Transcript

Hello everybody.

Happy Bacon Friday.

For those familiar with Bacon Friday, this is the nickname given to the Friday in the eve- Easter octave because you can eat meat, there's a solemnity and so for those who keep the Friday, uh, abstinence for meat all year round, this is a special joy and really for anybody who's been at least doing meatless Fridays all throughout Lent, the fact that you can have meat on a Friday is kind of a fun, uh, perk, I guess.

Uh, also for those who don't know, this is kind of an oops all Barry episode of Express Lane Q&A. So let me explain a little bit because this is not normally a public live stream, and that was, um, entirely owing to my haste, but it's actually an inadvertently good opportunity.

So I haven't been promoting it probably as much as I should.

I don't like doing ads of any kind, uh, but at the same time, it does help pay for the production costs and also there are real perks.

Like, I actually I love our Patreon.

I love the Patreon community and, uh, so I'm just gonna explain a little bit of what this is and how we're here and what questions I'm gonna be answering today.

So, um, at shamelessjoe.com, which is how you get to my Patreon, there's different tiers of support.

At the $5 a month level, uh, you get an extra, uh, bi-weekly, uh, like every two weeks, uh, live stream episode of about, uh, an hour or so, usually on Mondays.

At the $10 a month level, you get that plus every week you also get another so-called Express Lane episode.

Express Lane because I get to the questions faster, uh, because there's a lot of questions and they're often interesting nuanced questions that it takes me a while to answer, and so I don't get through questions as fast as I probably should.

I don't have Cy Kellett telling me to speed it up.

Uh, so I do that once a week, usually on Fridays, uh, sometimes I have to move it with travel.

This time I'm going to the Conference of Trent, so I said, Let's just do it on Friday, but instead of in the afternoon like we normally do it, I'll just do a slightly shorter one for about forty-five minutes.

And in my haste to set up the stream, I accidentally set it to public and then thought, well this is a happy accident, as and one guitar man says.

Uh, you get to Those of you who are not patrons can see the kind of questions that I answer on Patreon every week and if this is something where you're like, I would like that, I did the math and you get roughly six extra hours of Q&A content per month for ten bucks, which I don't know, seems like a, a good deal, and even if you're not interested in watching six hours, it's a good, it's a good way to support the channel.

There's different tiers of support.

While we're talking about it, then I'll move on.

Uh, I've got five, ten, twenty-five, and a hundred.

When I put the hundred, that felt insane.

Like I thought, No one's gonna spend a hundred dollars on this show, and I was wrong.

There's a group of you who do, um, and we're part of a Signal, like Signal app, it's like a, uh, an encrypted, like safer chat app.

It's kinda like WhatsApp or anything like that, you know, Facebook Messenger, anything.

And we have a Signal group and we're actually going to drinks tonight at, uh, the Conference of Trent in Dallas.

So the timing here was all very providential because I get to tell you about all these cool things and, um, yeah, there you go.

All right.

Uh, because this is public, I'm just gonna use first names.

You'll know if your question is answered, uh, those of you in the chat.

And this also means I'm not gonna be taking any super chats or anything like that, uh, because, uh, yeah, I've got a bunch of questions to get through and not a lot of time to do it in.

So Ben asks, Hey Joe, I was talking with my brother's fiancée, who is an OCIA, about the Jehovah's Witness belief about spending eternity on an earthly paradise rather than heaven.

I brought up that the Catholic belief is not too far off, that we believe that we'll live forever on the new earth after the Second Coming.

She was surprised and had not heard this as a Catholic belief.

She was confused on why we would die, go to heaven, then come back down to Earth.

She understood the new heavens and the new earth and was familiar with the relevant verses.

I tried to explain how the new creation won't have the same divide between earth and heaven, but I don't think I did the best job explaining the whole theology.

Would you mind picking up my slack?

It's a good question.

One of the hardest things for the Israelites to understand was that God wasn't localized to a certain place in the cosmos.

So you find these moments in the Old Testament where people who leave the region of Israel start worshiping other gods because they don't think the God of Israel can hear them, and so they'll turn to like the Philistine gods or whomever.

And that was very much the kind of mindset of the ancient world, that you have gods of different places and, uh, this is as I've, I've think I've said this at least twice publicly in the last month, but I'll just say it again.

This is part of the message of the Book of Jonah, that Jonah, we see in Jonah the folly of trying to run from God, who is the God of the whole cosmos, and this is also why God desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, 'cause He doesn't just have one You know, He has a chosen people, but that doesn't mean that He doesn't care about the rest of the world.

As He tells Abraham right in the start in Genesis, it- through him, all nations will be blessed.

Like the point of the chosen people is not a selfish, You guys are safe and everybody else is just doomed.

Deal with it.

The point of the chosen people is God wants to work through people to bring salvation to the whole world.

And so getting this right is really important because that same misconception of what we might call regionalizing God happens when we talk about heaven, that we talk about heaven as just like a far off place, um, and this is not a good understanding, that there is a directionality when we talk about heaven, you know, we talk about, you know, the ascension, Jesus is going up, but don't imagine that heaven is like outer space.

Um, when St. Paul talks about the third heaven-A good understanding of that is the first heaven is the atmosphere and the sky.

Second heaven is like outer space, and the third heaven is the, you know, the domain of God, if you wanna say that, the abode of God.

God is not local to that but this is the way we talk about, um, leaving the strictures of material reality in such a way that we are in the living presence of God but not in such a way that all materiality is left behind.

How do we know that?

Because Jesus has a body and as Catholics we would say Mary is also bodily present there.

So Jesus right now is bodily ascended into heaven.

So this is, I think, important to understanding, uh, where this heaven, new earth reality fits in.

That Jesus has ascended, and that's not the end, because Jesus will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

Now, I did an entire debate on the idea of soul sleep, so if you wanna watch a debate, um, this is on the Answering Adventism channel.

But it might have some relevant stuff in there.

Obviously, as you can probably tell from the context, in that, uh, capacity I was responding specifically to the Adventist version of this, but they're gonna have a lot of the same problems with the idea that when you die, your soul goes to stand in the presence of God.

Uh, there is something mysterious about this, but we don't want to imagine it as, uh, localized in that way.

Rather, a helpful way to describe it might be to think about heaven in terms of another dimension that you can't see, and there's plenty of evidence of this.

To give one example, in Luke 1, when the angel appears before Zachariah, he says, I am Gabriel who stand in the presence of God always.

It's-- I lo- it, it's a chilling line because here's the, the priest who is special because he can go before the presence of God on very special occasions.

You know, the high priest can go before God in this unique way on Yom Kippur and then the other priests can, you know, they serve in the temple, so they are adjacent to the divine presence in the temple.

But God is not localized in temples, as repeatedly he tells his people throughout the Old and the New Testament.

That, yes, he is present there in a special way, he has a certain mode of presence in the temple, but he's not confined there.

And Gabriel kind of pulls rank to just be like, basically, Look, I behold God in his essence always.

Um, that's incredible.

And then to see Gabriel be seemingly deferential towards Mary, saying, Hail, full of grace, it is revealing because Gabriel experiences something way cooler than Zachariah.

This is not precise theological language.

Mary experiences something even cooler than Gabriel.

She gets to bear God in her womb bodily.

The closest any of us can ever get to that is the Eucharist.

So heaven and Earth, the intersection.

We have here, even in that moment, right, you have the uniting of heaven and Earth in a, in a way that is united but not blended.

You know, Jesus is fully God and fully man, but he is not half and half, and it's not like he's fully God-man hybrid.

Um, so heaven and Earth have this intersection.

This is why the resurrected Christ can pass through walls without any difficulty.

And, you know, like, what is sown is a physical body, what is raised is a spiritual body.

It's not a repudiation of physicality, it's an acknowledgment that there is a new property to the body, uh, that it now has.

So that begins now, and we see that with Jesus, we see that with Mary, um, perhaps with Enoch and Elijah as well.

And eventually, all of us will participate in this, where the, the veil separating heaven and Earth will be ripped away and what appears to be ordinary creation will be revealed for what it truly is, and we will behold God without forsaking materiality for it.

Like, it's, it's a good thing that in the resurrection you will have your glorified body, that God doesn't scrap creation, he redeems and glorifies it.

Uh, so it's not about, like, we go up to some place where we can see God and then we come down where we can't see God anymore, and then we walk around, like, Chicago or something.

Like, no, no.

Even Chicago will be glorified.

Um, randomly chose Chicago.

I've got no beef with Chicago other than O'Hare Airport.

Uh, so yeah, hopefully, hopefully that helps.

If, if you're imagining this overly localized way, you're making this very ancient, very classic misunderstanding.

Okay.

Xavier says, Do not plan on doing this myself, but what are your thoughts on mortification like flagellation?

Is it harm-- Is harm to oneself intrinsically evil?

The difficulty of the question is all bound up in what we mean by harm to oneself.

It is wrong to do, uh, anything that would mutilate the body, so that would be too much.

But there are plenty of things that cause pain to the body that aren't bad.

There are plenty of things that, um, can e- like, even I've heard exercise is very tough on the body.

I'm, I'm joking there.

Uh, the Like, when you train really hard for a race or when you get into amazing shape for a movie role or something like this, people regularly put their body through the wringer, not out of a hatred for the body, but out of a goal that is higher than mere bodily pleasure.That's not evil And so similarly if you're engaging in practices where you are disciplining your body without causing like grievous injury that's fine and good There's plenty of ways to do this So a lot of times people's imagination is like really you know brutal bloody like people whipping themselves with shards of glass and all No But to give an example St. Therese when she would sit in chairs wouldn't relax her back on the chair She would sit upright without like relaxing into the chair That's not some brutal like oh I can't believe she did that Hopefully if that's your reaction touch grass So it's a small thing It's not an easy thing by the way If you've ever tried to do it it's not easy Or there are saints who you know they would offer their prayers with arms outstretched at times you know particularly like private prayer Those kind of things are about reminding your body and yourself that there's something greater than the body The goods of the soul are greater than the goods of the body and the inconvenience of the body is worth it for the sake of your own spiritual good So yeah it's depending on what it is it can be fine It's certainly not intrinsically evil However if it's something where you're causing grievous harm that would be that would be the problem All right Xavier has another question that I think is completely unrelated Says number one or number two sorry If material sufficiency is true then isn't the canon of scripture implicitly in the Bible?

If so doesn't the argument where does the Bible say what books belong in the Bible fail?

Granted it's certainly not clear where the canon of scripture would be in the Bible but the point still seems to stand So yes as one of their commentators replied people who believe in material sufficiency from a Catholic perspective typically make a provisio excluding the canon of scripture That once you have the canon of scripture from tradition and the church you then have the tools to find support for every doctrine that we believe This is okay let me step back because some of you are probably not familiar with material and formal sufficiency I referenced it in the debate with Doug Wilson but it works like this The matter would be like the marble and the form would be like Michelangelo forming the Pieta out of the marble You could give me the same chunk of marble and it would be embarrassing I don't know how to carve marble and I don't know how to draw I don't know how to sculpt so I don't think it's going to go as well We'll see but I suspect that Mary would have some Pieta for me That's pity for the record So there's a view that says everything you need is in scripture like everything in the Pieta was in the marble But you still need the church and you need tradition to tell you where all the twists and turns are or in a less metaphorical way how to interpret the scriptures because that marble is capable of being shaped into many different things This is certainly a view that seems consistent with the writings of people like St. Irenaeus who talks about how the heretics take the beautiful mosaic of scripture or of the apostolic faith and they rearrange the pieces from a glorious picture of a king They take all the tiles and they rearrange it into a picture of a dog That's a good it's a good description It's a good analogy because you can find people who have a heretical theology and they've got Bible verses that they've interpreted to back up their theology This is like every heresy basically So it's not a question of them not believing in the Bible It's a question of them not understanding how to interpret the Bible because the text is capable of multiple interpretations How do we know it is?

Because it is in fact interpreted in multiple ways So that so one view says everything is there in the marble That's material sufficiency Catholics don't believe in formal sufficiency In other words we don't believe that just you and your Bible are going to come out with the Pieta where you're not going to have both the matter and the form You need something beyond the Bible to tell you how to interpret the Bible reliably You're going to get there part of the way Like if you have a chisel and a chunk of marble you might be able to get something but you're not going to get exactly what you should be getting So we don't want to go to the extreme of like oh you can't understand any words unless the church tells you That's the caricature that a lot of online Protestants have of the Catholic view I've never heard a Catholic actually articulate that view but maybe there's one out there Either way that's not what the church teaches The church teaches that for the fullness of the faith to be preserved intact you need tradition in the church So on formal sufficiency we definitely don't believe in the formal sufficiency of scripture That's the scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith That's all you're going to need for the rule of faith We believe the regula fidei the rule of faith requires tradition and the church And this is very clearly how the early Christians talk about the regula fidei They don't say it's just scripture It's an interpretation of scripture Okay Oh again I saw somebody just left a super chat This was originally a Patreon only stream I'm doing a special You guys get it too because I accidentally set it to public and I'm happy to have everybody here but I'm not going to be able to get to your questions today So if those are Monday usually every other Monday I do a super chat one for the general public If you want to join in on future express lanes you can join at shamelessjoe.com OkayUm, the other half of material formal sufficiency, this is a dispute about whether everything is found materially in scripture.

And overwhelmingly, Catholic teachings-- like when somebody says, Oh, the Catholic church contradicts the Bible.

If you watch my channel at all, you know that it's like, no, no, this is the verses that we see as pointing to this doctrine.

Maybe you read them differently.

You're not the pillar and foundation of truth, so I don't know why I should prefer your interpretation over the church's.

But these are passages that plausibly and credibly seem to point towards this Catholic doctrine.

The most obvious exception to that on both the Catholic and Protestant ground is, well, where do you get which books are in the Bible?

That does seem to be something outside of the matter itself.

Um, and so I think there's a, a good challenge there.

The thing we wanna watch out for I'm gonna hold up the book again because I get to mention it again.

Uh, Keith Mathison's book, The Shape of Sola Scriptura, he accuses Catholics of holding a two-source theory, and his evidence for this is that, well, Catholics believe in tradition and in scripture, and so it's this idea, like one chunk of teachings is over here in scripture, the other chunk of teachings is over here in, uh, tradition, and that's not a good understanding of the Catholic view.

As I said to Doug Wilson, the difference between the content of scripture and the content of tradition is less like First Kings and Second Kings, where it's just two different parts of the story completely, and more like the relationship between Matthew and Mark, where it's a Venn diagram with a huge amount of overlap.

And there's gonna be a few things that you're not gonna find, um, written down in scripture, like the Gospel of Mark is canonical, but nevertheless, Christians know from the beginning, and they don't know from scripture, so it seems to be something they're getting from apostolic tradition.

So that would be an important, uh, kind of nuance.

If you wanna get super in the weeds, I've already gone way too long in this question.

For those wondering why I'm constantly behind answering questions, this is why.

It's like ten minutes per question.

Uh, at the Council of Trent, the formulation et, et was proposed that, uh, we get revelation from scripture Oh, sorry.

Partim, partim.

I got that completely backwards.

Uh, partim, partim was proposed, that we get revelation partly from scripture and partly from tradition.

That's not a very good way of describing that because that sounds too much like First Kings versus Second Kings.

So instead, Trent proposed the language, and this was what was accepted, et, et, which just means and.

We get everything from scripture and tradition.

Dei Verbum is even clearer about this, particularly in paragraph nine of the Second Vatican Council, where it talks about how there's a unity between scripture and tradition.

So it's not as if, like in Gnosticism, for example, you've got the public teachings, and then you have the private, like secret teachings of Jesus.

That's not it.

So if your understanding of the Catholic view is that we believe in secret, unwritten tradition, that's not accurate.

We believe that the apostles proclaimed their teachings openly.

These were received by the people, and the vast majority of them were written down, but n- there's no promise that everything was written down, and there's no evidence that everything was written down, and there's a good amount of evidence that not everything was written down.

Like, for instance, the Gospel of Mark is inspired.

So given all of that, we would say, um, material sufficiency I, I think, honestly, the material sufficiency question risks being overly simplistic in both directions, and something a little more nuanced than a simple yes/no is probably needed.

Uh, but I, I mean, you'll find Catholic theologians who line up on both sides of whether we should say materi- the scripture is materially sufficient.

Uh, it certainly doesn't have to be for it to be revealed.

Whether it is or is not is a, a pure historical question, really.

All right.

Ben says, Hey, Joe.

I was just watching your video, The Canon Question Isn't About Papal Infallibility, and you make the claim that the authorship of the four Gospels cannot be found from internal evidence.

However, I also listened to Brant Pitre's book, The Case for Jesus, in which he spends a decent section at the beginning of the book refuting that very claim.

He claims that the proposition that the Gospels and/or the manuscripts were at any point anonymous is just false.

Is this a point that you have or would change your mind on, or is it simply a place where you and Brant disagree on the evidence?

Uh, neither, neither of those.

I don't think that they were anonymous.

They're internally anonymous.

That doesn't mean the same thing.

Uh, like if I write you a note and hand it to you, you watch me write the note, I hand it to you, but I don't sign it.

That is internally anonymous, meaning if somebody merely found the note, they wouldn't know who wrote it necessarily.

But you would know who wrote it because you have this additional information.

You watched me write it.

You watched me hand it to you.

So we want to avoid two errors.

One error is the idea that they were just these random documents that the early Christians later ascribed to the four authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

A lot of, um, secular and skeptical, uh, critics of Christianity frequently will make that claim, and it's completely implausible.

And one of the ways it's completely implausible is that if we were just making up names to assign to it, number one, we wouldn't have chosen Mark and Luke, who are not major figures in the New Testament story, and number two, uh, we wouldn't have all of the early Christians agreeing on this.

So when you have a question where people genuinely don't know, the Epistle to the Hebrews is a good example of one where there's an authorial anonymity that even the early Christians express, uh, uncertainty about who wrote it.

And so in that context, you have different people guessing whether it was Paul or Luke or Timothy or someone else, um, because it's Pauline in its theology, but Paul didn't I mean, his ministry was largely to the Gentiles, so did he write a letter to the Hebrews?

And if so, you know, is that why he doesn't sign it?

And he signs all of his other letters.

But-Some have speculated, well, because he was not held in high esteem in Jerusalem, he wasn't gonna be like, Remember, it's, it's your old friend Paul, because that would not have been well-received.

So you get all this kind of question about authorship.

You have none of that with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Everybody knows Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John until the modern era.

Uh, so I completely agree with Brant Pitre that they're not anonymous in that sense, but they are very obviously anonymous in the internal sense that they, they never announce the author.

So let me Well, let me give you an example so you know what I'm talking about.

Romans one:one.

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures, et cetera, to all God's beloved in Rome who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul opens by announcing who is writing it.

There's a from line, Paul, to the Romans.

In, you know, modern Outlook, that's how it would work.

With Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there is nothing like that.

Um, and that's undeniable, indisputable.

Nor is there anything making it clear who the author is from context.

The closest you get is the beloved disciple in the fourth Gospel seems to be John, and certainly we would say it is John.

From the text alone, you might say, Oh, um, this seems to be one of Jesus's disciples.

You wouldn't know it was John.

I don't think you would know it was one of the disciples.

You'd have to have other scriptures to let you know it was John.

Uh, and then you could from that say, Well, maybe he's writing this way because he's that guy.

You could make a maybe deductive case from that, but that would not in any way close off the fact that maybe it was a disciple of John who was writing it, or maybe it was a different disciple and you just got the identity of John wrong.

You know, you couldn't come to a reliable conclusion about apostolic authorship, um, or canonicity from the internal evidence alone.

I don't think Brant Pitre would disagree about that because that's a pretty clear open-and-shut case.

And Brant Pitre, if you're watching this, one, you should come on the show, and two, um, yeah, uh, let me know if you disagree.

All right.

Aaron says, Hi there.

Been a while for me, so here's a weird one.

Prompted by Wes Huff's conversation with Sean Ryan and subsequent breakdown on seven arguments for Nephilim being actual angelic hybrids.

If this were so, do you think this would suggest that the angels fell at different times versus all falling at the same time across Luc- Lucifer's rebellion?

True, it seems that maybe some fell after creation of man by crossing those boundaries that should not be crossed.

Now, that would be one implication of that, which creates a lot of problems in terms of our understanding of angelic knowledge.

Uh, this is really deep waters , but the experience of the angels, they're not taking in new information through their senses because they don't have bodies.

That raises a lot of issues in understanding them as literal angelic hybrids in terms of, uh, the Nephilim, but I'm gonna leave that kind of to one side.

The, uh, bigger issue is, like, this is why the angels are beyond redemption, because they have everything revealed to them that they need in an instant, and they either say yes or no to that.

So the rebellion is before the creation of man, which is why you see the serpent already in the garden, and it's, it's an instantaneous rebellion, and the angels that are faithful to God are glorified, and so then they get to see God in this new way.

Um, they are given the beatific vision, but they already had some exposure to God before that, similar to Adam and Eve.

But unlike Adam and Eve, their exposure isn't mediated through the senses and revealed over time.

So there's a limited sense of before and after with the angels, but it's not in a material, spatial way.

So theologians, uh, distinguish between temporality and eternity with this middle category, uh, called sempiternity, uh, or aeviternity, and the angels have something like that.

So yeah, that would be the issue there.

Um, and then that also relates to the, uh, other members of the heavenly court, as you ask.

And then finally you say, What are your own thoughts on the whole Nephilim/sons of Gods as angelic beings versus being just a different branch of humanity?

I think Jimmy Akin supports the latter, but sadly I don't recall a single one of his arguments.

I have not heard all of Jimmy's arguments.

I haven't heard Wes Huff's arguments or Sean Ryan's or Gavin Ortlund's, which are all the names that you mentioned there.

So I have heard, like, uh, what's his name?

Jonathan Pageau, uh, talks about this and some others have talked about this.

I've read some stuff, watched some stuff about this.

There's a couple different readings.

One is that these are Satanic rites, uh, being offered to, you know, uh, demonic beings that were worshiped as gods and that these were fertility rites, so that there was a union that was happening under explicitly supernatural and sort of Satanic auspices.

So if you, you know, you can imagine what some of the old-timey prophetesses were up to and where they had kind of the source of their power.

A lot of it was, you know, what sometimes called fertility magic.

So that sort of thing may be one of the things at work.

Another is, as it sounds like maybe Jimmy supports, that we're talking about those who are faithful getting married to or at least uniting with, uh, people who are not faithful, and that is a recurring theme in the Old Testament as well, which seems quite plausible.The argument I think there would be for the former of those would be that these are the mighty men of old, and that Genesis seems to be saying these guys are mighty because they've been forged in these sort of demonic fires.

That they are, um, imbued with malevolent aid and so whereas the surrounding cultures would have worshiped these guys as demigods, the Jews are saying, Yeah, these guys were very powerful, but they're not to be worshiped because their power came from an evil source.

There's, uh, actually plenty of ways you could get to that.

Honestly, either-- I think that is the takeaway with the Nephilim.

Like, the Nephilim are indeed very powerful.

They are like giants.

Giants is often used metaphorically, uh, in scripture.

So for instance, when they arrive at the promised land, they compare the Canaanites there as giants and say that they're like grasshoppers, uh, before them.

Obviously, the Canaanites are not like so tall compared to the Jewish people that it's like a grasshopper to a man ratio.

I mean, if that was the re-- you would have real problems eating food if you were that tall .

And, you know, like there's an actual disparity, but it's being exaggerated, and this is one of the ways that these kind of exaggerations often signal an honorific.

So if you say somebody's like super old or you say somebody's super tall, those are ways of acknowledging their wisdom in the first case or their might in the second case.

Again, I'll, I'll use the example I always give.

When David kills Goliath, the women saying, Saul has killed his thousands and David his tens of thousands.

They don't want that to be taken literally.

They want you to know from this that he did an a- an amazing job.

He, he saved Israel by slaughtering the enemy.

He's literally killed one guy, but saying he killed one guy doesn't do justice for how brave and mighty and deadly he is.

So we're gonna say tens of thousands.

That's what has to be kind of negotiated as you're reading this, that it's not like the author of Genesis is confused or lying.

It's that Hebrew works with these intentional exaggerations that would be understood and recognized in the culture that way, that sometimes we take very literally.

So it's okay to talk about these giants and understand them to maybe not be the level of giant that it would seem to describe, where a man is a grasshopper compared to them.

Like, they're not that tall.

They're not that tall.

And, and the Jewish people are not that short.

Um, all right.

Oh, I saw Deuterocanon, uh, ask why I'm not in Dallas.

I will be later today.

I'm doing a short live stream.

This is originally for patrons only, which is why I'm not taking super chats today.

I've said that a couple times, but unfortunately I can't say it fast enough, and people are wanting to give me money, so I'm really sorry.

Um, so apologies.

In, in fact, I might ask Vanessa to poll.

I think the chat log is saved.

Hopefully, we can poll those questions and the next time I do a, a YouTube live stream, I will get to those questions as well.

Yeah, this is for patrons.

If you wanna be part of this chat, you can join at shamlessjoe.com for as little as five dollars a month, but this one is for the ten dollar a month level.

All right.

Uh, Aaron has another question.

He says, One that I've been holding onto for a few days.

I was reading through Galatians.

I see Paul stating in one seventeen that he did not confer with any human being to go to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles, but went away at once to Damascus and didn't meet Peter or Cephas at Jerusalem until three years later.

Then in Acts thirteen, it says, 'The Holy Spirit said to the prophets and apostles at Antioch to set Barnabas and Saul for the work which I have called them.' Was this laying on of hands making them apostles, both Saul and Barnabas?

What is the best way to square this with apostolic succession?

My guess is Paul was not a successor, so didn't need another apostle to appoint him, since his calling came from Jesus directly.

Aha, you very well anticipated a theme of Tuesday's video.

I'm thinking that event had to be ratified as true by Peter, though I can't prove that from scripture.

Can you add anything that would help if someone used the Galatians passage to claim they also were called by Jesus personally to be apostles?

Yes.

So this is correct.

Uh, Paul is certainly called.

Barnabas, whether you call him an apostle or not, I think it's fair to call him an apostle, but I don't know that he's actually called an apostle in scripture.

I have to make a distinction here.

I try to make this distinction in my debates, uh, like the Mormon debate with Jacob Hansen, and people were like shocked and scandalized and confused that I said that there's a difference between the Twelve and the apostles, but there is.

There's more than twelve people alive who are called apostles at the same time.

So just like the term disciples sometimes refers to the Twelve, sometimes refers to a much broader category because a disciple is a student.

So too, the term apostle means one who is sent.

Sometimes that is referring specifically to the mission of the Twelve.

Sometimes it's not.

It's referring to these other people called and sent.

So, uh, the clearest evidence for this is first Corinthians fifteen, where St. Paul says that Christ, um, let's see, appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.

Okay, that's in verse five.

And then in verse seven, he says, Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

Last of all, as one untimely born, he appeared also to me, for I'm the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God.

So Paul tells us three things.

Number one, there's the Twelve.

Number two, there's a different group, the apostles.

These overlapping Venn diagrams, the Twelve are a subset of the broader category of apostles.

Number three, that Paul is in that broader category.So that distinction needs to be kept very clear because it leads people to a lot of confusion.

I've seen-- I don't know if this is a new belief or if I've only just started hearing about it in the last, like, five years or so, but I've seen dispensationalist Protestants arguing that the apostles sinned by calling Matthias as an apostle, which is nuts.

That's not too-- that's not nice.

Which is not what scripture teaches.

Like, in Acts 1, it's very clear that they are fulfilling scripture using language of, For it is written, this is Acts 1:20, and then they cast lots after praying in verse twenty-four, and they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias, and he was enrolled with the eleven apostles.

The problem a lot of people have is because they associate apostles as equaling the twelve is then they don't know where to put Paul in this.

And this is admittedly a problem architecturally as well.

If you go to St. John Lateran, you'll see the beautiful, uh, enormous statues of the twelve apostles, except Matthias isn't there because Paul is.

Paul is important enough, they wanted to put him across from Peter because he's kind of the thirteenth apostle.

But there's twelve apostles who have this special place.

Um, so that's the first half of your question.

Second, and this I unpack with Brayden, uh, in Tuesday's episode.

When you are called, you are called either directly by God and can prove it with miracles, or you're called through the church.

Paul is actually called in both ways.

He's initially called directly by God.

This call is confirmed through the church, and, uh, this is where the right hand of fellowship, uh, comes in.

This is Galatians 2. Um, When they perceived the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.

Only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.

So you see this, uh, confirmation by the institutional church and the sending, and you see that also in the language that you quoted as well, where they set aside Paul, Paul and Barnabas for the sending, and then you see it in Acts fifteen as well, where Paul and Barnabas are sent.

They're appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question, and then in Acts fifteen, the Council of Jerusalem announces that they're sending Judas and Silas along with Paul and Barnabas.

So they-- the popular image of Paul as the kind of renegade cowboy who doesn't care about the institutional authority of the church, and he's just doing his own mission, is just completely untrue.

And it's also completely untrue, and people absolutize that language that we just heard in Galatians two, as if Peter didn't minister to Gentiles or Paul didn't minister to Jewish Christians.

Neither of those things are correct or true.

Uh, Paul ministers to both.

The community in Rome, when he's writing the epistle to the Romans, this is a Jewish-Gentile church.

It's not just Gentile.

And, uh, similarly, Peter's literally the one who opens the doors of salvation to the Gentiles in Acts ten.

And, um, you know, I mean, even in Galatians two, when he rebukes him at Antioch, it says, For before certain men came from James, he, Peter, ate with the Gentiles.

But when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party.

So notice, in the same chapter where it talks about Peter having this mission to the Jews and him to the Gentiles, he rebukes Peter for segregating the Jews and Gentiles like five verses later.

Uh, so the dispensationalist reading there of like, Oh, th-they-- Paul is our apostle, and everybody else, like the, the twelve only served Jewish Christians, they're dividing what God has joined together, and they're actually making the same error that Paul is rebuking.

Um, and as he says in verse fourteen, But I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, 'If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?' And so the idea is he's clearly ministering to both, and Paul is clearly ministering to both.

This is about sen-- like, you know, imagine it like this.

You've got a group of missionaries, which is what the apostles were, and you say, I want you to go to this country, and you to go to that country, and you to go to this other place.

So let's say you say, Okay, you're gonna go to Spain, and you are gonna go to China.

Well, if the first guy meets a Chinese guy in Spain, he's allowed to give him the gospel.

It's not about ethnic discrimination.

It's not about, uh, dividing what is united in Christ.

There's one flock and one shepherd.

So that kind of misreading, I know is not the heart of, of what you were saying, but that, that cowboy view is often paired with this other view that just completely misunderstands Paul's mission and how it relates to the broader mission of the church.

And, uh, um, yeah, this is a pre-recorded message.

You, you cracked that conspiracy.

Wouldn't that be an amazing if that was, that was built in?

Uh, sorry, somebody in the comments said, I have a crazy conspiracy that this is actually pre-recorded.

Joe's in Dallas.

And that would be hilarious if I managed to do that, including fake interacting with comments and guessing it at the right time.

It could be done.

There's-- look, this is an insane note to end a live stream on.

There was a really tragic case in, I wanna say Northern Ireland, where there was a gamer who murdered his girlfriend, but he did this elaborate thing where he pre-recorded a several-hour live stream pretending like his chat was broken, where he was just, like, gaming and, like, talking to the crowd and everything else, and then he, he set that up to play where it looked like it was live.

And, uh, then he went and committed the crime.

And he, he stumped the police very briefly.

I think he's currently awaiting trial.

Vale Levine knows what I'm talking about.

I'm not alone in creepy true crime.

All right.

Like I said, that's an insane note to end on, so let me end on this one instead.

Number one, if you're at the Conference of Trent, um, I will put something up in Patreon.

Come by and say hi.

I mean, if you're watching this, come by and say hi, but I'll also, uh, put something out.

Maybe I'm-- I don't know exactly my schedule, but I might be able to do an early coffee tomorrow with, uh, with patrons.

And number two, if you're not a patron, it is absolutely not too late to join for five bucks and find out where to get coffee when I figure that out and post that tomorrow.

So keep your eyes out on that, uh, the Shemist Joe account.

And, uh, sorry to patrons, this is a slightly shorter than usual chat, but hopefully, um, hopefully it's been good.

All right, uh, starting next time, I've got Hannah's question on the papacy.

All right, God bless you all.

For Shemin Philpree, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.