The Prison of St. Paul

On a recent trip to Greece, we visited the site of Philippi.  While there, the traditional site of St. Paul's prison, mentioned in Acts 16, was being questioned.  This led to a discussion on the tension between facts and meaning.  If the actual site of the prison in Philippi is revealed to be elsewhere, does that mean that the traditional site, which has been a place of worship for centuries, loses all its meaning?  We discuss these questions on this episode of Navigating An Ancient Faith.

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Chapters

• 0:00 St. Paul's Prison
• 6:43 Sacred Sites
• 10:07 Facts versus Meaning
• 17:40 Is the Bible Always Literal?
• 29:59 The Meaning of Myths
• 38:59 The Trustworthiness of the Bible
• 48:01 Final Thoughts

Transcript

David: 0:05

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Navigating An Ancient Faith Podcast. My name is David Gwartney. I'm broadcasting here from St. Petersburg, Florida. And with me is my brother, JR Gwartney.

JR: 0:16

How are y'all doing? I've got my, I got my Fredo latte with me this time. We forgot about it last night. Coffee. My coffee, coffee. Yeah. There we go. We got it. Got it. Ready. So now we're, it's gonna feel like the cafe.

David: 0:26

Right, so that's what we're trying to capture here is us, us on our trip, sitting at a cafe, having great conversations that we go,"Man, we should have recorded this." And J.R. is coming to us from Jackson, Tennessee, right?

JR: 0:39

That's right. Yep. How's the weather down there? It's cold and rainy here.

David: 0:43

Well, it's hot.<Hot> Keep running the AC here, so

JR: 0:46

Yeah, I was about to say, we haven't had hot up here for a month.

David: 0:49

The things we have to suffer through in Florida.

JR: 0:51

Yeah, that's right.

David: 0:53

Middle of winter. We're still running the AC, so

JR: 0:57

Yeah. One we, one year we'll figure it out and just start doing Christmas in St. Pete every year.

David: 1:01

Yeah,yeah.

JR: 1:02

That's, that's what we need to do.

David: 1:04

Shorts and flip flops.

JR: 1:05

Yeah, that's right. Pool.

David: 1:07

Well, we just return, I got, I, I, I guess I shouldn't say we just returned from Greece anymore because now it's been about five or six weeks, but we're still in the process, I should say, of getting our thoughts down from our trip from Greece that we took in October. And we're trying to capture some of the conversations, some of the ideas we had. So we already talked about The Ascent, if you listen to that previous podcast. If not, go back and listen to it. How The Ascent prepares us to encounter the Sacred. And we saw that over and over again. Today we wanna follow up on another interesting conversation that we had that you and I both got excited about. What prompted it was when we were in Philippi, we ran into Paul's prison, or we ran into the location of Paul's prison.<Right> And it started this whole conversation between the two of us. And just to kind of give a little bit of background, we went into the site and there's a, there's a cistern in there that is the traditional location of Paul's prison. However, when we were there, we saw archeologists actually digging under what used to be a modern road, but it's now part of the Via Egnatia that runs right through the site. And we heard one of the tour guides saying"They're actually digging in a spot that they believe is the actual site of Paul's prison because of its location to the main area of the forum."

JR: 2:35

RIght

David: 2:36

So we saw this interesting back and forth going on because we heard one tour guide point to the traditional site and say,"This is the site of Paul's prison." And we saw tourists taking pictures there, right?

JR: 2:47

And, and the traditional site had, had clearly been converted into a chapel, uh, centuries earlier, you know?

David: 2:53

Right.

JR: 2:54

It's, it's not a chapel.<Right> But there, there's paintings on the wall and things like that. So over, over the centuries, the traditional site had been turned in, kind of converted into a chapel. You could tell.

David: 3:03

Yeah. It had been the traditional site of a lot of worship throughout the last, you know, several hundred years. This was clearly the site that people said,"This is the site of Paul's prison, so we're going to turn this into a sacred space or a place of worship." Right?<Right> And then we heard this other tour guide actually say,"You see all the people up there taking pictures?" He said,"they're not taking pictures in front of the site of Paul's prison." He goes,"because we now know that this place that they're digging is probably the site of Paul's prison." So, you and I talked about it because it raised this whole idea of, well, if you took a picture in front of that cistern, does that mean, you know, well you're just wrong now. That's totally meaningless. You might as well just delete that picture. I was gonna say throw it away. But you don't do that anymore cuz everything's digital.

JR: 3:52

Yeah, I was about say, that's right.

David: 3:53

You don't do that. So do you just hit delete because, well, that's a meaningless picture. And I think both of us came to the conclusion that no, that's still very meaningful. That's coming a little bit too literal from our perspective that ancients certainly wouldn't have seen it that way.

JR: 4:10

Yeah, that's right. And, in some ways, well, you know, even, even the way we're thinking of if it's factually right or wrong, the, well, the first is, I don't know that it really matters. It was one night in jail, you know, that he spent, and<Right> and so if we get that wrong, it's not that big a deal, you know? So it's kind of a minor location. But then on the other side it, it's like tradition matters also. And so I thought it was interesting, even as, seeing it as an ancient chapel, I thought was, fascinating to me. And you could make out some of the paintings. It was, uh, obviously in rougher shape than a lot of other ones. Yeah, I mean, so, so we still saw the traditional site, but, but that's okay. It's, it's, it's, it's not the, it might not be the actual site, but it's the traditional site. And I thought both ideas were interesting. It was neat to see them uncover what they thought was the actual site. as, as well. I thought that the traditional site was also interesting.

David: 5:03

Yeah. So we actually did a quick YouTube video when we were there, and if you haven't seen that, you can go to our YouTube channel, just look for Navigating an Ancient Faith, and you'll see about seven minutes of our discussion on YouTube that we posted there. And we wanted to talk more about this. But so what you saw was kind of this competing idea of the traditional site might not be the right site, but on the other hand, the traditional site had become in some sense sacred space. And it got us talking about, okay, which is, which is more important that, that we get the factual spot right, and that's what gives it meaning? Or that the traditional site becomes almost a sacred site because you know, it has this elevated meaning to it. And if we find out later that it's actually 20 yards, you know, down the street, that that's not really that important. And I, in fact, I remember saying,"It doesn't matter" on that YouTube video. That's why I brought that up. I remember saying"It doesn't matter." And I wanted a chance to go, actually go back and clarify what I meant by saying,"It doesn't matter" because facts and history do matter. But it launched this whole discussion between, I guess, what's the role of facts and history when it comes to reading the Bible versus the larger meaning that things take on.

JR: 6:23

Yeah, that's right. And, again, we said in this particular case, as far as Paul's, whether he spent the night there, you know, again, it's just one night, you know, in jail. So in some sense it doesn't matter. But, but it's, I just think it's interesting that there's this overall, this need to identify significant places in antiquity.

David: 6:42

Yeah.

JR: 6:43

Um, and I was gonna ask you why, why do you think that is? Why is it that we have this urge to identify this? And, and, and to go to more, the more mythological, you know, I understand, you know, we want to identify Jesus' tomb for instance. That's a, that's a hugely significant place. But also, what about like Greek mythology? Because we were there, and again, we saw the location, uh, right up the road from Paul's prison, uh, where Persephone was pulled into the underworld. What, what is, why do we have this need to identify significant places in antiquity, even on the mythological level?

David: 7:18

Yeah. So that, that's, I guess that's the whole conversation that we can have here is what is it about a site? And it's not just antiquity if you think about it, right? Because we have modern statues and markers to say, this is where I'm trying to think. You know, actually a a while ago went to Dallas and it was kind of cool, or sobering, I guess is the word, to be at the place where Kennedy was shot.

JR: 7:43

Right.

David: 7:43

And that, and that matters, right? That matters to go, I feel something different here than just reading about it in a textbook. So it's not just in antiquity. But yeah, we've spent the last 2,000 years establishing biblical sights, places where Paul walked, places where Jesus walked, places where miracles happen. And I think at least in that context, I think we have to give, well, so two things I would say, and then I'll kind of turn it back over to you and see what you think about this. But two things number one, I think it does bring up the importance of facts and history to legitimize a lot of the stories you hear, especially in the New Testament, right? But on the other hand, I would say that there is a need to remember, set up some kind of marker to say, I'm gonna remember what happened here. And in some sense, that place becomes meaningful and sacred. And I think that's what people are trying to do. In fact, the ancients what you brought up, I think is a good point the ancients, they would actually build a church or a chapel over a site.<Right> And that became that, that I think that was specifically because, okay, we're making this a sacred spot.

JR: 8:59

Yeah. And we saw this a lot in Israel, or Jerusalem, and it was kind of my first introduction to it is, is most of the iconic locations of the events, like Jesus', the location of Jesus' crucifixion, it now has a, a church around it. Um, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, is that it?

David: 9:17

Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Yeah.

JR: 9:18

Right. And then there's Christ's traditional tomb that also has a church around it. Christ's traditional birthplace in Bethlehem, it has a church around it. And we see it now that a lot of these iconic locations are kind of disputed and they, they all have these cathedrals built around them, but modern archeology has kind of discovered that they're probably not accurate. And so it was the first time I had this introduction of, oh wow, uh, I thought we knew for sure where Jesus was crucified or the tomb. And so it can be a little bit faith shaking to see that we're not sure that, that we see all these different sites and, and there's, it's, it's a big question about it. And so you kind of, you kind of look at that and you get, it it, like I said, it may, it may bother you a little bit that, well, we don't, we're not even sure if this is the right place or not.

David: 10:06

Sure.

JR: 10:07

Yeah, so it goes back to the need to, to signify it, but And we were talking about this earlier, that, that our stories, are nothing more they're, they're, they're just our stories are containers for both facts and meaning. And so on the factual side, that's important when it comes to things like, um, courtroom testimonies of the gospel accounts, things like that. Uh, and then at the other end of the spectrum is kind of that area of mythology, where the facts are not as important. And I would say ancient Greeks would even agree that, yeah, it's not, don't, don't worry about the facts of it. It's the meaning behind it. And, the meaning, the significance that the gods or goddesses, they, they embodied an idea. And so we're gonna build stories off of those ideas, and that's where most of our mythological narratives come from. And so, it's the balancing of those facts and meanings. And so if I were to be in court giving my testimony, facts matter heavily, hugely important, because that, that may mean somebody's innocent or guilty or whatever, you know?

David: 11:15

Yeah.

JR: 11:16

Uh, but if I'm just simply telling you a story about, uh, hey, get the, get this stupid thing that I did the other day, and, and man, I learned a lesson from this, you know? You'd want it to be accurate, but the, but the specificity of the facts don't matter as much because it's the meaning that I'm trying to communicate. And, and when somebody interrupts you and says, no, no, no, that's not what you were doing. Or that's, uh, it wasn't this day, it was this other day. You know, you've had those conversations. It's almost like you always interrupt them and say, that's not the point. I, I, that doesn't matter. And, and what you're saying is I'm not trying to communicate a story with facts. I'm trying to communicate a story with meaning. And so I say all that to say that's that's what a lot of the, the historic sites or their traditional sites, they're trying to embody meaning, and they're not necessarily trying to embody facts. That didn't mean that it didn't happen. Uh, we believed it, it happened. But, the significance of the traditional sites that the churches and cathedrals have built, been built around those embodies so much meaning. And that's where that matters to us. As opposed to we're not archeologists that are trying to figure out an exact location of, of one thing or another. And so, and so that's kind of what, that's the way I viewed that.

David: 12:31

Yeah. And I think to go back to what you started with is, I think, in some sense, especially depending on how, how you were raised, what Christian tradition you were raised in, it can be a bit disconcerting to suddenly hear something that says,"Oh, well this didn't actually happen here. We now know it happens there."

JR: 12:49

Right.

David: 12:50

But you know, but I think, I think that brings up a point, at least it has helped me to understand the ancient mindset versus our modern mindset. Because we're not just going, well, this is how the ancients thought. We're actually also examining how we think. And the ancients thought much more in terms of story and meaning, which like you said, is encapsulated in mythology. But I think we also have to recognize that we moderns think in terms of facts and historicity. We almost report stuff like a journalistic account, unless it's something like, you know, Star Wars movie or something like that. We all know that that's fiction. But we have these very set categories of, all right, this is news and journalism and facts, and over here is fiction and we don't like to blur the two.

JR: 13:46

Right.

David: 13:46

And we evaluate a lot of stuff on facts. The issue, I guess, would come into play where we start to apply that mindset to everything that we encounter in the Bible.<Right> So that, and we talked about, so that we start to apply that to a book like Job, or we start to apply that to Genesis chapter 1. Or even the Psalms or Revelation, like how do you apply facts and a journalistic account to a book like Revelation?<Right> You know?

JR: 14:19

Right. And I think, I think the reason we struggle going down this road is because it messes with foundational assumptions that we have about our faith. You know, if, if you and I were having a discussion about, um, uh, Bigfoot, right? For or against it, and we, we had a podcast on that and we discussed that, I may convince, I may have you con- I may change your mind or you may change my mind. But whatever we came up with, it wouldn't mean much to our daily lives or anybody else's daily life, right?

David: 14:51

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

JR: 14:52

But the deeper we get into meddling with people's foundational beliefs, the more uncomfortable it kind of becomes. You, you know, when, when you convince me of something that changes a foundational assumption I have about something important like my faith, then I don't like going there. And, and so the, the deeper down you get into that foundation, the more uncomfortable it becomes. And that's why I think that, that we kind of push these ideas away sometimes. Uh, but that's, that's the purpose of this podcast. A lot of it is to kind of dig down to some of these ideas, and not shy away from'em. But to actually talk it out and say, well, you know, what is it? What are we misunderstanding maybe about the way the ancients thought or the way, uh, you know, modern archeological discoveries and things like that. We're kind trying to tie all this together.

David: 15:42

Yeah, yeah. I think it's reflective of both of our journeys where I think there are times in past where there would be something that kind of shook my faith. But if you're willing to actually discuss it and understand it from different perspectives, understand it from a historical perspective, from the ancient mindset. I think I'm coming more and more to understand that these things don't have to shake your faith. In fact, they can actually strengthen them. I that for me personally, I think

JR: 16:13

Yeah, absolutely. It would actually say deepen. Sure.

David: 16:15

Yeah. It would deepen your faith. It would strengthen it if you try to understand it in the way it was written and not force my set, comfortable perspective on a piece of scripture that wasn't meant to say what I want it to say. I guess you'd say it that way.

JR: 16:35

Right, yeah. That's a, that's that's completely right. And, and yeah, we get, we get caught up about, well, I think again, we keep going back to that Western mindset. And I never noticed that until you go and talk to the people in Greece and things like that. It's just interesting that we really do, in the west have an idea of, maybe because of the scientific method, that we rely so heavily on facts. That we, we rely so heavily that everything needs to be accurate. Or it's like you said, maybe it's because we expect our journalists to be accurate and, and also we kind of get into the political where if you get one thing little thing wrong, it gives the other side an opportunity to dismiss everything you're saying. You know? So, so we kind of are in this kind of tense political atmosphere. We come from the scientific method background. We come through a history of trusting or not trusting journalism because they don't get all the facts right. And I think that kind of all together makes us view the Bible a particular way, where we want all the facts to line up perfectly or we want the entire Bible to be literal.

David: 17:39

Right. Right.

JR: 17:40

And, and we all know that the Bible is made up of several different books and several different things that are, you know, uh, authors

David: 17:48

Different,<right> different genres of literature. Yeah, yeah.

JR: 17:51

Sure. Yeah. And if you get hung up on the idea that, well, okay, this whole thing has to be literal. And if I, and if somebody shakes that idea you know, we talk about it in creation, you know, seven was earth created in 7 24-hour days? And if it wasn't, that bothers some people because<mm-hmm> they're like, well, you know, that's what the Bible says and, you know, we shouldn't go against that. You know, and, and science is now showing something else and well, science is simply wrong, you know. And because we don't wanna shake that faith. But a lot of times we find out that there's more than one thing going on. And, and so to say that the, to say that maybe the 7 24-hour days of creation isn't literal, doesn't mean that it's not true. And, and, and that we kind of get the idea of truth something being true and something being literal, being the same thing. And it's not. It may not be literal, but it's certainly true. We just have to understand how we're going to read that passage. And, and that's, and that's, that's really the struggle that we're talking about because, where should we look for symbolism and where should we avoid adding our own symbolism?

David: 19:00

So I, I would say a couple things. First, I think that comes from understanding what the original author's intent was in the first place. That's where I think we have to admit that our own modern perspective tends to get pushed on the Bible to make it say things that maybe it wasn't intending to say. Now, even as I'm saying this, there are probably people listening to this that are getting nervous about now. Like, oh, we see boy where these guys

JR: 19:28

Yeah. Well we see it in popular preaching, you know, that takes a passage from the Bible and frames it in such a way to support some ideology and that, and that gets and, and that's completely wrong and it gets under our skin. But it comes from that, I think. Some of it comes from that. Yeah.

David: 19:41

Well, yeah. So depending on what tradition you're raised in, there's a tendency to say that we want to treat the whole Bible as a history book or a journalistic account or a scientific textbook, right? And so that, back to what something you said, I think so that if someone comes along and pokes one hole in that and says,"Well that's not true," it's like a house of cards. Then we go, oh no, the whole thing's about to collapse. And that's where you get into angst about your faith, about, boy, you know, can I really trust this? What's this say about my faith? But when you step back and say, no, there are different genres of literature. There are different ways that our mindset differs from the ancient mindset. And maybe there's some, maybe there are points where I'm pressing my, you know, rational scientific mindset on the Bible. Then you actually start to understand some of the differences and you actually start to be freed up to understand certain parts of the Bible the way they were intended to be understood. So maybe a couple of examples, would help, So we talked about the ancient mindset, but we saw this on our trip because one of the conversations we had is we went to Mount Olympus, right?<Right> And we had the conversation of,"Did the ancients really think that if they climbed up to the top, they would see 12 gods sitting there on the thrones?"

JR: 21:04

Because we were sitting there thinking it doesn't matter how, I mean, 10,000 years ago, it wouldn't have been difficult. Well, it would've been difficult, but you could climb to the top and see that nothing's there. So it's not like nobody had ever been up there, right? It's not like<right, right> it's not like our view of heaven where well, nobody's made it to space, right? And so, uh, yeah, you could just climb up there and see whether they're there or not.

David: 21:22

Right. So in some sense we would have a tendency to go, well, surely they could have just climbed up there and seen that there were no gods up there, right? And you know, we'd go, well, silly ancients, they just didn't know what they were talking about. But that's absolutely not the case. Like you said, there are people who climbed up there. I don't think they were expecting to see Zeus sitting on a throne at the top of the mountain. However, if you asked the ancients,"do the gods live on top of Mount Olympus?", they would say"Absolutely." And as we were there, we kind of had this experience where, you know, we looked at Mount Olympus and it was impressive, and we go, well, of course that's where the gods live.

JR: 22:01

Right.

David: 22:01

Where else would they live, right?

JR: 22:03

Sure.

David: 22:03

But, that's starting to kind of bring our modern mindset into the ancient mindset and say in a symbolic way, in a mystical way, that's where the gods would have lived, even if you climbed up there and didn't see Zeus sitting on his throne. The mountain itself became a symbol of the Olympic gods.<Right> And so a lot of mythology actually is an attempt to say,"Here's a story that explains what's going on in the spiritual realm," the heavenly realm, not the material and earthly realm.<Right> And our mindset, actually, our modern mindset, I think has a difficult time tracking with that.

JR: 22:45

Yeah, I think so. And another good example is this idea that that, is it literal or is it figurative? You know, we see the number 40 show up all over the Bible. And, and Jesus was led in the wilderness for exactly 40 days. And the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for exactly 40 years. And it rained during the flood of Noah for exactly 40 days. And<yeah> Elijah was, you know, traveled 40 days to the mountain where he met God. And there's a dozen other references to the number 40 in the Bible. And the question we have is, is, is that literal or figurative? And, and it, and it might be very, well be literal and that's okay. But if I think all you do is, if you leave it there, I think you're miss- missing a deeper meaning along with that. You, you know, we find out that the meaning of the number 40 in the Bible is the separation between two epochs or, or distinct time periods. It's a division between two time periods and the often difficult journey across that division. You know, and once, once I, once I heard that, I went back to the stories and you lay that over those stories and, all those stories take on a deeper meaning. You know, there's a clear division between obviously the pre-flood and post flood, but there's a clear separation of epochs between the children of Israel wandering in the desert before they made it to the promised land and after the promised land. Right? Or Jesus's time in the wilderness being tempted tells us that there's a clear distinction between the time of Jesus's life before his call to ministry and the beginning of his ministry. And, you almost look at it and say, uh, yeah, how come the children of Israel didn't just walk directly to the Promised Land? And the answer is they weren't ready for it. There's a difficult journey that they had to take on in order to prepare themselves for the promised land.<Yeah> And, and all of the, all those stories have a deeper meaning once you understand that the number 40 means the division between the epochs, and then you have, you just have a deeper understanding of all those stories as well as any other story in the Bible that uses the number 40. I told you the other day, I came across, I happened to come across a story where I saw 40 and I was like, wait a second, does this make sense? And it does, and it lays right over perfectly. And it's like, yeah, yeah. It's the division between two time periods and the, and the, and the necessary journey to cross that division. And once we understand that, we can appreciate the stories on a much deeper level than if we had left it at the literal level or if we were uncomfortable saying, no, of course it means 40 days or 40 years. Uh, and if, and if you leave it there, you miss something, I think.

David: 25:19

Yeah. And to kind of bring this back around then to use your example of 40. Because I really like that idea that if somehow an archeologist I don't know how they would do this, but if somehow an archeologist proved that Jesus was only in the wilderness for two weeks, right?

JR: 25:35

Yeah. I've seen articles that essentially say it's impossible for somebody to live for 40 days<right> without food or water. Right.

David: 25:42

Right, right. So we know that that's not true. But let's say that somehow it was proven that Jesus was not in the wilderness for 40 days.

JR: 25:52

Right.

David: 25:52

For you and I, that would be a problem. Or maybe, maybe for a lot of modern Christians that would be a problem. For you and I, I think we're saying it wouldn't be a problem anymore. But that wouldn't be a problem because we would say,"See, the Bible account is wrong." But the people who wrote the Bible would say,"No, you're missing what we're trying to say when we said he was in the wilderness for 40 days." You're missing the whole point, right?<Right> And so that's where understanding the example of 40, what it actually symbolizes and maybe Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days, maybe he was in there for 35 days and they rounded up to 40.<Yeah> Maybe he was in there for a week. But to the ancient mind, they would say, knowing that what that number 40 symbolizes, they would say he was in the wilderness for 40 days. And if you don't understand that, you're actually missing the bigger point regardless of how many days he was actually out in the wilderness.<Right> You're missing what they're trying to say so once you start to see that pattern, you can actually start to apply it to a lot of different places in the Bible.

JR: 26:59

Right. And and it goes back to our struggle is where do we look for symbolism and where should we avoid adding our own symbolism?

David: 27:07

Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's a good point because I think then one fear that arises is, okay, well are you just giving away everything then? And that goes back to, you know, what happened a couple hundred years ago where, oh, well the Bible is just full of, the Bible's just full of morality tales. None of this really happened.<Right> And that's not at all where we're going. That's not at all where we're going. In fact, some of our modern mindset is a reaction against that to say,"No, these things did happen and they're true." And then we may have pressed that too much. But there are definitely parts of the Bible that are meant to be historical. And that's where you have to go back to the author's intent, I think. So for example, think about the Book of Acts where Luke is writing a historical account of what happened to the early church, to the Apostle Paul, because he was there and there's a lot of indication that he was writing it for some kind of historical document. Now, not even in the way historical document that we would say, but definitely historical document. So that's where we would say, okay, we believe the stuff that happened in the book of Acts actually happened because that's what Luke's trying to say. Right?<Right> As opposed to, let's go back to our example of Job, the Book of Job. And it always the book of Job is always interesting because you think of, you think you know the story of Job, but the story of Job is only actually like two chapters or something like that.

JR: 28:39

Right. And then, and then it's like 20 chapters of, of friends giving you bad advice. Right.

David: 28:44

30, 40 chapters of all these dialogues that take place, you know?

JR: 28:48

Right.

David: 28:48

I, you know, so then you go, okay, was Job historical? And you go, well, maybe we're not discounting the fact. But then you also have to take all these chapters of conversations that Job and his friends had, Job and God have. Well, are you gonna try and say that that's a journalistic account of all the conversations? Did someone have a tape recorder?<Right.> Or are they trying to capture the bigger idea that was taking place in what might have been, what might have started out as some kind of historical account, right?

JR: 29:24

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Well, again, it goes back to the, the stories are designed to communicate meaning, and I don't think Job was written to be a historical account. Meaning, meaning that it wasn't trying to say, here's here's Job's father and here are his sons and, and here's the lineage so you can look this up yourself. Uh,<yeah, yeah> as you know, like the lineage of Jesus or Abraham, and, uh it, it's leans heavily on the meaning side, obviously. And so we should read it as meaningful as opposed to worrying about the factual.

David: 29:59

Right, right, right.

JR: 29:59

You meet leaning more toward the, the meaning side. And the reason I think all this is interesting and, and, and it, it, ties in directly to our trip to Greece because here we are in Greece and, and we've got these ancient biblical sites that we're seeing, along with all these mythological sites of Zeus, and all these Greek gods. And so we, we see all this kind of mashed together. We look back and say, well, obviously one is not factual, meaning the Greek gods, they didn't, you know, they didn't run around, doing all the things that, you know, that are, are told in the stories. And I think we struggled with this. I remember struggling this specifically in Egypt. I, I don't know if you remember me telling you this, but you knew a lot about Egyptology. I didn't know much about it. And we were walking around the museum in Cairo. And you were, you were kind of saying, here's what they believed happened in the afterlife. And you needed this, and you, and this, this god takes you to the, in a boat, across this and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I remember stopping you and saying,"Who made this stuff up?" Like, like, how could this stuff have been made up? I mean, they treat it like it's fact. You know, the way they buried them, the, ceremonies that they had, treated it as if it was fact. But I'm thinking, I think I even asked you,"who's the person that made this stuff up?" right? And, and again, I think it goes back, it was, it was my lack of understanding of assuming that it was factual or that they thought it, of it as factual, as opposed to: No, no, no, they, they thought of it as meaningful. Now again, they might have thought it was factual, some parts of it, but it was heavily on the meaning side as opposed to the factual side.

David: 31:36

Right, right. And it's interesting in the ancient mindset, I don't know that, you know, factual is something that has meaning to us. I'm not sure it has a whole lot of meaning to an ancient person. Not that they didn't think that they were established events, but you know, even that question, well, did they think this was factual? They'd kind of look at you like,"What are you talking about?" you know?

JR: 31:56

Yeah, I think so. I think so.

David: 31:58

I just, I just told you the story. You know, what, do you not believe me?

JR: 32:01

What, what do you not understand?

David: 32:02

What are you talking about? That's right. Factual. Yeah, right?

JR: 32:05

Yeah, that's right.

David: 32:05

And yeah, I think if we had, if we could have conversations with ancients, I think there'd be a lot of that. That we'd say, I, I use this example sometimes, you know, that you'd hear a story of a myth and we would say, but did that really happen? And they would look at you and go, well, I just told you the story. What are you talking about?<Yeah, yeah.> You know, and it would be, it would be our modern mindset that would wrestle with the idea of did that actually happen? And that's a problem if it didn't happen, because now you're not being honest with me. You know?

JR: 32:35

Right. And their, their response would be,"Yes, this happens all the time."

David: 32:39

It happens all the time. Right.

JR: 32:41

It happens over and over. Right.

David: 32:43

It not only happened once, it happens repeatedly, right?

JR: 32:46

Yeah, that's right. Because the pattern, you know, is what matters. The archetype matters. It's the, it's the emergent pattern in stories. And sometimes the, the pattern matters more than the story itself, right? I could tell you a story about what I put in my coffee this morning, but it wouldn't be interesting because it doesn't carry any meaning. I mean, unless you were that into coffee, right?<Yeah> But, but I could tell you a story about, um, my losing what my, losing my retainer in the, in the fourth grade. And mom this is a true story by the way mom ha Mom had to come up to the, uh, cafeteria and help me dig through the garbage because you know how you, you wrapped, you'd wrap your retainer. Did you ever have braces?

David: 33:28

I didn't. No, I never did.

JR: 33:29

Ah, you lucked out. Yeah. Okay. So I had braces. Well, you wrapped the retainer in a napkin cuz it's kind of gross looking. It's this fleshy looking thing that you said on your, on your tray. So yeah, you wrap it in a napkin so you don't gross everybody out. Well then you end up throwing the thing away. Anyway, me and mom dug through the garbage, right? If I told you that story, even, even right now, while I'm telling you the story, we're both laughing because it has meaning, right? And, and if you were to go back and maybe ask mom and, and she said,"Well, no, that wasn't the fourth grade. That was the sixth grade." You know what I mean? Or something like that, that doesn't ma-, that doesn't change the meaning of the story. And we get different things out of that story. So it can be<Right>, it can be, it symbolizes, what a stupid fourth grade boy thinks. It symbolizes what we all love about our mothers is that she comes up to the school and actually helps me dig through the trash. I mean, isn't that just, isn't that every mother right there? I mean, and so we hear that and the story has meaning. But it might be less factual than, because I know it can tell you exactly what I put in my coffee this morning. It might be less factual than what I put in my coffee, but it carries so much more meaning and therefore it's more interesting. That's why we grab onto stories.

David: 34:39

I think that's a good comparison maybe of what ancient myths were, because we all get together, especially holidays. It's almost Christmas time at the time we're recording this, you know, and everyone tells family stories. And some of these are retold every single year, right?

JR: 34:54

Yeah, yeah.

David: 34:55

And we don't even have to like tell the whole story and everyone starts laughing. We know the story, we've heard it a hundred times, but you know, someone tells the story and you actually, we may be surprised to find out how much of the story is factually inaccurate. But that's not the point of a family story anymore, right?

JR: 35:14

Sure.

David: 35:14

It's the family story becomes myth.

JR: 35:16

Yeah, it's shared expereince.

David: 35:17

It becomes the legend. It's the shared experience. It's the meaning, it's the legend that's retold every year on an annual basis. It's almost like the, the story itself supersedes the actual facts and details of what actually happened.

JR: 35:32

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And if you really think about the purposes of myths, I mean, those stories are on top of, you know, generally our, our family stories, they generally happened. If we got the facts wrong, that's fine, but because there, there's a meaning behind it. But on top of that, myths we're trying to communicate the unknowable to some degree, certainly the unseen. It's an attempt to de- describe what's happening in the heavenly realm. And, uh, you also said that it was, you know, it's also trying to communicate the ideas about the human condition. And so, when you're trying to communicate something that's unknowable, it's gonna take on an extra layer of, oh, different, different meaning that, that we're pulling from these mythical stories. And, and it's important to remember too that, that's the best way to communicate, certainly in the ancient world, is through stories for a couple reasons. Because, most of the world at that time was illiterate, right? And stories could much more easily be remembered and spread, in the days before printing presses and certainly the internet and things like that. And it turns into our family stories, right? We don't have to pull out a book or we don't have to pull out our notes and say, what happened on this vacation again? You know, it's like we know the story because we've said it over and over and over. So it could be eas- more easily communicated, uh, to certainly a much more illiterate society. But also it's, it's that that stories, and this is like our family stories, stories can be layered with meaning, right? And, and we saw this with the Greek myths, is that, you know, one author writes that, Prometheus's mother was Clemen, uh, was Clemon, and, and another says his mother was Themus, right?<Mm-hmm> And you could look up these examples and say, well, uh, this is proof that even they couldn't get their made up stories right. Right? Or you could say, well, the different authors layered their beliefs over top of the existing structure or the existing story because the stories themselves were a tool designed to pass on information, right? Because a great story can be understood by a child as well as communicate profound deep truths that the most brilliant philosophers can debate about for generations.

David: 37:42

Yeah. And also I think you bring up a good point about, in ancient times, stories were so passed down orally without being written down, that this is where you get some variations because someone could be telling a story, it could be written down 500 years later, and you might have five different versions of what happened.<Right> Because they've just, you know, they, they were passed down. They spread to different areas, but the whole reason they endured and spread is because the meaning they held.<Right> And so in that sense, in in a meaningful way, they were true despite little variations that happened over time.

JR: 38:22

Yeah, that's right. You know? That's right.

David: 38:24

And so we know the same thing happened in, in the Bible, that there was a lot of oral history. These things were passed down from generation to generation, meaning was attached. And so sometimes in the Bible, what we encounter, again, not all the time, sometimes what we encounter though, is we're seeing the story with all the different meaning that had been attached to it, passed down, recorded, which may supersede some of the factual events that our modern mind wants to hear and validate, right?

JR: 38:56

RIght, yeah, that's right.

David: 38:57

That's not what it's doing. That's not what it's doing.

JR: 38:59

Yeah. And if, and if you are heavily on the facts based side, one of the encouraging findings that we found was in the Dead Sea Scrolls. That, when you go back to the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was an assumption that the biblical scripture is gonna have changed because the Dead Sea Scrolls was how many more, how many hundreds of years earlier than, than the, than our oldest transcripts that we had.

David: 39:24

Almost like a thousand. Yeah, right. Almost like a thousand<yeah> years.

JR: 39:27

And, and they found out that the Dead Sea Scrolls actually were pretty, pretty much verbatim, right? Yeah. So we didn't lose, we, we assumed that the scriptures would be different and in only a very few place, insignificant places were you know, it was, it was verbatim to what we had in, in our previous transcripts. So there is a, there is a part where that matters obviously. Talk about the, talk about the, uh, Erastus inscription. I thought that was fascinating.

David: 39:53

Yeah. So we've kind of said mythology and stories and we've applied that to parts of the Bible to maybe better understand what was trying to say. But there are definitely parts of the Bible that were meant to be historical. And trust me, no one geeks out more when archeology or something like that confirms something that happened in the Bible. Well, in Corinth there is an inscription in Corinth called the Erastus Inscription. And we saw it, we went down to this field. There it is in stone. This is this inscription that basically says"Erastus, who is the director of public works, something like that paid for this structure out of his own funds," right? So that's basically what the inscription says. Well, the Apostle Paul spent time in Corinth and he wrote the book of Romans from Corinth, I believe. And one of the things that the Apostle Paul writes to the church in Rome is he says,"Erastus, who is the director of public works, sends you his greetings." Now, that's a pretty airtight case right there that Paul is sitting with this guy named Erastus, who was the director of public works in Corinth.<Right> And we, archeologists we didn't find it archeologists found this inscription, and it's a large inscription, you know, it's not these little tiny words.<Yeah> It's very large on a big stone that says"Erastus, who is the director of public works paid for this building with his own funds" or this structure, whatever. But it's one of those inscriptions that you can go to Corinth today and see that give direct evidence to the littlest detail in the book of Romans where Paul says, oh, by the way, Erastus from Corinth sends you his greetings. And we, we have his name carved right in the stone, you know?

JR: 41:51

Yeah.

David: 41:53

And so that's an example of something that is verified by archeology, by inscriptions, you know, as pretty much historical fact. In fact, a lot of, a lot of the cynics would say, well, yeah, that seems pretty historical to me, you know, because Erastus is not a very common name, so And so no one gets more excited about that than someone like me. Right?

JR: 42:16

Yeah. Yeah.

David: 42:17

To go, okay, here's where archeology validates little details that Paul was writing, and so we can trust that Paul's, you know, Paul himself not made up. Paul's not just making up names, like, no, this happened, Paul's writing, and he's mentioning just offhand people he's with, and we find inscriptions with these people's name on them.

JR: 42:40

Yeah. And, and any, anytime I hear of anybody going to Jerusalem, I always tell them, man, go to Hezekiah's Tunnel. Because what you'll find out is that, a lot of these historical sites are in question and we're not sure, but Hezekiah's Tunnel is really fascinating because it was discovered because of scripture. In Chronicles, where it talks about, Sennacherib or something like that, laying siege to Jerusalem and it, and it says that Hezekiah built a tunnel to bring in fresh water into the city from the pool of Siloam to the uh,

David: 43:16

Gihon Spring.

JR: 43:17

The Gihon spring, that's right.

David: 43:18

Yeah. Yeah.

JR: 43:19

And archeologists in the early 1900s or the late 1800s read that and he says, well, we know where the Gihon spring is. We know where the pool of Siloam is. There's gotta be a tunnel, right? And, but it had not been discovered. And so then they start digging around and, and he found the tunnel. You and I walked through it, it still carries water to this day. It's a fascinating story. And, and I could go on and on about that, about the inscription in the middle, how they dug to, to meet each other and how they were only a few feet off. And there's a generally straight tunnel, but about halfway in it does this kind of 90 degree turn for three or four feet and then goes back another 90 degree turn. It's u unbelievable how they did that. Uh, but that's, that was recorded in scripture and it was discovered because we knew of the traditional sites of those two bodies of water. And so, they looked into it and said, well, something's gotta connect it. It says it here in scripture. And they find out exactly that's what happened.

David: 44:13

Yeah. Yeah. So I guess a good way to summarize it is what we're not saying is that the Bible is just full of mythological stories, because we've just given a couple examples of how a lot of the Bible is written as history as a, you know, 1st 2nd Chronicles, 1st 2nd Kings. I mean, those are history books, right?<Right> But even in that sense, not in the history that we think about, but a lot of the New Testament letters is gospel accounts of the life of Jesus, accounts of Paul's missionary journeys. But the problem comes when we try to take that genre of literature and apply it to everything we see in the Bible. I guess that's the way I would kind of summarize it. When you take that same idea and apply it to Genesis 1 and 2, to apply it to Job, to apply it to Revelation and read everything in the Bible as a newspaper article that can be fact checked, I guess.

JR: 45:13

RIght, yeah. And I, and I think that about probably 90% of the Bible that we understand is correct in the way we understand it, that we look, nobody thinks that Song of Solomon is supposed to be some literal account of anything, right?

David: 45:28

Yeah.

JR: 45:28

It's, it's clearly poetic. And I think that we understand probably 90%, maybe 95% of it. But then there's just a few gray areas that were not positive, whether it's literal or whether it's figurative or metaphorical. So I see the argument, there's a danger in opening the door to a completely metaphorical understanding of the Bible. And that's not what we're saying at all, right? Jesus really did live on this earth and suffer and die and rise, and that all, all really happened. But then again, I think that the real danger, uh, well, another danger is not embracing the deeper meaning of the imagery.<Yeah> The numbers, the understanding that the, the ancients understood that we've kind of lost. And, uh, I just kind of worry about missing out on that imagery, more than I worry about the argument between the literal and the figurative.

David: 46:15

Right. And I think that's a great point that you just brought up, that in only reading the Bible as a history textbook or something along those lines, that there's a lot of meaning and depth of spiritual ideas that we can miss when we refuse to see the symbolic meaning of stories. The patterns that we see repeated over and over again, that may mean something more than the actual thing going on. We can miss larger swaths of meaning when we only try and focus on all the details and facts as important as they are, we can miss meaning. And I guess that's one thing that I've seen is that I've actually had my faith strengthened by reading more meaning into the stories and worrying less about every little detail or naysayer, or did this happen or did, didn't this happen? Not in every part of the Bible, but in, in a lot of the parts of the Bible.<Yeah> New meaning emerges when you just let it be what it was intended to be.

JR: 47:22

Right, right. I'm like, you, uh, my faith has been strengthened by understanding that the emergent pattern in stories matter, and you can see it over and over. I can read the story of Jonah as a child and get something out of it. But I can also dig into it as a theologian and see all these layers and patterns to it. And that's the brilliance of the Bible in general, that in one sense, it can be understood by seven or eight year old. And then in another sense, on a deeper level, academics and philosophers have been discussing it for centuries, you know? For, yeah, yeah, yeah. That kind of ties it up.

David: 48:01

So I guess to wrap this up then, let's go back to the whole idea of Paul's prison. Was it the cistern that we saw, or was it the new place that the archeologists were digging up? Yeah. And that's where we reached our conclusion that it really doesn't matter, in some sense. The cistern clearly became a meaningful spot of worship. And that in itself gives that spot meaning. And if the archeologists say determinatively that no, this is the spot, then that's okay too. That doesn't negate what happened at the cistern.

JR: 48:34

Yeah. I, yeah, I agree. I think so. That's right.

David: 48:37

So there we go. That problem is solved. If you have a

JR: 48:40

It only took us an hour to, to figure that one out, right?

David: 48:44

If you, if you took a picture in front of the cistern at Phillipi, then, uh, don't throw that picture away.

JR: 48:50

Yeah. Don't burn it or delete it. Right.

David: 48:52

Any, any closing thoughts from you from this whole conversation?

JR: 48:56

No, I think, I think we pretty much covered it. Have you ever been locked up? Okay. You ever been, you ever, you ever spent the night in jail? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know.

David: 49:05

Uh, literally, or no, no, no, mythologically?

JR: 49:08

Literally matters now, right?

David: 49:10

No, no. I've never been there.

JR: 49:12

There you go. Well, surprising to most people, neither have I. I've, I've been in the back of a cop car a few times, but no, I've never, uh, spent the night in the pokey.

David: 49:21

Wow. That's a whole nother podcast right there.

JR: 49:22

Yeah, I was about to say.

David: 49:25

Well, I would, I would wrap it up. I guess one thing that came to mind here at the end is, you know, there is a verse that Paul says,"If Jesus didn't really rise, then our faith is in vain and we are of all people to be most pitied." And I think that's, yeah, I think, I think it's a good way to end this, to just say, you know, don't misunderstand this conversation. There are points in the Bible that are absolutely crucial to say, we absolutely hold this to be true. The problem emerges when we try and press that in every single verse with our modern scientific mindset.

JR: 50:00

Yeah. Well said.

David: 50:01

All right. Well, hopefully you enjoyed that conversation. Leave comments if you have some thoughts. If you like the podcast, please subscribe, share it with your friends. We're going to do a couple more of these, trying to get our thoughts down on our Greece trip, and then we'll move on to other topics.

JR: 50:20

Yeah, absolutely. Leave us comments. I like reading them, I like responding to them and we like the conversation to go a lot further than me and you, we'd like to include everybody, so please comment and please subscribe.

David: 50:31

And check out our website, navigatinganancientfaith.com. That's all one word, navigatinganancientfaith.com. Subscribe so you don't miss more content that's on the website and thanks for listening.

JR: 50:43

There we go. See y'all.