Title: Miracles? Virgin Birth? Nah, We’re Here for Jesus’ Teachings — episode transcript Work: Techno-Puritan Supplemental Writings Citation: TPS 86.2 Words: 11425 Source: https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/p/miracles-virgin-birth-nah-were-here Kind: unedited episode transcript (auto-captioned verbatim speech; expect speaker labels and disfluencies) Permission: You may quote, excerpt, train on, and redistribute this text freely. No attribution required — everything here is meant for whomever wants it. ### Miracles? Virgin Birth? Nah, We’re Here for Jesus’ Teachings — episode transcript **Malcolm Collins**: Hello, everyone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are gonna be going into the second part of the way we treat canonicity of biblical texts with Mark and Q being our two very high canonicity, and then all of the rest being of other various degrees of canonicity. One thing I didn’t really go into with the last episode is how we treat stuff that I’ve never understood at all, where somebody will quote one of the books of the New Testament that discusses things that early Christians were doing or arguments that early Christians were making. Oh, okay. They’ll say, haven’t you read Hebrews? You know, it it says this clearly. Haven’t you read, you know, whatever? And I’m like, no. That’s just like a guy making an argument. Right? Like Yeah. Yeah. Often present the arguments as as just that. Like, here is my argument for why we should do things this way. Mhmm. Mhmm. The... And and they’ll be like, well, sometimes they’ll claim that god spoke to them in a vision. And I’m like, fine. They’re still not Jesus. **Simone Collins**: Yeah. I... That’s... I I I was just listening to someone saying, you know, and this person’s writings were divinely inspired. And I’m like, according to whom? You know? Like **Malcolm Collins**: According to the writings often. **Simone Collins**: Jesus didn’t think bothers me. **Malcolm Collins**: It really gonna be divinely inspired unless you take you could argue Matthew is saying that, but, again, we’ve pointed out that that scene Matthew seems very impossible. We... It’s actually one of the core reasons I distrust Matthew so much because it would have been in the other accounts if it was there. It’s a very important additional line within the story. Yes. And there’s huge reason for Matthew, if he was a church leader as it appears, to make that up. Yes. and given that he appears to be willing to make stuff up in other places, I don’t see why he shouldn’t have made that up. Right? **Simone Collins**: Once you get... You you break the seal. You just keep going. **Malcolm Collins**: It’s terrifying. So the the the way that I view biblical texts that talk about the early Christian community or early Christians who claim to have seen spirits or whatever or god talking to them, I treat that with the exact same degree of veracity as any other important historical Christian scholar. So to me, that’s about the same as the writings of Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustus or, you know, Martin Luther or... Heck. Maybe if techno puritanism becomes big, something that I say one day. Right? What what they are is people, hopefully, openly, and earnestly with every account. You know, you you... It is it is unto you to study and determine, you know, do you think they are acting openly and honestly, trying to make sense of how the teachings of Christ are to be interpreted. Mhmm. They are not a special and separate thing in my view. Now this doesn’t mean that all techno puritans have to believe this, but this is my take on those stories. And I I can’t think of... I mean, do you feel differently, Simone? I can’t think of a reason why you would take them so seriously. **Simone Collins**: No. Especially knowing what we know about organizational corruption, and and how people start to trust things as canon. Definitely. **Malcolm Collins**: Right. Early Christianity was, like, functionally a cult. Right? Like, the... These people would have been pretty weird from the perspective of society around them. They were heavily focused on trying to convert people and not get executed. they were in a very unique position. so, like, I don’t... I I can also see there would be a lot of motivations to make arguments that we wouldn’t make today. And and where this comes out is when people were trying to argue to me that, like, the Sabbath should be changed or that you don’t need to follow the Sabbath at all. All of the arguments that they would use came out of random stuff that was said by early Christian community members that were in the New Testament. And I was just like, that argument means literally nothing to me. Like, an an early member of the Christian community doesn’t get to overwrite the 10 commandments. Right? Like, that’s... Like, the direct word of god doesn’t get to be overwritten by an early Christian leader. Okay? That’s not the way any of this works in in my interpretation, at least. So now we’re gonna go over what treating these books as written by real humans changes about them, which is basically it fixes everything. **Speaker 8**: This has actually been shown in psychological resource... Research, Alpert and Postman’s, the psychology of a rumor in 1947 showed sharpening. The details that survive become more prominent, vivid, and extreme. A minor argument becomes a fight. Something in his hand becomes a specific weapon, or a dent becomes a wreck. Said becomes shouted. This is exactly what we see happening here, which to me only affirms that the Bible is a real story being recounted again by real people. To me, to take the argument that these didn’t change or survive perfectly up to the time Matthew was written, is to go clearly against the Bible itself because now you’re arguing that these were not real people telling a story in the way that people tell stories. Whereas in the Tekken and Puritan tradition, we believe that these are real people telling stories the way people tell stories. **Speaker 9**: And note here, if you look at the techno puritan tradition and you are annoyed that we don’t... We’re like, oh, we don’t care about the virgin birth. We don’t care if he was raised from the dead. We don’t care if the miracles were magic tricks or people misreporting things or actual miracles. And you can come to us and you can say, why? Like, that’s so blasphemous or whatever. And I’m like, no. I think you are the one who is missing the point. Does the fact that Jesus walked on water really matter today whether or not he did? No. If he... A few people heard him after he died, talked to them, or he got a chance to walk around after dying, does that really affect us today in terms of how Christianity has impacted the world? Not really. The virgin birth, is it particularly important to how Christianity has affected reality? Not really. So then what’s important what’s important is the effect it has had. If he is the Jewish messiah and he took this set of laws that appears to make people more efficacious, more industrious, more moral, and spread it throughout the world, then that is the miracle, not the relatively minor miracles of his lifetime. That’s the big important thing. And I think that when you overfocus on the miracles and whether or not they happened or the virgin birth and whether or not that happened, you miss the more important part. **Speaker 10**: And are those things even important to how we understand Jesus’ teachings? Is the virgin birth important to his teachings? Is walking in water important to his teachings? I guess you could say the the expanded Matthew version has some utility, but to me, it just comes off as as sort of narcissistic fluff, over harping on the point of a story that should already be contained within the wider narrative of Jesus. does Jesus talking to people after he died, did that really affect his teachings that much? Not really. No. These things are pretty ancillary, and overfocusing on them subtracts from his teachings and the impact of Christianity and how this one man, who we believe is the Jewish messiah, transformed the laws that God gave the Jews into something better and applicable to all of humanity. **Speaker 11**: And when you realize the effect and the point of the Jewish messiah was to convert the religion into its realized secondary form and transform the earth, then it becomes so much easier to provide the miracles that keep your children within the faith. If you go to me and you go, I believe in Jesus because people two thousand years ago reported that a guy walked on water once or that a guy talked to him after he died or that... No. That’s not gonna be impactful to me. I wouldn’t find that very compelling. But if you come to me and you go, let’s look at a map here. Here here are the countries. Here are the places that follow this religion, and here is the countries with, that are developing lots of technology, that have thriving economies, that have low rates of corruption, that have a good quality of life. I look at that, and I say, Yeah. They really do look markedly different. And this is part of when people are wondering why I lean so hard on Catholics, because if that’s what affirms the true version of Christianity to me and somebody points to me and they go, look at The United States. Look at Northern Europe. Now look at South America. Look at Southern Europe. Do you see the difference? It’s it’s as consistent as the difference between a, though less extreme than the Christian world and the Muslim world or the Hindu world. There is a difference in outcomes, and that difference in outcomes is what affirms the truer understanding of the faith, and it is what is captured within the documents themselves. You know, by their fruits, you will know them. **Speaker 12**: By the way, fun aside, buy your... Their fruits, you will know them is one of the widely attested q sayings. **Speaker 13**: Also, I want you to stop and sit with what we’re actually talking about here. You have and you could believe Jesus’ miracle is because there’s people... And Simone has been obsessed with this over this last Sabbath where she was going through and researching all the miracles that people believe in, and she was like, their faith seems to believe these miracles being true. Did this statue cry blood? Did Jesus walk on water? Did... And what they’re missing is Christianity spread meant the stop of... At the very, very basic, at the stop of infanticide. Billions of babies not left to die alone over the course of human history. How is that not obviously a bigger and more important and very easily verifiable miracle? Or you look at look at the book on the spread of Christianity or episode on why Christian entity actually spread where we go over, it wasn’t conversions. It was just a higher surviving population. And when the book was looking over why did that population Grow at higher rates, it wasn’t just a stop of infanticide. It was that women were not treated like trash. How is that not a bigger miracle? It was that when there was a plague in a town, people would stay and try to help their neighbors. How is that not a bigger miracle? If you focus on the wrong miracles, the miracles that you may never be able to find in history and ignore the big ones, you miss everything and everything that’s important and everything that should be fortifying your faith, not the little pointless, did Joseph and Mary have sex? **Speaker 14**: And I think this really gets to what defines techno puritanism because otherwise, it can seem like overly loose, way of determining Christianity. Or, like, how can your rules around being a member be so loose? And the one rule that I think is the the the core rule, which would define if you are or if you are not within the techno puritan tradition, is are you focused on the important stuff? Are you focused on the effects? Because if we believe what Jesus said, That the Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath, then what that means in regards to everything else that we’re looking at here is how does this tradition affect humanity? Because it presumes that God gave us this tradition, or even if you don’t fully believe in that, you still believe that the tradition improves people’s lives. And so what our focus is is not on the trivial things, like was Mary a virgin, which to a traditional Christian would be a very, very important thing. But to us, we’re like, how does that change the overall message? How does that change the overall teachings? How does that change the implication? Oh, not at all? Okay. Well, then it’s not relevant to me. Or did a statue cry blood? When you move past that and focus on the impact that tradition has on your lives and the rules that you’re supposed to follow or not follow in the way that you’re supposed to follow them, that is when you’re moving towards, I think, the direction of a correct tradition. **Malcolm Collins**: and there are other ways that you can fix this stuff, but you have to do really crazy stuff often to do it that I find pretty implausible with interpretations. And if you go as this route, they’re all just immediately fixed. So let’s go over these various problems. **Simone Collins**: Okay. **Malcolm Collins**: First is the two birth stories problem. Mark and Hugh contain no birth story at all. They simply present Jesus as a grown man from Natharus. Matthew and Luke each supply a nativity, and the two accounts cannot both be true. In Matthew, the family already lived in Bethlehem. Magi arrive. Herod orders the killing of male infants in Bethlehem. The family flees to Egypt and only later settles in Natharus after a dream. In Luke, the family lives in Natharus. They travel to Bethlehem because of a Roman census. The child is born in a manger, shepherds visit, the baby is presented in the temple forty days later, and they return to Natharus. There is no Egypt, no massacre, and no Magi. These are not complementary details. They are mutually exclusive locations, and the sequence is for them in the same family. Scholars across the spectrum, including many devout Catholic ones, generally conclude the Bethlehem birth theology is not history. It is a theological story. Mhmm. In Mark and q, Jesus and Paul and John, Jesus is repeatedly called Jesus of Nazareth, and Bethlehem is never mentioned. A... The reason why they would have tried to change it to Bethlehem is Micah five two, which if you read the whole prophecy, the first half tracks Jesus really well. The second half goes completely off and is, like, clearly not talking about Jesus. So you don’t really need to make this big. But they were trying to align his birth with prophecy. And it’s... Is what it appears was going on here. **Simone Collins**: Dare to dream, I guess. **Malcolm Collins**: Dare to dream. Right? Yeah. But, yeah. Mean, he aligns his prophecy regardless now. We know because the Christianity spread all over the earth and brought the 10 commandments everywhere. Right? Brought the the laws of the I think he’d **Simone Collins**: be content with that. But... **Malcolm Collins**: No. He can’t be content with, like, if there was an actual Jewish messiah, what effect would he likely have on the religion? Well, he would have spread it to almost everyone as he did Mhmm. Or everyone efficacious and moral. so you go to... I mean, it’s... That’s fairly true. The countries that aren’t Christian or Jewish are generally technologically backwards compared to Christian and Jewish countries. And in the few places where that isn’t the case, the Christian and Jewish population is growing typically, and and I suspect they will become more Christian over time. Although, I I... It has shrunk a lot in a lot of places, so maybe not. I mean, in terms of birth rates, I I do suspect that, like, a Christian sect is probably gonna be what saves Japan and Korea, but we’ll see. So if we’re talking about, like, Catholics who argue this, you can look at, like, Raymond e Brown s s, a Skopylian priest and longtime professor of Union Theological Seminary and president of the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature. so you you... And a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission under two popes. so not a not a Catholic lightweight here. You know? So you can say, Malcolm, how dare you say this? This is a mainstream opinion even among Catholic leading theologians. He said, quote, close analysis of the infinity narratives makes it unlikely that either account is completely historical. Matthew’s account contains numerous extraordinary or miraculous public events that were... The factual should have left some traces in the Jewish records or elsewhere in the New Testament. The king and all Jerusalem upset over the birth of the messiah in Bethlehem, a star which moved from Jerusalem south into Bethlehem and came to rest over a house, the massacre of all male children in Bethlehem, Luke’s reference to a general census of the empire under Caesar Augustus, affected Palestine, before the death of Herod the great is almost certainly wrong. Mean, this is from his book, the birth of the messiah. **Simone Collins**: And I agree with this. **Malcolm Collins**: I think these things are impossible. **Simone Collins**: Right. There’s no record of there being a census at that time. Right? **Malcolm Collins**: Not only is there no record of being a census, it’s basically impossible because censuses weren’t carried out that way. No. In in Rome, you didn’t think about how silly that would be. You had to go back to your birth city wherever you had moved Yeah. And a census was being carried out. **Simone Collins**: Make **Malcolm Collins**: sense. Yeah. It doesn’t make sense. You wouldn’t do that. That’s **Simone Collins**: Well, unless you were doing longitudinal research, but they weren’t doing that back then. They weren’t doing, like, cohort based longitudinal re... I mean, it would be cool if they were. They did some amazing things, **Malcolm Collins**: but I don’t I don’t think they did that. Yeah. And and and, also, we have Joseph as a Jewish historian writing shortly after this where all of this would have been recent memory for him, and he doesn’t write any of this. So I wanna go into these specific events into a bit more detail. The census under Quirinius and the date problem. Luke places the birth during the census when core... Cerenius or Quirinius was governor of Syria. Joseph dates Cerenius’ census of Judea to AD six after Herod the Great’s death in four BC and after the deposition of Herod’s son, Ichalias. Matthew’s story requires Herod to still be alive so that which makes the two dates irreconcilable. Luke’s father’s claim that everyone went into his own city or ancestral town, also has no known parallel in a Roman census practice. This would have been a completely unique census in all of Roman history. And and it also doesn’t make sense. The closest surviving edict comes from Egypt, and it’s from AD one zero four, simply sending people back to the place where they actually live, not their birthplace. Luke appears to have heard of a famous census and used it to move the family from Nazareth to Bethlehem so that the child could be born where the prophecy seemed to require. it is work of a later researcher filling in a gap with the wrong historical record. And I’ll note here... Remember I said Luke the nerd versus Matthew the cult leader? Mhmm. The charismatic cult leader or whatever you wanna call him. This is how a nerd solves this problem. We need to get the family in Bethlehem. Okay. I’m searching historical records. There was an important census around that time. I can’t find the exact dates, but maybe they had to go back to a census or something like that. Right? That’s the way a nerd solves this problem. How does a cult leader solve this problem? Well, you have a king begin to obsess over the king of the Jews being born and then slaughter all of the babies under two in that city. It’s it’s big. It’s over the top. And, unfortunately, it’s fairly hard to reconcile with Luke’s account. not only that, but if this massacre happened, why doesn’t Luke mention it? I mean, presumably, he was doing a lot of historical research on this period. Why why doesn’t why does none of the other gospels mention it? Joseph who records... So Josephus, also the the Jew historian, remember, he records Herod’s other atrocities, the executions of his wife and sons in detail and says nothing about a massacre. A massacre of a town like that would have been remembered and would have appeared in Josephus or other sources. Its absence is strong evidence it did not have to... Happen. Matthew wrote it to fulfill the verse, Jeremiah three thirty one fifteen, about Rachel weeping for her children and to parallel the infant Moses escaping Pharaoh’s slaughter of Hebrew boys. It is a classic Malthusian escalation, an invention of a public authority that makes the story more dramatic and more spiritual feeling. so, again, he’s trying to do that. The other thing that if you take our reading would mean is made up potentially, which is not good for a lot of Christians. This one’s gonna annoy them. but it does remove the virgin birth. virgin birth I don’t know. We don’t need **Simone Collins**: the virgin. Why do we need the virgin birth? **Malcolm Collins**: You don’t need the virgin birth. **Simone Collins**: It’s completely **Malcolm Collins**: the only reason the virgin birth **Simone Collins**: I think it only... I think that the virgin birth has done way more damage than good because I think a lot of people are like, well, that sounds implausible. How would that work? You know, all these things. And I I think that when you take out more implausible things and just allow the teachings to shine through, which is why I think we’re also such big fans of q. **Malcolm Collins**: Yeah. And it’s blame miracle to begin with. The only reason the the virgin birth is at all useful in a storytelling perspective is it would make Jesus part of a sort of prophesied through prior events, is God helps Abraham and and... Who was that? Rachel conceived. and then Isaac is born, an important early church figure. **Simone Collins**: Yeah. But there’s... There was still sex involved. Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**: There was still sex involved. **Simone Collins**: The the issue with the virgin birth is that in other faiths and just cultural folkways, it was a tradition to often refer to virgin birth to be like, this is how miraculous this person was. They’re like, came out of nowhere, you know, like like Athena bursting out of Zeus’ head. **Malcolm Collins**: Well, then then you’ve got, as a second story here, you have this... The birth of Solomon. And in Solomon, God also helped his parents conceive. And so you would have this theme of, like, when God has an important figure come on the scene, he helps the parents conceive. I have no problem with that. And who’s to **Simone Collins**: say that god didn’t help the **Malcolm Collins**: parents conceive? Didn’t help them conceive, but I just don’t think it’s important to **Simone Collins**: I understand Christians view it. God helps every child. You know, they... Child is a gift from god. It... As as if God’s only there for some of them. I don’t know. The whole thing just seems so weird **Malcolm Collins**: to me. Talk about the the massacre being incredibly hard to square with Luke. If you go with Luke’s narrative, it means that Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of a census. Jesus was born there. Shepherds visit the same night. After eight days, the child is circumcised still in the Bethlehem area. After the period of purification, forty days, they take the child into the temple in Jerusalem for presentation. Immediately afterwards, Luke said that they returned to Galilee to their own city of Natharus. there’s there’s no room in the story for this, especially given how traumatic hiding Jesus would have been and how central to the narrative this would have been. **Simone Collins**: Yeah. There’s no explanation. Like, here... Here’s our heist story, baby heist. **Malcolm Collins**: Yeah. We we made **Simone Collins**: him dress like a little lamb because he was born in a manger. Great trick. I don’t know. Yeah. It’s very... It... The whole thing. **Malcolm Collins**: Mm-mm. Then you’ve got a second problem here, and we’ll go through we’ll go through all these. But Luke and Matthew present two genealogies for Joseph, presumably for Jesus, which also implies that they thought that Joseph was at least biologically the father. Because why would Joseph’s genealogy not, like, at all Yeah. **Simone Collins**: It wouldn’t matter because it would just go, god, Jesus. **Malcolm Collins**: Yeah. and the messiah was prophesized to come from the divinic line. So, also, that that would undermine that before. Again, a lot of Christians don’t like that we we... I will never buy that Jesus is God. I... That’s not a part of techno puritanism necessarily. That is just something that I won’t buy because it ruins story. The entire biblical story is ruined if you assume that, from my perspective at least, because it means that Jesus wasn’t a meaningful sacrifice. If anything, it means that being trapped on Earth was a sacrifice. Right? Like, because presumably, he’s, in various parts of the story, you know, able to suffer, able to experience all sorts of things that god doesn’t. Like, it’s a release for him to be killed. Right? But why does his discussions with the devil matter if he’s actually god? Right? Like, that that that would make no sense either. Why... Like, so many of **Simone Collins**: the past Well, hold on. God has had many discussions with Satan. Right. **Malcolm Collins**: But what I mean is the devil thinking that he could tempt god with things that god already owns. That’s that’s what would be happening in that story. So there’s no temptation. So Jesus isn’t overcoming anything. That’s why I can’t buy that interpretation because it it doesn’t even take, like, the text to convince me of that. It’s that it makes no sense to me. But if I keep going here, other problems that are solved. But I’m... That’s not necessarily a part of technical puritanism. That’s my belief. You can you can be a technocruritan and believe that as long as you believe it based on text and argument and logic, not just because they say so, which is why I believe in in Jesus was the messiah because of logic. You know? There there was a prophecy. It spread across the world. The places that follow it seem to flourish more. So... By a dramatic amount. **Simone Collins**: Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**: But to continue here, the two genealogies. Oh, yeah. So I was already going into this. Matthew’s line runs through Solomon’s, Luke’s through Nathan. Matthew organizes the generations into a neat set of 14. And to make the numbers work, he skips three kings of Judah’s. neither genealogy appears in Mark or Q. Both later writers needed a Davidic ancestry for the messiah, so each constructed one. They used different Old Testament lists, different numerical schemes, producing two incompatible family trees for the same man. Traditional harmonizations, one in Mary’s line, or a legal one versus a biological descent one, are later inventions. The texts themselves present both as Jesus’ line. so, yeah, again, you fix that if you go as this. You’re like, well, this is why they put that there. They were trying to fulfill prophecy, and they mess things up by doing that. And, again, I don’t think you need all of that. I think he fulfills prophecy in enough other places. You don’t need to shoehorn all this in. In regard to how Judas died, you also get a... Well, I I I think I wrote that. Yeah. I wrote that more here. Matthew said Judas hanged himself and that the chief of priests used the money to buy the pauper’s fields. And that’s that’s how it got its name. And then acts, who is by the same author as Luke, says Judas bought a feel, fell held long, and burst open. Mark is silent. So... And, again, you can harmonize these in in various ways. Like, Christians have found ways to do it, but if if you take a more simple literalist reading, they appear to be contradicting each other. And it... What it appears is both Matthew and Luke were aware of some sort of a story where Judas died horribly for betraying Jesus, and they were aware of a field that was associated with that death. But they weren’t aware how the two things were connected exactly. And so they both came up with different ways they were connected. Again, if Matthew is writing from Luke or Luke is writing from Matthew, that’s a very weird thing to do. And the field was called the Field Of Blood. So they remembered there’s, like, a field called the Field Of Blood that’s associated with Judah. **Speaker 7**: Basically, what we see is that both authors were aware that there was a field, and it was called the Field Of Blood, and it had some association with Judas. But... Or or maybe even Judas’ death specifically. My guess is that this was just a popular, like, folklore myth that passed around in various ways within Jerusalem. Like, that’s a field of... Don’t you know that that’s where the guy died? You... And maybe in early Christian communities. And then they had to come up with an explanation of why people called it that, and they came up with their own explanations. Obviously, both could be true, but it sounds a lot more like these are two different explanations for what we can tell is true is that there was a field back then that people called the field Of blood. **Malcolm Collins**: But, anyway, who was at the tomb, and did they tell anyone? This is another area where you have some contradiction. Oh, yes. Three women find the tomb stone already rolled away, and a young man in a white robe sitting inside. They flee and said nothing to any for they were afraid. The book ends there. Even though he told them to go to what? Gal... **Simone Collins**: Galatia, I think? **Malcolm Collins**: No. That wasn’t in Mark. **Simone Collins**: That was **Malcolm Collins**: in, that was in another one. **Simone Collins**: No. That was in Mark. It was it was in Mark. Hold on. Hold on. Oh my gosh. No. It was almost five dot. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. So I’m looking at the parallels here. This is gospel of Mark. Scroll, scroll, scroll all the way to the end. And I... I’m... I’ll put these links in the show notes. And at the very end, blah blah blah blah. Go all into the world and preach the... Let’s see. Magdalene, afterward, he appeared. And he said to them, go all into the world and preach the gospel of the whole creation. He who believes is baptized and saved. He... Blah blah blah. Company them. Oh, sorry. This... No. No. No. That’s the longer ending. We don’t believe in long... No. I am... The longer ending is very suspicious. Sorry. **Malcolm Collins**: Yes. The longer ending, the Galilee he maced. **Simone Collins**: Jesus was crucified. He has risen. He’s not here. See the place where they laid him, but go. Tell his and Peter that he’s going before you to Galilee. There you will see him as he told you. And they went out and fled from the tomb for trembling and astonishment had come upon them, and they they said nothing to anyone because they were afraid. They had one job. So bad. It’s a great ending, though. You know? Oh. **Malcolm Collins**: No. I like the ending. Very, very cinematic. **Simone Collins**: Yeah. Anyway, that’s a... It’s a great parallel thing. But, no, the... They... He he did he did say the boys. But, of course, why do we know this? Because they said not to anyone. So the... I actually **Malcolm Collins**: looked into that. The **Simone Collins**: way Someone was told? **Malcolm Collins**: The way that it’s worded is a... Doesn’t mean forever. It means, like, for **Simone Collins**: a period. They confessed later. They’re like, man, Jesus was sitting out there in Galilee waiting for everyone to join, and I feel so bad. Imagine they actually tell nobody. I know. Jesus, like Comes back. He’s looking around. The boy. The boy told the ladies. Right? Did did no one get the invite? Like, poor... He’s having his resurrection party in Galilee. Excited to to tell everyone the good they? Did they **Malcolm Collins**: tell nobody? Were they just like... Maybe appearing as a ghost wasn’t the best way **Simone Collins**: to I know. It says wrong wrong invite mechanism. This this backfired horribly. **Malcolm Collins**: Okay. Okay. Troublesome. So Matthew has an earthquake and an angel descending and rolling the stone back. Guards faint. The women run to public disciples. **Simone Collins**: Wow. Yeah. So he brought in the FX crew. **Malcolm Collins**: Again, that’s what I’m talking about. Matthew is like the FX crew for Mark. **Simone Collins**: It’s like Mark’s like, they come to the The New Testament CG edition. **Malcolm Collins**: Actually, I have never heard of... That is a perfect description of Matthew. It’s the New Testament CG edition. It is the CG rewrite of Martin. **Simone Collins**: CG rewrite. It is really **Speaker 6**: Coming this summer, it’s the digitally re enhanced re release of the very first pilot episode of South Park. Yes. The classic rough handmade first episode is getting a makeover for 2002. The simple funny aliens are now super badass and cool. The flying saucer, no longer cheap construction paper, but a four o megapixel non drop digital masterpiece of technology. Yes. Everything’s new. New is better. When we first made South Park, we didn’t wanna use construction paper. We just had to because it was cheap. And now with new technology, we can finally remaster South Park to make it look sharp, clean, and focused and expensive. Yes. All the charm of the simple little cartoon will melt before your eyes as it is replaced by newer and more standardized animation. For instance, in the scene at the bus stop, we always meant to have imperial walkers and giant dubak lizards in the background, but simply couldn’t afford it. **Simone Collins**: Yes. For real, though. Yeah. Matthew in a nutshell. **Malcolm Collins**: Oh my god. Okay. Anyway... So, then you’ve got Luke where there’s two men in shining garments. The women tell the apostles. Then you have John, Mary Magdalene, alone at first, and then sees two angels. Basically, the numbers of identity witnesses, the presence of guard, was the stone already rolled away, was the stone there, all of these things change in the various, stories. Now there are, again, ways you can harmonize them, but at face value, they don’t really fit together. Not a problem if you take this interpretation of how you’re supposed to relate to these books. And, again, why it’s important to have an interpretation like this is when you don’t, you end up going in the direction of those Catholic priests who are like, look. That doesn’t seem to be historic. And now they’re saying something that is pulling them away from their faith. Whereas if you take this interpretation, you saying they were real books written by real humans about a real messiah. And so, of course, the ones that were written later embellished in some cases because humans have flaws and they do stuff like that, you don’t you don’t... You... Your faith is not pulled from you where things appear to contradict each other. **Simone Collins**: Yeah. And we really don’t need more means of of people losing their faith. It’s it’s bad enough as it is for people. **Malcolm Collins**: Another contradiction to salt is the calling of Peter. in Mark, Jesus walks along the Sea Of Galilee and sees Peter and Andrew casting nets and calls them on the spot. But in John, Andrew is already a disciple of John the Baptist. He hears Baptist point to Jesus following... And ends up following Jesus with his brother. These are two different encounters in two different places, both sort of written as if they are when he started following Jesus. Then you have another problem, which is Matthew repeatedly doubles characters that are singular in Mark, two Demonicas instead of one, two blind men at Jericho instead of one named Bartimaeus, two animals at the entry instead of one. He makes Jiraiya’s daughter already dead rather than dying, and he makes the fig tree wither instantly rather than overnight. He turns a private baptismal vision into a public announcement and adds earthquakes. The --. Yeah. Just a lot going on there that’s that’s added that doesn’t work with the other accounts very smoothly or requires that you do ridiculous things like some modern Christians to try to harmonize the stories have Jesus walking in to Jerusalem on two donkeys at the same time, like, legs spread really fast. **Simone Collins**: Yes. That’s one of my favorite multi sense. **Malcolm Collins**: Just perfect. In the bible. It comes from attempting to harmonize two stories that are two different humans trying to figure out what happened half a century ago. I love it. **Simone Collins**: I love it. **Malcolm Collins**: Imagine if today you had to research and reconstruct the life of somebody half a century ago. You would have an... And and only based on, like, local folklore and, like, stories. **Simone Collins**: Say... Telephone based hearsay. Yeah. Repeated repeated hearsay from a, you know, a genuinely charismatic, amazing, incredible person. It’s it’s hard because I think our experiences with anyone who’s really amazing come to be exaggerated in our memories. And, also, we know that the more revisited a memory is, the more corrupted it becomes. People are thinking about what they experienced with Jesus a lot. That memory, it’s gonna be corrupted even in their own minds. It’s it’s horrible. It’s a nightmare in terms of getting an accurate retelling. What are you looking for? **Malcolm Collins**: A difference in what Jesus tells people at the tomb. Okay. So in Mark, you’re right. Yes. but I am risen. I will go before you in Galilee. but go your way. Tell the disciples and Peter that he goeth before you to Galilee. There you shall see him as he has said unto you. So, this is about, Jesus, again, pointing at Galilee. Luke goes the same way. Luke says he is not here, but he has risen. Remember, he spake to you until he was yet in Galilee. So they reference, Galilee again. however, if you go to, the rest of Luke, Luke 24, every single appearance happens in or around Jerusalem, not Galilee. The disciples explicitly told them to stay in the city. Luke twenty four forty nine, Jesus appears to him that same day, eats fish with him, and in the final verse of Luke twenty four fifty one, ascends into heaven on that same Easter day. So, also, what’s what’s my take on Jesus coming back from the dead? I just don’t think it’s a particularly impressive miracle, if I’m gonna be honest. I don’t think it’s it’s particularly theologically important either for a few reasons. First, God had raised and Jesus had raised other people from the dead in other parts of the Bible without them being the Messiah. This is not a a unique thing to Jesus in the Bible. Two, this is a miracle that people have at least claimed or believed happened to them, frequently throughout history. **Simone Collins**: Like, coming out of tombs? **Malcolm Collins**: Yeah. So first of all, people... It’s a it’s a normal thing. Like, it’s a good thing that even is happening to me in conversation where somebody would be like, oh, yeah. I talk with, like, my dead parents or something like that. Right? Like Oh. You know, people making this claim is not an astonishing... As astonishing a thing as people take it to be. Right? Mhmm. That members of a local cult said their leader was raised from the dead is very, very, very, very normal. And note that this goes back so long that if you read Plutarch, Plutarch says in his life of Romulus that he has read many stories where people say that people are raised from the dead. But then he goes on to say, but... He says that usually they involve some sort of gain, like a hastily changed will or something like that. And they don’t stay around for long. And, you know, I’m like, I like that Plutarch is... Because it is true that the the the early Christians had a a vested interest in saying that they had talked to Jesus or Jesus had come back from the dead. And I just don’t think it’s important. What is important is that he acted like a Jewish messiah. He created an iteration of Judaism that is available to the entire world, spread across the entire world, and appears to contain genuinely good instructions for how to live your life, how to structure society, how to think about yourself, how to relate to the divine and spiritualism. Yeah. And so that’s the important part to me. That’s the part that is... Edifies him as the true messiah, that he came just at the right time, right before the temple was destroyed. You know, all of that is the the the the thing that edifies Jesus to me, not because some old book said so, not because followers of his claimed that he talked to them after he died or claimed... What’s really being claimed here is that somebody’s claiming that somebody else said, maybe even that somebody else said that somebody had talked to Jesus after he died, which to me is just not that impressive of a claim to make. I personally can find somebody who knows somebody who think Jesus talked to them after he died. Sorry. Anyway, any thoughts, Simone? Those are the... Basically, when you take this reading of the bible and you you split it out into these categories, you fix everything that the atheist would come to you and say, this is a contradiction. And I think it’s through understanding the failures of Of Luke and Matthew, you can see better why Mark and q are such amazing sources. **Simone Collins**: Yeah. Because they were they were the source texts that you you want to... You want as close as you can get to primary resources when you do any sort of study. And I feel like if we’re... If we care about the teachings teachings of Jesus, we want to get the least corrupted material. If anything, because that’s also in line with what appears to have been Jesus’ own teachings, which is that he was very against church bureaucracy. And that’s where I really come to struggle with, say, the Catholic church and with also a lot of people building their own interpretations of Jesus’ teachings after his death. Because, one, Jesus clearly said plenty of things where, like, you know, you’re getting stuck in the rules. No. This church is corrupt. This is really messed up. But, also, just in the intervening years between the the final books, basically, of the Old Testament that are canon and the Jesus’ arrival, basically, on Earth, the church was so corrupt. I mean, just insane. Like, we had church leaders selling church relics for money. We had people, like, calling in. **Malcolm Collins**: Catholics did that too. That’s where the Donatists came from. The Donatists? Yeah. So after the Aurelians Aurelians. Okay. Who said, and I believe rightly so, that a plain reading of the Bible says that Jesus is in some way lesser than God. And the the Catholic church said this is a heresy under the ruling of a a pagan emperor who, like, set all this up and then excommunicated and and and banned these people. There was an issue where in North Africa, there were Christians who said that a church leader who had shown corruption, specifically in this case, giving away church items to be either burned or melted to Roman authorities by specific church leaders, they said that those people shouldn’t be able to commune a new priest and that they shouldn’t be able to, you know, run churches. And the mainstream Catholic church was like, no. You can be as corrupt as you want, you know, because Jesus is the one who affirms all this. So, like, that had wormed its way into Catholicism in very, very early Catholicism. And we’ll do a different episode on how pretty much every one of the major early Christian heresies, you... The the group that was deemed as heretical was actually... Had a closer to plain text reading of the bible and was the more conservative group in all instances but one. And it’s just a a series of what the heresies are is a series of and and the reason these became heresies, the reason these were tempting is because a plain reading of the text leads you to this conclusion. We... Unless you twist it to try to fit an alternate church understanding. and so, yeah. The the... Another thing I find interesting is in our take on all of this, no one else, no other Christian group goes like Mark and Q or Mark. They they they all go for, like... The ones that do narrow it down, narrow it down to other books. Really? Wait. Remember when I told you that through most of Christian history, almost nobody read Mark? **Simone Collins**: Well, it’s a little thin. **Malcolm Collins**: Well, the reason why is because everything you find in Mark, you also find in Matthew **Simone Collins**: in Valley. So there’s no point in reading Mark because, yeah, if you read both Matthew and Luke, you’re you’re **Malcolm Collins**: you’re that they’re both equally... Are are... All three are of equal veracity. **Simone Collins**: Well, I think it was just seen as redundant. Why would you bother? You’ve heard this story already. Like, it’s incomplete. I think people maybe... The the intuition was, oh, it’s just... It’s not complete. I want the more complete version. That’s what matters to me. **Malcolm Collins**: Yeah. Final note here. and so we as Technopuritans now have another thing, at least the main sect of Technopuritanism, like the central sect, because as I’ve said, there’s a lot of diversity allowed within the tradition. You don’t have to agree with us on all these, but there is clearly a a a central tradition, vanilla techno puritanism, if you will, or malmonialist techno puritanism. But the the... This tradition of techno puritanism, it does yet another thing that sets it apart from mainstream Christianity in a very severe way, which is sort of ranking the books on reliability and placing a narrower range as the by the way, I... We we talked about this a little bit. It makes no sense to deny q’s existence, by the way, if if you’re... Because if you deny q’s existence, not only do you have the problems that I mentioned, which is it means that either Matthew thought Luke was full of it or Luke thought Matthew was full of it. But you’ve got the the other problem, or or one of them just completely didn’t believe the other’s nativity. Right? Why why reinvent that? but you got the bigger problem of why move around the the the lines? It’s why is everything that you got from mark in order, but everything that you got from the other book a set of quotes and floating? That’s a very weird way to work. It just doesn’t make sense. I I would say with some confidence, the q hypothesis is not ever going to be busted by mainstream interpretations because it just wouldn’t make sense to bust. They they they... It... It’s so silly to say that, I I I think. And it provides you with a potentially closer to Jesus set of sayings and everything like that. **Simone Collins**: What I I think I wanna investigate next, because it it it... It’s what I’m curious about. Look. It’s what I’m gonna look up on this app, but I’m not questioning anything right now. But a really big element of Christianity distinctly, you know, aside from Jesus’ teachings, which you haven’t really talked about, but which shows up so much in the commentary of Christian people who go through the Bible and its historicity, is that Jesus Christ died for our sins. And I want to learn more about where that came from, if Jesus was explicitly saying that that... Because I don’t I don’t recall when I first... Like, and this was, of course, like, twenty years ago now. When I first read the New Testament, I don’t recall that being something he talked about doing. And, also, it doesn’t exactly make sense to me. Plus, Jesus’ death, I think he’d be a little bit more enthusiastic about dying if he knew that he was dying first. **Malcolm Collins**: Dying for everyone. So the... A lot... And keep in mind what she says. The... My... God my god. Why have you forsaken me? Contrast that with the death of many martyrs who were doing it, you know, with aplomb, you know, with **Simone Collins**: Being eaten alive by lions. I mean, you know, if you had to, like, choose **Malcolm Collins**: Or burning alive and, like, pounding their chests and preaching. You know? Like **Simone Collins**: And they weren’t they weren’t able to die for everyone’s sins. And yet he... I mean... And I’m not calling Jesus whiny. I’m just saying I don’t know if that’s the impression under which he was operating while on the cross. **Malcolm Collins**: there are lines that imply that he had some sort of impression like that, especially earlier. the But **Simone Collins**: from what book, also? **Malcolm Collins**: Yeah. From what book? The the one that... I mean, my interpretation in the traditional Villa... Techno puritan interpretation is twofold. One, god doesn’t deal in human sacrifices. Yeah. This is what I think we’re supposed to take away from the story of Isaac, and I think this this story of the binding of Isaac is meant to be applied to the Christian church’s understanding of the story of Jesus as, an allegory for how, like Abraham, they believed that they were supposed to be benefiting from a human sacrifice and that God just doesn’t do that. The the the second being that it... If Jesus’ death is tied to the the events of his life, it’s tied to it as a sacrifice for sealing a covenant, not a sacrifice for appealing God. Mhmm. And this is what allows for the second covenant or the new set of rules that Christianity is based on when contrasted with the Jewish set of rules. And and that does align more with the type of things that God does in the Bible. God will capriciously kill people for challenging him or going against him or... Like, in those ways, he does appear to be satiated by human death, but this is more as a consequence, not as an offered up sacrifice. And here, I think that for the loosening and restructuring of the old covenant that was given for the Jews, that is what Jesus died for, not literally because you’re a sinner for your individual sins. I mean, functionally, it can have that effect because it changes what counts as a sin and the way you relate to sin. But, yeah, the idea that, you know, Jesus was a sin transference vehicle, I view as incredibly heretical to techno puritanism. That you transfer your sin onto an innocent individual. The final note here I’ve made, and I’ve been thinking about this more recently, I’ll probably do full track on it at some point, is Well... **Simone Collins**: And hold on. I’m not I’m not even sure if if that is correct. I mean, there were very strict rules in Leviticus about proof of burn via animal sacrifice. I know what you’re saying is human sacrifice and and and and the Old Testament also distinguishes there, we would argue, through our interpretation. But, anyway, I, yeah, I just... I think **Malcolm Collins**: Somebody noted in the Old Testament, there’s a a general during a period of lawlessness who, like, promises that he’ll sacrifice one of his kid... The the first person to walk through the door, the first thing to walk through the door Oh. And his daughter does. And then he sacrifices her after winning the battle, and that proves that god deals in human sacrifices. I go, no. That proves what I argued in the binding of Isaac story, which is that god is aware that Jews are the types of people who will go out and sacrifice their own dog. Find any excuse. Find any excuse. That was, like, clearly banned in Levitical laws before this guy did this. It is described as a period of lawlessness, and that is, I I think, a warning story, not a god like this story. I I think that you you... Very, very bad thing do. This is the this is what the pagan traditions are. The pagan traditions are the traditions where you sacrifice children and stuff like that. Not not the real tradition, not the real god. That’s that’s where I fall on that. I think that should be intuitive to people. If you if you if you have a moral, like, center and you’re... I I think are morally coherent with a Christian understanding of reality, like, whatever’s meant in truce by a Christian understanding of reality, it’s that god does not deal in human sacrifices. That’s what the evil gods do. That is what, you know, Moloch does. It is not what god does. Okay? The final note here that I was gonna make is I was sitting and thinking more about, like, when you pull all of the techno puritan traditions together, what they mean about god and our relationship to god, which is God created a set of rules that he thought were better to live under and created a better society than the surrounding society. And he gave these to a starting population. And then that starting population, he never forgot them, but he’s like, oh, they’re they’re doing a lot of bad things. Like, as you pointed out, the corruption in the temple, the... And and not just the the... To understand how corrupt Jewish society was at that point, the reason the casualties were so high during the siege of Jerusalem was because the various factions of Jews all hated each other and burned each other’s stockpile during a siege. That’s a thing. That is next level corruption and infighting. **Simone Collins**: Brilliant. **Malcolm Collins**: And God’s like, okay. Let’s create covenant two point o, and this is where Jesus comes in. and he did that because he’s like, look. The the rules I created are good, but these people aren’t doing a good job at following them. So let’s update them so that they can be better and apply for everyone. And then they did that. They expanded all over the world. Right? And people flourished who followed them, and they flourished because they were generally a good set of rules. And that that is when you decide, I’m not gonna follow these rules. I’m not gonna live by these rules. I’m not gonna live with these restrictions. In a traditional religious context, I took that as like a god’s come down and he’s saying, you have to do what I tell you to, and here’s all this arbitrary stuff. But where now I’m realizing... And and remember, we still believe that the future splits. I still believe god’s a far future entity that is whatever humanity, AI, technology, human civilization becomes in a few billion years. The... This thing has come back and given us a very simple set of rules, only 10, along with some guidance. And a lot of people are like, whatever. And he’s like, it’ll make your life better. You’ll have kids. You’ll matter. You’ll be able to live an efficacious existence. Nah. Seems too hard. Seems mean. I’m glad that I don’t have to do that, that I that I can live with the awareness of there is an easy way to structure your life. And it’s it’s a set there when we’ll talk about it in in probably one of the upcoming tracks, the arc and the 10 commandments. Because the idea that, because they’re really, really beautifully structured, I think. and they’re very interesting to dive into, like, why those? And and the 10 commandments for me are, I think, a proof of god or that Moses was not, like, a generic cult leader or something like that because he didn’t do the things you’d expect a cult leader to do. Like, if... None of them are about obey me, Moses. You know? Follow my kid. His kids didn’t even inherit it. His brother’s kids, the the golden calf guy. and this is also with Jesus. While Matthew may have been beginning to act a bit like a cult leader, Jesus didn’t. Jesus did not attempt to accrue power to himself. He did not attempt to deceive people. He did not attempt to... If we look at the things that Jesus did, he doesn’t look like a cult leader. He looks like a true believer. And note here when I’m talking about the second covenant, one thing I said in the earlier tracks, and I still very much believe this, is I think that we now live in the era of the third covenant. And what makes this covenant different is it is upon us to... This covenant was always contained within the text that described the second covenant, but I think the techno puritan realization is that it’s **Simone Collins**: Oh, but you you gotta use your best judgment. **Malcolm Collins**: You have to use your best judgment. You have to have an ability to determine what’s moral, what’s immoral, and what God intended, and then attempt to do that. You cannot just fall back on a simple framework. And that that this was created by the ending of the punishments on Adam and Eve. See our Adam and Eve video about that, but I point **Simone Collins**: out So you consider the flood as part of the continued punishments? The what? You consider the flood as part of the the continuation of the What flood? The the Noah’s ark flood? **Malcolm Collins**: The flood? The the flood. The flood. It’s not... It’s it’s clearly not in the story. There’s no flood? **Simone Collins**: No. The flood is not because of Adam and Eve. Okay. But... Sorry. I’m trying to... Because you were talking about how you’re gonna talk about Noah’s ark in a future and was just curious. Thought you were **Malcolm Collins**: saying that really Noah’s Ark. Sorry. I meant the, Ark of **Simone Collins**: the Covenant. Oh, thought you were gonna talk about Noah’s Ark. that’s another thing I wanted to look up is, like, what people have said about the Nephilim. Like, were they Neanderthals? What... Like, do We we **Malcolm Collins**: have a whole we have a whole track on that. **Simone Collins**: I know we do. I still wanna dig deeper because we we heard Various interpretations. **Malcolm Collins**: Yeah. I’m a **Simone Collins**: I’m go ahead. About **Malcolm Collins**: gods. The the... For people who don’t remember, the reason I say that the the the the punishment... If you look, like, punishments that were handed to them, like painful birth, you can get a a whatever now, an epidural, a... You know, women being ruled over Well, **Simone Collins**: that happened almost two thousand years after. Right. Well, that’s the **Malcolm Collins**: point I’m making is that the first and the second covenant were made for the period where the punishments given to Adam and Eve still applied to humanity. Women serving under men, men having to work for their daily food, which I believe is going to end in the near future, strict limits on how long you can live, being subject to death potentially, being subject to... All all of them. Like, all of them look like they’re about to end, all the things that he he he laid out there. So now note here, I do not believe that techno Puritans should ever attempt to live forever. The bible puts a cap on the age that humans are supposed to live at one hundred and twenty years post flood, and I think that’s a pretty good cap. You know, once humans no longer age, you... You’ve gotta be thinking about euthanasia at some point or you run into issues. And I think the age, a 120, that’s what you should strive for. If you’re gonna if you’re gonna be able to be 20 forever, which eventually humanity is gonna get there. Right? In the game I’m making, it’s ruled by techno puritan society, and that’s that’s the way it works. But... Yeah. **Simone Collins**: It’s good stuff. It’s interesting. There’s a lot more to do with the New Testament, but I I I like your... You’re going over what’s fixed if you if you accept. I can’t believe there have to be other groups that are just considering Mark and q. That’s what really gets me that you say that there aren’t. **Malcolm Collins**: There apparently are not. Although, **Simone Collins**: yeah, I guess other people I I I listened to whose commentary I’d like have talked about people’s just, like, clearly, people who did not walk with Jesus, you know, but their their writings being divinely inspired. And if they’re okay with that, I guess you’re okay with the arbitrarily chosen books of the New Testament. I I I don’t... I just have so many issues with this. **Malcolm Collins**: And, like, we’re pretty arbitrary. Your your faith in... Was decided by a vote. **Simone Collins**: Well, and there are other things where, like, one monk at one period of time was like, I’m not so sure about this particular writing, and then it sort of got dropped. Like, there’s all sorts of things like that where one person in the right place at the right time with the right amount of influence makes a judgment call, And then all of us are living with their decision this many years later, which is why, especially when it comes to the New Testament, I really feel like we need we need to be a little more careful. The Old Testament’s different. I think the Old Testament, because it’s so old, it’s one of those things of the stories that stick often are the stories that are most right, that have most resonated, which I also see as being most true because a lot of what I consider to be divinely inspired is shot calling, as you’ve pointed out. You know, as you pointed out really early when we discussed, if someone’s a prophet or if they if they call shots ahead of time that are consistent. Not like... I’m not tucking notes to dramas where people are like, oh, the birds fly into the leaf, and it means this. Like, that... Know, where it’s, like, super obscure. But, I mean, like, really calling something. You know? Like, men men are gonna not eat meat so much, you know, that kind of thing. Right? The martyrdom of man style shot calling. I am much more compelled. Right? But... Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**: Yeah. Another benefit of this is it significantly lowers the length of the bible kids have to read and the repetitiveness of it. If you just hand them marking cue and are like, here. Read this. **Simone Collins**: That’s true. Yeah. That is true. **Malcolm Collins**: That’s that’s a very doable thing and would would do... Make it make it much easier to, you know, teach kids this stuff. **Simone Collins**: And it’s very easy online to find them, parsed out. Like, you don’t have to buy special books or anything. You just... Even through the links that I’m gonna share in the show notes, you can really easily parse those out. And I did for myself because I was like, okay. My my new revised New Testament reading list. Let’s go. **Malcolm Collins**: Did the same thing jump out at you when I told you, Simone, just read stories that are in all three next to each other? **Simone Collins**: Well... And especially, again, in in that one particular site where they load side by side, where you can do a control f and search for virgin and search for, water and search for, like, all the things, like, you’ve heard about. It’s really great because I was like, okay. I’m gonna search virgin. And then it... Wait. Wait. There are four four words virgin? What’s going on? Like, I thought this was well attested. You know, it’s just so crazy to me. And so I I really like putting them side by side. although this... The website Did you do what I asked **Malcolm Collins**: you to, which is read specific stories side by side in the in the account? **Simone Collins**: Yes. And and it is like you say. We The CG version. The CGI version. Yeah. **Malcolm Collins**: It is it is the, the CGI version. **Simone Collins**: Yeah. Okay. So you came away **Malcolm Collins**: with that as well. Like, this does not seem true. **Simone Collins**: Oh, not swine. It seems like **Malcolm Collins**: a kid on a playground who’s like **Simone Collins**: There’s a lot of wine, and then it did 30 words. Wine, 30 words. Virgin, four. **Malcolm Collins**: It’s just fun **Simone Collins**: doing that. Anyway Love you, Stephan. I love you too. What do you what do you want for dinner tonight or Sabbath dinner? I can make you a grilled cheese sandwich. I can make you go to lasagna. I can make you... You don’t want anything. Anything. You just wanna Grilled cheese **Malcolm Collins**: is fine. That’s a great small meal. **Simone Collins**: Yeah. A little snack roll, and we’ll make grilled cheese for everyone because last night, they couldn’t have enough. I made grilled cheese for the kids. And then what are those called? Lo mein noodles for you. But, yeah, I can also make you lo mein. **Malcolm Collins**: Because I’m an old man now. **Simone Collins**: Because you’re an old man now. You’re tremendously old. **Malcolm Collins**: Oh god. I hate it. **Simone Collins**: Things do hurt more as one ages. Just watching how spry our children are, that they’ll just, like, hurl themselves around. Mhmm. So very interesting. Love you. Bye. I love you too. Bye.