If John's not doing that, you know what you could charge John with?
Idiosycracy.
It has no attachment to the Hebrew Bible.
"Why should we think that John is telling us the truth?
This is all novel information that doesn't hook into the sacred text anywhere."
Look, does that make any sense?
Of course not.
In terms of trying to figure out what the author means,
can you re-explain a bit how that applies to, for example,
the study that you're doing right now on Revelation?
There's been heated debates about why is Dr. Heiser making it look as if John,
the author of Revelation, wasn't just reporting the facts of what he saw.
It looks like Dr. Heiser is saying John is just purposefully digging into the Old Testament
to try to make a narrative himself versus, I saw this, it happened,
and now I'm reporting it and I'm writing it down.
Could you kind of dig deeper into that again, please?
All of those things can be simultaneously true.
Okay, you know, when John has a visionary experience,
he's not looking at the angel and saying, "wait a minute,
I got to get my paper and pencil out here,
because I'm going to sit here and draw pictures and write stuff down."
You know, occasionally, like in the beginning of the book,
the Lord will tell him to write something down and so on and so forth.
So, you know, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you have a visionary experience
that you're sort of interviewing angels and you're taking notes in real time.
It's a vision, okay? It's a vision, it's what it is.
And so, John is going to be led by the Spirit of God to describe this,
mostly after the fact, I would say almost totally after the fact.
And when John does that, pardon John, under inspiration,
trying to make sense of it for his audience, okay?
Of course, he would do that.
He's going to see things that because of his understanding and knowledge
of the Old Testament, he's going to know where that came from.
He's going to know what that image means to a Jew or a Christian
with a serious knowledge of the Old Testament.
So, why wouldn't he direct attention back to those things in the sacred texts?
Makes perfect sense for John to do that.
You know, if John's not doing that, you know what you could charge John with?
Idiosycracy.
It has no attachment to the Hebrew Bible.
"Why should we think, you know, that John is telling us the truth?
This is all novel information that doesn't hook into the sacred text anywhere."
Look, does that make any sense?
Of course not.
And the fact is that we can read it.
You can read the material.
We know where John is hooking into. We know what he's doing.
We know what he's throwing into the blender, and wants people to think about.
When I relate this experience I had, here's what I want you to be thinking about.
Here's some help to parse it, okay?
Here's, you know, this idea, this symbol, this vision, whatever it is,
here's where it's going to hook back into other things that other prophets saw.
He's part of a community.
It sounds like you're appealing to John's intelligence
and John's expectation that his audience has intelligence as well.
Yes, he's not a robot.
Again, we can read the texts.
They're right there in front of us.
Why would John have bothered to write it down if he didn't want people to read it?
Okay, if he writes it down, chances are really good he'd like people to read that.
So what I'm trying to do in the podcast series is, again, just get people
to take what John has given us; his relaying of these experiences, these visions that he had,
and how he describes them, the means by which he describes them,
the techniques that he employs to describe them, and to help his readers understand,
help them orient it somewhere, the material, back into what earlier prophets of God saw.
He is in a line of tradition of people that God, you know, brought into the throne room.
Again, it's like I say in Unseen Realm.
It's the divine encounter that really validates the office of the prophet, okay?
John is the same as all these others, and so he wants them
to see how the things are connected.
Now, why would John do that other than just some explanatory value, you know,
taking a stab at that, trying to help the people he wants to relay these experiences to?
In some cases, it's nice that John does this because the readers of John all of a sudden
know that, wow, that thing that Ezekiel talked about, that really happened.
That came to pass.
The prophet didn't lie.
It's a fulfillment.
In other words, it's confirming of the prophetic tradition that preceded him.
Why should we have a problem with that?
You know, when I jumped into the Revelation thing, I prepped people for weeks
saying, look, you all know how I feel about eschatology, okay?
I have a pretty low view of eschatological systems.
We're not doing eschatological systems.
I'm going to give you the data, and then you can go off
and evaluate your own system to your heart's content.
What I care about is that you see how the book of Revelation is the capstone
to all of this earlier stuff and how it culminates in Jesus and how John is thinking
about the end of days in relation to the fulfillment of this and this and this and this
and how it all gets funneled, you know, through Christ, through Christology.
You know, this is how biblical theology is done.
And John in the book of Revelation, on the one hand, it's great for this because
it makes such frequent use of the Old Testament.
But on the other hand, John is not... he's messy.
He just assumes that you know a lot, and a lot of us just are nowhere near
John's level of knowledge. You know, a few points in the podcast I'll say, look,
John just throw, he takes five or six passages, and he just sort of does this.
He just merges them.
He puts them in the blender, hits the button, mixes it up. There you go.
You know what the ingredients were in the recipe, and you're supposed
to just know where everything came from and why he connected it.
It takes study, though. It takes knowing your Bible.
You're not going to come into it, it actually takes work. I love it.
You know, and John, I mean, if there's any practical lesson here, it should be one
of humility and shame because John just assumes a lot of his audience, a lot.
And if we don't measure up, that ought to tell us something.
Maybe we're not spending enough time in the text.
Maybe we've neglected the Old Testament a little too much
because we got no idea what this guy's doing.