The Bema Podcast: A Friendly, Critical Review

Pop history, academic history, reliable history

Photo by Ali Gündoğdu on Unsplash

Over the weekend I did a deep dive into some historical claims about Caesarea Philippi that seem to circulate in Christian media, particularly those associated with Israel tourism. After investigating I wasn’t able to substantiate most of the claims I’d heard, and I was able to trace some of these claims to Ray Vander Laan, founder of That the World May Know and a lecturer and tour guide on biblical history. 

This led to a lot of people reaching out to me with media they had heard as being a reliable source for biblical history. A lot of the requests centered on media that cited Vander Laan (Rob Bell was a major culprit!) but the one that really caught my eye was The Bema Podcast. 

I wasn’t able to confirm what kind of circulation The Bema Podcast has, but I did hear from a few people that their pastors actively preached from and recommended the podcast. Plus, it’s the podcast arm of Impact Campus Ministries, which isn’t pulling Navigators numbers but still appears at a number of universities in my state. Any time you have media getting preached to church audiences, I think we have a responsibility that any historical claims are the best they can be and the best they can source. This can be tough, and as near as I can tell, no one on the Impact or Bema Podcast team really has extensive training in history. You don’t need a doctorate to write good history – my husband has an MDiv, and he’s an excellent historian. People can learn without getting a degree, but learning history and telling the good from the bad is tricky business. Training really does help.

So anyway, I listened to some episodes of The Bema, and I’m noticing the same kinds of problems that seem to dog That The World May Know. 

I am going to front load this review with what I hope is a warm declaration of sentiments and a friendly offer. I didn’t feel particularly inspired to give a gentle hand to Focus on the Family, of all things, but I don’t feel the same way about a small circulation podcast that seems to be staffed by sincere and decent people who want to educate the public. As far as I’m concerned, we play on the same team. My goal is not to go to war with The Bema Podcast. I do not want to be unkind or condescending about this. If anyone from The Bema Podcast is reading this, please let me say this as clearly as possible:

I love your interest in history. I love your passion for this subject. After listening to your show, I came to believe you are intelligent, capable people and you are motivated by a sincere desire to learn and grow, as well as to equip pastors and others with historical knowledge. I was consistently impressed by your humility, kindness, and commitment to resisting oppressive readings of the Bible on your show. When I say I heard errors in the show, my aim is not for you to stop the show, but to help you improve it. I want to help you, not tear you down. 

If you leave a comment in the replies or message me at @laurarbnsn on Twitter, I will send you my personal email address and we can talk. On Marty Solomon’s early blog post about sources (we’ll talk about this later) he mentioned the financial difficulty of accessing academic sources. This is a serious problem for scholars who don’t have university credentials and I’d love to help you overcome it. If there is an academic article you want access to that you can’t find, if I can get it through my institutional logins, I’ll get it for you. If you want help determining which scholarly sources are useful and which aren’t, I will give you my personal phone number and we can talk about it. I want you guys to do good work. If there is a subject I do not know enough about to assist with, I have friends I will connect you with. 

I believe in the importance of lay Christians and pastors being able to access the tools of scholarship. If you want access to good historical scholarship, you should have it. I speak from a place of incredible privilege that I was able to spend so much of my life in full time academic spaces and it is neither just nor right that I should keep the spoils for myself. I want to share. I have absolutely no interest in mocking or denigrating lay scholars. Your work is honorable, and difficult. I honor it. If you want scholars to help, I will help.

I’m going to break down what I see as three issues with the podcast that I believe are generally representative of a lot of pop history, and use an example from the show each time. 

So let’s get into it.

1. The “Small World” Problem: “Domitian thought Vesuvius was punishment for the Jerusalem Temple and persecuted the Jews because of it.”

In Episode 175 of the Bema Podcast, the hosts claim the Domitian persecution of Jews and Christians as the historical setting for Revelation. The argument goes that persecution of Jews and Christians increased under Domitian because, specifically, Domitian believed that the destruction of Pompeii was a punishment from the God of Israel for destroying his Temple in Jerusalem about ten years earlier. 

This is a good example of what I think we can call the “small world” problem in popular history – the idea that events that are a big deal to us are a big deal to people in the ancient world, that they’re known across the board and reacted to, and that we can make plausible connections between one major event and another without necessarily having the textual records to back it up. This is very favorable to maximalist reconstructions of history, where we can tell large narrative portions in history with clear motivations and clear connections between one event and the other. This usually involves, however, a fair amount of insertion into the small pieces of primary sources we actually have, and a lot of assumptions.

For instance, in order for this Temple-Pompeii-persecution link to be plausible, we would need to assume that A) Pompeii was a religiously devastating event for Romans who then sought some kind of religious explanation for it B) that the obvious source of the trouble would be the Jewish War, which had been over for years at this time and C) that the response would be to scapegoat and persecute Jews and Christians. But you can hear our biases in all the assumptions there. Pompeii is a big deal to us because it was a major archeological discovery and a popular tourist destination. The rise of Christianity is a big deal to us because it’s the dominant world religion. The destruction of the Temple is a big deal to us because it’s referenced so often in the New Testament and lies behind the construction of modern Judaism as we know it today – not as a sacrifice-based local cult with a diaspora but as a worldwide religion that’s practiced in synagogues through Torah study.

But let’s look at the historical claim itself. Does it make sense that Domitian would have taken Pompeii particularly to heart, would have believed it was caused by the God of Israel, and then persecuted Jews over it? 

No.

1. Vespasian was on campaign fighting in Israel at the time that Nero was assassinated. He returned to Rome to become the emperor and his son Titus took over the war, and ultimately sieged and destroyed Jerusalem. Josephus may not be telling the truth that Titus sought to spare the Temple and the revolutionaries destroyed it. However, this does suggest that the Flavians wanted people to think - that they had great respect for the antiquity of the Temple and had no intention of destroying it. Domitian took over for his brother Titus after Titus died of fever, and began ruling in 81 CE - eleven years after the destruction of the Temple and two years after Vesuvius.

2. Pompeii was more or less resolved by the time Domitian came to power and the idea that Domitian would have been looking for further explanation for either the Temple or Pompeii is dubious. Domitian did not rule until two years after Pompeii. By this time, Titus had already completed two tours of the region, provided for the resettling of refugees, and – after fire in Rome, the stalled construction of the Colosseum, and aftershocks in the Bay of Naples – abandoned the idea of reconstructing Pompeii. Remember that Pompeii was not a particularly large town and was mostly a resort city – the loss of Corinth or Ephesus would have been a much bigger deal the same way the loss of New York or San Francisco would be compared to, say, Destin, Florida. Furthermore, the Flavian family, which sponsored the writings of Josephus, already had a story about why the Temple was destroyed – because of the impiety of the Jews and God’s favor of the Flavians, not because of the Flavians’ own impiety. The official Flavian story was that God punished Israel, not the Flavians. The Flavians were not anticipating divine consequences for destroying the Temple.

3. There are two hints that Jews themselves believed that Pompeii was God’s revenge against the Romans for doing violence to Israel (in addition to believing that God caused Titus’s sudden death for destroying the Temple, which appears in rabbinic literature). The first is graffiti found in the ruins of Pompeii that reads “Sodom, Gomorrah.” The other is a section from the fourth book of the Sibylline Oracles that “predicts” a volcanic punishment for Rome’s war on Israel. However, there is no indication I was able to find that the Romans agreed. Titus fully intended to rebuild Pompeii, but abandoned the plan after a major fire broke out in Rome. There is no evidence I was able to find that Titus blamed anyone or anything for the eruption and simply dedicated himself to the cause of relief for victims.

4. Generally speaking, the last thing Romans wanted to do was piss off gods, and once you had done so you didn’t keep going after him. DesRosiers argues that the Romans brought back spoils from the Temple precisely because they weren’t cult images of the gods – bringing such a thing back would have been asking for trouble. The cult had simply ended, and the God of Israel was now under Jupiter. The Romans would not have believed that the God of Israel remained at large and causing problems – this did not fit with their theory of religion. The Romans did not want foreign superstitions to take off in Rome, but they also didn’t want to pick fights with foreign gods and generally believed that pacifying them was a better course of action. Rather than seeking to get revenge on foreign gods for perceived slights, they were far more likely to Romanize and domesticate cults at home.

5. The source for the idea that Domitian persecuted Jews and Christians is Melito, Tertullian, and Eusebius, though they generally do not portray Domitian as doing so violently – rather exiling Christians. The evidence that Domitian launched an aggressive persecution of Christians, though, is tricky. There’s not much evidence for empire-wide persecution at the time that Domitian reigned; by the time Pliny writes to Trajan he’s still pretty unsure what exactly a trial of Christians is supposed to look like. There might have been some local dust-ups specifically surrounding the imperial cult, which flourished under Domitian. The best evidence is Cassius Dio’s account of Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla, which suggests that Domitian (pious Roman that he was) was interested in purging Judaizing or Christian tendencies from the upper classes (and fits with the evidence in the church fathers). As far as a persecution of Jews goes, Westwood argues that while there is evidence that Domitian held the Jews in low esteem and taxed them heavily, there is not much evidence for sustained persecution. In fact, this may have actually been a fairly active period for Jewish reconstruction – but Jamnia may be a conversation for another day.

6. The association between Domitian, persecution, and Pompeii is a trope that appears in some mid-19th century Gothic novels and understandably still lurks in the American imagination. This might be the source of these ideas, but they are, of course, not historical sources in themselves for the relevant era.

I’d like to know which text the podcast was drawing on that made this claim. It’s possible there’s a primary source the show is drawing on that I just wasn’t able to find, but I think the facts of the case as I have them make this implausible. 

Let’s look at another.

2. The Over-Narrating Problem: “The Artemis procession in Ephesus looked like this.”

Episode 158 of the podcast seeks to explain the Ephesian rites that lay behind the household codes in the letter to Ephesus. Once again, my impulse to be kind takes over because I genuinely appreciate that the hosts are seeking to resist a misogynist reading of Ephesians. That’s very admirable. I am just not convinced how they got there. 

The argument goes that Ephesians is written to a city that observes a very degrading rite towards women, the procession of Artemis. In this ritual, the statue of Artemis would be carried to the sea and washed in the ocean, restoring Artemis’s lost virginity. On the ritual back, a wild, decadent party would take place, including (I think this is what is being implied and I heard from a person that their pastor claimed this based on the show) ejaculating on Artemis’s statue. 

Okay, so what is this? This is what we might call the “over narrating” problem - the idea that events in history are broadly accessible and can be reproduced and narrated in extensive detail and accuracy, without digging into the difficult questions of how such accounts would have survived and whether they’re reliable. For instance, if we can say in great detail what a procession to Artemis would have looked like, that must mean some very detailed account of it exists. What is it? Is it a mosaic? An inscription? A literary source? What is it? How old is it? How do we read it? 

So in that spirit: how much can we actually know about the procession of Artemis in the first century, anyway?

Very little by way of literary records survives explaining exactly how the mysteries of Artemis worked. The Salutaris inscription describes a procession path that does not make its way to the sea shore at all. Other paths (which likely predate the first century significantly) go alongside the ocean. While cleansing cult images in water was a common archaic and classical practice, this did not have to happen in the ocean, and may have happened in the sanctuary. By the Hellenistic period the procession was probably primarily landlocked because of the extent to which the Ephesian harbor had been siltified and moved west in the city. This means that the procession to Artemis would not have taken place next to the water and any ritual cleansing of the statue would have been inland. The Daitis festival does include a rite of carrying Diana to the sea and washing her in sea water, but we don’t know much about this ritual and it seems to have been a solemn one. 

What about the bacchanalia recounted in which the re-virginified Artemis would be made “not a virgin” again during the procession? Strabo recounts some elaborate banquets with feasting and celebrating that occur in the springtime in Ephesus, but does not name anything quite so graphic. Nor does he suggest these were specifically Artemisian mysteries. Strabo also names sacrifices of food and drink performed to Artemis. The Ephesian Tale by Xenophon also starts at a procession to Artemis, where young men and women go to the festival to meet and look for possible matches. The festival occasion is a celebration and party, but there’s no indication that part of the celebration is to take, or restore, Artemis’s virginity at any point.

In addition to being unable to find any record that Artemis’s virginity was restored before the ritual and taken during a wild party after, there are two major issues that make me very suspicious that this was, in fact, not a real rite the Ephesians observed.

1. Every record I can find about the Artemisian procession indicates that the statue was splendidly dressed and bejeweled for processions. This seems, frankly, like a statue you are not allowed to get close to. Clothing is extremely expensive in the ancient world, as is jewelry. Ephesus was prosperous, but they didn’t have bottomless money, they had a significant amount of local disasters to contend with in their history, and they did depend on local wealthy figures to sustain the temple. If Artemis’s clothes and jewelry had to be replaced semi-regularly, a patron who funded the Temple probably would have gotten sick of watching the hoi polloi walk off with Artemis’s headdress and ejaculate on her silk. Someone would have stopped this. This doesn’t mean that people didn’t party hard in the wake of (some) processions. But to go have sex with the statue of Artemis? Seriously doubt it. 

2. Artemis in Greek mythology was a virgin god who killed men for trying to look at her naked. The Artemis of Ephesus was almost certainly a syncretistic figure who had traits taken from Anatolian worship, so I don’t want to overly insist upon a connection between Ephesus’s Artemis and Athen’s Artemis. However, the Greeks took chastity as a virtue for women seriously, as did the Romans. It’s hardly likely that many people would have believed that a great goddess patron would have thousands of human sexual partners – this does not fit with what the Greeks or Romans believed an honorable, free woman should do. Artemis is not a slave or a sex worker, and Roman religion – even religion surrounding figures like Venus – usually functioned to reinforce Roman understandings of what a woman should be. Nor does the idea of sexual contact with a cult statue fit with ancient ideas of pollution. Generally speaking, bodily excretions did not belong in sacred spaces in much of the ancient world. The entire point of washing a statue is to ensure its ritual purity. You don’t wash a statue and then ejaculate on it. You definitely don’t go put the ejaculate back in the temple.

If there is a source someone can find that contradicts this, I am happy to look at it. But this does not sound plausible to me.

3. The Uncritical Source Use Problem: “The Talmud is a relevant background text for Matthew” 

It is not!

By “background text,” I mean a text that predates another text and thus can be understood as a field of allusions or shared understandings that may explain or elucidate devices in another text. A good example of this might be “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman and “I Too” by Langston Hughes. The Whitman poem is clearly alluded to in Hughes’ poem and shapes Hughes’ use of the imagery in the poem. 

The idea that the Talmud can be read to understand allusions and assumptions in the Gospel of Matthew is shot through the entire series “The Talmudic Matthew” by the Bema Podcast. This doesn’t work. The problem behind “The Talmudic Matthew” is boilerplate: uncritical use of historical sources. The argument introduced at the beginning of the show is that the Talmud is later than Matthew, and Jesus, but contains a significant amount of material that predates Matthew, and Jesus, because it attributes sayings to people who lived before Jesus. 

The fundamental misunderstanding about what rabbinic writing is, and how it relates to the New Testament, seems to lie at the heart of a lot of this series as well as the sources the show draws on. For instance, on an old blog post Marty Solomon recommends the writing of Lois Tverberg as illuminating sources for the Jewish context of the life of Jesus. 

You can see there’s just a fundamental misunderstanding in this passage about what rabbinic literature is (I wasn’t able to get a copy of that book but I did read Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus — same problems). For instance, Tverberg just takes it as a given that what the Mishnah calls “oral Torah” is exactly what later rabbis said it was: oral tradition passed and preserved perfectly from one century to another before it was recorded. But that’s just not how this works. Oral tradition is, on the whole, just not that stable, and the business of trying to figure out what, if any, traditions from rabbinic literature go back to the Second Temple era is incredibly difficult. If you look at something like Jacob Neusner’s From Politics to Piety, you see that he’s actually much more circumspect with trying to determine what might be secondary to a rabbinic tradition.

All we actually have for sure are the written sources, which dramatically post-date the Gospels (to say nothing of Jesus!). There’s just no reason to think that if a tradition appears in the Talmud that Matthew would have known it. 

For example, in Episode 394 Elle Grover Fricks uses the Talmud to explain why a star appears to announce the coming of Jesus in Matthew. According to the Talmud, the rabbis say that light filled the house when Moses was born, and in the same way Jesus’s birth is also associated with light. The reference here is probably to b. Sotah 12a, and it is far too late to be a plausible reference for Matthew’s nativity. In fact, Shana Strauch Schick argued that the Talmud’s miraculous account of Moses’s birth may be an imitation of apocryphal birth narratives of Jesus that circulated in Syriac. In other words, at least through indirect channels – Matthew influenced the Talmud, not the other way around. 

Another explanation the hosts offer for the star starts at 24:28, which appeals to a passage in the Talmud that combines Numbers 24:17 (a star will come from Judah) with Obadiah 18 (a flame of Joseph will consume Edom). (I believe Grover Fricks is talking about b. Bava Batra 123b here.) It’s hard to follow Grover Frick’s argument here and figure out exactly why she is invoking this part of the Talmud. It seems that her argument is that the Talmud agrees with Christians that the messiah will overcome Rome, and this is why the star appears in Matthew – the star that comes from Judah is also the flame from Joseph that consumes Rome, and on this Christians and the Talmud agree. Grover Frick’s words are “we can say with the Talmud that Jesus is the flame that consumes the empire.”

But- we can’t. For one thing, there is no reference to the flame of Joseph from Obadiah in the nativity story in Matthew, so I don’t think we can say Obadiah is an intertext in the Matthean Nativity. I’m not sure if Grover Fricks means to imply that the flame of Joseph is the star from Judah because Jesus’s father in Matthew is named Joseph, but if this is what she meant, she doesn’t say it and that may be a leap I am making ahead of her. At any rate, the Joseph from Obadiah is simply not the Joseph in Matthew. 

More to the point, the Talmud absolutely does not agree/predict that Jesus will come from Joseph and Judah to destroy Rome. This passage records a dispute between two rabbis who lived four centuries after Jesus about who can destroy Edom. They almost certainly knew who Jesus was, since Christianity had become a widespread faith by this time – but they didn’t think he was the messiah, because if they did they wouldn’t have been third century rabbis. It is not even clear that this passage is meant to predict any one figure – the problem that both the star of Judah and the flame of Joseph can defeat Rome is resolved by appealing to the fact that in the Genesis narrative, Judah and Joseph’s descendents work together. This passage does not clearly predict one Rome-defeating messiah, and if it does, it is definitely not Jesus, who had been gone for 300 years by this point. The idea that the Talmud is predicting Jesus here is like claiming that Thomas Aquinas predicted that Muhammed would be the seal on the prophets. Thomas Aquinas didn’t believe Muhammed was the seal on the prophets, and even if he did, he was several centuries too late to predict that.

Next, there’s the problem of what Edom represents in rabbinic literature. There are a lot of rabbinic references to the idea that the Romans came from Edom, and that Edom can represent Rome in interpretation. However, Edom in rabbinic literature doesn’t just represent pagan Rome. It represents Christian Rome with Rome. When the Rabbis thought about the great enemies of Israel and the “spirit of empire” that rose up against and destroyed their people – they were thinking about Christians. We were their problem. Christians were the Empire. This text is post-Constantine and should be assumed to reflect that.

While Jesus is called a rabbi in the New Testament, the norms and patterns of Rabbinic Judaism postdate him significantly. We should not assume that rabbinic writing reflects traditions that were extent in the first century, nor that anyone in the New Testament would have necessarily been familiar with them.

Conclusion

The problems I’ve seen in That the World May Know and the Bema Podcast are problems that seem to be common to a lot of popular history. I don’t want to come out swinging and say you shouldn’t listen to this show. I don’t think that’s true. But I am going to suggest that if you are going to make a historical claim in a sermon or in your own writing based on something you learned from these pieces of media that you should check it out yourself. Look to see if you can find an academic or primary source that backs up the claim. 

Studying history is, in my biased opinion, one of the best things you can do with your time. The people behind the Bema Podcast deserve no criticism whatsoever for seeking to learn or teach history. But, I am concerned that their back catalog reflects the use of unreliable sources. I am not saying you should not listen to the show. I am not saying you should have any ill will towards them. But, the claims deserve some fact checking, and if you’re going to use it as a source for your work, you should do the checking first.

If I could give some unsolicited but well-intended advice to the Bema Podcast staff, in the event they are listening:

1. Every episode would really benefit from having a works cited and show notes. This would make it easy for people to look up references and look up competing interpretations. 

2. Explain why you’re using the source you’re using in the text of the show itself. If you think there are interesting things in the Talmud that sound like Matthew, that’s fine! Comparison between historical texts is a totally valid practice. It’s completely valid to explain how rabbis thought about the “star of Judah” and use this as a comparison point for Matthew. Just be circumspect about suggesting Matthew would have agreed or known a later tradition.

3. If you want to include a story or reference that you’ve heard but you can’t find in a primary or academic source, name it as a hypothesis rather than as a historical fact. Historians should be very comfortable admitting what they don’t know or what can’t be known. For instance, if you’ve heard that Caesarea Philippi was called the “gates of Hades,” you can say that you’ve heard someone say that explains a passage in Matthew, but you can’t find watertight evidence that’s the case. That’s a completely normal and valid thing to say.

I don’t want to discourage lay interest in history and I don’t want to scare anyone off of it. But I want it to be well done. I think these are some easy steps that could really improve the output of the show.