This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 674: Two Powers in Heaven 1: Introduction This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode. Audio file 674 Two Powers part 1.mp3 Transcript 00:00 Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan and you are listening to Restitudio, a podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today. 00:12 What do you know about the two powers heresy? 00:14 Have you heard about it before? 00:16 In today's episode, we're beginning a new series on the Jewish condemnation of the idea that there are two powers in heaven. 00:23 This subject is fraught with confusion and difficulty and my goal is to clear up the confusion. 00:29 As always, I'll be taking a fact-based approach to the subject. 00:33 Instead of telling you what I want to be true, we're going to investigate this subject together from the primary Jewish sources and see what they actually say. 00:43 Then we'll apply good old-fashioned logic to analyze each to see what the ancient sources can tell us about the Two Powers heresy. 00:51 When did it start? 00:52 Who believed in it? 00:53 What does that tell us about Christology? 00:56 I hope you'll join me for an exciting learning adventure as we explore the Two Powers in Heaven idea together. 01:02 Here now is episode 674, Two Powers in Heaven, part 1, introduction. 01:16 I'm super excited to start this new series with you today. 01:21 It's on a subject that I've been researching for months. 01:26 I've spent a fair amount of money purchasing resources to delve into it. 01:30 I've written dozens of pages on it, and I'm going to present on this subject of the two powers 01:39 next week at a theological conference, and I'm super excited about that. 01:43 In today's episode, I'm going to explain what the two powers heresy was and why it matters. 01:50 We're going to consider statements by Alan Siegel, Daniel Boyerin, Michael Heizer, and Michael Jones of the Inspiring Philosophy Channel. 02:01 We're going to see why so many Bible-believing Christians today are excited about 02:07 an obscure ancient heresy mentioned in post-biblical Jewish literature. 02:13 You're going to learn why this subject matters and why it's worth your time to learn about it. 02:19 So stick with me in today's episode of Restitudio. 02:23 First up, what am I talking about? 02:26 What is the two powers heresy? 02:28 Well, 02:30 As it turns out, Jewish people at the time of Christ believed the Creator God was the only supreme being in the universe. 02:38 For example, Deuteronomy 4.35 says, to you it was shown that you might know that Yahweh, he is God. 02:47 There is no other besides him. 02:50 So this text very clearly indicates that there is only one who is God. 02:57 There is none other besides Him. 02:59 Also in Deuteronomy 4.39, it says, know therefore today and take it to your heart that Yahweh, He is God in heaven above and on the earth below, there is no other. 03:12 We also see something very similar in the Shema, the famous statement from Deuteronomy 6.4 and 5, which reads, Hear O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. 03:23 You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. 03:28 Texts like these really do show why Jews at the time of Jesus, this is their Bible. 03:35 All of these texts that I just read to you are from Deuteronomy. 03:38 They would be cited by the Jewish people. 03:40 They would be known by the Jewish people. 03:42 Deuteronomy is a very significant part of their lives at the time of Jesus. 03:47 Jesus himself quotes from Deuteronomy from these very texts, in fact. 03:52 And so we know that this was something that was very much alive and well in 1st century Judaism. 03:59 But there are also other texts to consider. 04:02 For example, we could look at Isaiah 43, verse 10, which reads, you are my witnesses, declares Yahweh, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I, singular personal pronoun, I am he, 04:19 Before me, once again, singular personal pronoun, there was no God formed, and there will be none after me. 04:26 I, even I, am Yahweh, and there is no Savior besides me. 04:32 It is I who have declared and saved and caused it to be heard, and there was no strange God among you. 04:39 So you are my witnesses, declares Yahweh, and I am God. 04:45 So what we see here with this text is a very, very repeated theme that there's only one individual, we would call today, one person who is identified as God, as Yahweh to the people. 05:00 And we see this in other places in Isaiah as well. 05:04 For example, in Isaiah 44, 24, we read, thus says Yahweh, your redeemer and the one who formed you from the womb. 05:12 I, Yahweh, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by myself. 05:18 So God here claims to be a solo creator and spreading out the earth all alone. 05:25 I am Yahweh and there is no 05:28 5, Besides me there is no God. 05:32 I will gird you, though you have not known me, that they may know from the rising to the setting of the sun that there is no one besides me. 05:40 I am Yahweh and there is no other. 05:44 So with scriptures like this in their Bibles, Jewish people at the time of Christ would obviously be very committed to 05:56 a monotheistic view. 05:58 So one of the thorniest problems for belief in early high Christology. 06:04 Now, if you're not familiar with that terminology, Christology is just your understanding of Christ. 06:09 Like who is Christ? 06:11 Is He God? 06:12 Is He lower than God? 06:14 Is He God in man? 06:15 Is He just a human? 06:16 Is He just a God? 06:18 And so forth. 06:18 All of that falls under the umbrella of Christology. 06:22 And the idea of high Christology is that Jesus is at the highest level. 06:27 He is God himself. 06:30 And so that could be interpreted a number of different ways. 06:32 So for example, you have the classic Trinitarian formulation that God is a, that Christ is a person of God. 06:40 So he's like the second person, or he is, excuse me, he is the second person in the Godhead. 06:46 Or it could be more like the modalists of today, which in ancient times 06:51 were called Sabellians or followers of Praxeas. 06:55 And these people identified Christ as the Father. 06:58 And so those would both be the high Christologies that are available. 07:03 These days, I'm not really concerned as much about modalism. 07:08 It's not as popular. 07:10 So I think more our focus, when I mention, for example, high Christology, I have in mind the Trinitarian mindset that 07:18 affirms the full deity of Christ as a person of God co-equal coeternal coessential with the father um so yeah if Jesus is teaching this in the Jewish milieu how would people how would Jews receive that how could a group of second Temple Jews that's Jews at the time of Jesus first Century Jews people living during the second Temple period 07:44 The first temple, of course, you know, Solomon had built and the second temple was constructed about 500 years before Christ. 07:52 And then during the time of Christ was being renovated and then would be destroyed in the year 70. 07:57 So this is the second temple period. 07:59 How could a group of second temple Jews come to believe a man was fully god-given the stern warnings we just read against identifying anyone else's God apart from Yahweh, the God of Israel? 08:14 I mean, if Jesus thought he was God, why wouldn't his followers just reject him given these strong, repeated, clear statements of God's singularity and supremacy in their Bibles? 08:27 If Jesus' apostles began teaching Jesus was God in the first generation of Christianity, how did they gain so many followers if they were teaching something so radically against standard Jewish belief? 08:40 So these are the historical problems that scholars wrestle with if they're approaching the New Testament from an early high Christology point of view. 08:51 And that's why the two powers material is so significant. 08:56 So in the year 1977, a scholar named Alan Siegel wrote a book called Two Powers in Heaven. 09:06 And in that book, which was a landmark study of Jewish literature on this subject, he said, two powers in heaven was a very early category of heresy, earlier than Jesus if Philo is a trustworthy witness. 09:21 So Alan Siegel's claim here is that this two powers idea, which I'm going to define a little more carefully in a few minutes here, but his main idea was that this was an early belief. 09:32 It wasn't 09:34 a later belief in the second century, third century, fourth century, fifth century, and so forth. 09:39 No, it was actually there at the, no, he says earlier than Jesus. 09:44 So Jesus, as it turns out, is born slightly before Christ. 09:47 That's a little awkward, but the guy who was figuring that out, I'll come back to him in a minute. 09:53 He probably missed it by like three or four years. 09:56 Scholars debate it, but so around three or four BC, 10:01 5 BC somewhere in there is when Jesus was born and so Siegel is saying this idea of two powers existed in Judaism before that so it's a BC kind of thing um then you had Daniel Boyan coming in in the year I think it was uh 2004 he said the following 10:22 There is significant evidence uncovered in large part by Siegel that in the 1st century, many, perhaps most, Jews held a binitarian doctrine of God. 10:34 So that was a stupendous claim of Boyerin, which if true, would really just blow the lid off early high Christology. 10:45 Let's face it, if Jews held a binitarian doctrine of God, if there was some sort of way of thinking about 10:52 God as two persons in one essence, that would be what binitarian is, binitarianism, then that would be an incredible discovery. 11:05 And that's how Boyerin reads Siegel. 11:10 He's saying, well, yeah, Siegel basically proved that in the first century, many, perhaps most of the Jews held a binitarian doctrine of God. 11:19 So that's a massive, massive claim. 11:22 And now my third piece of evidence, my third scholar would be Michael Heizer. 11:28 And Heizer says, in my dissertation, UW Madison 2004, I argued that Siegel's instincts were correct. 11:39 For the Orthodox Israelite, Yahweh was both sovereign and vice regent, occupying both slots, as it were, at the head of the divine council. 11:49 The binitarian portrayal of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible was motivated by this belief. 11:55 The ancient Israelite knew two Yahwehs, one invisible, a spirit, the other visible, often in human form. 12:03 Jesus was the incarnate second Yahweh. 12:06 In response, as Siegel's work demonstrated, Judaism pronounced the two powers teaching a heresy sometime in the second century AD. 12:17 So we see that 12:19 Heizer's position, like Boyer and Siegel, is to see this as significant for understanding who Jesus is. 12:30 And for Heizer, he's comfortable with the language of two Yahwehs, despite all of the scriptures we just saw in Deuteronomy and Isaiah, where Yahweh repeatedly says, I'm the only Yahweh, there's no other Yahwehs, there's no other gods besides me. 12:43 Heizer takes a different position on that subject. 12:48 So I think these three scholars are really significant for you to know about. 12:51 Alan Siegel, Daniel Boyerin, Michael Heizer both have significant influence in scholarship. 12:57 And yet on a more popular level, I found the video that Michael Jones released on inspiring philosophy to be a very helpful way to summarize how this scholarship is actually being used by apologists today. 13:15 And so this is what he wrote. 13:18 How can Jesus be God in a religion built on the Shema? 13:23 That's exactly our question, right? 13:25 Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 13:28 From the outside, Christianity can look like it made a hard left turn from the monotheism of ancient Israel. 13:35 But what if the real story is the opposite? 13:39 What if long before Jesus of Nazareth 13:42 the earth, the Jewish scriptures and Jewish interpreters already had categories for more than one divine person without abandoning monotheism or the Shema. 13:53 This is what later rabbis would call the two powers in heaven, a theology in which two distinct figures share Yahweh's throne, his worship and his authority. 14:05 Now, when the later rabbis were using the phrase two powers in heaven, they were addressing a very specific idea. 14:12 It described the belief in two distinct divine figures, both fully sharing God's authority, worship, and even His name. 14:19 In other words, this wasn't about a high-ranking angel or rival God. 14:24 The two powers were both understood to be on the same side, operating in complete unity. 14:31 One power was often identified with the unseen transcendent God, and the other appeared in visible form as the angel of Yahweh or the angel of the Lord. 14:41 the divine word or heavenly son of man. 14:44 This was the conceptual space of Jewish theology before the time of Jesus until one day it was declared heresy by rabbinic Jews. 14:54 So this I think is just such a great quote to summarize for us how Christians today, especially thinking Christians who are exposed to these ideas, are using this two powers idea to make a case for 15:11 a compatible milieu at the time of Christ, or even an anticipation of at least a binitarian, if not full on trinitarian understanding of who Jesus is and who God is based on this idea of two Yahwehs and really two powers in heaven. 15:29 So here is our question for investigation in this podcast series. 15:35 Is it true? 15:37 Did Jews at the time of Jesus believe in two powers in heaven? 15:43 Was it an accepted belief? 15:45 What's the evidence? 15:47 When did this belief come about? 15:50 I think we all understand that the Jewish rabbis took a position against the two powers idea, calling it a heresy. 15:58 But the question is, well, when did they do that? 16:00 Because when they did that would indicate to us when this belief was around. 16:06 So how do we figure out the evidence? 16:08 How do we research this question? 16:11 Well, we need to go to the sources. 16:12 There's really no shortcut on this. 16:15 I want to show you exactly what the Jewish literature says. 16:19 Now, most people don't know about Jewish literature outside the Bible, and most don't know how to find this stuff. 16:25 I mean, it is pretty obscure. 16:27 It's not something that 16:29 New Testament scholars know a lot about. 16:32 It's not something that Old Testament scholars know a lot about because it's largely after the time of the New Testament. 16:39 Some New Testament scholars will dip their toes into Philos writings to some degree, but really most of them are not equipped or interested in middle Platonism. 16:49 So really the question is, what are the Jewish sources outside the Bible and 16:56 how do we learn about them to learn about this two powers idea? 17:00 All right, so let me show you what we've got here. 17:04 When it comes to categories of Jewish literature, there are quite a few different periods of time. 17:12 The first, I would say, is 1400 or so BC until 400 BC. 17:17 So it's 1000 years that we would just call 17:20 biblical literature. 17:22 This is where you're going to get all the books of the Old Testament written down and circulating among the Jewish people. 17:31 And then after that, we get what we call Second Temple literature. 17:37 So that's literature written between 516 BC and AD 70. 17:42 Then you have Tanaitic literature written by the Tanaim. 17:46 These are Jewish sages or rabbis. 17:49 who lived in the first and second centuries, from the year 10 AD to 220. 17:56 And then you have the next period, which is 220 to 500, the Amaraic literature written by the Amarim, and then the Savaric literature in the 500s through to the 700s. 18:10 So I realize that some of this terminology, maybe all this terminology, 18:15 is new to many of you, but it's really helpful to understand like what are the different Jewish literature periods beyond what we read in the Bible. 18:24 So those are the different main periods. 18:28 I want to just mention something before going too much further about why I use BC and AD. 18:35 I guess the short answer to that is like that's just what everybody did when I grew up. 18:41 I'm that old that 18:44 It was normal to say BC and AD in public school when I went there. 18:49 But in the late 20th century, new dating terminology became popular. 18:53 And that's when they replaced Anno Domini, that's what AD stands for, with common era. 19:00 And they replaced BC, which means before Christ, with before the common era. 19:05 Now, in case you're not familiar with the Latin Anno Domini, it means the year of our Lord. 19:11 So 19:13 It's not hard to figure out why people wanted to replace that. 19:19 The Jewish people in particular didn't want to recognize Jesus as Christ or Jesus as Lord in their dating system. 19:27 Totally respect that. 19:29 If I was a non-Christian Jewish person, I wouldn't want to have to call Jesus Lord in order to say the date, which is literally what you're doing every time you say AD. 19:38 You're saying the year of our Lord 19:42 i.e. 19:43 Jesus. 19:44 And Jesus is not their Lord. 19:46 So I totally respect that. 19:48 Desire not to perjure themselves. 19:50 So among Jewish communities and academics, it became popular to use CE, Common Era, and BCE, before the Common Era. 19:57 And over time, that became common in secular academic writing. 20:03 I continue to use the old BC and AD because I am a Christian and I delight in confessing Jesus 20:11 not only as my Lord in Christ, but also as the hinge of history, the one around whom we date everything else. 20:21 I think it's so cool. 20:23 And I am taken aback when I see Christian scholars shying away from using BC and AD. 20:30 But anyhow, I just figured I'd mention that because that's what I'm going to be using throughout. 20:34 And don't want that to trip you up or confuse you or anything like that. 20:39 so all right moving on after scouring the work of those involved in this subject I've identified the main primary sticks sources okay and I want to share them with you the first one is the tonic literature that I already mentioned to you within that period the first two centuries of 21:02 of the year of our Lord, of the common era, whatever you want to call it. 21:06 We have Philo, who wrote around the time of Christ. 21:10 Christ was active in the 20s and 30s, give or take AD. 21:14 And so that's actually when Philo was also active, 30 through 50 AD. 21:19 And that's also a little after that is when we get the parables of 1 Enoch, 21:25 anywhere between 70 and 270. 21:27 That's the part of Enoch that's relevant to this whole 2 powers subject. 21:31 So we're going to be spending a lot of time looking at First Enoch and the parables of First Enoch next time. 21:37 Then you have the Mishnah, also called the oral law. 21:41 That was written down sometime between 200 and 220. 21:45 So it also is part of this very first period of time. 21:49 Then you have the two collections from the Amaraic period, so that's from 220 to 500. 21:56 The first up would be the Tosefta, written around 220 to 250, and then the Midrashim, 250 to 300. 22:03 And then we have one very, very, very significant piece of literature written in around the year 600 is when they date the Babylonian Talmud. 22:12 So that's from the Savaraic period. 22:15 Now look, I realize that these collections of literature are probably totally foreign to you. 22:20 You've probably never read Philo. 22:22 Some of you maybe have read Philo and 1st Enoch, probably haven't read the Mishnah. 22:26 If you have read the Mishnah, you probably haven't read the Tosefta, okay? 22:30 And you've probably never heard of the Midrashim. 22:32 But we're going to get into all of it. 22:34 We're going to look at all six of these primary sources to see what they have to say about the two powers heresy so that we can go to the sources and find out the truth. 22:43 Like I don't want to 22:44 base my faith, no offense to Alan Siegel, seems like a really capable quality scholar. 22:51 Same thing with these other ones that I mentioned, but like, they're not the ones I have to answer to on the day of judgment. 22:57 I'd rather just. 22:59 be able to look at the primary sources and make my own judgment based on what they say. 23:04 So we're going to go through all six categories of Jewish literature. 23:08 And in each case, I'm going to read you what the primary source says. 23:12 I'm going to read it out loud to you in English translation so that you 23:17 know what it says. 23:18 And you can make your own judgment. 23:19 You can even disagree with me, but I'm gonna do what I can to analyze each of these quotations and ask the question, what does this tell us about the two powers heresy? 23:30 If it does tell us something about it, what? 23:33 We're going to take our time with each source. 23:35 We're going to evaluate each one critically. 23:37 And I hope you join me for this adventure. 23:40 It's going to be an awesome ride. 23:42 And I really think you're going to learn a lot, not just about two powers theology, which is obviously very significant. 23:48 It's probably why you're here, why you're listening to this video. 23:51 But you're also going to learn a lot about Jewish literature and how Jewish 23:56 intellectuals think about a lot of different subjects, many of them biblically related. 24:03 So I think it's going to be well worth your time, and I encourage you to check out the next episode in this series, which is going to be looking at the two powers in the book of First Enoch. 24:19 Well, that brings this little introduction to an end. 24:23 What did you think? 24:24 Have you heard about this subject before? 24:25 Do you have thoughts on it? 24:27 Come on over to restitudio.org and find episode 674, Two Powers in Heaven, 1, introduction, and leave your comments, questions, and feedback there. 24:38 as you can see, this is a very short episode for today. 24:41 I hope those of you who love my one hour episodes and longer will not be too sad with such a short episode today. 24:51 But I assure you that other episodes in this series will be much longer, so that will scratch the itch for long form content if that's an itch you have. 25:01 If you have always wanted me to get under 30 minutes, well, guess what? 25:06 Today is your day, so leap for joy. 25:09 But before closing, I did just want to mention that there are two Unitarian Christian Alliance conferences coming up in this month and next month in Arizona and New Zealand. 25:22 So the one happening in Arizona is happening next week. 25:26 So you got to come. 25:27 Please come, say hi. 25:29 We're going to have so many people there at the event giving presentations about biblical Unitarianism. 25:36 And I'm going to be speaking on 2 powers. 25:39 And I'm going to try to cram everything I have learned into, what, 40 minutes, 45 minutes. 25:45 So it's going to be very shallow, sad to say. 25:50 But that's why I'm doing this series. 25:51 I just could not bring myself to leave so much on the cutting floor of my presentation. 25:59 And I said, you know what? 26:00 If I do a series, a longer series on Restitudio of all that I've learned about two powers, then that will justify making a very, very short presentation for the UCA event. 26:12 So anyhow, that's my motivation. 26:14 I hope to see some of you there. 26:16 I know folks who are Restitudio listeners have signed up. 26:19 And I've taken a look at the registration list and recognized a few of the names on there. 26:23 So looking forward to seeing you. 26:25 If you are able to go to the event in New Zealand, that would be awesome. 26:29 That's coming up in November. 26:31 All the information for both events is available at unitarianchristianalliance.org. 26:35 So you should definitely go to that website to check out information about these events. 26:40 Well, that's going to be it for me. 26:42 If you'd like to support Restitudio, you can do that on our website, restitudio.org. 26:47 Thanks so much to those of you who are. 26:50 contributing on a monthly basis. 26:52 Also, if somebody that would benefit from this content, please share this episode with them. 26:57 I've got a YouTube version, I've got the Spotify or Apple Podcast version, and hopefully you will have everything you need to share it with other people because this is important stuff as we'll see in the coming episodes. 27:10 All right, that's it for today. 27:11 Thanks everybody for listening to the end. 27:13 I'll catch you next week and remember the truth has nothing to fear.