Welcome and Introductions

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host, Dr. John Dehlin. It is December 15, 2021, and we are broadcasting to you live this evening from the Mormon Stories podcast studios in Holiday, Utah. And we're joined, as always, by my comadre. Is that a word? Com. Madre.

John Larsen [00:00:19] Comadre's mother. Right.

John Dehlin [00:00:21] I know I can't say compadre.

John Larsen [00:00:22] Are we the parents of Mormon studies? But you don't want to.

John Dehlin [00:00:25] Compadre. Compadre. No, that doesn't work.

Carah Burrell [00:00:28] What did they teach you in that mtc?

John Dehlin [00:00:30] Carah Burrell. Welcome to welcome to Mormon Stories. It's good to have you.

Carah Burrell [00:00:34] Yeah, good. Good to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:35] Thanks for joining us.

Carah Burrell [00:00:36] Thanks for having me. It's going to be another epic John Larsen episode.

John Dehlin [00:00:40] Yeah. And of course, we are so thrilled to have back our monthly visitor, Dr. John Larsen. Hey, John.

John Larsen [00:00:48] No, doctor.

John Dehlin [00:00:51] Welcome.

John Larsen [00:00:52] I have a. I have a. A master's degree and a half. You can call me Master.

John Dehlin [00:00:58] Master John. Master Larsen.

John Larsen [00:00:59] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:01:00] I'm sure there's a joke there somewhere.

Carah Burrell [00:01:03] I'm not making it.

John Dehlin [00:01:04] Okay. Well, John, you continue to be well loved by our audience. For those of you who don't know the Mormon Expression Archive that is up on Spotify, there should be every single episode you ever recorded but one.

John Larsen [00:01:20] Which one? Do you know the number?

John Dehlin [00:01:21] It's the one about Zilpha. I think that's the only one.

John Larsen [00:01:25] It is. Yeah. So I'll give you. It is one that Zilpah recorded with a close friend when they were children who had gone through a particular faith journey, and it was at their request that it be taken down.

John Dehlin [00:01:41] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we don't need to mess with that. I mean, I'm just thrilled that we've got 99.99%.

John Larsen [00:01:46] I have been moving, so I've been sorting stuff and I have found all the masters.

John Dehlin [00:01:52] Oh, fun.

John Larsen [00:01:53] So we might maybe at one time, maybe for subscribers, give you an unedited. For one of the first ones when there before we edited three hours out of it.

John Dehlin [00:02:05] Well, as of now, logging into My Anchor app, 120,000 total plays of Mormon Expression episodes since we launched. It's pretty good, right?

John Larsen [00:02:16] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:02:18] So thanks to everyone who supports both the Mormon Expression Archive and John Larsen's monthly appearance on Mormon Stories. Those of you who are supporting us, thank you. If you want to keep John Larsen on Mormon Stories, you can always go to mormonstories.org mormonexpression and you can become a monthly donor to support John's appearances. We do like to pay. John, I hope you got your paycheck this month.

John Larsen [00:02:42] I did. Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:02:43] Yeah. And. And we're going to set him up in his new studios. Is it fist. Fist in the face to do?

John Larsen [00:02:50] You know, it's like. It's like a baby. You can't name it till you see it, you know.

John Dehlin [00:02:54] Okay, well, we're going to set John up with. With a studio of his own in Oregon where he's moving. And we're. But we're just glad you could be here at least one more time here in Mormon Story Studios. Thanks for joining us.

John Larsen [00:03:06] Yeah, yeah, it's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [00:03:09] So, John, you usually have a few announcements before we launch.

John Larsen [00:03:13] Oh, my. The. My pre things.

John Dehlin [00:03:15] Yeah. Do you have any pre. Do you have any preamble kind of things?

John Larsen [00:03:19] Yes, I go back and I read comments and I listen to portions sometimes and try to think about what we're trying to say. And, you know, we tend to focus a lot on the negative parts about leaving the church and going through that faith transition because we're trying to help people through those difficult times. They're very. They really are difficult. It's. It tears up your relationships. But I was thinking maybe I've made it sound like it's this horrible experience. And, you know, my cohort. And for. For when you leave the church, there's other people who are leaving the church at the same time that you are, and they're your cohort. And once somebody in the cohort has to kind of take the reins of getting people together and making sure they can get to a coffee shop and talk and make friendships, and if nobody's doing that where you are, that's because it's your job. You're the one who's supposed to do it. So if nobody else is doing it, it's you. But the thing I want to say is I've thought about my cohort and, you know, we. We really started leaving the church and making connections with each other in the mid 2000s. So it's been 15 years for. For a lot of us, and our kids were all about the same age. And. And, you know, we. We did struggle. We struggled and we cried and we listened to each other and we held each other's hands, but we danced. We fucking danced. We sang, we went to PTA meetings. We did all sorts of fun things. We went streaking, we fucked, we danced. We did it all. And I'm saying lean into life. Like, leaving the church is hard, but it's Also delicious. It's also wonderful. And not, not in necessarily a sinful way, although those things are delicious too. But, but there's, there's life to be had, there's things to be tasted and there's relationships to be, be made. And you find once the church is not mitigating everything, you can form these deep friendships. And I think one of the greatest things that happened is I have, I've formed deep, deep relationships with people. And I just had a dinner last night with some of my closest friends, you know, kind of saying, saying goodbye and, you know, watching each other's kids grow up, watching the struggles they have and seeing the, the, the happy, healthy adult children who have been raised completely without the, the confines of the church and been able to navigate this world. It's been wonderful. Find your people and dance. Brent, do I dance?

Brent [00:05:57] We've had some great dances, right?

John Larsen [00:05:59] Yeah. There was always a disco ball in

Brent [00:06:02] my house, decked out your house, put on our six inch heels and dance to some great tunes.

John Larsen [00:06:08] Well, we'll have to send the disco picture of Brent and I.

John Dehlin [00:06:13] And I didn't introduce Brent to our live audience after the recording started. Brent is here. He's one of John's closest buddies. I know Brent as a pretty amazing pickleball player because I play pickleball with Brent. But Brent, you're kind of playing the Ed McMahon kind of character today on Mormon Stories.

Brent [00:06:33] Cause you're John in pickleball. But I'd love being on your team because we win.

John Dehlin [00:06:38] We occasionally win. Anyway, it's good to have you, Brent. Thanks for joining us.

Brent [00:06:42] Thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [00:06:43] Yeah. All right. Also, I should just mention formally that for those of you who live in Portland or near Portland, John is going to be speaking at Thrive Unite on January 22nd. We're going to have Thrive, a local Thrive event to build local communities in at least 16 cities across the world, including including UK, Canada, and several in the United States. You know, Texas, Arizona, Idaho, Utah, lots of different places, even Georgia. And John is going to be speaking at the Thrive Unite in Portland. So if you want to attend a Thrive, if you've been bummed out that you haven't been able to attend to Thrive yet. And by the way, Thrive makes no money. Thrive only loses money. Nobody's on the take. It's literally existing to help build local community, and we're doing these local events to build it all throughout the country and world. John's going to be speaking at Thrive Unite in Portland, and you can go to thrivebeyondreligion.com and register for Thrive Unite. Portland or any of the major cities. San Diego is going to be amazing. Southern Cal, I mean Sacramento is going to be amazing. Carrie, you're speaking at Sacramento, right?

Announcements and Upcoming Events

Carah Burrell [00:07:49] I'm speaking in Sacramento with. We got Brad Bonner, Matt Easton and Alan and Katie Mount for marriage on a tightrope. So I think people from Nevada, all out, all over, like Northern California.

John Dehlin [00:08:00] Yeah. Bill Real is going to be speaking. Bill Real speaking at the 1 in veg rate of free Mormon is speaking at the one in Seattle. Like and, and I love it that we're, we're kind of like pulling the Avengers together. It's no longer just like one or two, you know, notable people. We are building like a rolodex of like 2 or 300 different speakers that can speak all over the world.

John Larsen [00:08:22] You're naming some, you know, kind of famous critics of the church. And, and, and people should understand that thrive is 180 from criticism. Although there it comes up. That is not the tenor of it. That is not. It is very positive, very affirming, very kind of helping people find their way and find their place. So it's something I wholly endorse because, you know, the negativity can become a lot. So. But, but, but, but, you know, if you're worried about that energy, it doesn't exist at Thrive, you know.

John Dehlin [00:08:50] Yeah, we try not to even really talk about the church. It's literally all about healing and growth.

John Larsen [00:08:54] So yeah, whenever I've spoken at Thrive, I. We don't talk about Mormonism at all. Yeah, it's just not a topic.

John Dehlin [00:08:59] Well, thanks for supporting Thrive Portland and a shout out to all the organizers throughout the world that are making Thrive.

John Larsen [00:09:05] I'm excited and I'll do a little selfish plug. I've been talking to some of the locals. We're gonna set up a picnic, sort of meet me, get to know me, break the fast in Salem, probably about February. The best bet is I'm not on social media so you won't find me there. But there is a Portland ex Mormon group on Facebook. So if you're on Facebook, you can get in touch with that group and details will arise. So we'll setting up a mid Willamette sort of get together. We have people coming up from Eugene, people coming down from port and just from all over the area. And it's, it's time for people to remake connections. The, the connections in real life are really important.

John Dehlin [00:09:42] Love it. Andrew's asking if there's a plug for SoCal Thrive yeah, the. So the SoCal Thrive group's amazing and they're doing their own Thrive Unite Day. I think I mentioned Anthony Miller. Anthony Miller and Randy, my friend Randy. Randy Bell. And a lot of cool people. Jesse. Jesse Funk is going to be speaking at Thrive.

Carah Burrell [00:10:04] That's the Costa Mesa one, right?

John Dehlin [00:10:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, and if you want to find a Thrive community near you, you can find it on a. On a map@thrivebeyondreligion.com and if you want to start a Thrive community near you, you can start it there as well. Okay, enough Thrive stuff. John Larsen, what's the topic for today?

Introduction to the Gospel of Mark

John Larsen [00:10:23] Today we're talking about the Gospel of Mark.

John Dehlin [00:10:25] So it's Christmas time. You want to get Jesus up a little bit?

John Larsen [00:10:28] Well, well, sure, sure. We can say, you know, this is a topic I've wanted to address for a long, long time. And one of my regrets of Mormon expression and kind of the approach is you're usually deconstructing or my approach to the church was usually deconstructing some belief, some element, you know, to try to try to look at it, take it apart, analyze it. So the general tenor of everything I put out there is fairly negative. Right. And we don't have a lot of space to talk about some of the things that I think are positive because we just don't. And of course, the Bible is extremely important, and I think it's extremely important to engage the Bible and it's meaningful to me. I see comments pop up every time we do one of these that usually I'm assuming it's some kind of evangelical Christian or something that'll come on and say that we need Jesus and we should read Jesus and we should read the Bible and da, da, da, da, da, da. And so I really want to say I actually like Jesus quite a bit. However, we're going to engage this directly. So if there might be some things we say that some people would consider blasphemy. I. But I don't consider it that. So.

John Dehlin [00:11:51] So yeah, that maybe we should do a content reading. We try and do that these days. Carah, what do you want to call this one?

Carah Burrell [00:11:57] Oh, PG 13. You feel like you're going to maybe drop some F bombs today or.

John Larsen [00:12:01] Only. Only if the mood strikes.

Carah Burrell [00:12:02] If the mood strikes. So just want to make sure that we're doing that at the beginning as much as we can. But John, you do whatever you want to do. So if people are driving in the car with their kids, they know maybe to save this one for later or something.

John Dehlin [00:12:14] Yeah, all right, let's do it. So you're, and you're basically saying you're going to speak candidly about Jesus. So if somebody is not comfortable with a candid, historical, thoughtful discussion of Jesus, they should turn this off now.

John Larsen [00:12:26] They should really turn it up. They should really pay attention. I'm just putting the warning out there that, that although it chagrins me, I don't think you should be offended at this sort of stuff. Now, what's really funny, I was thinking about this last night. Why do I feel like I need to put that disclaimer when I take the sacred beliefs of Mormons and tear them to shreds? And I think I was thinking about that. The Bible has a different place in our culture and a different place that I think we'll talk about here in just a second. But I think there's a certain deference that's given to it by Western society that we actually need to pull that cover back a little bit. And we're going to talk, we're going to try that a little bit tonight. So I think this is me coming at a topic more from a positive perspective, although there'll probably be many Christians who won't see it that way. But I think the Bible is extremely important.

John Dehlin [00:13:23] Okay, cool.

Carah Burrell [00:13:24] I'm excited to get into it. I just posted a TikTok this week of me talking about we did an episode about post faith crisis Christmas. And me just, John asked me candidly my thought feelings on Christmas. I don't know, John, if Christmas changed for you after you lost your faith. But a lot of Mormons relate to losing a faith in Mormonism and then also going through a deconstruction of Christianity and noticing the same kind of flaws and still not really feeling like the evidence is there to devote your life to it anymore. So a lot of Mormon, Mormon stories listeners just this week, I think, really relate to this topic. So I'm glad that we're doing this.

John Larsen [00:13:58] Good. Yeah, Christmas. And I didn't have to deconstruct Christmas because I never was part of the cult of Santa now and I, when I say the cult of Santa, we're using the, the real life term here. And, and, and, and we should probably come back to this at some point. But the word cult has basically two meanings. The one that you hear all the time is any religion that evangelicals don't like. And the other definition is a religion or a view that's centered around like one person. So you'd have the cult of Apollo, the cult of Athena, the cult of, you know, whatever. And the closest thing we have to ancient religion today in the United States is the cult of Santa Claus. And it really follows the patterns of people who believe in it. And I'll tell you why. It's real. And I'm just about to piss a whole bunch of people off. You have die hard atheists who hate everything to do with religion, but they will go bend over backwards to lie to their children about Santa Claus. So I never did. I didn't buy into that religion. I didn't buy into that paradigm. And so I never had anything to deconstruct. It was always a myth. And that's the way my kids encounter. That's the way I encountered it. So because we never put any stock in it being true, it just is. Just like I don't have any problem going to the Indian festival of Lights, right? I try to appreciate it for what it is. I don't try to contextualize it in any way. So Christmas never was a problem for me. But that's a decision that, that, that Zilfa and I made when the kids were young. My children never, never were taught to believe in, in even when we were Mormons, never taught to believe in Santa because I just couldn't bring myself to lie to them.

John Dehlin [00:15:39] Yeah, yeah, we didn't want to lie to our kids either.

John Larsen [00:15:42] Now there's a lot of people who kind of play the middle and I don't want to. And, and, and. Okay, so lying to your kids about Santa is a sin, but it's a minor one. Don't feel too bad about it.

Carah Burrell [00:15:54] I told my kids the truth this week and they immediately said, nope, he's still real. And then they asked for a mermaid for Christmas. They're still too young to understand. I'm trying to be a good atheist here. Come on, kids.

John Larsen [00:16:05] Okay, so why the Bible? And I should say that I am a Noel Case atheist. And I took 10 minutes to explain what that meant in a podcast that is unreleased. Maybe someday, someday it'll come off the. Off the cutting room floor. It was kind of boring.

John Dehlin [00:16:18] That was a great episode.

John Larsen [00:16:19] It was boring and the cameras gave out, so. But at some point, for a donation of $25,000, we will be happy to provide you the raw audio tapes of

John Dehlin [00:16:30] the best John Larsen interview ever.

John Larsen [00:16:32] I put both these guys to sleep. I can't even remember what we were. We were going to some academic anyway. But I'm a null case atheist. I'm being serious. By that I mean that the no case in Science is the default expected belief, right? So after we established something like evolution, human evolution became the null case in about 1860. So it's the assumptive origin story. So anybody who has a different theory has to deal with that. Germ theory is the null case and it's used in statistics, it's used in science. It's really an important thing you should have learned about in the seventh grade. But I realize we're in the United States, we're in a third world backwater country and not everybody gets scientific education here. So they may not understand the null case. But what I mean by being a null case atheist, if you take a geologist, then this is an extension of that paradigm or the parable I've used before about the Franken BYU professor, which is basically, if you took BYU professors and just what they're expert in, there's no place for Mormonism there. Their Mormon belief always exists outside of their area of expertise. So if you took and sewed a BYU professor together by just taking the geological beliefs from the geologist and the historical beliefs from the historian, Mormonism would disappear from byu. And so a similar thing. I don't actively choose to not believe in God. Just everything I see has him not there. Everything in my view makes more sense when you assume there's not a God. Right? Photography makes more. I'm like trump camera lady person. See, I've got cognitive skills too. So I think when you take that view and you say, well, where is God? I don't see God anywhere. And you know, agnosticism is just atheists who don't want to fight. So I'm an atheist, I want to kind of establish that from the get go because I think that's important for where we're going here. So why is the Bible important? The Bible, and we'll get into some more of the details, has been part of our culture, part of western heritage and you know, the people of the book. You know, when I'm talking about the Bible, I'm talking about Jews, I'm talking about Muslims, I'm talking about Christians, I'm talking about about just anybody who is part of English or Western culture. That biblical references and a biblical understanding of the world so permeates our culture and our literature that if you don't understand the Bible, for example, you'll never understand Shakespeare. And if you don't understand Shakespeare, you're really not able to understand the foundations of English literature. So the Bible itself is a key, very important book. And the philosophical underpinnings that Are, are dissected in the Bible, you know, really from the Bronze Age on, on on to, you know, the age of the Romans. You see progression of ideas and interesting thoughts. And then it's been used to influence and shape western culture for 2,000 years. And one of the reasons we're engaging the Book of Mark is because we really want to see, well, what does the damn book actually say? Not what everybody's been piling on it, not what everybody proof text it, but, but what are we really getting at? And so I really think understanding, having a key understanding of the Bible is important. And I know there's a lot of ex Mormons I've seen who, when they leave the church, they throw everything out, literally. I've seen many people who burn their scriptures and burn their books, garments, burn their garments. And I will provide an exception for burning garments that I think, because you're supposed to, that can be a healthy activity. I would say whenever you're part of an organization that's burning books, check yourself. That's a sign that you're, you're in the wrong place. And because, because of what it symbolizes and what, and what, what it means. I, what I've told a lot of people is take your scriptures, put them away and leave them there for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years. Don't yourself right now does not need this. But it's part of your journey and part of who you are and part of what shaped. Don't, don't just try to throw out everything if you. And again, I'm practicing armchair psychology, so forgive me, Dr. John, but you know, if you try to change a transition by just ignoring everything that came before and pretending it didn't exist and try to just do a 180 change, you're going to run into problems down the road. There's a lot of stuff you got to deal with there, and the Bible is one of them.

Why the Bible Matters and Mormon Struggles with It

John Dehlin [00:21:05] Absolutely.

John Larsen [00:21:06] Okay, well, let's talk about how Mormons struggle with the Bible in particular, because it is Achilles, a big Achilles heel for Mormons, and one, they are completely blind to meaning. Most Mormons, even educated Mormons, even educated Mormons teaching religion at BYU do not understand the Bible because they've been, they've been put, they've been added layers and layers and layers on top of it to, to where they're, they're, they're using it to interpret and, and change things. For example, I mean, I'll be, I'll be very explicit if Joseph Smith goes into the Bible that it says something that has been understood that way for thousands of years and then reinterprets it. Then you accept that reinterpretation, and then you're taught that without understanding that context at all, what Joseph Smith changed or why, you're going to go talk to somebody else who's not a Mormon, maybe to convert them, and you're going to be speaking a different language that they don't even understand, and you're going to be in over your head pretty quick. And the LDS struggle, and I've already used this term once with proof texting. Now, proof texting is a knowledge practice and you can read about it in evangelical sources and Christian sources, and it's done all the time in religion, Christianity. And basically what you do is you have a theological thesis, a theological point. You're trying to make a theological interpretation. And then you go through these different books of the Bible and you find stories or scriptures or events that support that, that make it sound like there is a congruent, consistent belief. And you can construct all sorts of things out of the, out of the Bible, which is one of the reason it's still around, because it's very utilitarian, it's very useful, it says everything. So if you want to prove any particular point of view, you can find it somewhere in the Bible. And proof texting makes people so they don't understand the context, they don't understand what's happening. And if you grew up and you went to church on Sunday and you went to seminary for four years, you have been heavily indoctrinated when it comes to understanding the Bible, and you've been subject to tons of proof texting where what's even there won't register for you. So one of the important things that we'll talk about a little bit here is about what's not in Mark. And I would dare say that most of you can't tell me which parts of the Gospel are in Luke and which are in John and which are in Mark and which are not there. Because what's happened to you is. And happened to me and happened to all of us is they take those four gospels and they ram them all together and create a narrative that doesn't ex. It's not. It's not a book that actually is out there.

What Is and Isn't in Mark's Gospel

John Dehlin [00:23:43] The assumption is that all the four Gospels are true and that they all just fill in different holes or pieces to the puzzle. And then if there's a conflict, if you're an evangelical Christian, then you redefine words or history or recontextualize things to make it so there's no conflicts between the Gospels. And if you're a Mormon, it's okay if there's some conflicts. And because Joseph Smith said in the article of Faith that we believe in the Bible as far as it is translated correctly. And Joseph Smith kind of downgrading the Bible to be flawed because of Council of Nicaea translations or whatever allows Mormons to, to accept that there's flaws in the Bible. Agreed.

John Larsen [00:24:27] And I think, even though we say that, I think your standard average non reading individual, like the majority of us, couldn't identify any things in the Bible that they don't agree with as Mormons. They just wouldn't even be able to point it out to you because. So we say, oh, as far as it's translated correctly or it's the works of men. But we don't really go through and cut apart the Bible and say we don't believe this, we don't believe this. We don't believe this because nobody up there in Salt Lake has the balls to actually say that. To actually go through and say, see this thing in the Bible, we think that's wrong. They did in the 1870s. They would say stuff like that. But they don't do it anymore or

John Dehlin [00:25:10] hear contradictions in the Bible, clear contradictions

John Larsen [00:25:13] where they'll just ignore them. So, and it was when I was leaving the church, it was a real revelation. I was sitting in Sunday school and I had the manual and I was reading through the lesson and then I read the questions and I thought these questions, maybe we should do a podcast on this. Were very cleverly carefully constructed to not deal with any of the really interesting issues in whatever lesson we were. They're designed to plow around these stumps in the field that they don't want you to see. And they're designed to not create discussion that will create any kind of controversy. And then seeing that revelation, I started flipping through and saw the whole book was that way. And that's when I first the light really went on saying, oh my God, I've been propagandized hard. And this is how it's done. Because you think propaganda is something the enemy does to their people and it's all full of lies. And, and what you don't realize is propaganda is usually 98% true. It's just misinterpreted, misused, you know, re emphasized. And, and that's why it's so hard for any of us to break out of cultish systems. And we've been propagandized because they're, they survive because they live in the recesses of your mind and exploit flaws in our reasoning.

John Dehlin [00:26:22] I'm going to just throw out there for our show notes. There's a couple really epic episodes we've done on Mormon stories dealing with the Bible. One is what we interviewed Bart Ehrman and he talked about the New Testament that everyone should go watch that episode. It gives you an overview of some of the things we'll be talking about. He's a world class scholar on, on the New Testament. And then of course David Bachavoy talks a lot about the Old Testament and just Mormon scripture. And those are two series that you just really want to check out if you haven't. If you're newer to Mormon stories, Bart Ehrman and David Bachavoy are must views, must listen to.

John Larsen [00:26:58] Agreed. Yeah, I think I agree with all that. The other real element that the Mormons and some evangelicals, Baptists have a particular affinity to King James Version 2 is the king James Version. So I mentioned before, my undergraduate degree is in linguistics. I studied linguistics and language has always been a fascinating element to me. And as somebody who schooled in linguistics, I wouldn't touch the King James version with a 10 foot pole, with the 39 and a half foot pole. It's the holidays. So because it is written in early modern English and it's got all sorts of linguistic problems, you're taking on such a load trying to understand these scriptures. And in the Book of Mark that was written in rather simple Greek is what the book was written in. And it was written in Greek to act, to give to people who would then read it to illiterate people like. And the book itself, Mark being the oldest book is, has very simple language and very simple construction. And the rest of the Bible or the New Testament we'll say kind of follows that these were not the sophisticated like scripture like they would have heard from the cantors and stuff. And we'll get back to that in a minute. But it was a simple book written in simple plain language and the King James Version because of how language has drifted and because we've taken a cultural view of taking things like the multiple pronouns like the, the thousand thy and the youth versus the and whatever. And we have, we have imbued that with all sorts of meaning as if it's a holy language. You can find Oakes gave a big talk on this a while ago. There's been several books written by Mormon authorities who argue that the language of the restoration is the Language of King James and it's holy. That's not true. It's just something they made up.

John Dehlin [00:28:55] It's so holy that the Native Americans spoke King James. That's how holy.

John Larsen [00:29:00] Well, that's the trap the Mormons find themselves in that Joseph Smith was supposed to be translating this stuff, but he grabbed the King James language. And this is not. And like you pointed out, the King James. The problems of the King James version are legion, and we can't go into all them. But just understand that it's difficult. And I'll give you an example. One of the difficulties, the language has changed. And for example, 1 Kings 18:21 is a scripture. And it says, it says, how long halt ye between two opinions? Said scripture. We've all heard, how long halt ye between two opinions? Now, the way I would interpret that scripture, the way most people do, is to halt, to be stopped by two positions. You're. You're, you're in the middle land and you're looking between these two positions, and you're halted. You're stopped. You can't move forward because you haven't chosen one. You need to choose one or the other, right? That's the interpretation of that scripture. Everybody agree?

John Dehlin [00:29:55] Sounds good.

John Larsen [00:29:56] The word halt in early English meant to limp. It didn't mean to stop. So if you say he was halted, that meant he had a limp. So what the scripture says is, how long will you limp back and forth between two opinions? How long will you be undecided? Those are two completely different things. And what the Bible says is the second one. It does not say the first one. It is not open to interpretation. It is not open to. Well, I like this version better. Halt in 1611 English means to limp. It does not mean to stop. So when you're reading that scripture, unless you're. You're like an expert in King James. And I found that by reading some, some evangelical exeges on the problems of the King James Version, right? That's how I found that I didn't. I'm not genius enough to read through kings and say, oh, I got the wrong hall. I mean, it's way above my ability, and it's way above the ability of most people, except for maybe 300 people on this planet right now who really understand, you know, who'd really understand Hebrew and understand King James and understand that sort of stuff. So you are really putting a disservice to yourself by reading the King James Bible because you don't know what the hell it's even saying, right? And You've got a lot of people who've used that language in the King James Bible itself. The scholars who shaped it together, changed words and made interpretations and added words that there are many scholars who call King James and a commentary on the Bible as much as it is, as it is, you know, biblical text itself, if that makes sense. So there are, there are flat out translation errors. And you know, one of the reasons that people keep to the, the King James Bible is they say it's poetic or something like. And I, I pulled an example for that. The prodigal son. The story of the prodigal son, which is in Luke 15:11 through 32, most everybody's heard it. But I would dare say if you went up to, you know, 10 people on the road and ask them what the word prodigal means, they would say something like the one who goes and returns, the repentant son. That is not what the word prodigal means at all. It means to be a spendthrift. It means somebody who spends a lot of money recklessly, somebody who is wasteful. It's the wasteful son is the story. So he went and pissed his inheritance away. And in the story this father accepts him anyway, even though he had taken inheritance. And the fact that he returned is not encoded in the word prodigal. That word exists in the King James Bible because it's an old fashioned word. And now in English it means just that story. We don't use it for anything else. And that's a disservice because when you're reading that version in King James you now have all this baggage that has occurred since 1611 that is not in the book, that was never written there, that was never intended by the original authors. And we could go on and on with examples like this. And it's a minefield. Stay out of King James. So I recommend my Bible right here is, and I have several Bibles, but this is the New Oxford Annotated Bible is the one I use, which is the New Revised Standard Version nrsv. When you're seeing things, this is the, what's considered the, the most ecumenical, scholarly Bible. So scholars of the Bible tend to use this translation and they fix the language and they did things like there are words in Greek that are not gendered. And then when they were translating King James they put gender on them. So there's a lot of times where the, the Greek would mean more like humankind. And then in the King James Version they would say man and men and they, they gendered the Bible. The, the text of the Bible where it's not Bibled. So versions like this take that out and they, the scholars who translated out of the Greek understand if they're using vernacular Greek and then translate into vernacular English and, and if you're using more, you know, so, so, so they really understand what's going on with the language the way it was written. And again, unless you want to go study Greek from, you know, the first and second century and Greek language has changed for 2,000 years. That's. That there's, there's a lot of scholars who are expert in it. It is a tough field and hard to understand. Rely on the people who've already done this. And if you're sitting there in an LDS thing saying this thing is full of errors, it's not the, the, the, the New Revised Standard in rsv. It's not, it's, it's. And they, if you, if you read it and we talk about Bart Harriman and stuff, and they go through for, for. We don't have very many full scripts of like Mark that exist, but we have little scraps and they take every piece of paper, every scrap of every fragment that have ever been discovered in the Bible and they date them and they use them to try to figure out what it originally said. There has been tremendous scholarly work done in the last 200 years on this. And Mormons have done themselves a disservice by cutting themselves off from it. They just, you can understand more by just taking this and reading this language in plain English than probably going to Sunday school for 10 years.

Translation Issues and Authorship of the Gospels

John Dehlin [00:35:07] All right, this, this portion of Mormon stories was brought to you by the NRSV Bible Company.

John Larsen [00:35:14] I don't, I don't, I, I think, I don't think anybody really owns it.

John Dehlin [00:35:17] No. Okay.

John Larsen [00:35:18] It is a, it is a cooperative and it's one of the few. This goes to another problem. The King James Bible. It was written, it was commissioned by King James, of course. Henry VIII left the Catholic church in the mid 16th century. And so by the time James commissioned this, I think he commissioned it in like 1570. And it wasn't finished, whatever it was. But it's a very Protestant Bible. So King James is taking you down a Church of England doctrinal interpretation, which is why for a lot of years there were two main Bibles in America. You had the King James and the Catholic Bible. And this is, they brought both Catholic and Protestant scholars together to complete this. So it's not tilted towards one dogma or the other.

John Dehlin [00:36:02] Okay, got it.

John Larsen [00:36:04] All right. Okay. Let's talk about the scroll of Mark, shall we? So the scroll of Mark dates to about 18 or 70 AD and I'm not going to get into all the elements of biblical scholarship, but they. They tend. They can take references in different things and language and like, pinpoint those things down. And they can also do carbon dating and other dating mechanisms on the paper and the ink and the vellum and the animal skins and that sort of stuff. So they've gotten pretty well down. And of all stripes, people who are biblical scholars are pretty much in universal agreement that Mark is the oldest book of the Bible, and it dates from the first century. And the other two books, Matthew and Luke, were written from Mark. This is universally accepted by biblical scholars. So that they had the Book of Mark or the scroll of Mark, we really should say in front of them, or they had heard it read or heard it recited, and then they added probably other legends and stories or writings that we have lost and started compiling things as. And most of those were written in the second century. So the Book of Mark, our best guess, it's about 30 years after the death of Christ, give or take. And the others, we're talking 100 years. So it is very unlikely that the author of the Book of Mark never is identified. It was later done by church fathers. They said Mark, but there's nothing in there to indicate any guy named Mark or anything like that had anything to do with this. But it is unlikely that the author actually knew Jesus. He was probably relating stories that had been related now for about two generations, given his 30 years.

John Dehlin [00:37:49] Yeah. And for those of you who are brand new to kind of this whole thing, just to restate what John just said, Matthew didn't write Matthew. Mark didn't write Mark. Luke didn't write Luke, John didn't write John. They were probably passed down by oral tradition for at least a few generations, at least the later ones, before they ever got written down on scrolls. So you're. So you're talking about multiple generations later, not by people who were ever there actually witnessing the events, and not by the people whose name. Whose names are on the books.

John Larsen [00:38:18] Right. Like, let's say the four of us, I mean, because we have our own nationalistic mythology. And let's say the four of us were going to sit down right now and try to write a book about the founding of the United States. We'd throw in stories about Washington chopping down a tree, Benjamin Franklin and his kite and his. You know, just. We've heard these stories over and over again. And that goes to the tradition. I'm glad you brought that up. So this would have been written on animal skins that had been processed to make a scroll. And it would have been written by somebody who understood Hellenistic Greek. At the time it was written in Greek for a Roman audience. We'll come back to that in a second. But it would have been on a long scroll, and what would have happened is have been read. And then it would have been when they would have gotten together for their church services, somebody would have read through it, and they would have sat and listened. So even though this is a written book, it really wasn't experienced as a written book by any but the priests and scholars until after the printing press. Just most people would have never seen it. It would have been recited. And the liturgy, Kimmy, that's the word I was looking for. Earlier liturgy, the liturgy of the church would take people through cycles. So when you were at the feast of Saint Crispin or the feast of Saint John or the feast of whatever, that there would be a part of the Bible that would be recited, and that's how you would learn the scriptures. In fact, coming out of Jewish tradition at the time of Jesus, they would have mostly been illiterate, too. And nobody would have had an Old Testament, but the cantors would have read it on the holy days. So you would go in and much of the Bible would have been sung or chanted, you know, like the Book of Job. And that's why it's still in poetic form. So it would have been read on certain times, and it would have been attached to the calendar. So as you grew older, you'd keep hitting the same stories over and over again. So the idea of a Bible just didn't exist. Now, the Bible that we have now with its 27 books, was put together by the Council of Nicaea in 327, I think.

John Dehlin [00:40:21] Talking New Testament.

John Larsen [00:40:22] Well, yeah, the New Testament.

John Dehlin [00:40:23] Okay.

John Larsen [00:40:24] And. And I think they did some of the Old Testament too, but I'm out of school there. I'm not sure. So they. And they. They took these scrolls and they decided, these ones we're going to take and these ones were not. And they mostly purged all the Gnostic stuff. There was a real battle between Gnosticism and what run out won out as Roman Catholicism during that time. So there would have been no concept when the Book of Mark was written that there were other books or this was anything that a narrative of Jesus, who at this stage, 30, 40 years later to a couple hundred years later would have started to become mythologized and people would tell these stories. As the church grew, it took on new foundations and new dimensions that weren't necessarily there at the, the beginning. But like you're implying, there's nothing to suggest in the writings or from the writings that these were contemporary by people who knew Jesus Christ.

John Dehlin [00:41:22] Yeah, and I know you're going to get to this in just a second, but the, the date of when each scroll or book was, was authored is important because if you line them up chronologically, don't you kind of get a classic kind of fish tale that the, that the further you get from the actual event, the more fantastic the story becomes. Right.

John Larsen [00:41:44] And this is a point we broug up before in terms of criticism of religious texts. To me, the oldest version wins out. Right. And we can and again, read Bart Ehrman, he writes for a lay audience how this whole process works. And, you know, I was taught growing up in church that the scribes made errors. And it's true they made errors, but not very often. They're usually caught by other scribes. This was a highly skilled thing to do to write those, you know, because they were handwritten when you were illuminating the scripts. And it would have been monks who did it, and it would have been their job. That's what they did every day, day in and day out. They translated these, they copied from one to the other. So they are actually quite accurate. And I was reading something a couple years ago about some Tibetan, Tibetan monks. They had found a very, very, very old scroll. And I can't remember, it was over 2000 years old of incantation they use today. And it was spot on. It was not changed. Like it was exactly what they say right now. So those oral traditions, you know, Mormonism has this belief that the church and the doctrines just drifted and became screwed up. When you've got all of those cantors, you know, those Jewish cantors reciting the same thing over and over again. If you're one dude who starts doing it, different people are going to catch. They're going to say, that's not the way I see it. It's kind of like if suddenly you started decorating your house in the Santa Claus wearing green, everyone's gonna be like, why is your Santa Claus green? They're gonna pick it up right away. And when every Sunday or every Saturday, you're going to listen to the scriptures being recited your whole life, you're going to catch. You're going to catch errors in them. So the idea is these are More, we'd get a better idea of the primitive Christianity by looking at the older and older and older scripts. So that's why we're starting with Mark, because Mark is the oldest document we have, and we have scraps of it that date back to the first century. And so we want to know what it actually says and what the people actually thought it said. Right? To me, that's the interesting thing. Not what this prophet says or this church says, what did they think it said? Because you've got some guy at some point or collection of guys, and I'm using gender neutral guy collection of people who wrote these down, these myths and these stories that have been shared. And their intent was for their fellow Christians, and Christians at the time were a dispossessed people. It spread mostly among the slave class. They were poor people, uneducated people, people who were oftentimes slaves who had nothing really to look forward to. There was no, like, you know, capitalistic dream of getting out of slavery in Rome. So this was their only respite. And this is something that gave them hope in a hopeless life. And when we look at the baggage of Christianity, we have the Crusades and the papal wars and we have the Protestant Reformation and kings and just all of the blood and gore and dirtiness of Christianity just screwing this up. It's refreshing to go back to say, what did it really say?

Early Christianity and the Historical Jesus

John Dehlin [00:45:10] Yeah, yeah, tell us more.

John Larsen [00:45:12] Tell us more. Okay, so let's, let's set the stage. Alexander the great died in 323. And Alexander, of course, remember from school, was a conqueror and spread and spread the gospel of Greece far and wide, all the way to India. And of course, the region of Jesus is modern Israel or Palestine or whatever you want to call it. And it has an unfortunate geologic, geographical distinction of being sandwiched between some of the great violent civilizations of the last 4,000 years. The Syrian, you know, the Mesopotamians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans. And they all conquered this place. This was a place and it was a small place. You read the Bible and you get the idea that this kingdom, the Davidic kingdom, was this important thing. It wasn't. It was small and it was important in that it was at the crossroads. But they were constantly being smashed by other armies. So so is the state of Israel had achieved a mythical high point under King David. And that was the. The longed for what he called Camelot. It was, it was the place in past where everything was right, where we had a king and our king was powerful and we were a powerful people and we were feared. And by the time Jesus comes around, you've been under, under hellenistic influence for 300 years. They was conquered by the Greeks and they never let go until the Romans took the territory in 31 BC. So about 30 years, that's when the Romans really come up and displaced the Greek empire. But at the time of Jesus, the most common language was Greek. And the language of the poor people, the Jews, would have been Aramaic. So in the Greek, when we look in Mark, it's written in Greek, but it has references in Aramaic because that's probably what Jesus would have spoke. But when you're seeing Jesus interact with Pilate or whatever, they would have likely been speaking Greek, not Latin. But if they were speaking to each other, they probably would have spoke Latin. So our Bible itself and this stuff has gone from Greek and then it goes into Latin where, you know, for thousands of years it was preserved in this Latin form. But the Latin is not. Doesn't have anything to do with the foundation of the book. It was written in this Hellenistic Greek.

John Dehlin [00:48:05] Right.

John Larsen [00:48:05] I'm sorry if this is pandemic. This stuff's fascinating to me. That's why I like it. Okay, so all that time, 31 BC is a time period known as Assyrian wars. You've got, you've got troops moving back and forth. And when troops move around, they don't have logistics like we have. So they'd come in town and they would take your crops and you know, like having troops march through is not a pleasant thing. You know, they'd rape everybody and kill your cows and kind of like, kind of like the hind cut companies, burn your house down. Yeah, so. So Octavian Caesar Augustus, who's mentioned in the Bible, who becomes the emperor. Octavian is the one. It was the Senate, it was a democracy before that point. And then it slowly, the democracy had slowly become corrupt. Something that should be familiar to all of us living in western democracies today. Until Octavian had himself crowned emperor. And of course, he's the one in the Bible, a decree that everybody should be taxed. He died in about 14 AD, so it would have died when Jesus was a very young person. And after Octavian, it was Tiberius. Well, there's a bunch of them. But we'll skip ahead to Tiberius. Tiberius was the emperor when Jesus died. And Roman scholars believe that Tiberius was completely unaware of Christianity, that it just let alone Jesus, that it never rose to any kind of level that he would understand. Then we have Nero. Nero was the emperor from 54 to 68 or so. And Nero scapegoated the Christians. And Nero's favorite thing was burning Christians alive. And Nero, of course, famously, Rome burned. Some people say he started the fire, but it was blamed on the Christians. So during that late period, Christians had entered into a lot of persecution from, from the Roman Empire. And, you know, all this is happening after the death of Jesus. And then the last emperor we're going to mention is Vespasian, who was the emperor from 69 to 79. Now that year before 70, 70 is the year that the temple was sacked. And this is important because the Bible talk, the New Testament talks about it all the time. That's a key element, which is why we sort of know the Bible. The New Testament was written mostly after the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 because it was such a monumental, such a key element to the foundations of Christianity. And oftentimes in Mormon Sunday school, we don't talk about it very much because we believed, of course, that when the New Testament referred to the sacking of the temple, it was prophetic. It was talking about something that hadn't happened yet, where scholars would say it wasn't prophetic at all. It was talking about what actually happened. So the time of Jesus is a time of a lot of tumult. And you've got a lot of actually contemporaries like Jesus, if you want to get into this, who are teaching things that are just almost seem verbatim, right? Jesus was not the only rabbi walking around teaching some of these radical teachings. And so let's really pause for a second on the concept of the Messiah, because this is important, and this is something that as a Mormon, we all tend to misunderstand. And Christians, we do too. The Messiah, the word Messiah is, I think Messiah is Hebrew, I'm not sure, but it means the anointed one. And the Romanization of that is Christos or Christ. So when you say Jesus Christ, you're saying Jesus, the anointed one. And we should, as long as we're deconstructing language, we should be clear that Jesus name was Joshua, which is a really common name. It was then, was now. So. So you've got Joshua of Galilee, right? Which I think is really important.

The Messiah as Political Redeemer

John Dehlin [00:52:05] His last name wasn't Christ.

John Larsen [00:52:07] It wasn't Christ and he wasn't necessarily seen. Well, not necessarily. He wasn't seen the way we interpret him at all. The Messiah, the anointed one. There were only two. In Jewish tradition, there were only two individuals who were anointed. One was the king and the other was the high priest. And David was not the high priest. So it is ambiguous when you read the Old Testament, when they talk about the Messiah, the anointed one, if they are talking about the king or they are talking about the high priest. But it generally became that the devotic kingdom, David's throne, had been lost and it needed to be restored, that there was going to be a restoration of the Jewish kingdoms. And, and so, so the Messiah was the once and future king. The Messiah was the inheritor of David's throne. The Messiah was a very important role. The Messiah was a hero. The Messiah was not a God. And that concept does not emerge till after the New Testament period. So when you read the Book of Mark, which I invite you to do, I want you to read it and understand that he is never once referred to as God in that book, not at all. But you might think he is because the word Messiah to you now in 2021 is associated with the doctrine that Jesus Christ was an incarnation and avatar of the one great God. That is not biblical. At least it's not biblical in the Book of Mark. So you have the concept of the Messiah, which is really being interpreted by people around there as a military deliverer to throw off the shackles of Roman rule at this time. So, so, so there's a lot of that. But there's another thread from, from Jewish thought of the idea of the Redeemer and the. The. And these two ideas absolutely get merged in the person of Jesus and moving forward. And the Redeemer is referred to a lot of times and the Redeemer is more on an individual basis is one that can help you with salvation. Now biblical pre New Testament, there's no concept of the afterlife in the Old Testament. So whatever rewards or punishments happen to you, happen to you in this life. And it's only in later Christianity, probably coming from the slave class, because they would never get anything in this life. So the idea that if you become a righteous person, then you can have multiple wives and lots of cattle and land and God will bless you with the fat of the cream and honey or whatever, that message would not play with a Roman slave at all. So that reward had to be pushed to where it could feasibly happen, which is after you're dead, because it's not gonna happen in this life. So the idea of a Redeemer shows up all over in the Old Testament. I wrote down job 1925, for I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth. But but these ideas of between a Messiah and a redeemer get really tightly integrated. Okay, so, so as, as Christians take on the role of Jesus first as kind of an exemplar and a teacher and the Messiah, the, the problem they run into right away that we're going to encounter in this book that when they're writing at 70 is Jesus has not come back. So Jesus is supposed to be our, our deliverer, our military deliverer to restore the kingdom of God. And we use that word, we use that, that phrase metaphorically. Now they did not. When they're talking about the kingdom of God, they're talking about the literal devotic kingdom of God. That meaning not that it's the only kingdom in the world, it's the only one that's sanctioned by God and that will trample all of its enemies underneath its feet. Right. So, so, so that theme remains consistent throughout Mark. Mark talks about Jesus being a redeemer and talks about Jesus being a messiah, but never talks about Jesus being a God.

John Dehlin [00:56:15] A political redeemer.

John Larsen [00:56:16] Yeah, political redeemer. Yeah. That quickly transform as the religion into an individual, individual redeemer. So, so it's, it's a message. You can see the zeitgeist at the time was looking for redemption and then they of course get blasted out in 70 by, by the Romans. You know, they sacked the temple and, and it's a mass slaughter. Right. And so post that event, now you've got to explain how this all happened. If Jesus is supposed to come back and he's going to be back shortly to lead us to salvation, then what's happened? Where is he? Why isn't he here? And that's some of. And even you have that in your mind. The person writing Mark is starting to try to answer that question, where's Jesus? Because our belief was he's coming back to redeem us and he's coming back shortly. The Bible, the New Testament makes that clear. He's coming right away. And why isn't he here? So when you understand that Mark is a book written by these believers before the structure of a church came out to be recited to other believers, they could understand who Jesus was, what he accomplished, why we believe he's the Messiah and why he's not here right now, you have a better interpretation of Mark.

John Dehlin [00:57:34] Somebody's saying in the comments that in Mark Chapter one, verse one, he's referred to as the Son of God. Is that sure?

John Larsen [00:57:42] And who told you that the word, the Son of God is a God?

John Dehlin [00:57:48] Do you have a sense for what that would have meant.

John Larsen [00:57:51] Well, I think that the term sons of God shows up. Shows up a lot. That he would have been. When I'm talking about the Messiah, it's not like they would have interpreted the Messiah to be a mere mortal. It would have been more like Hercules. He would have been a. A demigod. He would have been like David. You know this. You read the stories about David and he has super power. You know, he takes down Goliath and, and you know, he. He exhibits superhuman powers.

John Dehlin [00:58:17] A mythical figure.

John Larsen [00:58:18] Yeah. So every religion has gods, demigods and heroes. Right. And really Jesus would have been considered more of a hero. But the idea that, say, the Son of God implies that he is directly the Son of God is not backed up by the book, I think. And I think it's a great place to start because the Book of Mark, remember, we've established that this is the oldest book. It begins with him coming out of Galilee. There is no virgin birth. There is no nativity. There is no recount of him being a God. He shows up as a carpenter from Galilee.

John Dehlin [00:58:57] Some dude.

John Larsen [00:58:58] Some dude.

John Dehlin [00:58:59] Yeah.

John Larsen [00:59:00] And.

John Dehlin [00:59:00] And no wise men finding a star.

John Larsen [00:59:03] All of that is missing from the book. There is no divine birth and no mention of his mother. Well, at this stage.

John Dehlin [00:59:10] Or like angels and. And like John the Baptist preparing the way. Or like Sarah and Elizabeth or whoever. Like.

John Larsen [00:59:19] Yeah, it's all. It's all not there.

John Dehlin [00:59:21] Yeah.

Walking Through Mark Chapter by Chapter

John Larsen [00:59:23] So if we go to chapter one, when you get out your books.

John Dehlin [00:59:27] Yeah. Get out your scriptures. Do you have your scriptures with you, Carah?

John Larsen [00:59:31] You know, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Now, you know, at this stage this is written. Let's. Let's assume this is written around 70. This. Jesus has. Has already achieved more of a mythological role. And they do believe he's returning. Right. He's. He's going to come back. But then as it is written, the prophet Isaiah, then it gives a scripture. Then he talks about John the Baptist and then he comes in. In that day, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, was baptized by John in the Jordan. That's. That's our introduction in the book of Mark to the man who is Jesus. He emerges as a man. And there's never anything that says in here that he's perfect. Matter of fact, he's a dick several times in this book in obvious ways. So, you know, he. I don't even. My point of saying that is, is that he appears to be kind of human, which is common in mythologies. If you read Hindu Mythology or Greek mythology, the gods and the heroes, they're not perfect. They're. They're full of. They're full of human foibles. Okay, so. So what does. What does the Book of Mark say? What its theme. It has a major theme in it, which is a really bizarre one, that God goes around. There's actually not that much doctrine in the Book of Mark, which is really incredible. This is the oldest thing about Jesus. This guy who's been so influential and say what? He's the good news, the gospel. Right. So what is the good news in the Gospel? The Book of Mark is mostly recounts of him healing, and about half those healings involve exorcism. So the Book of Mark is replete with stories of exorcism. And Jesus converses with the demons, and the demons have things to say. This is one of our first encounters and problems with the Bible. The modern Christianity is it does not shy away from its belief in human possession and demonic control of human beings. And Jesus is going through and he's casting those out. But the bizarro thing that Jesus does in the book is he keeps telling people, don't tell anybody. I'm gonna cast this stuff out, but don't tell anybody what we're doing. So to me, and this is my opinion here, is I'm trying to understand what is this about, because the book is so much of stories of Jesus healing somebody, which, if you don't already believe Jesus heals people. The book is completely unconvincing. You know, it just says, hey, there's this random person that Jesus did this, and then they could see and then they could walk. But there would be no proof of any of that. Right. But which I think is really fascinating, that Jesus is always telling people in the book, don't tell anybody what I just did. There's another passage in the Book of Mark where the disciples take Jesus after, and they're saying, why are you always speaking in parables? And Jesus answers them and says, I speak in parables, so nobody understands what I'm saying. And then I come back. You can imagine if I came on John Dehlin's podcast, and I just told you bizarro metaphor to bizarro metaphor. Bizarro metaphor that you don't understand. And then I went back with these guys and explained what I meant. That is what Jesus says he was doing. Jesus said he spoke in parables so that nobody would understand what he was saying. Jesus, that's a less effective way of teaching. Right? That's not really Gonna accomplish much of anything by going to people and telling these stories. Like, no, what the fuck is this guy talking about? But that's a reoccurring. Sorry, there it was. That's a reoccurring theme in the Book of Mark over and over again. That Jesus heals people, tells them not to converses with the demons, and he gives the demons a lot of. A lot of free reign. In the Book of Mark is the story of Legion, right? And of course, Legion. I can tell you the Legion. The Swine, chapter 5, verse 9. Legion says, we are many and we are possessing this guy. So Jesus throws him into a herd of swine who trample off the edge of the cliff and die. I got a few questions. This is. This is Israel, right? Like 30 AD. Who's got a herd of swine? And why? Who. Who's the. I guess the Greeks would eat. Would eat pork. But. And, and do. Do pigs live in herds? I don't know. But. So 2000 of them run off. Why would Jesus do such a thing? Isn't the life of those. Those 2,000 pigs? And somebody owned those 2,000 pigs.

John Dehlin [01:04:11] That's a lot of money.

John Larsen [01:04:12] That's a lot of money. Like, so why is Jesus giving these demons this sort of free pass? It really is a head scratcher. And the reason I'm hammering on these things is because oftentimes when you read modern Christian stuff, they just kind of ignore these things or they use it to try to explain why people struggle with it or why it doesn't make any sense. That's the most common one when I've encountered in seminary, whatever you're reading some story and it just doesn't make any sense. Then they'll refer you to this verse of Jesus saying his parables were designed that way so only the believers would understand. But that really doesn't hold water. It doesn't jive with the foundation of Christianity. It doesn't seem like anything that would really happen.

John Dehlin [01:04:54] I mean, the whole devil casting out thing is problematic, at least for a couple reasons. I think a lot of people think that people just mentally ill. And he was like saying some type of prayer for a schizophrenic guy, basically. But. But like, it left. It left people in the modern era thinking that when somebody actually had mental illness or was acting out, that there was actually demons inside of them. And it's led to all sorts of weird sorts of missionary practices in developed countries and in the United States. And it also, you know, it begs the question, why aren't we casting out devils now. Like, if it was really important Jesus to be casting out devils, then should we be doing it all the time? And somehow with the advent of, like, cell phones and the Internet, all of a sudden we're not casting out devils anymore.

John Larsen [01:05:42] And was Jesus doing some kind of performance art? Let's say that I flew out to, like, the remotest forest of Borneo and there were sick people there, and I took some penicillin with me. Of course, the tribe has never seen penicillin. So I prepare and I bless this meal in which I put the penicillin in and I give it to the natives, and they all miraculously heal. And then they say, john, what did you do? And I say, I cast the demons out. I'm a fucking liar and I'm a manipulator. So we've got a problem here. If Jesus knows that there's no such thing as demons possessing people, what's he doing? What's this grand performance art? Because he could have just as easily said, and let me pull back for a second, because there's an element of Jewish theology that needs to be talked about here. And I think it's one of the reasons why this stuff shows up in Jewish theology. Sickness was an outward sign of displeasure of God or sin. And if you don't believe me, it's all over in the Bible. And one of Jesus message, matter of fact, there's a time in the book of Mark when the Pharisees come to him and, you know, he says to somebody, your sins are forgiven you. And the Pharisees say, nobody can forgive sins but God. And then Jesus replies and says, well, that's easy to do. Here's what's hard to do. Heal people, and I'm going to heal a person. And that you could take the connection, say, I see no connection at all between God forgiving somebody and healing somebody of a sickness. Unless you've already accepted the theological belief the sickness is an outward sign of sin. So where it does actually start making sense in the narrative, and this is what I believe the author of Mark was trying to say is he was trying to show that Jesus had power over sin, that is, he had power to heal. And I think that's a message that's lost on us because we're unwilling to kind of really confront the idea of the Old Testament, holding forth with the idea that people who are sick or lepers or lame were that way because they were sinful, because their parents were sinful or whatever, Right? So I think what the message really relies on is that Jesus is trying to show that people can be forgiven, there is a path to redemption. There is a path where people can be healed and people can be freed. And he's demonstrating that by healing their sickness, which in the tradition would have been a soured sign of sin.

John Dehlin [01:08:19] And there are some people commenting that the swine are allegory. That the casting out of the spirits into the swine and them going over the edge. Don't take that literally. Don't put that on Jesus. He would never do that.

John Larsen [01:08:32] Why, why would I take it as an allegory?

John Dehlin [01:08:34] Because Jesus told you just, didn't you just say Jesus spoke?

John Larsen [01:08:38] Well, I guess I'm trying to. I'm trying to make a point in a ham handed way that's a modern interpretation that is warranted by this, by the scripture. I don't, I don't think you can go through the book of Mark and say at this point they're talking metaphor. This part they're talking. You would need some reason to argue that this part of the book is allegory. It's metaphor. And last week I've read this book three times. I don't see any indication anywhere in the book that it is an allegory. And I'm saying that's a modern parachute to try to justify a belief in something that's not justifiable. It's there in the book. Jesus casts Legion out and sends it into the herd of swine. And if you want to say it's an allegory, you want to start taking your scissors to this book, go at it. That's what every other Christian has done. But that's one of my main complaints against Christianity. Show me a Christian. Show me somebody who believes it. Because they black out whole sections of that book, every single one of them. They don't actually take the book serious. They have their religion and then they take this book and they go through it and they take this passage and take this passage and they make up religion. I contend with you, dear listener, that if right now we were to. I've got me on my delay down here and all I see is a maniac waving his arms in the air all the time. If you were to take, if you were to take and wipe all the Christian religions off the face of the world, everybody who is a Christian had been part of any Christian tradition, destroy all their symbols and then hand humanity the Bible, there is no way they would reverse engineer any of the religions that we have today that are in the Christian family. It's just not warranted in this book. Now, there's an interesting 2000 year history of that, but it's not here. And that's my point. What's here? What does this thing actually say?

John Dehlin [01:10:31] Quick, shout out to Ryan Silver, who donated through Super Chat. Super quick. We applied through YouTube, our Mormon stories podcast channel, to affiliate it with the Open Stories foundation, nonprofit. So I think now your donations fully come and there's no sort of cut that YouTube takes. But thanks to everyone who donates to the super chats on YouTube. You can also click the stars on Facebook, but your donations help pay for John and Carah and. And me. So thank you for that. All right, John, back to you.

John Larsen [01:11:01] Tracy Gris asked how. She sends me a note. You can just write it here and. And Carol pick it up.

John Dehlin [01:11:08] Yeah, yeah. John reads. John tries to read all the comments, at least on YouTube.

John Larsen [01:11:11] I do. I do.

John Dehlin [01:11:12] Yeah. And so he'll respond. Maybe he'll respond to you on the YouTube comments.

John Larsen [01:11:16] Yeah, maybe. Okay, let's move forward. Into the. Into our. Into our passage. I wrote down everything interesting in the book. So I wrote down 45 points. I'm not going to go through all. Yeah, I'm not going to go through all 45. I will spare you. Do the good, dear leader, our dear listener. Okay, so there's some really, I think some really important teachings in the Book of Mark that are glossed over, that are really meaningful to me. And it kind of goes with what we were just talking about. And we're going to skip ahead to Mark, chapter 7, verses 1 through 22. And in this passage, his disciples sit down to eat, but they do not wash. They do no ceremonial washing, which was at the time and still is for many Jewish traditions, an extremely important thing. Not just for hygiene, but it's an important thing ceremonially. It's a ceremonial washing. So for whatever reason, there's some Pharisees there who see this. And he's eating at the house of Levi, who is a tax collector. Well, I'm actually, I can't say that this house is identified as the House of Levi. Levi, the disciple, is a tax collector. We don't know that they're the same two guys. So I don't. I don't want to make that mistake. But he's hanging out with tax collectors now. Let's. Let's unpack that for a minute. The, The.

Brent [01:12:45] The.

John Larsen [01:12:46] The kingdom of Israel is under Roman control, and they do not believe that this is righteous or worthy or anything. A tax collector would be somebody Working for Rome, it would be a turncoat. It would be somebody who cooperates with the. With the Nazis, right? They would be seen as. As somebody who's disloyal to their own people and disloyal to Judaism and disloyal to everything they hold dear. Jesus hanging out with the tax collectors was a huge statement that's lost on us today because he's hanging out with those who are seen as abandoning what they believe and cooperating in the demise of their own traditions. It was not seen as anything positive at all. Right? So he's there. They don't wash, right? And then the Pharisees ask him, why do you not follow the law? You're supposed to be this Jewish rabbi. Why are you and your disciples not following the law? Right? And then Jesus comes out with some zingers that I think are relevant today. So as an atheist who admires Christianity but is absolutely disappointed with Christianity today, I want you to listen up to what Jesus says. So Jesus is not following the religious traditions of his people. He's dishonoring them. He really is. He's supposed to wash. It's not hard to wash. It's a bucket of water. Right? Do it. He doesn't do it. And then he says, this people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. In vain do they worship me teaching human precepts as doctrines. So he's saying, Then he says, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandments of God in order to keep your traditions. Read that sentence again. By Jesus, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandments of God in order to keep your traditions. And I would throw down and say, in America, we have a problem with this right now. We have dishonored the Judeo Christian traditions of what we value to honor the traditions of what they're doing now. You know, I have seen violent billboards suggesting violence to advocates of abortion that have pictures of people with machine guns with scripture on it. These people need to read the New Testament and read what Jesus is actually saying. Jesus is very iconoclastic. Jesus is busting down the traditions of religion. Jesus never formed a religion, nor did he ever say anything that would form a religion. And best I can see, everything he was saying was criticizing formalized religion and people in those in those positions. Then Jesus says, listen to me, all of you, and understand there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile. But the things that come out are what defile. Is that my phone?

John Dehlin [01:15:50] I think it's yours.

John Larsen [01:15:53] Sorry.

John Dehlin [01:15:55] How are you doing over there, Carah?

Carah Burrell [01:15:57] Great, perched, ready, listening, intent.

John Dehlin [01:16:02] John's turning his phone off.

Brent [01:16:04] Sorry.

John Larsen [01:16:04] So. So I think that's a key passage and it's a key passage to Mormons. Listen to me, all of you, and understand. There is nothing outside a person that can go in that can defile for the things that come out. Defile teaching of Jesus Christ. While he is rejecting an established Judaic tradition, apparently my silencing my phone was not successful. I'm going to turn the damn thing off.

John Dehlin [01:16:28] I'm curious what he was saying. You do not worship me or something

John Larsen [01:16:32] like, well, you have to remember, you have to detangle some of that. The stuff I gave with Messiah I invite to go read and study deep. These are some deep concepts that I'm just throwing down. In the beginning, this book is not written by Jesus, right? It's written by people generations after him and the coded language switches. But he's saying that, that you, you're trying to keep pure by following these rules. Like if you do this and you do this and you do this and you do this, then you will be saved. If at 8 years old you get baptized, then you get the priesthood, then you go to the temple and you get your, your, your, your, your tokens and signs and you get married in the temple and you obey the commandments and you pay your tithing, then you will be saved. Jesus rejects that teaching right out in chapter seven, right in the beginning, and he says it's false. There's nothing you do that defiles you or there's nothing out there in the world that defiles you. It's what comes from you that defiles you. Sin is a product of the internal and it's not to be just like, you know, there's not some kind of little ceremony that gets rid of it. Now there's people who come and say, well, what about the Last Supper? I don't know that Jesus was this. And that's outside of the scope of what we're talking about here right now. But, but, you know, that's up for debate. But again, as somebody who doesn't accept the divinity of Jesus Christ, I see the masterful teaching as he is pulling down these traditions that really kept them butting heads up against the Romans and the Greeks and to this day is still a problem. The hubris of Israel is a huge problem. And the way they treat the indigenous people who lived in that land before it was settled, you know, post war in 48 is appalling. Right? And it's still a problem of clinging to these traditions because they're righteous, meanwhile doing every wicked thing out there. That's what Jesus is condemning. And he's condemning it very clearly. He's going to come back to that two more times in this book. It is probably the biggest doctrine taught here is sort of the rejection of this showy religion of saying, I've got my ceremonies, I've got my garments, I've got my temple record recommend. Jesus is not impressed, my friends. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:18:48] Someone mentions in the comments that Jesus wasn't even here to start a religion. That, that wasn't.

John Larsen [01:18:53] I don't, I don't. I don't think so.

John Dehlin [01:18:54] Not a lot of evidence that. He's certainly not start a church.

John Larsen [01:18:57] He. He was, he was there to tear down. He was, he's a mystic. He was tearing down the false traditions that kept people bound up. Jesus was ultimately about ex. In my view, about acceptance, about interpersonal relationship, about the people who are here. You know, when, when he said it's, it's kind of dick. But he, you know, they, they say, Jesus, this is in the book of Mark, your brother and your mom's outside. And he says, you know, the people who are here listening to me are my, my mother and my brothers or whatever. And I think what Jesus is trying to say is sort of, I'm present here with, with, with this, there's, there's this external. But here we are, we're in the here, we're in the now. And love and loving kindness and support are the important parts of that. Okay, let's continue the theme in the next chapter. Jesus says this. If any of you want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their crosses and follow me. This is an important sentence just to kind of give a parenthetic statement. This is the kind of thing that there's no way Jesus said that. It would be meaningless to everybody. Why would Jesus say, take up my cross and follow me. So. So, I mean, that's a good sign that this was written after Jesus was crucified. Because crucifixion was just a Roman form of torture and control, right? They parade these guys out. So you didn't. If you walked by a bunch of thieves dying up there in a horrific way. Crucifixion was terrible. But the idea of Jesus saying, take up your cross and follow me before he was dead would have absolutely zero meaning to any human being at all.

John Dehlin [01:20:32] Period.

John Larsen [01:20:32] End of story, full stop. That, that would require a lot of interpretation of what happened to Jesus under the Roman torture. Okay, if any of you want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it. And for those who want. Who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel will save it. For what will it profit them? To gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? And he's not talking. It doesn't say. Notice that this interpretation is not soul, it's for their life. What will you give in return for your life? I. E. What will you do with your life? You have a few years on this planet. What are you going to do with that? And what Jesus is saying is, take up your cross and follow me. What Jesus is saying is, now he

John Dehlin [01:21:25] hadn't been crucified yet, why is he talking about crosses?

John Larsen [01:21:28] That's why I was just. This was metaphorically metaphoric that they put in later. But we're trying to get at the words of what Jesus is saying. So forgive me. I know I sound like I'm contradicting myself. I'm not. What I'm saying is that sentence. The author of this is trying to get the heart and soul of Jesus teaching, which is what people glommed onto, which was the gospel, which is what they were forming a religion around. So they're putting these interpretations down, but they're post Jesus's death. But Jesus is saying, you need to follow me, meaning do what I'm doing. Reject the economics of the system. And later in this book, we get to the parable when they ask him, what about the Roman coin, the Emperor's coin? We'll talk about that too. But here's another place where Jesus is rejecting the whole social order and he's saying loving kindness. He's rejecting all that and saying, you've got to have compassion for one another. You've got to take care of one another. That's Jesus's message here. Let's see. And then, then here, here's. Here's. So that's the second rejection of, Of. Of structure and of. And of economics and that sort of thing. And here we go again. In chapter 17. Oh and 10, verse 17, as he was setting out on the journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus said to him, why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. Again, a verse that has to be ignored by people who believe that Jesus Is God. If you believe Jesus is God, that sentence makes no sense whatsoever. No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments. You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness. You shall not defraud. Honor your father, mother. He said to him, teacher, I have kept all these since my youth. Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, you lack one thing. Go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor and you have treasures in heaven. Then come, follow me. When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieved, for he had many possessions. There is nothing in this, in the New Testament to suggest Jesus was speaking metaphorically. This is actually what Jesus did. This is actually what his disciples did. This is actually what the followers after him did and serious followers like the Benedictines did. And it has long been a tradition and it is the modern sort of materialistic, nationalistic interpretation of the scriptures to suggest that this is not real. I would say, if you're a Christian, I will know you're a Christian because you'll sell everything you have and you will give to the poor. And I am tired of people living in million dollar homes, driving Bentleys and driving planes, telling me about Jesus. I don't find Jesus anywhere in what they're doing. I find the exact opposite. And for scriptures like this. So this is the third iconoclastic scripture I've read of you out of this short book where Jesus, like I said, read it, read Mark, and you see what he has there. He doesn't teach very many things, but the one thing he teaches over and over and over again, the rejection of societal structures. Take care of the poor and take care of one another, and reject materialism, which surprisingly enough, is the message of all great gurus throughout. They all, they're all teaching the same message. Jesus's message and the Buddha's message aren't that different. Roman Catholicism and modern Theravada, Thailand, Buddhism are extremely different. But it's like the founders were saying the same thing and we still aren't listening. Okay, yeah.

Jesus on Wealth, Social Order, and the Kingdom of God

John Dehlin [01:25:16] I'm sure modern Mormon would sort of say, well, that's metaphorical. Again, he doesn't mean sell everything you literally have.

John Larsen [01:25:23] Right.

John Dehlin [01:25:23] He just means kind of like make sacrifices for, for the cause of goodness. Right, yeah.

John Larsen [01:25:28] And I think it's a metaphor that means the Mormons need to send all their money to John. Yeah. Anybody can say, oh, this is metaphoric, and it does that. But you have got to give me an exegesis and explain how you arrive at the fact that, that this is a metaphor, but the sentence before it's not, in the sentence after is not. And this one we should follow, and this one we shouldn't follow.

John Dehlin [01:25:46] You know, well, John, that's why we need modern day prophets to tell us

Carah Burrell [01:25:50] what the scriptures, the biggest sigh of relief from a congregation if you hear somebody read that scripture and then you say, and now here we're here to tell you why Jesus didn't actually mean what he says, that he said, here.

John Dehlin [01:26:00] Thank you, modern day prophets.

Carah Burrell [01:26:02] So glad I still get to keep my Bentley. Okay, we're fine.

John Larsen [01:26:04] Okay. So when he heard this, he was shocked and went away because he had many possessions. Now let's pick up the next line. Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, how hard will it be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God? And the disciples were perplexed at these words. They're always confused. But Jesus said to them, again, children, how hard is it to enter the kingdom of God? It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God. And when I read again, and I'm not a biblical scholar, I'm just a dude, but when I read the parts of the New Testament that vibrate with me, that really speak to me, it is a constant rejection of the pursuit of the kind of things that we pursue culturally. Big institutions, big, big things. And he is stating flat out, and that's why I think it's funny, is you take all this stuff about Jesus healing and they love that, that even though it doesn't show anything or prove anything because he's long gone, and then, then he actually says stuff and they say, oh, it's metaphor, metaphor, metaphor, metaphor, metaphor. And, and that's, that's a problem.

Brent [01:27:09] Right?

The Fig Tree, the Temple, and Taxes

John Larsen [01:27:11] All right. I've called Jesus a dick more than once. I'm going to call him a dick again. In chapter 11, he's walking along. This is a couple days before Passover. And Passover happens when? End of March, early April.

John Dehlin [01:27:24] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:27:24] And he walks by a fig tree, right? And he's hungry. And so he sees there's no figs on this tree in April, so he curses the tree and it withers and dies because he was hungry in April.

John Dehlin [01:27:38] Yeah.

John Larsen [01:27:39] All right, let me tell. Explain basic horticulture to Jesus. Like there's a cycle of the winter and the summer, and plants, you know, they'll leaf and they'll spring in the spring, and then the fruit comes on Middle east in lay in the Middle East. And I did. I actually looked up. Up the Aggregarian cultivation cycles of Middle Eastern figs, so I wasn't too much of a dummy. And yes, figs are not harvested till September or October.

John Dehlin [01:28:02] And if Jesus were the God of the universe, he might have known that.

John Larsen [01:28:06] Why was he so mean to that little tree? It was doing its best. Of course, it didn't have any figs. It was April.

John Dehlin [01:28:14] Apologies to my Christian listeners and friends who might take umbrage at Jesus being labeled a fallic symbol, basically.

John Larsen [01:28:21] Oh, yeah, he's is. There's a reason we use that term, but he's not always nice and he doesn't always say things that are right.

John Dehlin [01:28:36] Just like John Larsen. If John. If Jesus.

John Larsen [01:28:38] No, don't. Let's not go there. You take that back. I am nothing like Jesus. You're not going to compare me to Jesus.

John Dehlin [01:28:45] I'm just saying, if Jesus can do mean things, John Larsen can use a potty word every once in a while.

John Larsen [01:28:50] Right.

John Dehlin [01:28:50] That's all I'm saying.

John Larsen [01:28:52] Well, and you know, like I say, I'm Jesus. Is Jesus real? I mean, we probably should have addressed that at all. Who knows? Who cares? Does it matter?

John Dehlin [01:29:01] Bart Ehrman says yes, most likely.

John Larsen [01:29:03] I believe most likely. There was a rabbi named Joshua from Galilee who taught some of these things. Again, you can find other Jewish writings from the time that are very similar to other rabbis, but there's a lot of stuff that's not. How much of this can we believe? I think we can believe the heart and soul of it from when it was written was the belief of the people at the time. This tells us what the author of the Book of Mark believed about Jesus in the first century.

John Dehlin [01:29:31] I have to call you out. Father vampire on YouTube says John Larsen. He wasn't being a dick. Father Vampire says he's really tired of you saying that Jesus was teaching a powerful object lesson. That's a Father Vampire.

John Larsen [01:29:48] Okay, what's the object lesson?

John Dehlin [01:29:51] I don't know.

John Larsen [01:29:54] I just. I walked by a tomato, a withered tomato plant this morning, and I said, you damn tomato plant. I want tomatoes. Tell me what the object lesson is. Give it to me. I'm not that smart.

John Dehlin [01:30:07] All right, well, I'll let you know what Father Vampire says.

John Larsen [01:30:09] Okay.

Brent [01:30:10] About it.

John Dehlin [01:30:10] All right,

John Larsen [01:30:14] let's see. I. I want the. The. The coin. I'm looking down my notes here. Okay, here we go. So chapter 12. Then they sent him some Pharisees and some Herodians to trap him in what he said. And they came and said to him, teacher, we know that you are sincere and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the Emperor or not? Should we pay them or should we not? But knowing this hypocrisy, he said to them, why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a dinars and let me see it. And they brought one. And then he said to them, whose head is this and whose title? And they answered and said, the Emperor's. And Jesus said to them, give to the Emperor the things that are the Emperor's and to God the thing that are God's. And they were utterly amazed. And I think. I think this is one of Jesus's brilliant teachings. We as Christians and we as believers or followers of Jesus, and people like Jesus, believe we can participate in systems and gain the good out of them. This is completely consistent with everything else Jesus is teaching. Again, why I would push back on the idea that these particular teachings are allegorical, because here I've given you four, four times that Jesus rejects the greater society, including the law, the Jewish society, and just says, don't participate in the system. And I think Jesus is spot on. That coin belongs to the Emperor. It was minted by the Emperor for the Emperor's economic system. That coin belongs to Caesar. And that's what Jesus is pointing out. How are you going to find any good out of that? That is not part of the kingdom of God. Jesus would say it's an external system. And when you get people who lean into those systems, you get the corruption we have right now, which the corruption that exists in the Mormon Church is Jesus teaches the lesson over and over again. Give to the poor, take care of the less fortunate, heal the sick, take care of the widow, sell everything you have. Get rid of your material possessions. Live in the moment. Adorn yourself like the sparrows do. Don't worry about racking up treasure. This is a constant message from Jesus, Right? And the problem is his followers, that is like the Mormons. They know how to collect money in his name. They know how to go to you and say, john, do you believe in Jesus? We both believe in Jesus. Well, guess what? I can baptize you. Yeah, I'll baptize you. Well, now you need to give me 10% of everything you have. And they believe that they're collecting money for God. I've met thousands of these people. Many of you are these people. And so you Believe you're doing something good because you're collecting money from God. But what the Mormon Church doesn't know how to do is spend money for God is what Jesus is telling them to do. If the Mormon Church, in my view, were really a Christian church, it would be broke because it would constantly be pursuing good for the people. Jesus told us to pursue good for. For. I mean, what are the three main ones he talks about all the time? The poor, prostitutes, and then the tax collectors he's talking about. Well, those three show up. But, you know, prostitution, people who are trafficking, sex. We. Those are people that we shun. And, And I think it's important and not metaphoric that Jesus did not shun them. Not only did he say, pay attention to him, take care of them, he ate with them, he hung out with them. That was his crew. He was hanging out with hookers. Right. Because. And that's who Jesus is. He wasn't building 37 story towers in Salt Lake City to try to figure out how to get another hundred billion dollars. That is not in the book. And you say, well, how do you know the mind of Jesus? I don't, but neither do you. But I can read what's written here. And this thing that we're doing now is not what's written in this book.

John Dehlin [01:34:22] I have to. I have to kind of highlight some of the comments.

John Larsen [01:34:26] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:34:26] I don't mean to bring us back to the conversation about the fig.

John Larsen [01:34:30] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:34:30] But you'll be pleased to know that we have several interpretations.

John Larsen [01:34:33] Oh, great. I want to get.

John Dehlin [01:34:35] Of what was going on, and I want to just read a couple of them and. And then kind of make a point. So. So let's see. One person says, Father Vampire says the importance of bearing good fruits, the importance of acts over words, over faith, over posturing and pretending to be what you're not. That's. That's one interpretation from Father Vampire.

John Larsen [01:35:04] I don't follow.

John Dehlin [01:35:05] Rowan says the object lesson was about the state of Israel. Let's see, Rowan says that he cursed the state of Israel, which the fig tree represents.

John Larsen [01:35:19] Well, there was.

John Dehlin [01:35:21] And then Ken says, no, fig tree represents the gospel and the fig represents the knowledge of eternal life. This fruit should be available year round. And then, of course, Carah just shared what I think may have been the most wise comment of all, which was the comment from Andrew Shaver, which is, there are like three different people telling different interpretations of the fig tree in this chat alone. Which sort. Which sort of goes to the theme of what John Larsen is talking about. And it Reminds me, and this is for the show notes of a movie that Carah Barrel has not yet seen, which is the Life of Brian by Monty Python. And if you remember that, it's on

John Larsen [01:36:00] Netflix for free right now.

John Dehlin [01:36:01] If you remember that movie. There's a point where, like Brian, who everyone mistakes as the Messiah, is like running and his sandal falls off. And everybody's debating about what the sign means. And some all think that they should all take off their shoes and be barefoot. And others say that it means he's this or that. And it's sort of. Life of Brian is a wonderful exploration of religious belief. And it kind of makes fun of religious belief, but. But, you know, there you have it. You have at least three different interpretations of what the. The fig.

John Larsen [01:36:34] Right.

John Dehlin [01:36:34] Allegory meant.

John Larsen [01:36:36] The Life of Brian, I'd recommend to everybody. It's more. It's worse than I am when it comes to blasphemy, but it points the ridiculous. What the. My favorite scene in it is the opening scene when they're at the Sermon on the Mount, of course, they're standing in the backs. No one can hear anything he's saying. So they keep asking, they keep misinterpreting it. You know, like a lot of these stories, they just couldn't pan out. Like you. You wouldn't hear. You wouldn't be able to hear. You wouldn't be able to do what they're talking about doing. It just. They just won't work. And that's what the Life of Brian points out. Quite often that these things don't.

John Dehlin [01:37:10] It starts out with, like, these people way, way far back. Jesus is doing the Sermon on the Mount, and it's got these four or five people, like, way, way, way so far back, they can't. Can't even hear what Jesus is really saying. They're arguing about who has a big nose and who doesn't. And they keep mishearing what Jesus says. So when Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers, somebody goes, blessed are the cheese makers. Why do they get special treatment?

John Larsen [01:37:35] Exactly. All right, so let's talk about. Let's kind of go back and talk about what this means altogether and what it means for me. First of all, I wanna go back to the point. I really like this book. I like the Book of Mormon.

The Last Supper, Betrayal, and the Resurrection Ending

John Dehlin [01:37:47] Can I ask you a question?

John Larsen [01:37:48] Sure, sure.

John Dehlin [01:37:48] So I went and read ahead and just read a bunch of the chapter headings. There are places in Mark where Jesus talks about his own resurrection.

John Larsen [01:37:57] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:37:57] And then at the end of Mark, he is resurrected. So, you know, when we talk about it not claiming he was divine, it does have him being resurrected and it just. Do you have thoughts on that? I don't think I'm going to try spring that on you.

John Larsen [01:38:12] You almost made me abandon. I almost was about to abandon an important point. Thank you for bringing that up. Okay, so I brought up in the beginning that the Book of Mark does not have the divine birth. He just shows up as a. As a rabbi from Joshua.

John Dehlin [01:38:26] Rabbi Joshua. Joshua the carpenter. Yeah, from somewhere. From Nazareth or whatever.

John Larsen [01:38:30] Yeah, from Galilee.

John Dehlin [01:38:33] Galilee.

John Larsen [01:38:33] Okay, if we go to chapter 16 and if you get a copy of this book, it. It will show you this. Oh, I'm in the Maccabees. That's the wrong place. Mark, chapter 16. Okay. There are two endings to the Book of Mark.

Brent [01:38:49] What?

John Larsen [01:38:51] There's the old one and the new one. Okay, so the oldest copies of the Book of Mark end a particular way. And let's. Let's go through. Let's go through the ending and through. So Jesus has this last supper with his disciples, with the people who are following him. And you have these men. Let's be clear, they're the disciples at this point are all men. There are disciples that are named in the book of Acts that have female names, but the church later changed them to male names. Just Mormon Church, the Catholic.

John Dehlin [01:39:20] Catholic Church.

John Larsen [01:39:20] Okay, so it wasn't always Catholic church

John Dehlin [01:39:24] changed male names to female names to male names so that no one would think that any of Jesus's disciples were female.

John Larsen [01:39:32] Yes.

Brent [01:39:33] Cool.

John Larsen [01:39:34] So how do you feel about that, Carah?

Carah Burrell [01:39:37] I go by Carl. So everyone knows this is a legitimate organization at Mormon Stories.

Brent [01:39:41] Carl.

Carah Burrell [01:39:42] Yeah. No broads in here, Carl. That was good.

John Larsen [01:39:45] Okay, so. So Jesus says before, you know, before the, the morning, you. You know, one of you will betray me. And. But the story actually has him betrayed twice, actually betrayed three times. They all, all of his disciples who pledged that night that they will stick with him to the end. All, they all desert him. These men all desert him. And there are two heavy betrayers. One sells him, betrays him, Does a. Does a flat out betrayal. Sells, sells him up the river, gives his location away, turns him over to the Romans. The second person who betrays him is Peter, his closest disciple, who denies him in his moment of need. Jesus is abandoned by two people. The one who pursues the worldly structure and money. The one who goes to the government, you know, the, the, the. The one who goes for the political monetary solution. And the other one is the institutional man. His right hand man, but his right hand man is not actually willing to follow him and back him up and denies him three times. So both denials were instrumental because people kept asking, aren't you with this guy? Don't you know him? Can't you vouch for him? Anything like, no, I don't know, I don't know who he is. And I think that's lost on, on in the Christian narrative. Oftentimes it's an important point. Jesus was not betrayed. He was betrayed by both ends, though those who fancy themselves followers betrayed him as much as those who rejected him him and were turncoats. In the end the, both the Mormons and the ex Mormons betrayed him.

John Dehlin [01:41:32] Right.

John Larsen [01:41:33] So he is tortured and, and executed by the, by the Romans and, and

John Dehlin [01:41:38] any idea why the Romans were threatened by Jesus in Mark?

John Larsen [01:41:42] He's a rebel rouser. You know, remember the, the time the, the zealots, we saw that word were literally operating, that there were, there was terrorist sales around in Palestine to overthrow the Roman rule. Right.

John Dehlin [01:41:59] So if he, so when they're saying are you the Messiah? When people are, when wherever in the New Testament people are saying Jesus, are you the Messiah? They don't mean the Son of God, is that right? They mean the person who will come and liberate Israel from Roman rule.

John Larsen [01:42:17] Both things. The Messiah is the descendant of David, which of course is a problem in the New Testament anyway, it's in the other books, so we're not really addressing it here because they don't identify Jesus as a descendant of David. They say he's a descendant of God and Mary. So they've got a big problem. That's why there's two different genealogies in Matthew and Luke. But he's supposed to be a descendant of David. Right? And the descendant of David who is the Messiah is the Son of God. But I'm just saying he's not God. He's the Son of God. He is. So, so, so the Jews would have seen that as blasphemy, potentially. At least that's the way the book is presented. Remember, the book is written by Romans. So the Romans come out looking good like, like the, the, the, the guard who cuts him down. The centurion who cuts him down says, oh truly, this man was the Son of God. And Pilate says, I'm washing my hands of this. You're making me do this. Right. That's because by the time the book's coming around, it's written to a Roman audience. So, so the, the book de. Vilifies the Romans and vilifies The Jews instead. So it has priests and stuff doing things to him that it's really unlikely the Romans would have ever allowed the kind of access to the Jewish priests to this guy. But you know, it's really Hezbollah and Afghanistan, it's the same thing we do and every other powerful nation does. You go in and you occupy a country. I don't care who you are, you're the United States, you're any country. You go and occupy another country, you are an occupier. You then start to kill the local citizens and terrorist, quote, unquote, cells will spring up and start fighting against your occupation. It happens everywhere. It's universal. Has nothing to do with the fact that we're the United States. Has nothing to do with the fact that they're Rome. Has nothing to do with that. It's just what happens when an occupier comes in. So he was, he was put on trial as a rebel rouser, potential terrorist, basically. And terrorists go up on the gallows. And that's what happened to him.

Carah Burrell [01:44:16] Him.

John Larsen [01:44:16] Right. And I think that's a valid interpretation. What he was, he was radical and he was saying, you know, we're not subjected to the Roman monetary system. Just stop playing the game. You don't, don't do it. Don't, don't go in. Don't. You know what, you don't need to wash. It's, it's, it's, it's that you don't need to do these ceremonies. It's, it's, it's, it's your soul, it's your, it's your heart. Take care of one, take care of the poor, pay attention to the prostitutes, pay attention to the. And that is a subversive message. It was then, it is now. Anybody who's saying you don't need to go to the temple to find God, that's a subversive person. And that's what Jesus was. Okay, so he's betrayed twice. The Romans send him up and kill him. And then what we see is, we see the women are there. In this book of Mark, he's betrayed by all of the men, but he's never betrayed by the women. And in the book, that's the Sabbath, so they can't take care of him, you know, and I'm sorry, it's a little bit tender because if you read the book, the relationship between Jesus and the women that show up is really special. It's really meaningful. It's really spiritual. And church fathers later did things like they would take and push all the personalities of the women together. So they would take the example is, you know, the woman who was taken in adultery, it never names her. It was later a pope that identified her as being Mary Magdalene. Because we can't have multiple female characters. They all have to be whores or they all have to be Madonnas. Right? And that's the only thing we'll accept. They're complainers, they're Mary's or their Marthas. Right. Women are always bifurcating this holy, untouchable Madonna thing that can't be achieved, or a dirty thing that just distracting men. But that's not what the Book of Mark says. Jesus gets betrayed by all his male followers, but the women go to clean up. So let's read how the book ends. When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome brought spices so they might go and anoint him. And very early the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, we will roll. Who will roll away the stone for us to the entrance of the tomb. When they looked up, they saw the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side. And they were alarmed. But he said to them, do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Look, there is a place there they laid him. But go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him just as he told you. So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement seized them, for they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Who is the message of accepting Jesus's divine role, or, you know, his role as Messiah? That message is first delivered to these three women. Right. Then we will read the last paragraph in the book as it existed originally, before it was mucked with, it says, and all they had been commanded, and all that had been commanded them, they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them from east to west, the sacred, imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Jesus never returns in the first issue of the book, and through them they go out to preach his good message.

John Dehlin [01:48:03] So you're saying there's no resurrection in the first version of Mark?

John Larsen [01:48:06] There is no resurrection that occurs in the first. Now, I read this over and over again and very carefully and read some things. So I think the interpretation would be that he is the Messiah. For the early Christians, he. He is going to return and rebuild the kingdom of God. But the book ends with him dying.

John Dehlin [01:48:26] It doesn't end with him returning.

John Larsen [01:48:28] The book, the original book, the oldest version of the story of Jesus begins with him wandering into town and ends with him dying

John Dehlin [01:48:39] and saying the resurrection part was added later to Mark.

John Larsen [01:48:43] I would believe that by this stage, it was a belief that this man had been resurrected. That was an important thing, that his body was not. He wasn't destroyed by the Romans. He had been taken up by God as the Messiah, and the Messiah was going to return. And if you read some of the later books, and they're important, it's not like Mark is the only important book. There was a belief that he was eminently going to return and lead them to build the kingdom of God. But the idea, what I think is clear here is these would have been the people only 30 years away from Jesus. To me, my interpretation is Jesus never came back because people don't come back from the dead. And that's what the book basically says. And as you saw me tearing up, I'm sorry about that. I think. I think it's a very tender message that he was telling them. You know, he was telling them the message. The message that all the religions are trying to tell us, like, we're here for a short time, take care of one another, the big systems of money and power, and none of that stuff matters. That's Jesus's message. That's the good news. That's the gospel. You don't need all this ceremonial stuff. You know, God is available in your heart, and I accept that.

Brent [01:49:58] We're all.

John Larsen [01:49:59] We're all part of. Part of the same humanity. Right? So I think. I think that's a powerful message. And it's a powerful message of the divine divinity or whatever, the importance of the feminine, which, of course, has been stomped out by the goddamn patriarchal church for 2,000 years. Okay, let's sum up some thoughts about really, really quick.

John Dehlin [01:50:19] Father Vampire is really hitting us hard today.

John Larsen [01:50:21] Oh, okay.

John Dehlin [01:50:22] And Father Vampire writes, not true. The oldest version of Mark ends with the discovery of the empty tomb. Not what you.

John Larsen [01:50:30] Yeah. Yes. Well, that's what I just read.

John Dehlin [01:50:32] Okay.

John Larsen [01:50:33] Yeah. They remember. They go to clean his body. The stone has been rolled away. The tomb is empty. There's somebody there sitting in white. It doesn't say an angel who says, he's gone. He's gone to Galilee. Go find him there. And then the women run off. And then it says, and then they preached his message throughout the world. Basically the tomb is empty because that is a sign that the Romans didn't win. He conquered death. He is the Messiah. I'm not saying that these people did not believe Jesus was the Messiah. I'm saying that Jesus never came back. And it's pretty clear from the first book, the oldest book. It's only later books when he comes back and does all sorts of funky things. Those, those don't exist in the earliest books. Do they believe he was resurrected? Yes. Do they believe he was a redeemer? Yes. Do they believe he's the Messiah? Yes. They believe he was some kind of divinely imbued heroic person? Yes. Do they believe he is the Trinity? It's not in the Book of Mark. Not at all. That is a later doctrinal development. And I'm not trying to argue again. I think Dr. Vampire here somehow thinks I'm trying to insult his religion. The religion grew and grew and grew. What we have is we have a little piece in time and it happens to be the oldest piece in time. So it's the most interesting. And it's interesting to me that he doesn't come back in that book. Now can I say that he doesn't come back. I would say the null case is the belief that humans die and they don't come back. And that's what I would say. I've not seen anything in this world to suggest that any being has ever returned. But that doesn't take away from the beauty of what Jesus taught us and it doesn't take away from the meaning of this book. You don't have to believe that the Bible is true to have the Bible have value. That's my point. I am a die hard atheist and the Bible can make me weep. And that's. That's okay, right? I think so. Okay.

Reflections on Jesus and the New Testament

John Dehlin [01:52:36] So, Carah, are you good with Jesus now?

Carah Burrell [01:52:38] I've always been good with Jesus. Just don't see him as a, you know, an actual deity. But I can totally relate to the things John's been saying about, you know, tearing down the structures that tell us to do the things that are quite opposite from the things that he taught. And I didn't see that in Mormonism. I didn't, I didn't see that Christ alive and well in Mormonism. And I lived one foot in Christianity listening to sermons of preachers that did preach that kind of Jesus and then also living as a Mormon for seven years because I needed the type of Jesus we're talking about. Right? Now, so I definitely have always been down with that guy. Do I pray to him though?

John Larsen [01:53:14] No, I don't, I don't know that you need to. Yeah, I don't know that he would ask for that, even if he is God or whatever. I don't have any problem, like taking my concern straight to the man if you want to, you know, that's why. Blasphemy, whatever. I, I would bring up my concerns with Jesus if I was in front of him and maybe we would have a drink and laugh about it. It's the same things, you know, there's, there's points in the book where I say, oh, Jesus did this and Jesus did this, did he? I don't know. It's what the book says and there's times when I say it's obviously false. I would actually say that it is unlikely that Jesus. Let's unpack John Larsonisms a little bit. I don't believe Jesus ever cursed the fig tree. I believe that's ridiculous. And I believe Jesus.

John Dehlin [01:53:58] What about like cured the sick would have been rose the dead?

John Larsen [01:54:01] No, that doesn't happen. It's not real.

John Dehlin [01:54:06] Cast out spirits.

John Larsen [01:54:07] There are no spirits.

John Dehlin [01:54:10] You're very secular, John Larsen.

John Larsen [01:54:11] I, it's just, it's. I, it's just you look, you look at the world and you read all the books and you look at the, there's no, they're not here.

John Dehlin [01:54:19] I mean, if, if, honestly, if Mormon prophets and revelators claim to be special witnesses of Christ and have all the power that he had, they should be running around all day long casting out evil spirits, healing the sick, resurrecting the

John Larsen [01:54:32] dead, and they're not, or helping us understand this. We have very little writing about and from Jesus. If these guys are where they say they are, what we should be getting after 170 years is a much clearer vision of what the New Testament means. Clearer vision of what it means to be a Christian in an electronic post industrial world. What it means to be ethical with the ethical dilemmas that we have today. What I think is fascinating is Joseph Smith started his religion right before really the Industrial Revolution took off. And the changes that came after 1850 just dwarfed the changes that came in the 2000 years. Why is it, if this is the message for our day, are all of the big questions that we struggle with at this time, why is it that Jesus doesn't weigh in Pepto Bismol? The process to create Pepto Bismol relies on fetal cells. It's a complicated issue. Right. Can we Have a prophet help us out with this one a little bit. You know, the Supreme Court's just about to overturn Roe v. Wade. Little help, anybody, you know, but they, you know, it's, that's, that's why I'm just utterly disappointed with Christianity, full stop. And I'll give you, I'll give you all a little Christmas present. There is actually a version of Jesus that I dig on, but I have not found anybody that actually believes in it. Any religion that actually teaches what I'm about to say. The idea that it's always kind of conundrum about Jesus redemption, it was such a short time and there's so many billions of us that anytime you start adding it up, the price that Jesus paid for my sins is so insignificant that it's meaningless. Right? Jesus paid for all of our sins in a matter of like 48 hours. The redemption of all of humankind happened in minutes. That's, that's not useful. That's weird. It doesn't do anything for anybody. You know, it doesn't, you know, and the idea that we're going to come down here and be bastards and some of us are going to be bastards, but we're going to say this little prayer that wasn't really invented till the early 20th century, or I accept Jesus Christ as my own Lord and personal Savior and now suddenly my sins are taken away and for the rest of the next 78 trillion years, everything is going to be dependent on the fact that one Tuesday afternoon I pronounce that prayer, even though I might have been a bastard, that's theologically just bankrupt. I mean, I can't. Even though there's millions of people believe that today, I can't believe they do, but they do. It's completely non biblical, right? There's nothing in the Bible about that at all. But for me, the idea that Jesus became empathetic to sinners, the idea that Jesus became a sinner not in action, but in heart and soul. The idea that Jesus is the only one who can judge a child molester, because Jesus is the only one who knows what it means to be a child molester would make him the redeemer. If what he experienced was to achieve 100% perfect empathy, meaning he can understand completely what it means. But to do so would mean he would have to know what it is to rape. He would have to know exactly what it means to kill. He would have to know exactly what it means to every despicable thing that's ever been done. And that man alone could Judge us? Because I am unable to judge a child molester, even though I find it absolutely repugnant. I just don't even want to think about it. I don't want to deal with it. But it's a psychological disorder and it's not one that anybody really chooses. How can I judge it? I can't. So if there was a Jesus out there that could understand sin completely, then I can get behind that idea. But it's not biblical and it's not really what any church believes. And this goes to the Terrell given thing. I think Terrell is a great guy and he and Fiona have created their own theology, but it's not an actual theology that anybody believes out there. So that I can construct a construction that makes Jesus and Christianity make sense to me. Doesn't mean anything. I'm just one person. Right. So theologically, if God really cares about his children, then he would care about things we collectively believe. He wouldn't make sure that I understand Jesus correctly when everyone else doesn't. That's ridiculous. So the idea of redemption from sin, I think is a useful idea because we are all sinners. We all make mistakes. We're humans, we're flawed. We feel bad about that. But I really don't like living around Christians because they are just as flawed as everybody else. But they've been suddenly pronounced clean. And so they don't have the same responsibility for their action the rest of us do. So they're dangerous.

John Dehlin [01:59:39] All right.

John Larsen [01:59:39] In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

John Dehlin [01:59:41] All right.

John Larsen [01:59:42] No, so I, I know I've been all over the map here. The, the, the New Testament is, is, is a, is a wonderful, fascinating, weird, destructive, great, beneficial book. And it really. The ex. Mormons do themselves a disservice by not engaging with these, with these ideas. And the Mormons do themselves a disservice by putting these ideas into cages. Let it free, read it, figure out what it says, and then you can start saying, what did they think it said in the second century, in the fifth century, in the 13th century? And what do they interpret it now? And what does it mean to have the Protestant Reformation? Those are all fascinating questions, but really here it's like, what does that book actually say?

John Dehlin [02:00:23] Love it. Al wants to know if you have read any books by Bishop John Shelby. SpongeBob.

John Larsen [02:00:29] I have read portions I've never sat down and worked my way through. Shelby sprung, but he is referenced all the time when you get into theology. So you can't study theology at all without. Without. But I'm not ready to write an essay on him or whatever. So what's. What's the. The Bishop Shelby sprung the thing that he's inspired to. I'm asking you.

John Dehlin [02:00:50] Yeah, he didn't say. Yeah, we do have one listener, viewer saying M. M says, I wish we could hear more about how women were changed to men in the Bible. She says, that's fascinating. So, anyway.

John Larsen [02:01:05] All right, well, the name from. If I remember correctly, there's one instance I can think of directly, and it. It was a. It was in the. In the Greek or the Roman. It was a female name. And they switched the. They switched the grammar to turn it into a male name. So. So like Claudius versus Claudia or whatever. So. So they. They switched it that way. But the original. The oldest version has it as a female name.

Carah Burrell [02:01:31] I'm just remembering feeling really bamboozled right now. One of the first apologetic books that I read was the Reason for God by Tim Keller, who I really loved when I was a Christian. And I remember part of that book he said was, look how many women there are in the Bible. Look how Jesus was, you know, appearing to women as the first. Where normally people would not want a woman's testimony to be the one to talk about the resurrected Messiah. And that was proof in the apologetic circles, you know, that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. Cause why would they write women in there? And now I'm feeling kind of bamboozled not knowing all of the other ways that they wrote women out of the Bible now.

John Larsen [02:02:05] Yeah, And I think women are key in the Bible. They're. They're all over Jesus. You know, when he's hanging out, he's hanging out with the men, he's hanging out with the women. And, you know, there's time they refer to his disciples. And it's clear from the context that there's both men and women there. I think you could theorize potentially that when he anointed the 12 to go out and preach the gospel, that culturally at the time, women would not be able to travel like that unescorted. They would be in danger. So you could argue that Jesus had the presence enough to say, I can't send women out to do this because it's too much of a danger to them. But he doesn't say why he does it. So I think you could very well interpret that. But I think especially the early teachings now I keep saying Paul ruins everything. Paul doesn't like women at all. So I think that Jesus was much more gender fluid. And it's Paul who kind of came in and introduced the patriarchy into the church.

Carah Burrell [02:03:02] Interesting. Somebody asked if we could do a whole podcast about this one day, maybe about women and men in the Bible. Like that.

John Dehlin [02:03:07] We're getting a cue. We're getting a cue.

John Larsen [02:03:10] What's a cue?

John Dehlin [02:03:10] We have a list of topics we want to cover. Oh, yeah, I want to cover Thomas Stuart Ferguson, the story of Thomas Thomas Ferguson. Don't you?

John Larsen [02:03:18] Well, the. You're more likely to get me to cover a topic if it has less study on the front end. You know, I get the comments. I want to hear John talk about how, like, the early religion of the Vikings related to the. You know, like, oh, that would be fun to get your graduate degree in.

John Dehlin [02:03:37] Well, Brent, anything you want to add to kind of take us home? Bring it all. Bring it all home.

Brent [02:03:43] I mean, I can't wrap it all up, but the part that. So I come from this. This space as well, where I don't really. I don't buy into the mysticism or that, you know, the Goddess there directing my life or directing anybody else's. And so it always takes me back to. So here were these people so long ago, trying to make sense of their humanity, just as we are all trying to make sense of our humanity. And along comes this guy, this Joshua, who by everything we read was. Was trying as well to make sense of everything that was going on. And a lot of the things that he was talking to his disciples about. Like when I was first asking John, like, why are you interested in Mark again? He's like, it's because it's interesting. And I think to myself, I read a lot of books by a lot of people who are trying to make sense of our humanity because I. I'm always trying to make sense of our humanity, too. And I see that, okay, here's this guy who's trying to make sense of humanity. He's got all these people who are joining with him, much like we are in this kind of living room, trying to make sense of humanity, too. And I love, John, that you kind of went back on there and said, this is what Jesus is trying to teach us. And it has so much for me. He's not trying to teach us. Go out and join a church and that will make you whole. I do think there's something to be said for community, but not always churches. Churches often sort of find a way of controlling you.

John Larsen [02:05:42] Rather than Jesus created a community without

Brent [02:05:46] creating a church, without creating a church. And. And we've had these conversations about cults as well, and we've been You've had several people talk about being deep into cults and how the organization of all of this has often been so difficult for me. Whereas some of the people would say, well, what do I do then? What church should I join? And even I think, I think Joseph Smith asked that one time too. And some of the answers that, that I've, that I've heard are don't join a church. Start gathering with your friends, build communities, read books and understand what the human condition is. And John and I also had this other, this other question of, well, well then what's the purpose of your life? Are you, are you gonna, if you're not going to get to heaven, well then what are you even doing pursuing all these things? And like, let's say that you accomplish these things and you start to understand it. John says, well then what? I said, well then you'll probably kind of revert back and you'll need to then grow again and continue to grow in that. All of that is part of your, your pursuit of happy. Like the pursuit of happiness is more than actually ever achieving that. So to me, that's, that's the lesson. Jesus, Jesus was, was teaching us to continually pursue happiness, not join cults or churches if you can help it and join together and support your people in your community.

John Dehlin [02:07:30] So you're down, you're down with Jesus. Basically, bread's down with Jesus.

Brent [02:07:34] Well, there was some really crazy things that he did that I don't understand.

John Dehlin [02:07:37] Like pigs, like the figs.

Brent [02:07:39] I don't understand the pigs. I don't think, I don't understand the figs. I do like the idea. I think, you know, as a human, people are going to do weird things. Thinking maybe he thought he was going to get some other outcome.

John Dehlin [02:07:51] I have no idea.

Brent [02:07:52] But I do like the idea of, of pulling back away from trying to become the next corporate president. What happiness? Have we ever seen a story about that happening? We don't. The Bezos of the world are not really that, that they're not happy. They, they are tortured souls who cannot connect with anybody. Right. The most connection you're going to find are, are building these communities and trying things out to, to help support people and yourself. That's my little takeaway.

John Dehlin [02:08:30] So all you rich people out there, you're not happy. You're just not. And if you think you're happy, you're fooling yourself. No, I'm, I'm being a little bit tongue in cheek. I'm kind of joking.

John Larsen [02:08:38] They're happy in not in deference to Their wealth, and in fact, their wealth can oftentimes make. Make them very unhappy. Because for a lot of reasons we could go into. But, you know, Brent kind of references some of our conversations. And I, you know, when I came in here, and of course I was negative and called a lot of things neg negative names and said F words and stuff, but, you know, I was saying, we're always so negative on this thing. And I wish you all could sit with Brent and I as we're nursing whiskey well into the hours, talking about things like happiness and what it means. And, you know, one of the things that is important to me, and I was taught by others, and there's a simple example. If you want to play the guitar, you want to be a guitar player, you will never learn to play the guitar. You have to want to practice the guitar. And that seems. That seems really silly. But I want you to think about it long and hard. If you're trying to get to these states, you will never be happy either in those states or achieving them. Why would you want to play a guitar if you think playing the guitar is miserable? Well, because I want all the chicks and I want the money and I want the whatever, right? But, but, but those. That's the unhappiness part. The problem that rich people have is they can't ever justify the process of getting rich, which is what they do. They never achieve a status of being rich. Because I've never met anybody, and I've known people. I've known people who are worth nine figures, they do not stop. The one guy I know who's worth over 100 million, he goes and invests money every day. He. He's in his 80s. He could blow, you know, a million dollars a day from now till the day he dies and never get through his money. But he can't stop because what he does is he pursues wealth. And I think that's what Jesus is saying. Whose face is on that coin? Lord Jesus? How can I use a dollar to make me happy? And he said, you can't because the money is not a system of happiness. Right? Lord Jesus, how can I walk far enough that I will not be hungry anymore? You can't, because walking doesn't satiate hunger. Eating food does. Right? And what Jesus was telling us is there are ways of happiness. Take care of one another. Take care of the people who are. Who are. Don't play their games because their games do not lead you to happiness. You gotta find the thing that you like practicing. You gotta, you know, if you. If. If you like practicing the drums, then you'll love playing the drums. If you don't like practicing, you'll hate it. And I think Jesus was scratching the surface of that message. And the message, again, I've identified myself as more of Buddhist than anything else that the Buddhists have been teaching us. Stop playing the game. The game doesn't work. You won't get happy that way. You can't get happy trying to satiate a desire because we evolved. We're machines that are desire machines. And feeding a desire does not satiate it. It just grows it. Jesus was there. My book.

Listener Questions on Christianity and Charity

John Dehlin [02:11:58] We have a bit of a challenge from Jonathan Streeter, thinker of thoughts. He writes the broad. I think he's saying this to you. The broad generalization that Christians think that they're already saved and so they feel no moral responsibility for the world around them is uncharitable and cynical.

John Larsen [02:12:17] Sure, yeah, I'll take that. I. I would say that there are. There are good. There are people who pursue charity, and some of them are Christians, and some of them use Christianity as a justification for it. There are people who pursue war who are Christians. There are people who pursue torture who are Christians. There are plenty of people who are waterboarding and breaking the bones of people in Guantanamo who believe themselves to be practicing faithful Christians. I believe that they believe that. But to say that an uncharitable Christian is uncharitable is not uncharitable to Christianity. But what I'm saying is I see a lot of acts by Christians that are not backed up by their own book. And I would also say that when I take a cross section of Christianity for 2000 years, it is not what it says to be. Christianity is not a religion of peace. Christian Christ himself, Jesus was a preacher of peace, but its religion sure as fuck isn't. Name me. You know, like the wars, the blood that have been dropped in this guy's name. And Christians want to pass. They want to be able to do whatever the fuck they want. You go look at pictures of the KKK and what they have is Christian symbology all over. It is a Christian organization by their own definition. Does the KKK define Christianity? Absolutely not. The idea is insulting. But the KKK is a Christian group, right? So when I'm sitting out here, this type of Christian, you say it's uncharitable. Say Christians are X, Y and Z. I say bullshit. Because I can show you example after example after example of popes and kings and priests. The number of people walking around this country who were molested as children in the auspice of even our church is legions, right? So don't give me this shit about what Christians are and what aren't. There are great Christians and there's great things in this book, but you don't get a pass. You lost that in the Crusades.

John Dehlin [02:14:18] Jonathan Streeter ignited John Larsen. Yeah.

John Larsen [02:14:21] What's his response? But I agreed with him that it is uncharitable.

Carah Burrell [02:14:25] It makes me think of one of my best friends, is a really hardcore Christian. And, you know, she's kind of perfect. She's kind of amazing. And I love her a lot. And anytime I feel bad, she's like, it's okay, we're all sinners. And so she puts herself down to the peg of like, it's okay, we all have things we're working on. But then at the same time, she also believes in predestination. And so I think, to combat a little bit with Jonathan Streeter. Love you so much, Jonathan. I think any Christian who believes in predestination, that everyone's. Can be foreordained for glory or for hell, like a lot of Christians believe. That does kind of say that, like, you kind of wash your hands of this world. That like, you already know that you've got your place in heaven, right? You're already. You've made it. Other people haven't. So when you bring up like Calvinism and other ideas like that, I think that speaks to I. I agree more with you, John, then I think. I think it's okay to be cynical a little bit.

John Larsen [02:15:14] And whenever anybody says to you that we're all sinners, you can say, I'm not sure about that. What are your sins? Because I think it's a. It's a cop out. But let me go back to the word uncharitable, because this speaks to. We're going to hit all sorts of things. This speaks to white American Christian privilege, the idea that Christians somehow deserve some kind of special charity. Yes, I have fucking no charity for Christians because they don't deserve it. I have charity for charitable Christians, for good Christians, but you don't just get a pass. You don't get to say, I'm part of this family of Christianity, therefore you deserve deference. I say that Jesus is a God and taking his name in vain is blasphemy. Therefore you have to obey my rules. Right? Therefore you have to give me deference. You have to give me the benefit of the doubt. Fuck no, I'm not giving you the benefit of doubt anymore. You lost it and you lost it for me hard. In 2020, it's gone. I have no charity left for Christians, not the way they manifest themselves. You are not what you think you are. And if you read in the ecumenical back cycles, they are all worried about this problem. The Christian baptisms around the world are tanking because everyone looks at America and says, this is what Christianity is. This is what you're preaching. You guys have sold your soul for a mess of pottage American Christians right now and you're skunked and you're fucked. And that goes for the church too. You're dying on the vine because you've wed yourself to every evil that's out there. You've wed yourself to good out there. But differentiate them. Like, show me. Show me that you don't believe that money is God. Show me that you don't believe in rape. Show me that you don't believe in human trafficking. Show me. Because you don't just get a pass because you have been in charge for 2000 years. That's harsh. It's rough. But we are in a harsh and rough time. And when fascist regimes emerge, they almost always do it under the name of religion.

Carah Burrell [02:17:17] All right, follow up question.

John Larsen [02:17:18] Yeah.

Carah Burrell [02:17:19] All right. Jonathan Streeter says, why don't you make John argue with us? I love when we get John Larsen on fire. How is this any different than taking like the worst examples of a particular race or another religion and then making broad statements about the adherence of those religions or that race in general?

John Larsen [02:17:38] I agree, except I think the, the one exception is you can find, if there's a particular philosophy and you find the adherence to it, show a marked statistically significant behavior, then you can make an argument from that. But you would find the same despicable behaviors among the atheists and among the pagans and among the neo atheists, you know, like all, all these people. What I'm saying to you Christians is you're no different than the rest of us. Pull off your high horse. Human beings have problems and they're genetic. We are violent, we are greedy, we are selfish and we have very little foresight. That's in our fucking DNA. And if the religion helps us to deal with those problems, then I support it. But the problem is the mystics, the Jesuses come in and give us that message and then the fucking priests come in later and they ruin it all. And they have their big homes in Midway and their big cars and their red velvet chairs and their million dollar salaries and their billion dollar slush funds and they give secret, sacred anointings to their children. There are the very values of corruption. The Mormon Church today looks no different than the Pharisees of the time of Jesus and the idea that he would come in and sit on a red chair and hoard $100 billion. Do you know what you can do in this world with $100 billion? You could end poverty, you could end hunger and have enough money to take us all to dinner at the Chuck E. Cheese. There's plenty of money there. And they gather it and they hoard it and they keep, keep it and they take it and they're dirty. And that's one of the worst things that have been done. They are on par with the most terrible organizations that have ever been up just to hoard that wealth. That wealth had to be generated by labor. It had to be generated by exploitation of resources. It didn't just magically appear and they hoard it and they sit on it, and they do that to gain power. And that is not what's in this book. You want people to become Christians? Start reading your own book. But I love your points.

John Dehlin [02:19:39] Thanks, Jonathan. You can comment on Mormon Stories podcast anytime. Shout out. If you want to find a really amazing YouTube channel, go to Thinker of Thoughts by Jonathan Streeter. He's brilliant.

John Larsen [02:19:51] Hey, and Jonathan, we'll send you my email. I want to talk to you some more.

John Dehlin [02:19:54] Yeah, well, maybe we'll have. If Jonathan will ever come on Mormon Stories, open invitation.

John Larsen [02:19:57] Jonathan, I want. I, I, sometimes I, I, I, I take a rhetorical strong arm. It's my Achilles heel. Jonathan and the others who are throwing ideas at me, I think they're important ideas and I'm glad that you're surfacing them just because I argue vehemently. I was talking to Brent about this yesterday. I argue from a stronger position than I think my positions actually are. And I want people to challenge them because that's how I've learned things when smart people challenge me. So I think I'm right, but I might be wrong. And I need you guys to help me where I'm wrong.

The Decline of Christianity in America

John Dehlin [02:20:31] I love it. I also, I just thought it's timely to kind of read an article that came out. I saw it first in the Wall Street Journal, but it's really from just a Pew update on religiosity in America. I don't know if you saw this, John Larsen, but the, the news just comes out from the Pew foundation that, that Christianity continues to be in decline in the United States. Christians are now down to 63% of the population. So, you know, a little less than two thirds now are identify as Christian. And the nuns are up to 29%. So all pretty much 30% of the United States now no longer identifies with any religion. It's the largest single group. If you break Christianity down into subgroups, the nuns are bigger than any other subgroup and it's the fastest growing group. It's hard to get the largest group to also be the fastest growing group. But that's how, that's how much secularism is sweeping. And so for all of you Christian who are sad that John used swear words or said harsh things about Christians, I think John's right. You need to kind of look at why your religion is in steep decline. And it's probably because your house isn't in order. And I know you're all thinking about how to put your house in order, but a lot of people are fleeing religion just because of the difficult political associations that are now being, being made with Christianity these days and have been

John Larsen [02:21:58] made for a long time. I mean, you go back and read the rhetoric of the slave era and it was laced in Christian theology. Right. But I'd say something else about that study, if I remember correctly. It also shows that the number of people who identify themselves as spiritual is growing. So the number of people adhere to organized religion or self identify as Christians is on the decline. The number of people who define their religion as none or who identify it fully on as atheists are both on the increase. But the number of people seeking spirituality, seeking meaning, and I think there is a huge amount of that. And I don't think you have to believe in Hoobly Jubilee moobily boobly to find a spiritual center. And that's why you need to go to Thrive full circle there. No, I want. I'm poking you guys. I'm saying I rude mean things to you on purpose because I want you all to wake up and recognize what's going on and that we need the good parts of our culture back. And it's going to sound strange coming from me. We need decorum back.

John Dehlin [02:23:07] So stop swearing, everybody. It's. It's rude. Don't stop swearing.

John Larsen [02:23:10] I'm part of the problem. I really am. I. I wish it weren't so, but I speak from the heart and there's few voices that speak plainly to power and because it's costly and I try to do it and I do it and I'm flawed and I don't do it very well.

John Dehlin [02:23:28] All right, Carrie, you get the last word.

Carah Burrell [02:23:31] What Were the nuns percentage at again?

John Dehlin [02:23:34] The nuns are at 29% or almost

Carah Burrell [02:23:38] 30% fleeing to monasteries. Did you hear that?

John Dehlin [02:23:43] I never thought of you as doing dad jokes. But you just did a dad joke.

Carah Burrell [02:23:46] Carah, I am a mother. I am physically incapable. Why are you trying to man me? You're trying to man. Turn me into a man in this. No, this is a mom joke. As a nun joke. Basically it's a woman themed joke, start to finish. What I liked about what John Larsen said in this Jonathan Streeter exchange is I understand that we don't want to generalize too much and I get that objection. But John Larsen, what I heard you saying is that if Christianity is on the decline, like we're discussing, Christians of all different types need to show their best foot forward of what it means to be a good Christian. And I think Christians have given up that in a large part. Now I'm generalizing, but I want the best, you know, mental health for as many people. I want the best world America for as many people as possible. And so when John Larsen's saying, be the Jesus that's in this book, follow the Christ that's in this book, the one that's, you know, butting heads with the pharisaical people who are over the structures and all the things we're talking about with wealth, that's what I wish for every Christian out there. So it's not so much generalization in my point of view. It's more of just a prodding. So I loved it.

John Dehlin [02:25:03] Yeah. And Christians, we, you know, we, we love you individually, especially my, my friends. And yeah, we should all try to do better. Ex Mormons and atheists and agnostics. We need to, we need to figure some stuff.

John Larsen [02:25:16] We bounce around the term Christian, like I was telling you, all sorts of Christian things. Am I a Christian? Do I follow Christ? To a degree. Yeah, I'll take that on. I just don't accept his divinity. And I think if we can realize that, that, and I say this over and again, what unites us is more than what divides us. I have more in common with MAGA folks than I have. That separates me from them. And that's where we have to cut through the horseshit to get back to the things that are important. And that means Christianity too. Let's attack it from all sides. Let's figure out how to make the atheists better. Let's figure out how to make the Christians better. Let's create a society that we can live in. Let's create a pluralistic society. Let's create a society that honors different thoughts and let's not use things like the First Amendment to bully in ideas about prejudice and the right to discriminate. Which reminds me, we're going to talk about Oaks coming up here in a little bit.

Closing Remarks and Thank You to Donors

John Dehlin [02:26:14] All right, so a couple final items. Again, if you want to see John Larsen, if you live in Portland, you can go to the Portland Thrive unite event. On January 22nd. There will be at least 16 Thrive Unites. There's one in Bristol, UK, there's one in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, all over Utah, all over, you know, Nevada, Arizona, Northern and Southern California, even Atlanta. There's gonna be Thriving nights all over the place. Check out yesterday's Mormon Stories podcast episode to to know how you can register for Thrive Unite or organize your own. We want to try and have 22 thrive unites throughout the country because it's 2022 on January 22nd, and that's what Clint wants. So what Clinton wants, Clint gets. But yeah, also support. If you really love and value having John Larsen on Mormon Stories podcast, we want to upgrade his home studio to have really good quality video in audio now that he's moving to Oregon. And so please, if you're not a financial supporter of John Larsen and the Mormon Expression Project here on Mormon Stories Podcast, you can go to mormonstories.org mormonexpression click on the donate button, Become a monthly donor and you can have more swear words on Mormon Stories Podcast by supporting John Larsen and Mormon Expression.

John Larsen [02:27:35] Fetch.

John Dehlin [02:27:35] Yeah, thanks to all the commenters who comment. Thanks to everyone who supports Mormon Stories generally. And thanks to Carah Burrell for being no co host.

Carah Burrell [02:27:47] No, I'm actually going by Carl now. Carl's easier to spell because nobody can spell Carah. It's C A R, A H. All right, so I'm just gonna go by Carl. It's easier to spell. And I think if I'm a man krc, I'll get paid more. All right, all right. No more broads in here. All right, all right. It's. Oh, darn. It is with a Carl with a K. I'm gonna switch it up on that one first one. And also my big man brain remembered to put all of the show notes already in the YouTube description box right now. So you have no excuse. You can go click on it and go to thrivebeyondreligion.com and go get your tickets for the nearest Thrive event by wherever you live.

John Dehlin [02:28:22] Yeah. And Carah's work, your support to Mormon Stories and the Open Stories foundation goes to put show notes in the descriptions of all these episodes and time codes. And you may not, may or may not know this yet, but if you want to just jump to the description and look at different parts of the interview that you want to just jump to, instead of having to watch the whole thing to figure out where each part is, you can literally go to the description in YouTube and. And see those time codes and click on them and use them and fast forward to different parts of the episode that you want to jump to. So these are all type ways that we're trying to innovate and add value for our listeners. And we hope you all appreciate that.

Carah Burrell [02:29:00] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:02] All right. Well, Brent, you're awesome. Thanks for joining us. Hope you can come back someday.

Brent [02:29:06] Thanks for having me.

John Dehlin [02:29:07] I miss you at the pickleball table. Pickleball court.

Brent [02:29:10] Hard to play in two feet of snow.

Carah Burrell [02:29:13] Yeah, a real athlete wouldn't say that.

John Dehlin [02:29:19] But we're serious, though. We're glad to have you, Brent, thanks for joining us.

Brent [02:29:23] All right.

John Dehlin [02:29:24] And John, come back and see us again next month. All right, thanks.

John Larsen [02:29:27] Love you guys. Thanks for all your feedback. And I especially love the feedback from people Disagree. I'm wrong about things all the time and I'd like to like to hear about it.

John Dehlin [02:29:36] Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Please give us your feedback@mormonstoriesgmail.com. please comment on Facebook or on YouTube. We always appreciate your super chat donations through YouTube. We registered the Open Stories foundation recently with YouTube to cut the fees so that a larger percentage, if not all of your donations now go to the Open Stories Foundation. Thank you for those donations, those super chats in YouTube, you can click on the stars feature of Facebook. I think that also sends us some bones. And then you could always just become a donor to Mormon stories@mormonstories.org Click on the Donate button. Less than one out of a thousand listeners donates and we're losing. We lose 15 to 20 monthly donors every month because people move on or they fall in love with another podcast, which is great. Or they fall on financial hard times.

Carah Burrell [02:30:29] They don't like the broads around. Who can blame them?

John Dehlin [02:30:32] So we need your. We need your support to keep this going. So if you don't support us and you want to see continue, please become a monthly donor. And if you want to see Carah not get fired or laid off, no donate.

Carah Burrell [02:30:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:30:45] Plus, she's expensive. Care's expensive. I think we pay you more because you're a woman, not less.

Carah Burrell [02:30:50] Actually, that's true. John's pretty good boss.

John Dehlin [02:30:54] Anyway, thanks for your support. Keep it coming and we'll see all guys. We see you all gals and guys and non gender people, non binary people as well. We'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.