one of the next steps in your dissertation. So we've got this understanding that the stars are considered divine, the celestial bodies are considered divine. This is still operative during the periods of the New Testament. So what is the patriarchal promise here?

David A. Burnett That's right. So if you're familiar with the stories to Abraham, the father of Israel, when he's given a promise in Genesis 15, he's taken outside, it says, by the word of Yahweh, which is very interesting. He's a character in this scene. He's taken out of wherever. We'll talk about this in a second. It says he's taken out and he's told to behold the heavens, and he says, "Number the stars if you can number them." And it says, "So shall your seed be." And so this great promise, you can envision it. Father Abraham looking at all the heavens. And traditionally, when we read this text, we think he's looking up. He's looking up at the heavens. He's seeing all the stars. "Oh, man, there's so many, I can't even count them." And what people will just innately, instinctively do, and it's totally fine. It's a pretty plain reading of the text. We'll say, "Oh, he's talking about how many seed he's going to have, how big of a family he's going to have. He's going to have tons and tons of offspring," and he can't even have children. Him and Sarah couldn't even have kids. So that's the miracle. That's the whole miracle. Well, yes, that is a big part of it, but lots of early Jews that I would argue and others have argued, Matt Thiessen is another scholar who's argued along similar lines in his book, "Paul and the Gentile Problem." But he cites my article a couple of times in that book, so that's good.

Dan McClellan And he's got a new book coming out called "A Jewish Paul."

David A. Burnett Yeah, "A Jewish Paul." Yeah, we want to plug that, as if he's not plugging it enough already. Just kidding, buddy, if you're watching. So this idea, when they read this promise and it said, "So shall your seed be," there are Jewish interpreters, ancient Jewish interpreters, and I would say it goes way back into ancient Israel as well, that did not interpret this just quantitatively, as in just how many there are. They also interpreted it qualitatively, what they would be like. So when they're promised, "So shall your seed be," a major Jewish interpreter, same time as Paul in the 1st century, a relative contemporary of Paul, writing from Alexandria, the famous Philo of Alexandria. When he comments on this text, he'll be very clear and says the text does not say so many. It says, "So shall they be," which denotes all kinds of other things like glory and immortality and all of these things. To take on the life of the stars, the astral beings. Because again, for them, for people like Philo and other authors in Judaism at the time of Paul and after, both Christians and Jews, even after in receiving these texts, they all think these beings up there are just that. They are gods. They are divine beings. Sometimes they're called angels. Josiah Bisbee's doing great work on questioning what angels really meant. In a lot of these texts, because that can be a term for lower tier servant deities. So, angels are not like these little floating cupids with wings floating around, right? These are like divine beings that when they show up to some human being, they fall like dead men. That when they encounter God, they're afraid they're going to die when God appears on the mountain. Well, humans act like they're going to die when they see these malakim, these angels as well. So, divine beings are divine beings to humans. We're little peons. They're like the immortal, powerful beings up there. So when they see stars up there, they're thinking, "Okay, well, if the promise to the patriarchs, to our fathers, that our identity as Israel, as a people, is going to be as the stars," that becomes generative of all kinds of interpretation in later Judaism. And in particular, the idea that those stars, they rule over all of the earth below. And this comes from the idea from Deuteronomy that Dan has already brought up and we've brought up, and this is what my book chapter was about, on 1 Corinthians 15, is that that assumption that you will become like the stars in the heavens is an interpretation of the promises to the patriarchs. Because we know from lots of Jewish literature at the time, especially all over Paul, he never shuts up about it. He's always talking about the promise to Abraham and the inheritance to come. What is this big kleronomia, the inheritance of the cosmos? He talks about in Romans 4. And this is what my first article was about, is like, I'm going to introduce a problem here. How in the world, in Romans 4, can Paul squeeze so much out of so little? He quotes Genesis 15:5, "So shall your seed be," from that star promise, and he squeezes into it the resurrection from the dead, becoming the father of many nations, inheriting the cosmos. It's like, okay, bro, hold up. Pause. How do you get all of that out of that? And there are scholars over the years who have pointed out like, "Oh, well, maybe there was an expansion of the land promise in Second Temple period, and that's what he's talking about." Or they'll say, only a few of them that I've found, one in particular that was really helpful was Philip Esler, has admitted like, okay, we cannot squeeze all of that theological content into Genesis 15 here, this little astral promise. If the promise means, "So numerous shall your seed be," if that's what it means, you're not going to get all that content into it. And this is what people do. Translators, including scholarly commentators, you can look at all the commentaries for the past hundred years, which I've done slogging through, and you'll find that every one of them almost, almost every single one, will insert the word numerous into their translations. Wow. And the text doesn't say that. And what's fascinating about it is that first-century interpreters like Philo catch this and make a huge deal out of it and say, "Yeah, it means way more than that. The author could've easily said, 'So numerous shall they be,' but he doesn't. He says, 'So shall they be.'" So then what are those stars? What does it mean to become like a star? Well, for lots of Jews, go to a book like Deuteronomy. Go to Deuteronomy 4 and see that the sun, moon, the stars, it's the famous don't make any graven images passage, right? This is like Dan's bread and butter right here. Wrote a whole book on it. So I will default to him on all divine image stuff. But I've said a couple things in print about this. But the point is, in that passage in particular, the one that talks about not to make any graven images, when it says not to make any graven images, it has a terrestrial creature list and then a celestial one. When he talks about the terrestrial one, he says, "Don't make any graven images because you didn't see my form in the cloud of the fire, not of man or woman, beasts of the field, fish of the sea, birds of the heavens," blah, blah, blah. But then when he addresses the celestial, he says, "Now look up to the heavens." And it's sort of like a similar image that you have with Abraham, right? It's like, "Look up to the heavens and behold the sun, the moon, the stars, all the tsaba'ot, all the hosts of heaven." This is the word for God's armies, his divine council, his celestial host that is around him. That's what he calls the sun, moon, and stars. He says, "Look at them." And he does not say there, "Don't make graven images of them." He doesn't say anything about that. He says, "Don't worship them." And he says, "Those that were allotted to all the other peoples or nations under the whole heavens." You see? So their idea of the gods of the nations that are allotted to them way back in that Tower of Babel story, when they separated all the peoples by their languages, and God's talking to an us, "Let us separate their languages," that's what we would call the divine council that y'all have discussed before. And so Deuteronomy imagines those, sun, moon, stars, that's the host up there. They're allotted to the other peoples. But Yahweh, my peoples, Jacob, I'm the one that delivered them out of the fire of Egypt, out of the furnace. I did that. And also, by the way, he mentions in Deuteronomy 4 after that, he's like, "Nothing greater has been done in this whole creation of Israel out of Egypt thing since the creation of man." This is significant because in my chapter, I try to argue that The list that Paul draws on when he wants to talk about what's the resurrection body like, because we have lots of texts in Judaism, from Daniel to 1 Enoch to 4 Ezra to 2 Baruch, all kinds of texts that talk about the resurrection is all about becoming like the stars, right? Lots of them. And so it's not surprising that we find that in Paul. But when he wants to describe what is that body actually like, what is that celestial body like, he has a creature list. And most people say, "Oh, that's right out of Genesis. It's creation, blah, blah, blah." But I argue that no, this is coming from Deuteronomy, and it's the exact same creature list you find in Deuteronomy. It's closer than the Genesis one. But in particular because Paul's one of those guys that thinks that the gods, those celestial bodies, they're bad. Back in verse 20 through 28, they need to die. So who's going to take over the show? Well, remember what he said back in Romans 4, that seed of Abraham is going to inherit the whole cosmos. And so now they're going to become like the stars, they're going to become like the gods, and they're going to rule the whole thing. And if you think that reading is crazy, what does he say right after his whole nature of the resurrection body section? He tells you, flesh and blood cannot inherit what? The kingdom of God. The whole rulership thing of the whole cosmos, you can't have flesh and blood for that. You need to become these pneumatic beings that are celestial. He literally calls the resurrected ones celestial bodies. And it's the same term he uses for sun, moon, stars.