The Dead Sea Scrolls & Nag Hammadi Library with Professor Dylan M Burns & Professor Matthew Goff

[Music] Our guests this morning are two scholars who have made incredible contributions to this project, but more importantly, incredible contributions to their respective fields of study. Of course, I'm just I'm talking about Professor Matthew Goff and Professor Dylan M. Burns. So, first, Dr. Dylan M. Burns is professor is assistant professor of the history of Western esotericism in late antiquity at the University of Amsterdam. Dylan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Jason. Great to be back. And of course, returning Absolutely. And of course, returning for his triumphal third appearance is Dr. Matthew Goff, who is professor religion at Florida State University. Matt, welcome back to the show. Hey. Hey, Jason. Glad to be here. Absolutely. So, together you co-edited the open access volume, The Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Namadi Cotices, which is the topic of our discussion this morning. Yeah. So, yes, there we go. Photo op. Um, yeah. And you can put a link before we get into this volume. I was just going to say you can put a link in the show. Yeah, it's in the um I'll put it in the chat, but it's also in the show description in the show notes. So, if anybody wants to grab that, it's a wonderful wonderful volume. I've I've spent a lot of time with it over the past month. So uh hope everybody will do likewise. Um so gentlemen before we get into this volume itself um we need to lay down some preliminaries about what these texts are and how they were discovered. There may be some in these sorry I think we I dropped out there for a second. I apologize. Um so there may be some people in the audience who are unfamiliar with these two texts. So, uh, Dylan, Matt, could you give us a brief historical background to this the discovery of the Nagamadi library and the Dead Sea Scrolls? Yeah. And maybe Dylan, maybe you could start since I think the the Nagamadi stuff was found was uh discovered a few years before the Kuman stuff. So a bit a bit um although some sometimes you read in the secondary literature that they were discovered around the same time uh immediately following the the first use of nuclear weapons. Bombshells that changed the world. Um the Nagamati library is a phrase that's used to describe a body of 13 manuscripts. Okay. So 13 ancient uh manuscripts uh that were discovered in upper Egypt. So in the south of Egypt around December of 1945 and these manuscripts are written in the Coptic language. Coptic is the youngest phase of the Egyptian language. It's mostly written with Greek letters plus some additional letters to capture um apoxinous Egyptian sounds that you don't have in Greek. And these uh 13 manuscripts contain uh over 50 uh separate trackctates that uh belong to the worlds of early Christianity and especially the religion or movement known today as nicism. That is a religion or movement having to do with salvation through some kind of higher knowledge usually bound up with some form of cosmic rule. So the naggamati cotices are really special because they give us all of these texts from the ancient world especially texts pertaining to gnosticism that we did not possess before and give us a huge data set about uh this uh particular ancient movement ancient religion that did not exist that that we did not have until publication of these texts in the 60s and 70s. M um thanks. And and the Dead Sea Scrolls like were were found uh like like a couple years later in outside of Jerusalem. Um and uh like like people people we don't fully know when exactly, but like late 46 or early 47. right around the same time that the Nag Kamadi texts were found, but not in Egypt, rather in um um um well, it's it's Israel, but it was actually just shortly before the modern state of Israel was was created. So, it was actually discovered in Jordan. And um and it was it was a um material found in several caves outside of the Dead Sea. um many some of them were were um large intact scrolls many others are just small fragments together it's a it's a large corpus about 930 texts the texts are from the 2n century BCE to the 1st century CE and um um and material from um a Jewish sectarian community at the time and let me also emphasize a point that that Dylan raised like about why this these texts are significant meaning it's always great to find have new textual discoveries but I'd emphasize that in terms of uh Judaism in terms of Christianity in terms of the Bible like like we actually didn't have a lot of ancient texts um like the the the main manuscript the Old Testament is based on for example is is the medieval manuscript. Our oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible is the Lengrad Codeex produced in the year 1008 CE like like not BCE CE. So we like in term so so for a lot of material how we understand Judaism and Christianity a lot of it is based on medieval copies of older texts and we really don't have a lot of ancient texts themselves. And then like I really like Dylan's metaphor of sort of Oh, sorry. Um my phone was um I'm g turn this. So, and then we we um we we found I I like Dylan's metaphor of the the the bombshells because we actually have the in terms of the study of this material, both like it's two bombshells like the non-commodi stuff and the Dead Sea Scroll stuff right around the same time. And and it's so interesting when you actually look at these ancient texts in some ways they sort of echo with things we know. But when you when you have these new discoveries of the past they don't just give you new information like it's the past is a foreign country. It can often be sort of weirder and stranger. It's not just how we understand. It's it's it's this conflict between how we understand the past and then you're actually seeing something from the past, you know, like so so it's it's it's that's one of the reasons why we're so interested in this material. Yeah. this material uh uh these these two corpora as they were as it is um two bodies of of manuscripts forced us as scholars to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate how we talk about history of early Christianity and the history of ancient Judaism. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that that was uh part of the emphasis for your putting this conference and later volume together, right? Um so the relationship between these cotices and these scrolls um in early scholarship was much different than it is today. Um in your introduction to the volume you emphasized that there is a relative lack of interaction in comparative scholarship u between these two disciplines and you hope that the volume would suggest further areas of comparison and study. Um and you emphasize in the introduction this concept of weak comparison. Uh so could you tell us what you mean by weak comparison and tell us about um how this the uh disciplines interact today or don't interact today? Yeah. Well, I think it I think it's maybe worth saying a moment as to why we would want to compare these these corpora in the first place, you know, why why talk about the non-commodi and the dead sea schools together at all? Um, and one reason is that they're already associated with one another in popular culture. So, a great example I can think of that's that's personal is when I was a student, an undergraduate, I remember one summer I bought a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It had was a kind of journalistic perhaps pseudocientific exploration of ancient religion trying to show that there were Jesus was married and had had children and that there was a bloodline that the Catholic Church had hidden. I think that was the theory. And according to the book, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the discovery of the non-commodic cotices next to one another gave us a revolutionary new data that could be used to support the married Jesus hypothesis. Mhm. Uh in other words, the Catholic Church had one doctrine about Jesus's life and death, but thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nakmic Cotices read together, we could come up with another hypothesis about Jesus's life and death and what they meant. And so, and and I read this very innocently as a as a 21-year-old without the tools to uh access the scholarship, but I was fascinated by it. And so because both the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nagamadi cotices uh make us force us to re-evaluate um the history of early Christianity as well as the history of ancient Judaism. They're associated with one another in certain bi pockets of popular culture and popular scholarship as containing the secret or hidden history, the esoteric history of late ancient religion. exciting stuff, right? So, you would think that there would be scholars who would write about these corpora together. And Matt and I found as professionals working in these fields that this was not the case. Yeah. People who write about the Dead Sea Scrolls do not generally talk about the Nodacies and vice versa. And so we thought it would be cool to join forces as it were and begin that conversation from a scholarly standpoint as a way of coming up with a a book that I could have given to my 21-year-old self reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Yeah. Had some questions about whether this stuff actually has anything to do with it. Yeah. And and here I I'll mention like so that Dylan and I have been friends for a long time and from talking like like we realized that o over the years that like like the stuff we were working on like like in in very different academic venues were actually quite similar and we started doing more comparative stuff. we doing kind of joint sessions at the SPL and and um and that and the volume came out came out of that and and and one of the things I would stress is that like so sort of the val let's call it the value of comparison and why and why do that meaning like like um at one level the these these corpora are really different from different one's Jewish one's Christian one's like like the dead sea scroll are earlier and and they're written in different languages, they're really from different like thought worlds. And a lot of times when people think about comparison, the point is to kind of find two different things where there's a similarity and then kind of posit some sort of like link between them. And what one of the things that we really and this is kind you asked about the weak comparison and and um we I got we got that phrase from a scholar by the name of Bruce Lincoln where where what he tried to do like if if you go back in scholarship a couple generations he called the strong comparison where like it was really normative in religious studies that that scholars would have this encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of different religious traditions, very very different ones. and and thinking of it just as data to kind of make these grand constructs about how to understand religion in the human experience and how and how it changed over over time and like grand evolutionary stages and and and these kind of those grand narratives fell apart and and that's why what Lincoln was was trying to call like he was advocating weak comparison where you're not trying to come up with a grand narrative but you're looking at kind of uh you know like example A and example B from very different c they can be from very different cultures and they don't have to have a direct link between them but the idea is kind of putting them in conversation with each other hopefully you'll see like like some new perspective about about either one that you didn't see before you know sort so and you don't need to sort of draw a kind of genetic link between the the two of them to to do that and that's what we're trying to do. But I also really like Dylan's point like like in in the context of the study of Judaism for example in the in the last few years there's been a real interest in reception history like like not just kind of what was going on in this ancient stuff but what over in later centuries people were doing the with these traditions and there's very much like like this legacy in the field where like like where we don't think however we think of Christianity ancient Christianity there's often the sense that it doesn't include the non-commod stuff that that that that narcissism like like h was something different like like and really I'd say it's more of like just it shows the diversity of Christianity at the time and so so people were looking at all like like tracing these traditions in Judaism and manachism and Islam but like they're leaving out the non-commat stuff and that was and I was like come on like like this stuff's It's really interesting. So, so um um yeah, like so we found it was really interesting things to to explore like like bringing scholars together to kind of like and make them kind of work with the stuff they know like either the scrolls or the non-commodi stuff and and encourage them to kind of engage some stuff they didn't know the other comparison and to kind of and to see what happens was kind of the idea. Yeah. So maybe an example of comparison uh for for the listeners uh would be your bow house shirt Jason. I also had that bow house shirt in high school by the way. Great shirt. So if we to compare this awesome band, awesome shirt. Um, if we were to compare Bow House to say, uh, Michael Jackson, you know, uh, 80s the 80s pop star, you know, we could we could talk about how they're both funky or maybe, you know, there's a there's a lick in about house song that sounds like a Michael Jackson lick. That would be strong comparison. You're looking for things they have in common that could tell you something maybe about influence or genealogy or belonging to the same pair. But we can also compare Bow House and Michael Jackson to talk about how they're different from one another. The fun in Bow House is really about a different kind of vibe than you get in Michael Jackson's music. You know, um the the the drumming in Bow House is way more repetitive than you're going to find. The Bow House plays 12 minute long songs with only one baseline. Michael Jackson didn't do that. you know the comparison that tells you a lot about Bow House and a lot about Michael Jackson but because of the ways that they are different and so the point does not necess so the comparison is still useful but it gives you a different um kind of meaningful statement that's an example of we comparison looking for differences and so Matt and I were not trying to compare the Nagati cotices and the dead sea scrolls looking for a shared genealogy or a hidden history of suppressed early Christianity in the ancient Judaism. Um we we rather wanted to compare these corpora without presuming any kind of genealogical or religious continuity between them, but rather to say okay um scholarship on these corpora have changed so much in the last 70 years since they were initially discovered. So what do they have to say to one another today? Even if we're interested in differences as much as similarities. Yeah, that's what we wanted to experiment with. So, we went in with like a really open mind interested in all kinds of comparisons and conclusions. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of like to think of comparison as a kind of uh an act of intellectual uh experiment where you sort of you bring you bring two things together and and and see what happens, you know, like but if it's two un different things, you're not like like really sure what will happen when you think about them together. And that and that's that was kind of the I that was kind of the idea. Absolutely. And I think that it's a really great testament to the vitality of this weak comparison if you look at the articles in this um in this volume. Um, and I I'm glad that you mentioned actually Dylan, you mentioned uh Holy Blood, Holy Grail earlier, and uh this was by by the I'm probably dating myself, but by the time uh that I was kind of like a young man in college, Holy Blood, Holy Grail had been distilled into those Dan Brown conspiracy books like Da Vinci Code and things like that. So that was really big at the time. And I think for the viewer, some viewers, there will be a shroud of mystery and allore to these texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Namadi Cotices. Um, they'll be seen as something spooky or perhaps verboden. Um but unfortunately this show may burst their bubble because both of these uh corpora of text are products of ascribal culture and one a scribal culture that not only wrote but also and this is very important uh they read and interpreted these texts for their communities at the time. Uh so um who's watched my talks with Ivon Moshnikov on the Coptic apocryphal texts or the Coptic language in these texts will know the textual fluidity is extremely important. Um interpretation of these texts is extremely important and there's a fantastic article by Hugo Lunhow uh in this text that we'll in this book that we'll talk about later. But first, um, Matt, could you talk about some of the misconceptions, um, yeah, in regards to and the scribal communities behind the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then Dylan, after could you discuss the Nakamati cotices? Yeah, I'd be happy to. meaning like like uh traditionally what what we knew about scribes or how how biblical scholars talked about scribes is they really meant copious. Um, and meaning like like this understanding that we see like like like once the Bible is a standardized text that the jaw job of the scribe is simply to copy the text. And in that sense you only see the the the hand of the scribe when they make a mistake. and and and it really fits with the sort of the the the idea which became really prominent in our culture of the idea that sort of the the the Bible as a canonical text and and you have the sense that the Bible is a sort of autonomous force that moves through history through these kind of anonymous scribes um like before the printing press who just sort of like like copied out the same thing um um um over gener generations and and then you and you only see it when when they make their hand when they make mistakes. And this is one of the things where you're actually getting ancient Jewish material texts, the actual texts themselves from antiquity where the our understanding of the where where the evidence really doesn't it can challenge our understanding of what a scribe is. meaning like like and let me put it this way in terms of the biblical texts from uh uh like like from Kuman they only match exactly our later Hebrew texts which became standardized in 41% of the time. So, so like so there's a sense of there's a common text and there's a tradition, but it's not really but you never get the word Bible and they don't really have the the same sense of of canon in the way that we do. So you actually see um in the Dead Sea Scrolls how people are talking about the text, how people are reading the text, how people are interpreting the text affects how they're actually writing the text and telling the story. meaning thinking of the scribe as not simply an anonymous copist but a kind of um textual intellectual, a textual scholar with his own agency, their own like like and the ability to discern interpretive problems and how they copy the text will um see how their solutions and even also the idea that the scribe is probably in the context of a of a of a community of people where it's not simply like the individual scribe cribe like at their their desk, you know, like late at night like like it seems that like like they were reading out loud. We we actually know from like like they didn't have desks with like papers spread out like like that that wasn't how it worked. It was more in the context of like a community people like one person reading something out loud in the context of discussion. So, so um like like there's lots of examples where you really see that um the scribes are doing all this creative stuff and and I I could give an example or two, but I I'll I'll hand it over to to Dylan to talk about the stuff with the Nagamati material. Yeah, thanks Matt. Um so the the Nagmi manuscripts are are super interesting from uh the scribal perspective and the history of the book more generally. Uh for starters they are books and late antiquity uh is the time of the the rise of the book. We have records of bound books um being used and circulated in the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries CE. The Nagamadi cotices meanwhile are products of probably the late fourth or early fifth centuries CE and they are also bound books and as whole artifacts bound books from the fourth or early fifth century. They're actually some of the oldest preserved books we have from antiquity. So they give us lots of information about how books were put together, how book binding worked, how uh books were copied out and manufactured um in their own right without regard for the the contents of the books themselves. And this is also a real difference with the Dead Sea Scrolls which are of course scrolls not the books. Um, as for the the scribes themselves, the Nagamati cotices are named for the upper Egyptian city of Nagamati, which was simply the the closest large city with a train stop uh to the site of their likely discovery, which um was a a a mountain or a rocky area called Jabal Alarif, close to the upper Egyptian town of Alcaser. And in the region of Alcaser, there were a number of monasteries in the 4th century. And the fact that the non-commodic cotices are written in Coptic would tell us that these texts were copied by people who knew how to write Coptic. Right? So then a question regarding who uh regarding the identity of these copists, these scribes would be who were Coptic scribes in the 4th century. And we actually don't have a lot of information about Coptic scribes of the 4th century. The fourth century is at the very beginning of the development of the Coptic language. Copic didn't really exist two centuries or even before that or even in the 3rd century. Um so the dog body cotices are also very close to the rise of Coptic as a language. So we don't have a lot of options um from our data about who could be writing Coptic at that time except for monks. We know that there were monks writing in Coptic and that these monks had monasteries and these monasteries were close to where the cotices were discovered. So monks are the leading hypothesis for the identity of who were copying this stuff out. There's a great new book exploring this hypothesis by Paola Tati, one of Hugodunhow's students, the the monks of the Nagamadi cotices, telling you all about the relationship between the nagamati cotices and the monks in the upper Egyptian area around modern day Nagamadi. The monks are not the only option. I should point out uh we have manacan cotices. So cotices produced by adherence to the religion of mani um which are roughly coterminus with non-commodi cotices and are similar in make in a lot of ways. However uh it's it's I think much more difficult to show that non-commodi cotices were produced by manacayans than by monks. The data definitely points in the monastic direction more. Uh what I would say is definite is that whoever copied this stuff out was were Christians. okay, of some kind that they were interested in apocryphal or non-cononical texts. So while the Dead Sea Scrolls basically include nearly complete Bible copy of the Bible and and many copies of biblical texts um acrew Bible I mean um across the the various scrolls the non-commoded cotices do not include any New Testament texts. It's all Christian and Christian adjacent um Gnostic and philosophical bore non-cononical literature. So supplementary reading for Christians interested in Gnostic subcultures I would say. Okay. Um, so we know they're interested in that and there's a lot of intertexts with magical material in the nagatic cotices in the prayers, descriptions of rituals, incantations, uh, names of angels and demons and higher beings to invoke um, discussions of occult learning like astrology, alchemy, you name it. This stuff is spread all over the nagodi cotices. So whether they were monks or not, we know that they were interested in magic and what we would today call occult sciences. At the same time, we should remember that they were also definitely Christian. And so when the nakamati cotices were first discovered, some people thought, h this is a gnostic library. We finally found the books that the gnostics wrote up for themselves. Well, these texts tell us a lot about nnosticism, but we know that uh Christians in monasteries were reading them. So this may give us more of a picture like the monks in Alberto Ekko's novel in in the name of the rose, right? Where we have monks who are definitely monks and they're definitely Christian and some of them are up to no good. Yeah. The body cotices seems to have been copied out by scribes like that. Yeah. One one of the things I really like about that like all like in in both corpora force us to sort of reexamine how we think about both Judaism and Christianity in this formative period meaning like we can we we have our own understanding of these religions today and and but like but it often doesn't fit with what we see like like with the stuff going on back back then and So it forces us to sort of realize that sort of the our the earliest stages of this of these religions could be um by our perspective weirder and stranger. Like we tend to just think of the past as just foundational for what we are in terms of the our own norms. But but like the the for me an overarching lesson is like the past the like like uh for both of these traditions like is weirder and stranger than like our normative traditions would have led us to believe. Absolutely. And um I think that it's it's extremely interesting especially when you and we'll get into this a little bit later but the the vast amount of material at a place like Kuman and these uh fragments literally thousands of fragments versus a relatively stable but still a text that attests to fluidity um like these cotices these 13 cotices right yeah um and I think that it's um I think for me what's really interesting that's going on here and that this volume and especially this art this article in the book that we'll talk about um shortly is the emphasis on the materiality of the book. It's it's really interesting when you um compare it to what's going on with the uh Greek and Egyptian magical formularies. Um, if anybody saw that talk with I had with Sophia Tales Tovar about the materiality of those texts, um, she really emphasizes the importance of these texts as books and as material artifacts. And I think that that's what Hugo Lunga and his article um, and I cannot stress it enough, but I'm a big, sorry, I'm a big admirer of Hugo's work. So, everybody go check out his work. Um but for me the highlight of the volume was Hugo Lungha's uh article on material philology and the cotices the non-commodi um because um a lot of the and of course I have to bring this in as well. Uh Dylan, you mentioned the the monks and the interest in the magic. And I think that a good corpora of text to bring in to this conversation um maybe informally but good for weak comparison is the uh Coptic magical u spells that Coridosu works on um because the monks we know monks were working on those as well. So very interesting. Um, but let's talk about this article by Hugo Lunga because in it he emphasizes and quite convincingly to me the monastic background of the Nakamadi library's origin and the key of textual fluidity in the transmission of these texts and how they were meant to be read because he does emphasize that these are books and they were written by anywhere from you know five scribes to 15 scribes you know depending on who you ask. So um but they were put in a certain order and much like another weak comparison much like Greco Egypt like say the Paris magical codec uh the Paris uh magical papyrie the um PGM4 they were put in a certain order to be read in a certain way. So let's kind of uh talk about this textual fluidity uh for a bit. So um Dylan, do you want to start? Matt, do you want to start? Because I know you wrote a great uh response to this. Yeah. like I I'd say since you started with mentioning Hugo's article, I I'll I'll hand the baton over to to Dylan and and to get us started. Sure. Um well, Jason, you summarized a lot of Hugo's wonderful article uh already. Um namely that the the Nagmari cotices, like I said, they contain 13 manuscripts. these the they're they're bound into books um written in Coptic and they contain various texts and tract dates. Um these texts and tract dates were were copied out in particular orders bound together for particular reasons. And so while today we historians pick them apart and make our own systems as to how to read these texts against one another, the most natural way to read these texts with respect to understanding the fourth century readers of these codices is simply to take each codeex and read it straight through. Uh this is the way that people would have read it 1700 years ago. the texts were bound together into particular books for uh the reasons that only the scribes and binders of these books knew. Um so this is something that Hugo discusses in his wonderful article and this can produce very different results. So then we might get um from modern readings that focus on extrapolating one text from one CEX and another text from another CEX and see how they're theologically related to one another. So for example uh one famous example of such a reading strategy would be take namati codec 7 which begins with a text about cosmology the paraphrase of shem and then finishes up with texts that talk about ethics and and mysticism and sort of the the end reaching the end of one's own mystical journey uh the uh three stalies of seth one scholar argues this mirrors the pattern of the New Testament and the of really the Bible alto together starting with Genesis and going through pastoral epistles and the apostles interesting hypothesis but it's easy to see how a 4th century Christian could have easily read this codeex that way right another thing Hugo points out in the article is what you referred to Jason um rightly as textual fluidity so while we have over 50 um tech outs In the non-agodic cotices, not all of the texts are unique. We have multiple copies of particular texts spread out in the cotices. So a great example is the secret book of John. Uh we have uh one version of the secret book of John that is copied out in two cotices, non-agamadi cotices 2 and four. And then another version of the secret book of John that is copied out in codeex 3. and then a a third Coptic version of the sacred book of John and another Coptic Gnostic Codeex uh that that wasn't found in Nikkamati uh that was found 50 years before um in Egypt um called the Yakmim Codex or the Berlin Gnostic Codeex. So three Coptic witnesses. Are they the same? No, they're quite different from one another. And scholars used to uh retake the three witnesses and try to three manuscript witnesses and then try to figure out which one was the original or how can we reconstruct the original secret or from these three manuscripts with all their differences. Hugo taking on the methodology explored by medievalists suggested that instead we simply read the three manuscript witnesses as three works in their own right. So we don't have to try to reconstruct a hypothetical lost version of the secret book, the archetype that informs all three of the manuscripts. Rather, it's worth reading each manuscript witness as its own separate work, which is also how ancient people would have read them. And this opens up a lot of new avenues for discovery. Um, and and certainly um asks us to focus on evidence that was neglected. So, for example, the CEX 3 version has always been set aside by scholars in favors of the versions BG codeex 2. But actually the Codex 3 version is super interesting in its old right for linguistic reasons, translation practices to say nothing of theology. So looking at textual fluidity, the the the way that texts change over time, um, and analyzing those changes with respect to each text in its manuscript setting instead of trying to smooth over those changes and trying to reconstruct a hypothetical or a text is a really useful way to go about extracting more information and learning more from these ancient artifacts. It's great. And um um yeah, so Matt, you wrote this awesome response to Hugo's article. I I yeah I try because we we felt it was important to in the in the issue of sort of engaging the material like like that we have someone who knows a scroll sort of engaging like what Hugo was doing and and and um like and basically what I what like you could so so the the sort of the material philology um that uh so it's a a form of scholarship that came out of medieval studies that that is is becoming normative in biblical studies. And the idea that like like Hugo does such a wonderful job of showing how that that approach can sort of unlock ancient material and they're the idea like I really like the language of textual fluidity. Um um where the idea that each manuscript is a text unto itself that needs to be sort of appreciated. What was a scribe doing? What was a scribe trying to do? And um and this while while at one level this might seem obvious, it really goes against the grain of let's say biblical studies because often like like one of our let's call it the tyranny of canonical assumptions or also the tyranny of critical texts meaning like like a critical text the creation of a critical text takes all of this manuscript evidence and reconstructs this one kind of text which is actually doesn't not something that ex actually exists but something that sort of extrapolates like like the most original text from all of this material and all of the individual nuances get erased from these the the discrete manuscript evidence. So it's a new appreciation of the manuscript evidence and and Hugo is doing a great job with that material and the Nagamani material like Dylan was emphasizing you see similar approaches going on with the Dead Sea Scrolls. I also got a sense that like some of the some of the like the work is is a little like like at some level the materiality is is is is offers different challenges like the scroll like like there's things you can do with scrolls and and you can't do with codeexes and and vice versa. So, for example, one thing we can do with scrolls because it's a um a rolled thing like like I remember kind of doing this in grad school like I went to an art supply store and got like some poster paper, rolled it up into a like a little tube sort of thing and I took a big knife and just like stabbed it. And why? Because when you unroll it, the the difference the the the gap between the the knife mark will change. And so the idea there if you have that if you see kind kind of common damage patterns you can sort of extrapolate like how many like like what's the whole role like like we we might just have a column or two but but you might be able to extrapolate the ro the size of the original scroll for example. You see you see what I mean where the dam like a recurring damage pattern. Um, so there's there's stuff there there's the materiality um the like how the material theology kind gets applied. It can be a little different and and and Dylan can correct me on this, but I think like like the Dead Scrolls have more scraps like like like than than like like it's the non-commoded. It's all stuff in cotices, right? Like is there scraps that like that that we know of to I I think the answer is no. But I but tell me Dylan. Well there there are unplaced fragments and and when I say you know the Nagmati cotices include 13 manuscripts some of these manuscripts are in really lousy shape. Yeah. So, so that means leaves leaves that sort of fell out where you don't really like they were in a co they were in a codeex but we don't really like know where like like Yeah, exactly. So a a good ex so codeex 10 um a lot of codeex 9 most codex 12 the the in the critical editions the the pageionation of the different leaves pages as it were um has a little asterisk next to it yeah to show that they don't really know I mean they we we don't have enough of the codeex preserved to be able to tell um is which page this actually belongs to in terms of the larger design of the codeex. All we can tell is um from the uh the fibers on the papyrus uh fragments these fragments are not from the same page as these fragments. Yeah. And they probably can and from what we can discern in the text this one comes before that one you know and there there are a number obviously preserved like that and then there are there are other fragments that we can't place anywhere. We don't know where they go. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's some like but my like there's there's But you're right because some of the scrolls were found like the ones in cave one were in these big jars which was sort of like the equivalent of a filing cabinet in in in antiquity. There's a language in Jeremiah where is like put a scroll in a jar. Meaning like if you want to kind of preserve it like like do that. and and the stuff from what we call cave 1 was in those these big jars like about four 4t high and that stuff was well preserved. It was all published in the ' 50s but a majority of the stuff was what we call from cave 4 and cave 11 and a lot of that stuff is really really fragmentaryary where it's like a 100,000 pieces where it's really important. It raises the question of of sort of like like like I sometimes I use the analogy like if you have puzzle pieces like from all sorts of different puzzles and you don't have like the cover of the box to kind of guide you like what like what do you do and and the issue of handwriting becomes very important like meaning like this fragment and this fragment like they they they actually might seem really different but if you can tell it's from the same hand like you may maybe they're from like like the same the same text. There's a lot of room for for for speculation, but I want to emphasize the kind one example of the kind of where where actually having the actual materiality is a really good example of sort of how they understood this material. What one example I I give is from the like like in Kuman in the Kuman world we call it 4Q8. It's it's it's a fragment. We you could just call it a like a fragment of Genesis, but I but as I want to you you'll you'll see that's not really a good example. It's about one column. And in the same way like with puzzle pieces, if you have the edge, the edge can really help you figure out what's going on. And meaning because as a scroll, if you have the edge, you can actually see that like because it's it's sheets of leather that were sewn together. And when you find these these edges, you can you can generally see like like where there was kind of thread like when the scrolls were first found, they actually did have the thread, but like it disintegrated very quickly. And in this one text that I have in mind, like like it it it is very similar to our version. It's one passage from Genesis 47 from the Joseph story. So you could just say, "Oh, it's a Genesis manuscript. Oh, it's a it's from the Bible. But we have the edge and there's no um sewing. There's none. So meaning this was not part even it's what we would call Genesis 47. It's not part of a book of Genesis. This was not part of a larger scroll. It was not part of a Torah scroll. It was not part of a larger book of Genesis. Like someone just wrote this out on a sheet. And then the question like it was not producing a book uh or of the Bible the way we understand it. And it raises the question what they were what were they doing. And here I'd emphasize like this is sort of an example where the the the mi the evidence forces us to sort of examine what what what our tradition is. The word Torah doesn't mean Bible doesn't mean law. It literally means instruction. Meaning in a way there's something about the term scribe. But I don't really like that much. Like it's it's just kind of the as if they're sort of just writing stuff out like like it's it's it's it's there's a there's a pedagogical context. There's a there's a scribe there there's a there's an intellectual where where it's it's teachers talking and students learning and and so one I like one possibility for that example is like if I was the teacher and if you were the student Jason I'd say like oh show me you know the Joseph story write something out from it you know like like like where where it wasn't in the context of like copying the Bible it was in the context of a sort of a like like a a specimen from a sort of a pedagogical interaction, you know, and and and this is why when you put all these manuscripts together, you see like like why language of fluidity and and and difference really u um um is is is valuable. And it's interesting with some of these books traditions you see a lot more fluidity than others like like um like the best example of this is with the psalms because if you think about it like Dylan mentioned the lurggical stuff too like the sort of the the the the issue of ritual and the different trai different communities have different lurggical traditions like like it's what that community their forms of prayer is what is driving things not like a fixed assemblage of prayer. pray. So with the prayer stuff like like is it kind of one book that people could just do really in a free way or is there like no book at all but rather people would have different instantiations of a of a body of psalms like where the language of book isn't even really or or like like where people would just kind of in in different lurggical contexts would produce different collections of sort of a a body of material. The other point I'd emphasize that like where where the term scribe doesn't really do it for me is all of that that that pedagogical example I'm talking about Jason. It really shows there's this oral dimension like like of people teachers and students working with their other and antiquity. So it's like our written our written evidence. It's like one it's like we only have one scrap of like these lost living interactions. It's like it's it's like we're we can we have all this wonderful evidence, but it's actually kind of uh we're only kind of getting part of the conversation, Jason. You know what I mean? Like, and sort of and and and sometimes to understand what's going on in the written part, you have to sort of imagine like like or speculate on what that pedagogical inter what what what people were saying to each other. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I think that this is really where um understanding those pedagogical techniques from antiquity, whether they be Jewish or Greco or Roman. Um and Dylan, I believe you did a presentation on the Coptic Mill of this educational aspect for Westar not too long ago. Uh great paper by the way. I loved it. Um and and uh I think that we lose sight of this when we look at these texts as these spooky the spooky domain of gnostics or these mysterious monks. Like we have to understand that there it's a living tradition and there's a pedagogical aspect. There's a an interpretive aspect and a fluidity aspect that's going on in these texts that we don't um always see with the naked eye when we try to get to the origin of these uh uh mysterious texts, you know. Um and I know we're running low on time, but um I don't know if you all have time for a couple more questions before we go. I I um I know we had about an hour. Okay. Yeah. So um and before we move on from this materiality, I just want to emphasize that for those who aren't convinced that the Namadi scrolls are or the Nagamadi cotices are um most likely the product of monastic communities, um we didn't even mention the aspect of the materiality argument where the the insides of the covers of these books were consisting of monastic letters from a a monastic community. So, um, you know, my money is I mean, they could be some mysterious gnostic group, but my money is on Pomcomian monks, but that's another story. Um, so before we go, I wanted to kind of end on this book. Yes, I'll check it out. And I believe I believe it's uh open access as well. So, you can you should be able to download it for free. If Brill has a summer sale, I'll definitely pick it up. No. I picked up some good stuff last last year. But um um let's talk about this wheat comparison for a bit. So um Matt, you're the you're the Enoch and you're the Walkers guy. We had a wonderful conversation about that last time. Um that was our first talk actually and uh I wanted to get into this article that you have in the volume about the Watchers lore and the uh cosm cosmogonic myth of the apocryphono John. Um, so you explore again this creativity and the polifany of voices and exoggetical perspectives that these works bear witness to. So could you discuss watchers lore and the reform of John for a bit? Yeah, I'd be I'd be happy to. And so so one of the ways that the scrolls and the nakamadi kind material forces us to sort of rethink in particular sort of like like the biblical tradition is um like like it's actually it one of the point it's not just the scrolls or the the non-comamadi texts themselves but it also forces us to sort of rethink the whole biblical tradition and how they understood this stuff when it was being produced. And so, for example, the the New Testament and the letter of Jude cites something called a book of Enoch. And one thing I like to do to get my students interested in this material is that like I'll show them I'll show them like like that, you know, I'll ask them like, "Does your Old Testament have a book of Enoch?" Uh, no. and and then I'll pull out the the Rastafarian Bible like like the Bible is a movement involving uh it's a Caribbean millennial movement. It's not simply about reggae music and marijuana and and they have a book of Enoch and then I'll show that like the the passage in Jude actually matches pretty closely to the book of Enoch and the Rastaparian Bible and then I'll ask students why is the New Testament citing something in the Rastaparian Bible but not in your Bible and at that point I'll have the attention of everyone in in in the room. But the idea is because the Rastapharians are very enamored of the Ethiopian Bible and the Ethiopian Bible has long since the 4th century had in their Old Testament something called the the book of Enoch and and and that actually is a heritage of this that this forgotten text was actually very important and had a scriptural authority. That's why it's in the uh the the New Testament is citing it. And um and one of the things about the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nagamadi where there's interesting connection is the Dead Sea Scrolls community like like they thought of the book of Enoch. It gives you a sense of like what was scripture in ancient Judaism. They very much thought of Enochic scripture and Enochic writings as having this authoritative value like a and Enoch was a a figure he's described in Genesis as the seventh uh p generation after um um Adam and this kind of this understood as this great sage who received angelic revelation from before the flood. And one of the things that that the the about the Nagamani material which is so interesting is it actually retains not unlike the book of Jude this kind of this older Christian heritage uh that continued this thing we see in the scrolls in that valued at some level Enochic trai like like scripture. And right around the same time, like one of the things that makes the Nagamani material interesting is right around the same time, and Dylan knows more about this than I do, we see a sort of transformation of Christianity in the 4th century like like you know like like uh you know Constantine gets tra like like becomes converted. We we see the transformation of this of this tradition into something which is becoming more like acceptable and like like a recognized religion of the Roman Empire and and we begin to see it having something like with p like with with power and authority in a in a in a new way. And this results in a kind of orthodoxing process where it's in the first four fourth century where you see people sort of like begin to say like this is normative Christianity that's good and this stuff like like isn't so language of heresy language of orthodoxy and those people and a lot of this is happening in Egypt and and those people who establish what became orthodox Christianity don't like the book of Enoch in part because some of the Christians, other Christians they don't like very much do like Enoch and a and so a and this is this is going on in in Egypt. So so meaning the the Nakamani stuff while from a modern standpoint might be very strange, it actually retains this older interest in the Enochic stuff, but they're thinking about it not as biblical the way modern people do. They're not there's no citation of a book of Enoch, but rather there's an incorporation of Enochic material about how like the Enoch stuff is re is depicts material about from before the flood. So it reflects a real interest in sort of deep time in the primordial history. And that sort of and that sort of early primordial history stuff is something the Nagamadi folks are just fascinated with like like like elaborating and and and telling these elaborate cosmogonic scenarios that at some level are based on Genesis, but it's not presented as kind of textual exesis. It's often presented as kind of like like like Genesis adjacent elaborate stories about the the early story early history of the world and the naga and and and they incorporate the the the some of the enoic material into that. So it has kind of a like like a value and a re relevance for them but but it's not that not as uh not biblical in the modern sense of the word. Is that sort of like like like I um I I could go on but I I'll keep that there. Um no, I think Yeah. No, I think that's great. I think that um it actually um ties into another question that I had which I just have to get this in because it was it was in a footnote but I love to go into the down the rabbit hole in footnotes and uh I I had Doomsa's book another seed actually when I was reading these two articles by you and Dylan and uh there's this footnote that you have in your article on this uh subject where you talk about how the depiction of Noria and hypothasis of the archons has more in common and this this This get this again gets into the concept of traditions versus canon. Um you talk about how in the hypothesis of the archons there's the the depiction of Noria who is trying to get away from the archons who are trying to you know ravish her. Um and that has more in common with something like say from a medieval Midash than any Watchers lore that we're really familiar from the second temple period. So yeah just because I'm a nerd if you could talk about that a bit more. All right. Yeah. Yeah. And you do get nerd points for asking that that question, Jason. Like, like, so, so yeah, like like Dylan can um correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but but yeah, and you're right in the in in the figure of Noria, who I think is a sister of Seth, like this this really important kind of feminized principle of like Seth is idolized in in in the in the Nagamadi tradition, and Nori is kind of like this feminine analog of her. I I I I I think and and uh the archons, the evil archons who rule this this uh realm like try to rape her and she escapes and I believe she escapes by like like and this actually key for analogy she she ascends right like there's an ascent tradition which is really interesting because a lot of times the ascent tradition involves kind of male um aesthetics and and um and so and the tradition so the idea that these that these kind of evil spiritual beings want to rape her has a strong analogy to the watchers myth. The core watchers myth in the inaka tradition tries like like what you what you see in Genesis is that like the flood happens because of evil in the world but they're wonderfully vague about like well what what happened like like must like must have been bad but like you don't really know it doesn't say. And you get this more elaborate version in in the book of the watchers where it has angels coming down to earth because they see they they they find the women attractive and they and they sleep with them. Like sometimes it's called a marriage but like you know there's there's no marriage ritual. No, no one's uh, you know, throwing rice around or anything like like it could be rape, you know, and and you know, there's no account of the women's consent. and and in the Watchers myth and the Enoch uh story like they the the the women become pregnant and give birth to these horrible monstrous giants meaning like the horrible children are the idea that there's this um there was this kind of really improper horrible violation of this boundary of not simply like like the illicit sex represents us kind of this boundaries of heaven and earth that shouldn't have been merged that that that that was and then because the rampages of those giants is why the flood happens. But you're right, like one of the most extensive retellings preserved in rabbitic literature of all this material, a text called the Midash, Shmikaza, and Aza imagines one story where one woman like like um um um Astaram like like um like um um where where where the angels are coming to her coming coming to the women, one of them says like like one of the women says, "Teach me like because they give revelation. They don't just sleep with them. They give revelation and they and they say like like teach me the shame muares like teach me the inexpressable name of God. and they do and she and she ascends like like like it's it's it's it's a kind of mystical thing but it's also sort of like getting a like like like escape from rape kind of thing, you know, and this odd thing that like then you have this kind of righteous human and the stars and the the evil angels on earth and then talks about like one of the stars in heaven like that she was affixed like like and they mentioned the pleades like like the idea that one of these seven stars is this righteous woman who remained pure in the context when a lot of women on earth were were defiled. And so so and that's and we only have that in medieval text. But one of the scribal things like like you you're you're you emphasizing is so we might have something in a late text but like we don't know the whole story of how it got there. It's not like it that like that story I I described. could be like the context of medieval discussion of of these things, but it might actually be kind of a survival of older pedagogical traditions like well did all the women get raped, you know, like like carrying on older ideas. So I like I don't have a smoking gun but like but the idea that like that that um so some of the stuff in that medieval stuff text might actually be late but at a very at the very minimum you see a kind of in the late antique stuff and the late and the medieval Jewish texts like like like they're thinking about the the the the role of the women in like like in this kind of in these scenarios in similar ways and the idea that like they're not always depicted as like like as as as as victims of sort of like uh like like these angelic male transgressors, you know, like so so the thing about Naria is that she she does her own thing. And yeah, so in in the hypothesis of the Archons, you know, Noah is working with the Archons. He's no he's no good. So she she burns down Noah's arc, sets fire to it. Um, she has agency. Yeah. No question. And when the the archons come after her, she she prays to heaven for escape. Um, she utters a prayer and one of the the four luminaries, Allet, shows up and helps her and it's not clear where they go, but but but the archons disappear. And this basic pattern of a a holy woman with agency um assault from a malevolent superhuman being sexual in nature. Um petition for aid from heaven and then granting of that petition and rescue. This this is what you find in in also a number of medieval tales. And so there there there's also a Coptic text. Uh I don't think it's Strumza who found it. I think a scholar named Steven Garrow, an American in Germany, um, pointed out also Coptic analoges, medieval Coptic texts, um, to the Jewish texts that Matt mentioned where it is the Queen of Sheba who was under assault from a demon. She utters the prayer, she gets rescued, but but it it conforms to the Nora narrative. And what we see is is a a greater pattern that reflects a a transformation of the anakic story of the angels descending to mate with human women. Um transforming then repeating itself over time and the nagmati cotices seem to be our earliest witness to that transformation to where the story becomes one of the woman having agency to escape. Yeah, that's great. That's great. where we often think about this kind the the our own my own sense is thinking about the Gnostics as a as a sect like like often means that we we like like we kind of sectarianize it in in the field and we we think about the non-commodi stuff as something other and then like I think Dylan just gave a great example like the material the people writing the stuff were part like they were they they were part of this larger intellectual worlds they were they were part of these streams of tradition And then later authors and scribes like like with with their own intellectual traditions the non-commod you know like we can talk about it as a like like it's f like the sectarian the debate is fine at one level but like sect or not like they were part of these intellectual worlds and and and that's actually the point that we that Dylan and I over the years have really tried to sort of push against you Yeah. So, I mean, and and for some of your your listeners, Jason, I think there there's also um a a depiction ofnosticism or the Gnostics have a reputation for being open-minded, right? You can valorize the Gnostics as having been a really enlightened early Christian sect that was uh oppressed and and pushed out by the Catholic Church. And the Gnostics were non sectarian. they they were open-minded and they drew freely from all kinds of mythologies. This is the the portrayal of the gnostics. You have for example in theosophical literature bloatski or um Rudolfph Stein's for example various esoteric movements see the gnostics as free thinkers but there's this also isolates the gnostics in a way by excluding them from having any kind of reception in orthodox or non-nostic circles. Uh, in other words, the Gnostics were freeth thinkers and then they were oppressed and we don't hear anything about them after late antiquity. Well, actually the example of the story of Nora and its echoes in rabbitic and Coptic literature of of the medieval period show us that people were actually reading and transforming these Gnostic stories and gnostic characters long after late to antiquity. This they they were not isolated. Um although um mnostic dualism uh went through its own medieval transformations in different social environments like with manism and the bo Yeah. and so forth. And and and Alp in particular, the angel that Nora calls upon to save her, um is a great example of this himself because he appears in a number of uh Coptic magical texts uh from the medieval period in just Christian environments. Um he's he's a really a gnostic angel. We read the name first in Ireneas in the second century and we read about this angel all over the naggamati cotices and the so-called sethian gnostic texts. And yet we also find him in Coptic magical spells as simply a Christian angel hanging out with another one of the Sethian luminaries David who has been transformed into King David. He's walking around with a a harp playing. So David h got to be the same one you know. So another Gnostic luminary becomes conflated King David and Adele just becomes a good angel. There's an afterlife, a reception to these Gnostic figures outside of Gnosticism. And this also shows us how integrated Gnostic literature was in ancient and medieval literature. Yeah. And and I know we we we should wrap but like but let me emphasize there's a there's an important analogy with the Dead Sea Scrolls meaning like the Dead Sea Scrolls are the product of one sect like like where it's one leader. They have their own group structure. They don't like other like like other Jews are getting it wrong and they they they don't like the Pharisees like like you get a sense of like that they have their own little sectarian view and and and there's a kind of pmic against other the temple pmic against other sect. So you can sort of understand the dead scrolls as like like teaching you about this one particular sect. Um like like just just that and but like and but there's also the issue of like and and you can do that and it is a sect but like for them to sort of put their own unique iteration that we have the truth and other groups don't and actually use language of new covenant like like to describe like their own sense of of election not unlike the later Christians but like and and so so but it also sort of but yeah this the sect It gives us a wind like they're they're drawing from the world around them for their own unique iteration. So we do the stuff a disservice by just kind of closing it off and thinking about it simply as like like we don't want to shut off we don't want to close off the sect in our analysis you know like like even though if that's at one level that's what the sect was doing you know we don't want to kind of sectarianize our own analysis of the sect you know so I couldn't agree with with Willan's point more like like that we need to sort of broaden this stuff out and like like like and realize that uh you use the word kind of living traditions, you know, like like like and there's a way to anal an analyze sects that that that uh prevents that, you know, amazing. And I think that uh before we wrap up, I think just to this section of the conversation just in terms of the medieval reception of these watchers myths and these uh receptions in Nagamadi attesting to these fluidity of textual perspectives. A good analogy that I can make is um I have a talk with Martha Himlarp coming out pretty soon about the book of Zerubbabel and this uh fluidity of messiah messianic traditions. Yeah. and how should we discount this book u just because it's late. Um I mean there's a lot of traditions in there that Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing and I'm I'm very excited for that. Wild stuff. Wait, before we end like like my son wants to make a brief cameo. Hi. Hi. What's your name? Uh Liam Goth. Liam. Yeah. Yeah, that's your name. All right. Your dad is your dad. So Lord Sobeck over there. This is his podcast and like like and uh and so uh and this this is this is this is my son Liam. Um um glad you're here. So what do you want to say to the world? I I I think uh Lord Sobeck uh who are the two guys standing behind you? It's a good question. It's a good question. Oh, so so my my my jam nowadays is ancient fictional narrative. So uh this is Matiakus and that's Parthnip and this is an ancient uh Greek romance that was translated into many different languages. Um um long story short, I really love ancient fiction. So that's kind of why they're kind of like my main thing right now. So, um, but but Liam, you're you're I just want to let you know that your dad is a total badass at this. So, I hope you know that. He's, uh, brilliant. I know. As is Dylan. So, yeah. So, I'm I'm very very blessed to have, uh, two scholars of such caliber um, agree to talk to this weird guy um, named Lord Sobeck. Uh, so yeah, just thank you both. Love the name Lord Sobeck. Homage to Lord Sobeck. Yeah. All right. So, Dylan, like this was as always. Wonderful. Like like So, Liam, say, can you say goodbye to the world? I could just save some more stuff, right? Well, uh like like we're wrapping up right now, but like but yes, keep it brief. I have more time. We're wrapping up. We're wrapping up. like um um so so I think you need to get your own podcast. This is Jason's p like it's Jason's call. It's L. You have to respect I have a kiddo too who wants to start a podcast. Maybe you two can start a podcast together. So uh he likes his son likes video games. His son likes video games and Okay. Okay. Yeah. Oh, wait, wait. Do you want to show you're looking? All right, Liam. Like, that's not what I was. Oh, okay. Okay, then tell us one thing before before we wrap. One thing ignore mythology. I'm really into mythology. Uhhuh. That's it. Uh, I have um I'm going to that that was a I mean that was that's pretty inaccurate. Uh, I mean, well, the main idea is, um, I drew that. I forget when, but it was a while ago. Um, notice the runes at the top. The runes. I I think I know it's wrong. I could be wrong. Um, like for example, uh, I have this eagle up here just saying unnamed. It's actually its name is supposed to be Harice Velgar. Um, wow. But a lot of Who's your favorite Norse god? Who's your favorite Norse god or goddess? Norse god. I mean, uh, that's a good question. Um, a lot of them are really interesting. Obviously, Thor is at the top because Thor is like one of the most documented. He has the most stories. Um, but I I guess besides Thor, um, I mean, Balder is pretty cool as well. Um uh but um I have I I um do you know um I'm guessing you know the uh I'm I'm saying like you like do you know but the the Nephilim from the I know Oh, we know about the See, I don't honestly know that much about Norse mythology. So you're educating me now. And do I need to know? I do not know a lot about like Abrahamic mythology, but um besides what my dad has been telling me. Um but the Nephilim, according to my dad, um he says they're around like a mile or something tall. According to the book of Watchers, 3,000 cubits, but uh so that's a lot. Like a mile and a half tall giants. In uh Norse mythology, there is a um a a giant made out of clay uh called Muk or Calfie. Um it says that his heart is the heart of like a deer, I think, or something or like a calf or something like that. Um it states that he is uh 9 miles tall. It just says 9 miles. Yeah. And it say it says specifically in the prosa um 9 miles tall. and then three miles underneath the arms. And it says that Thor, it literally states in the pros eda that like not word for word obviously, but it literally states something along the lines of like we don't need to get into the fight that Thor had with Mocker Calfie because it was so short, but like please go into the fight. How did Thor do that? Yeah. You know, it's really interesting and and sorry to hijack this Dylan and Matt, but uh you know, just getting into the concept of these these uh these figures as as you know, how giant they are. You know, there's a good I don't know how familiar you are with uh Greek mythology and Greek lore. But the heroes, yeah, the heroes, the hero of old were much like the Nephilim considered, you know, tall as well. You know, you have actually a lot of ancient giant dinosaur bones were mistaken for heroes bones. So, and displayed in temples. So, uh you might like Adrienne Mar's book, The First Fossil Hunters, if you're interested in that. But, uh yeah. Yeah. like like a lot of different ancient cultures had the idea like we could call it giants but this idea that like the earth like like and I came there's actually I think a nagamati text I remember one nagamati scholar was telling me camera but it's in it's in a text called fourth Ezra like the idea that we like how do we know that the end is coming soon is because people are getting shorter like like people like as we get closer to the end of time people are getting shorter and That's kind of like like meaning the the the the at an earlier stage the earth had more vitality, more exuberance and creatures were were larger and like and so we're getting progressively smaller and that by the and then the end time we're sort of like the universe is sort of running out of gas and and I think that's a really broad uh like broadly attested idea. you get it in the north stuff, but like the kind of gargantuan creatures of of old is just a wonderfully broad idea. So, uh like um maybe one thing, one other thing because like like I like I I don't want it's we I really appreciate the cameo, but also like I I think you need to do something like we need to get my son and your son together, Jason, and like like Right. And I want to mention that um uh so like the the main like mythologies that like everyone knows about like I don't know like like Egyptian, Greek and Norse like the main three like the most famous but um Norsey is very different from those two because um we it is extremely blurry like uh we we uh there's a lot of key things missing uh because for a lot a multitude of reasons for example like it was a um it was an oral religion. Um, and another thing was that uh cuz uh all like most of the like the the the evidence we have for Norsetologology were were all written down by Christian scholars like not the actual like I mentioned the pros eta that's written by a guy who's Christian and that's that makes the prosa makes up like 99% of all our information on northology. Um and so um we we do not know how much of Norse theology is exactly like I guess accurate because it's very clear to see that in some points Christian scholars definitely snuck in their own like Christian related stuff like um for example uh there's literally a part where um a giant flood happens and then two giants uh need to hide in a box to survive and like they they wait out the flood. The only difference is that this time not a flood of water like in the the thing in the Bible, but this case is actually the fl a flood of blood after a the biggest giant in the world. His name is Emir. I don't it doesn't say how tall he is, but he's big enough that his corpse is used to create the entire world um by the gods. when they when the gods kill him, Odin and his brothers Villian and Vy, um when they kill Emir, his blood floods the entire earth and kills all the Yotar. Um and Yotnar is just like giants. Um well, Liam, I think that I think that if you go back and watch this show, you'll see that this is actually pretty um pretty consistent with what you're talking about in terms of reception, right? So even though we may not have what the original of these stories are, these are receptions right of of this north Norse mythology by Christians. Liam Lord Sobeck's podcast is called We Are Being Transformed and and I think you should like a lot of the stuff that he's getting into like are things that I think you might be interested. You should watch it now. Like like you should watch all of it, every episode. So, should I say something about that one story where Thor almost drowns in urine? Yeah. Okay. But that's keep it short like and then end this like like because we do need to actually I think you already told it you know like it it's I'll keep it brief but one one a very famous story where Thor and Loki uh well obviously Loki doesn't want to cuz it's Loki but uh Thor wants to uh go kill this giant Grod. Um, well, Loki wants Grod, he trying to trick Thor into not bringing his hammer cuz he wants Grod to kill Thor because Loki is just like that. And so he's like, "Oh, if you don't bring your hammer, it'll be harder." And like you like challenges. And so Thor's like, "Yeah." Um and uh um however on the way this like old giant lady gives him uh like iron gauntlets to replace his missing gauntlets and and also gives him a big stick. Um and to replace his hammer. Um and on the way they are need to wade through a river and then according to the prosetta one of the daughters of the her name is uh guelp one of the daughters of the giant gad is straddling the river and quote unquote this is word for word in the proetta causing it to rise. Um, and um, and then Thor almost they almost drown, but then Thor grabs a rock. And then another line that he actually says in the edas like to actually I forget what he says, but it's something along the lines of like uh like uh to stop some to stop the flooding, you must uh you must uh hit it at its source. Um, and then he throws the rock at Galp. Um, and then she uh she doesn't die. Thor later kills her with a chair in the story, but uh yeah. Dang, I feel like I'm studying the wrong tradition. Yes, Liam, you should start your own podcast on Northology. Um, and yeah, everybody, um, thank you so much for watching. This has been the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nagamadi Library with Dylan Burns and Matthew Goff in addition to Norse mythology with Yeah. A little Norse mythology extra bonus at the end. Bonus clip. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Uh so yeah, thank you. Thank Thank you all three of you for your contributions to the show. It's been it's been a blast for me. And and yeah, Liam, I'm serious. She should um I uh my son does a similar thing where he explains and I love to just listen to, you know, my kid explain stuff. So, you know, big fun big big fun time for me. So, you should start your own show. Um you know, talk about this stuff. It's really cool. Yeah. This is Thank you guys. Oh, I want to mention one other thing. Uh before Excellent. So when school was happening, uh, one of the assignments for history class was for like a end of the year test was like make a 10 slide or no 20 slide presentation about whatever you want. And um I I was actually exempt from this test because I had good enough grades in his class. Uh, so I was exempt from it, but I chose to do it anyway because I wanted to talk about Norathology. And so now on my on my uh device uh if I just sign into Office 360 with my school email, I am now greeted with a not 20 slide but like 25 slide. I went over the limit of just like the basis of Northology. Uh so yeah, he's not fooling around. Awesome. All right, this was great. Thank you both. Thank everybody for watching. Yeah, Dylan Dylan has been wonderful as always. Great to see you, Matt. Rock on, Jason. All right. Bye. Take care, everybody. [Music]