12 Objects
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Christianity is tangible, historical. You can read it, yeah, but you can also see it, touch it, sort of. We're going around the world in this episode to take a look at some of the objects that represent the different chapters in the story of Christianity. From a small, now almost indistinct piece of graffiti on an ancient Roman wall...

to a stunning illuminated manuscript hidden in a Viking Age medieval Irish monastery. From the Bible translation without which some claim we wouldn't have Shakespeare, to the world's largest bronze statue shedding light on how stupid some Christians are.

Wait for that one. We have 12 objects to give you an overview of the good and the not so good of Christian history. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com/undeceptions. Don't forget to write "Undeceptions." Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture or ethics

that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Hey Tim, cool idea, or should I just say epic idea. How did it come to you? Well, yeah, it came to me when I was studying church history and realizing there's a big gap between what we can read about in books and what we can actually see. But there's something really neat about...

That's Tim Challies, a Canadian author and pastor who was blogging well before it was a thing for 20 years this year, actually. We're talking to him today about his book and documentary, Epic, an around-the-world journey through Christian history. Our friends at Zondervan have made it into a master lecture, too, so you can see the artifacts and watch as Tim travels and talks to experts about all these things.

And you can get 50% off their full suite of videos, including Tim's at zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. And make sure you use the code undeceptions50. That's just a five and a zero. That's especially true when you're in a place like Canada or perhaps Australia where the Christian history is very, very recent. And you're reading about all these remarkable places and remarkable things and thinking, man, I'd really like to see them.

And so I got it in my mind, I would like to go and see church history. You had some rules though. You didn't want to go to monuments that just marked, you know, great figures and whatever, nor just places. You wanted artifacts. Is there a historian locked inside that pastor's heart? I did study history back in my college days, my university days. I've always loved history.

So there was definitely some appeal there just to study history as it was. But the idea of objects came to me. At that time, there were quite a lot of books being written or videos being done about historical objects, but nobody had really explored it in the Christian space yet.

As is often the case, you see things out in the general market and Christians see it too and adapt it for a much smaller market. But there's something about objects that are, well, just so tangible. They're just so there. So it's one thing to stand in a place and say, this person used to stand here. If you've been to Jerusalem or something, there's something neat about walking the streets of Jerusalem and saying, hey, Jesus once walked these streets. That's neat.

But there's something really neat about holding an object and saying this person in history held this object or here's the significance of this object. There are things you can see. There's things that really bridge the past and the present. Yeah. I just was teaching a class at Wheaton College yesterday about Emperor Julian, the pagan Emperor Julian. And I have a coin of Julian's and, of course, was able to pass it around the class. And there is something amazing to think about.

This is a real point in the history of the world. These events were as tangible as this artefact still is in my hands today. Up first, we're heading to my happy place. Not Balmoral Beach or Perisher Ski Slopes. The other one, ancient Rome. Fact File 1. The Augustus Prima Porta. Location, Vatican Museum, Vatican City. Type, work of art.

First century AD. Interesting fact: Prima Porta, or First Gate, was a town a few kilometers outside of the ancient city of Rome. The town had a Roman aqueduct, which gave travelers their first indication of having reached Rome. The statue was found in Prima Porta, within the grounds of the villa of Livia, the wife of Augustus.

Gaius Octavius Terenas was the great nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar. In 27 BC, the Roman Senate acclaimed him with the titles Imperator, Caesar, Divi, Filius, Augustus, which basically translates as Commander or Emperor, Son of the God Julius Caesar, His Majesty. Something like that, anyway. Octavian was the first Romanian.

Roman emperor. The Augustus Prima Porta statue shows the emperor in an elaborately decorated cuirass. That's that breastplate that's attached around the back to a back plate fastened together. His cloak is wrapped around his hips and Augustus has his arm raised as if addressing a crowd.

This is the image I show of him in all my lectures where I mention Augustus. In the statue, he's barefoot, which is sort of a sign of divinity. And Augustus himself was not only the son of God, the son of the God Julius Caesar, but a god in his own right after his death in AD 14. So the denarius I wear around my neck, which I'm wearing around my neck and showing the team right now,

actually is Tiberius, Augustus's stepson and heir. And it calls Tiberius Divi Filius, son of a god, because now his dad, Augustus, has been elevated to divine status, just as Julius Caesar had. And so they all become gods as we go down the family tree.

So an interesting thing about the statue of Caesar Augustus is that it took me three tries to actually see it. It being Italy, sometimes things are just inexplicably closed. At least that's what my Italian guy told me. You just never know. Things will be closed. No reason.

Eventually, we got into that part of the Vatican Museums and saw this statue of Augustus. The statue is called Augustus of Prima Porta. And it stands in in this book as an object that represents the world into which the New Testament came, into which the church was birthed. Of course, Augustus was the one who helped establish the Pax Romana that gave the context in which Christianity could spread and thrive. Even...

Pax Romana is the Roman peace. It describes the period immediately after the civil wars, you know, Antony, Cleopatra, Brutus, Cassius and all of that, which resulted in the assassination of Julius Caesar and the rising to power of Augustus. And Augustus brought a crushing peace compared to this civil war period. And in that peace, poets flourished, roads were built.

External wars were won and the empire became the uncontested superpower of the world for at least the next 200 years. Even before the big waves of persecution came, the groundwork had been laid through which missionaries could travel through the Roman Empire, across the roads and with the army sort of holding back the boundaries of the empire.

Interesting fact: Up until five years ago, the Pilate's Stone was the only object from his time to bear the name Pontius Pilate.

In 2018, Israeli archaeologists released new findings from a 1960s excavation, saying they believe they have found a ring with the inscription "PILOT" from the early first century. But this has been questioned by other scholars. So the Pilate stone is likely still the only piece of physical evidence we have for Pontius Pilate.

The other one was the inscription you mentioned, the Pilate Stone. For ages now, there have been historians or there were historians who disputed that this guy Pontius Pilate had ever actually lived. He had actually existed. And it became sort of assumed after some time that no, he was not a real figure. He was fabricated for the Bible until one day somebody was doing some excavations and overturned a stone that had his name on it.

And like so much else we read in the Bible, eventually the record catches up and we see these clear evidences that the Bible is referring to real people in real places. It's real history.

Yep, it's real history. I've played with this Pilate stone in Jerusalem. It was discovered by fluke, as so often happens, on the coast of Israel, just north of Tel Aviv in the ancient town of Caesarea Maritima. We had literary texts from antiquity that mentioned Pilate. We had Philo, Josephus, Tacitus, and of course the New Testament. But this was the first archaeological evidence, and it resolved a little dispute.

The Gospels call Pilate the hegemon of Judea, the prefect or governor. But the great Roman historian Tacitus, at the dawn of the second century, calls him the procurator of Judea, which is a slightly different Roman title. Tacitus writes, "'Christus suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate.'"

Now, this stone, which was set up by Pilate himself, calls him Prefect. Boom! In this instance, the Gospels are closer to the fine details than the greatest Roman source of the ancient world. And now for one of my favorite items from antiquity.

Fact File 3: The Alexamenos Graffito. The Palatine Museum, Rome. Type: Inscription in plaster. Approximately AD 200. Interesting fact: This piece of graffiti is the earliest surviving depiction of Jesus hanging on a cross.

Very much contrasting Augustus and Pilate, two powerful figures, is the gorgeous little Alexamenos piece of graffiti on Palatine Hill. It is special. I know it took you a couple of times to see that as well. But tell us about that because some people have never heard of this. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it is just such a neat little artifact. You can see it there on the Palatine Hill. And it is the first known visual portrayal of Jesus. So this was the first time anybody had, as far as we know, had jotted down a picture of Jesus. What is that picture? It's a picture of Jesus.

something on a cross, a human-like figure on a cross, and yet the figure is of a donkey. And there's this man bowing down to this donkey on the cross, and the inscription says, "Alex, lex amenos," is worshipping his God. And what an amazing thing that the first portrayal of Jesus Christ is one mocking Christians and mocking Jesus. This little piece of graffiti is a fantastic example of the mockery the early Christians faced.

The shame of a death on a cross is sometimes lost nowadays because it's become a symbol of beauty and love and religion and so on. One of our guests from last season in the episode The Crucifixion was Fleming Rutledge, and she rightly called the cross the most degrading, dehumanizing form of death.

So the idea of worshipping someone who had died on a cross was just stupid. And if you think about artistic representations of Jesus in our day, very likely they're going to be mocking depictions of Jesus.

So, so little has changed between then and now. And it just shows that at the time Christianity was birthed into the world, already people were turning against Christ, denying him and mocking those who follow him. Yeah, it is a powerful picture of the shame of the cross, the upside downness of Christianity. And eventually Christianity would turn the Roman world upside down and we would be valuing humility in a way that the ancients never did.

Fact File 4: The Dogmatic Sarcophagus The Vatican Museum, Vatican City A sculptural stone coffin Approximately AD 340 Interesting fact: It is suggested that the first depiction of the Trinity, the Christian doctrine of the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is sculpted into the sarcophagus.

Dogmatic sarcophagus, which I think sounds like an amazing name for like a metal band or something. It's actually a box from the fourth century that has the first known representation of the Trinity on it. And so it's a visual representation. Of course, we know the Trinity can't really be portrayed, but here's one person's attempt to display the Trinity in artistic form. Yeah, it's another artifact that's there in the Vatican Museum to see at all times, except the first two times I showed up, it was...

It just happened to be blocked. But eventually I caught a glimpse of it and had to content myself with that. On the third attempt, there's something Trinitarian about that. The third attempt, yeah. And, you know, that thing, if we're thinking about what these objects represent, that was the idea. Every object would represent some part in Christian history. Then something like this represents the creedal times. It represents the Arian controversy. It represents even today all those who deny the Trinity, etc.,

first half of the fourth century, right? So we're really right in the thick of those debates.

The sarcophagus is called the dogmatic sarcophagus because it seems to reflect the dogma or principles laid down by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. This was a really important church council. It was attempting to put to bed some of the divisions that had erupted 30 years earlier in the church, including what Tim calls the Arian conflict.

controversy. The Aryans, named after a priest from Alexandria called Arius, claimed that Jesus wasn't fully God. He was more like the bridge between humanity and God, a midway point that allowed finite creatures to reach the infinite God. It was a very cool idea from the perspective of Greek philosophy, and so it would have resonated with a lot of pagans in the ancient world.

But the problem was it ran against the traditional view of Christians that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were co-equal, were co-eternal. And it was a dispute that could have torn Christianity apart, except that Emperor Constantine locked a few hundred bishops in a room for eight weeks in the city of Nicaea and demanded they resolve the issue. Now,

Now, Constantine didn't care what they all decided. It was all a bit too philosophical for him anyway. He just wanted unity. At the end of it, Arius and his buddies lost the debate, and the council agreed on a 175-word summary statement called the Nicene Creed. It's a statement agreed upon by all Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant right up to today.

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of the same essence as the Father. Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven. He became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. There are legends of a secret book.

Whose pages hold tremendous power to defeat the forces of darkness. I've never seen anything like it. Now, one boy must fulfill his destiny. If I don't try, the book will never be complete. And write the final chapter to bring light back to the world. Would you like to help me?

That's a clip from the trailer for the 2009 animated film The Secret of Kells, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature that year.

It incorporates references to both Celtic myth and medieval manuscripts. It's also family friendly. So for those Undeceptions listeners who want to pass on their love of history to their kids, this could be one to check out. It's about the treasured Book of Kells and a brave Irish boy who takes it upon himself to protect this priceless work from Viking raiders. It's our next object.

Fact File 5: The Book of Kells Trinity College, Dublin Illuminated Manuscript Date: Around the 6th to the 8th century AD Interesting Fact: The Book of Kells was an ambitious undertaking. It's estimated that the skins of 185 calves were needed for the project, to produce the vellum it was written on.

I'm completely jealous you've played with the Book of Kells. Oh my goodness, Tim. So for those who don't know the Book of Kells, we are zipping forward three and a half centuries. Tell us what the Book of Kells is and what you reckon it tells us about Christianity and its movement.

Sure. To see the Book of Kells, you've got to go to Ireland, which I recommend anyways. Amazing artifact. Okay, I didn't get to play with it. It is under the strictest security of almost anything I saw. You may not take pictures of it. You may not really spend too much time with it. They guard it heavily. But it stands in for that era when the Bible was being transmitted through these

delightful illuminated manuscripts. And here we see the transmission of scripture in that monastic era when it was really being carried on through the many monasteries. We see the spread of Christianity into the British Isles, you know, starting to be embedded there in the monasteries, especially along the coast. That's just the Gospels, isn't it? The four Gospels. Correct, yeah. And tell us something about the illuminations that go with it. I mean, why are they...

making it pretty as well as just words. Yeah. And I mean, it really is. It is stunning. It is beautiful. The colors, everything has lasted so well. So it's just a beautiful thing to look at. But it shows us how highly they valued Scripture. And, you know, we're used today. I could, if I wanted to, I could copy and paste the Bible. We have myriad printings of it, etc. We have no shortage of Scripture, Gospels.

But in that time, it was very rare and very difficult to transmit. So here we see people who are dedicating their whole lifetime to painstakingly copying it out and then showing the value of the book, the value of the Bible, by making it beautiful, by illumining it as they did. So it's really, it's the Bible, but it's also a work of just the highest art.

The Book of Kells is one of medieval Europe's greatest treasures, full of ornate and intricate illustrations. It's believed that monks on the remote Scottish island of Iona created this book.

The island of Iona and its monastery came under attack from Vikings in 806. The raid left 68 people dead, and the monks sought refuge at a newly founded monastery in, you guessed it, Kells in County Meath in Ireland, probably taking this Book of Kells with them and finishing it there.

Hey, and if you want to hear more about the Viking raids in this part of the world, including the earlier one in 793 on Lindisfarne, head to perhaps my funnest Undeceptions episode ever to make, episodes 65 and 66, The Vikings 1 and 2. For something so old, the Book of Kells is incredibly intact.

60 or so pages are missing, but over 600 pages remain. It's handwritten in beautiful Latin script, even if some of the letters and words are missing. It's more a visual book than a perfect literary copy of the Gospels.

It's in Latin. The Book of Kells is in Latin, of course. And you make a good point along the way in your book that I think is sometimes lost, that Latin sort of starts out as the common language. They weren't putting this in Latin because they wanted to keep it from the people initially. It was because this is the vulgar language, the common language.

But of course, over time, as you also acknowledge, Latin does become an elite language and people who speak local languages are unable to access for themselves the truth. And that brings us to the wonderful Tyndale New Testament, because here's a story that

trying to remedy that problem. In some ways, trying to replicate what the first Latin translation was doing. So Jerome and these buddies who gave us the Latin translation were trying to get this Bible in weird languages, Hebrew and Greek, into the common language of the Western Roman Empire. And Tyndale tried to do something similar. MUSIC

The British Library is to pay £1 million for a copy of William Tyndale's 1526 translation of the New Testament into English. Dr Brian Lang, Chief Executive of the British Library, said yesterday he could not think of any printed book in the English language that has more significance than this. Fact File 6. The Tyndale New Testament. Location. The British Library, London.

Book Date: 1526 Interesting fact: 3000 copies of Tyndale's New Testament were originally printed at Worms in Germany. Today, only three remain.

Yeah, well, you're right that over time, the Bible became associated with the elite rather than the commoner. And that meant that it really passed from the knowledge of the people. You know, they could only access it through the priesthood, which then gave the priesthood way too much prominence, more than they should have. And so Tyndale and, you know, Wycliffe as well, before him, they were really engaged in preaching.

taking the Bible back into the common tongue so that even the plow boy, as Tyndale famously said, even the plow boy would be able to read the Word of God. And they did manage to translate Scripture. They did it at the cost of Tyndale, especially the cost of his own life. And what a blessing that they did that, that they accomplished that. And of course, Tyndale is regarded as the author of English language, one of the real

systematizers of the English language and so much of the words of Christian vocabulary we take for granted today was really coined by him in a work of just incredible enduring importance.

I reckon there's a whole episode we could do on William Tyndale and the impact of his English Bible. Tyndale is the second most quoted writer in English, second only to, of course, William Shakespeare. And some scholars have gone so far as to say, without Tyndale, no Shakespeare. It's a big call.

William Tyndale translated the Bible into English and was basically shunning a century-old law that banned the translation of the Latin Bible into the vernacular, into English, which is kind of ironic given that the Latin originally was the vernacular. The church was using St. Jerome's Latin translation called the Vulgate, which means the vulgar or the common language.

In England, most people now, though, by the time you get to the late medieval period, spoke English. But clerics claimed that a widespread familiarity with God's word in the common English tongue would breed irreverence and cause confusion.

They were snobs about the English language itself. They weren't sure English could convey the power of Jerome's Latin. And there was also, no doubt, a bit of control freaking going on. They didn't want people reading and interpreting the Bible for themselves. Who knows what funny ideas English people might come up with.

When word got out that Tyndale was translating the Bible into English, he had to flee England. He went to Germany, where the Reformation was well underway, and the Tyndale Bible was printed there in the town of Worms, close to where Martin Luther was at the time. Copies of this English Bible were then smuggled into England in bales of cloth. Thousands of Bibles were distributed this way, despite it being a banned language.

It didn't end up well for Tyndale though. He was eventually captured in what is today Belgium and declared a heretic just for translating the Bible. And in October 1536, he was tied to a stake and strangled to death. His body was then burned to ash to erase his presence from the earth.

But his translation lived on. And this Tyndale translation lies behind some of the stock Bible-inspired English phrases like "Let there be light," "Signs of the times," "Where two or three are gathered together," or "Seek and ye shall find." And yes, the King James Bible a couple of centuries later relied heavily on Tyndale's translation.

This brings us to the Reformation because, of course, that impulse to bring Christianity to the masses, bypassing the priesthood, as it were, is a Protestant dream. Now, at Undeceptions, we've just done an enormous double episode on the Reformation, so we're going to be very choosy here. I'm going to let you choose one artifact out of the many that deal with the Protestant Reformation, okay? So you can choose one out of the following. Ready? The Gutenberg Bible,

the indulgence box, John Calvin's chair, and maybe the sculpture known as the triumph of faith over heresy. So Tim Challies, I'm letting you choose. Oh boy.

All right, so let me just say, there's some precursor to the Reformation objects, and that would be, you know, Jan Hus' cell door, and even the Gutenberg Bible. Those lead to the Reformation, Erasmus' New Testament, and so on. So we'll set those aside. I think the best Reformation-era object, just because it's so evocative, is that sculpture, the triumph of faith over heresy. Fact File 7

Triumph of Faith over Heresy Location: Mother Church of the Jesuit Order, Ciesa del Gesù, Rome Type: Sculpture by Pierre Le Gros the Younger Late 17th century Interesting fact: the sculpture is well known as a piece of Catholic propaganda during the Counter-Reformation.

which was launched to combat the growing Protestant movement and reform the Catholic Church after a period of great corruption. In a bottom corner of the sculpture, an impish angel gleefully rips the pages out of a book by Martin Luther.

I've seen it a few times now, and it really is just something to behold. And almost every time I've looked at it, I've picked up on something else. But here is a sculpture that really represents the Counter-Reformation. And so, as the Reformation swept over Europe, the Roman Catholic Church responded through the Jesuit order.

And here's this sculpture that shows what they say would be the church triumphing over the heresy of these Protestants. And so you see a woman who's either Mary or the church or both.

throwing these people into hell and casting them into hell. And as you look closely, you start to see details. You think that man maybe looks a little familiar, but they didn't have photographs of those men as we do today. But you look at the books that are falling with them, and you start to see there's Luther's name, and there's Calvin's name, and here she is throwing these reformers into hell. And it just so wonderfully represents the counter-reformation of

as the Catholic Church attempted to stop the gains the Protestants had made. Fact File 8: The Fleet Bible. Sydney, Australia. Book. Date. Date of printing is unclear, as the title page was lost in fire. But the prayer book that accompanied the Bible was printed in 1784. Interesting fact:

The Fleet Bible is a rather plain copy of the King James Bible, brought from England on the First Fleet to Australia by Chaplain Richard Johnson. He used the Bible and the accompanying Book of Common Prayer to conduct the first church service in Australia on Sunday February 3rd 1788, under a large tree near the shore of Sydney Cove.

The Bible is signed by every member of the royal family to have visited Sydney since the early 1900s. I can't resist taking us to Sydney. I mean, well played on that, Tim. Well played. Yeah, nice. One of my favourite places. Good. Not many people would place Sydney on the great map of Christian artefacts, so tell us why you went to Sydney and what you got to play with.

Okay, so we went to Sydney in part because we wanted to get to every continent. So, you know, we had to go there as well. But what we thought would really be useful there was thinking about the First Fleet, thinking about the fact that Australia really was founded in large part as a Christian nation or with Christians right at the forefront.

And so we wanted to consider the founders, consider the work they had done, and consider how Australia, right from the get-go, was regarded as Christian. And so, yeah, we looked at the Bible that had been in hand right when the first fleet landed. You would know more about the people and the origin story there.

One of the best books to read about the history of the Bible in Australia, by the way, is by Aussie historian Dr. Meredith Lake. It's called The Bible in Australia, of course, a cultural history. Dr. Lake skillfully lays out the huge influence the Christian Bibles had in Australia, and she dispels two persistent myths.

One, that Australia is a straightforwardly Christian nation. And two, that Australia is a doggedly secular or post-Christian nation. The story is far more complex, as is the story of British colonization of my beloved country, and especially its treatment of First Nations people. And for more on that in particular, check out episode 37, Racist Church.

So did you look at several pages of that First Fleet Bible? We did, yeah. There's some lovely stains along the way. So like where the communion wine has obviously been dropped, you know, right into Matthew 26 or something. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it is a well-worn Bible. And what fascinated me, I don't even know if I should say this, was it wasn't locked in a museum. Mm-hmm.

I didn't see exactly where it was taken from, but it's just in a cupboard or something, isn't it? Well, no. My good mate, Justin Moffat, whose wife, Laurel, actually hosts a podcast for Our Undeceptions.

He actually would have got it out for you, knowing you were coming. But it actually lives in a little dungeon behind a cage. Okay, that's what I assumed. Yeah, somewhere in the back. Yeah, just fair warning to any thieves that are thinking of robbing the church. There's much of a resale market for artifacts like that anyways, but you never know. Ooh, I tell you, I'd like that one. In fact, right opposite me, Tim, I won't jump from the microphone and grab it, but I have...

A photograph that Justin let me take of my favorite prayer from the prayer book that came with the same Richard Johnson, you know, right alongside that First Fleet Bible. And now I've got it framed right opposite me.

O Lord, our Heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day, defend us in the same with thy mighty power, and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger, but that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do always that is righteous in thy sight, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Tirat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash undeceptions. Fact File 9. Amy Carmichael's plaques. Location. Donover, 30 miles from the southern tip of India. Type. Painted wooden plaques. Date. Mid-20th century. Interesting fact.

After a severe injury in 1931, Amy Carmichael was confined to her room almost entirely for the last 20 years of her life. The plaques of simple, short Bible quotes that were placed around her room were a source of constant encouragement to her. I'm going to quote you here. Of all the historical characters I encountered in my round-the-world journey, none of them blessed me more at a personal level than Amy Carmichael.

Now, most of my listeners won't have heard of Amy Carmichael. So who's that and what's the artifact and why is it such a big deal? A number of reasons. She's such a big deal. But for me, it was we went to Ireland, which is where she was born and where she became a believer and where she felt called to mission work. And then we went to India, which is where she went up, where she ended up. She had hoped to go to Japan. That didn't work out.

And so she reset herself and ended up in India where she founded a ministry that would take in orphans, especially orphan girls who had been handed over to the sex trade there to some sort of temple prostitution. And she would essentially raise these children as her own.

Amy Carmichael moved to India from Ireland at the age of 27, and she never returned. It was 1895, and she arrived with dengue fever. Despite some missionaries suggesting she wouldn't be able to stay the course, Amy lasted 55 years. Early in her time, Amy learned of the trafficking of little girls for prostitution in Hindu temples, an ancient practice that has now mercifully been outlawed.

Girls as young as seven years old would be dedicated to a particular god or goddess and performed favours with the income used for religious offerings. Amy dedicated herself to helping these kids, bringing them out of servitude and offering them Christ's compassion, a place to sleep, to learn and be loved in safety.

The Donova Fellowship was the orphanage she founded in 1927. And you know what? It remains open as an active refuge for girls to this day. Go check it out. Amy had a series of simple wooden plaques made to hang in her living quarters. One was engraved just with the words, I know. Another with the words, fear not.

They're references to a passage from the book of Revelation, and they're meant to remind her that God knows the pain we feel and that we needn't fear because Christ has conquered death. Here's a poem that she wrote about these biblical words, which were a profound comfort to her after a devastating fall that left her room bound for the final 20 years of her life. I know.

The words contain unfathomable comfort for our pain. How they can hold such depths, I do not know. I only know that it is so. Fear not. The words have power to give the thing they name. For in an hour of utter weariness, the soul, aware of one beside her bed, is comforted. O Lord most dear, I thank thee, and I worship, thou art here. ♪

We went to Donover Fellowship, which is the orphanage, the organization she set up there, and found that it still exists and that it's still serving the Lord. It's still doing well. And what was really neat was we met one elderly lady there who was actually one of the very last orphans who was brought in and handed to Amy Carmichael, who would pray for her and give her a name.

Wow, that was just a really neat bridge. We're talking historical artifacts. But here's a person who sort of spans from that character in Christian history who did so much, suffered so deeply, loved so well, honored the Lord, wrote psalms and poems, and of course cared for all these children. And then here's this woman who didn't know her. She was too young to know her, but who stands in there and represents her. And a friend of mine was just there a few weeks ago and says that woman's still going, still showing people around.

And she's pretty elderly now, but she's still the last, I believe, of the orphans that Carmichael herself brought in. So it was just a tremendous encouragement. So often when we visit families,

Older places we find that perhaps theologically they've gone off the rails or we find that there's nothing there anymore, that the organization came and went. But it was just a huge blessing to see that organization doing well and still committed to what she was committed to. So just these little things you pick up as you travel around that really, really bless you, encourage you. Fact File 10, The Slave Bible. Location, The Museum of the Bible, Washington, D.C.

Abridged Version of the Bible. Its title was "Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro slaves in the British West India Islands". published in 1807. Interesting fact: This abridged version of the Bible was used by British missionaries to convert and educate slaves. It excludes any portions that might inspire rebellion or thoughts of liberation.

About 90% of the Old Testament is missing and about 50% of the New Testament. Passages like "There is neither Jew nor Greek" "There is neither bond nor free" "There is neither male nor female" "For ye are all one in Christ Jesus" from the book of Galatians chapter 3 do not appear.

Christianity has done wonderful things for the world, of course, we acknowledge that. But Christians aren't above, well, taking advantage, or Christians aren't without blame. And there's, of course, people who masquerade as Christians and are not. And as you throw

Search out Christian history. You do see sometimes you're not sure, was that person truly a believer or not? And sometimes it's very obvious that people were not. So you ask about the slave Bible. So you go back in American history and you find this era of slavery, and it was people who proclaimed themselves Christians who were enslaving other people who were often Christians. In order for those slave masters to maintain their religion,

authority, their power, whatever it was. They had to justify what they did from Scripture, and they had to make sure that they weren't, as they were engaging with their slaves, that they weren't showing those slaves that they themselves were, that the slaveholders were wrong. And so they would take the Bible and they would gut it of any parts that would counteract the master-slave relationship. And so the

That slave Bible was a version of the Bible. It was really a perversion of the Bible because all the passages that somebody might read and say, hey, this slavery thing is wrong. Those were taken out of it. So a fascinating but also horrifying artifact and one that I think we all just need to ponder from time to time. Again, one day we'll have to do a whole episode or maybe two on slavery and the Bible through history.

We did a few singles on this topic back in 2020, so we'll link to them in the show notes. They'll have to do for now. Well, from the distressing to the ridiculous. Fact File 11. Oral Roberts' Praying Hands. Location. Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Type. Bronze sculpture. Date. 1980.

Interesting fact: the sculpture is 60 feet tall, just over 18 meters, and is known as the world's largest praying hands. Tulsa actually claims it as the largest bronze sculpture in the world, period. The second largest giant praying hand statue is 32 feet high, in case anyone was wondering. And you can see that in Webb City, Missouri.

You know, slavery may not be something we're prone to justify, but there may be other things, other forms of evil that we may justify in order to maintain our own power, our own wealth or whatever it is. Yeah. And I can take wealth and bridge then to the praying hands at Oral Roberts University. They just stand in as sort of as an artifact for the prosperity gospel, the health and wealth gospel that really Oral Roberts was so key to creating and to

popularizing around the world. Some of my listeners won't know about the prosperity gospel. Yeah. A bunch of my listeners are skeptical about the whole Christianity thing and won't know about that. So tell us about that. What was the kind of theology that someone like Oral Roberts tried to give the world?

Yeah, the prosperity gospel says all the future promises are, you know, we shouldn't worry about future promises. We should be able to have all the promises of God right now. And the promise they believe God is giving us right now is the promise of material wealth, i.e. lots and lots of money. And Oral Roberts really, he was one who...

in many ways, popularized that idea. And he was the one who came up with that evil, evil idea of seed faith, that if you plant a seed, so if you step out in faith and give Oral Roberts $100 or $1,000, God will then multiply that, and you'll somehow receive back something

tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, which we can shake our heads and say that is so gross, so stupid, so wrong. And yet so many people are drawn in by it.

And for the record, I totally agree with Tim. It's true that Jesus preached that one day in the kingdom of God, all things would be made well. Sickness, sadness, and death would be overturned, and the entire creation, including our bodies, would be restored and elevated, glorified. But any suggestion that we can claim that concrete flourishing now in this fallen world?

is about as far from what Jesus teaches in the Gospels as I can imagine. And there are so many people now who teach it. I mean, it's so obviously a scam. And yet, here it is. It's still carried on so often in the name of Jesus Christ, which is what makes it not just wrong, but full of blasphemous.

Location available everywhere. Type free online Bible. Date 2006. Interesting fact. As of 2023, the YouVersion Bible app has been downloaded 742,700,000 times.

You end with something that doesn't sound much like an artefact at all. The YouVersion Bible is an app. Like, you can't go to some, you know, 13th century monastery and handle this. So what are you trying to convey by making this an object of Christian history? Producer Kayleigh Hugh.

Honestly, when I heard John scoff at the notion that an app is an artefact, I thought immediately he sounded like his snobby fictional hero, President Bartlett from The West Wing. Just don't tell him I said that.

They got pretty well crushed. What are you doing? I'm sorry, sir. I had a few minutes. I'm not on you. I'm just asking. I'm making notes for a final in modern American history, consumer movements in late 20th century America. Modern American history sucks. I had a hunch. You want to study history, study the Crusades, the fall of the Roman Empire from Theodosius to Justinian. The Visigoths. Damn right, the Visigoths. Modern history is another name for television. Yes, sir. Is there any way I can help?

Yeah, I guess I was trying to be a little bit cheeky with it, but just to show that really, if you want to summarize Christianity here in the 21st century, you may have to look at something virtual rather than an object that's tangible that you can have and hold. I mean, think about what we're doing here.

Miles apart, you and I from different nations, all of that. We've never met face to face, yet here we are having this conversation. Many of us are reading the Bible today, not in physical form, but through some sort of a glowing rectangle that we hold in our hands or have on the desk in front of us. And so I think the Bible app, which is still the most prominent scripture reading app, kind of stands in as the object for our era, for our generation.

John Dyer at Dallas Theological Seminary wrote a fascinating article for Christianity Today called Bible Apps are the New Printing Press. We'll link to it in the show notes. In it, he writes, as a new generation encounters the Bible for the first time, they will not experience it exclusively orally, as in the days before the printing press, or primarily in print, as in the days before the printing press.

as was the case for the past several centuries. Instead, for them, the Bible will always be a multimedia category, and they will have more complex decisions to make about which combination of Bible media they want to use. Yeah, I don't know what I think of that. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.

All this talk of historical artifacts, especially the early ones related to Augustus, Pontius Pilate and the ancient piece of graffiti, remind me of something strange about the Christian faith. It is doggedly historical, even tangible.

Unlike other religions, Christianity gambles its plausibility on supposedly historical events. Christians don't just say otherworldly things like "God loves you", "we all need forgiveness", "heaven is open to all" and stuff like that. None of that sort of stuff is the least bit confirmable or falsifiable. We can mock those kinds of spiritual claims, but we can't disconfirm them with counter evidence.

But that's not really how Christians talk. Listen closely and you'll often hear them say things like, Jesus was born during the reign of Emperor Augustus. Or, he grew up in the Galilean village of Nazareth. Or, he emerged from the circle of John the Baptist in the late 20s AD. And finally, he was executed by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.

Statements like these aren't immune from historical scrutiny. They touch times, places and people we know quite a bit about. They intersect with figures like Augustus, the Baptist and Pilate, about whom we have pretty good information.

The alleged events all took place in a cultural, political melting pot, Roman Galilee and Judea, for which we have thousands of archaeological remains and hundreds of thousands of words in ancient inscriptions and written records.

When people proclaim an intangible thing like "God's love is universal," they are safe from scrutiny. You can't test it. But as soon as they say, "Our guy was crucified by the fifth governor of Judea," they're stepping out of the mere spiritual realm onto public ground, secular territory, and someone is bound to want to double check.

And as it turns out, an entire industry of double checking has developed over the last 250 years. The study of Jesus is a huge subdiscipline of history today. Now, adherents of the other faiths don't bear this burden. Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, to take the next three largest religions, don't risk their credibility making historical claims.

Hinduism's rituals and philosophy don't invite any historical investigation for the simple reason that the central Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita, don't make historical pronouncements.

And it's the same with Buddhism. Its central claims can't be attacked with this worldly evidence. How could we even begin to disprove the Buddha's claim that while meditating under a Bodhi tree one night in May, he'd come to know all that there is to be known, as the Tripitaka puts it? What historical or empirical test could be devised to critique his teaching about the karma of this life which attaches itself to our rebirth?

The core content of Islam too includes nothing testable in this historical sense. The key Islamic ideas are things like the oneness of God, predestination, angels, the obligation to pray and fast and so on. Of course we can study the history of Islamic expansion as a subject of history. We can do that with Hinduism and Buddhism too. But the faith claims of the religions themselves are beyond historical reach.

I've often imagined that it would feel kind of safe to be a devout Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim in today's sceptical West. It would be comforting to know that your core beliefs won't ever be the subject of critical examination in a History Channel documentary or reassessed every year like clockwork in the opinion pieces each Diwali or Bodhi Day or Ramadan.

in the way the hidden history of Jesus seems to turn up in the press every Christmas and Easter. For better or worse, Christianity's central claims are historical. The form of the New Testament documents is recognizably historical. The Gospels, for example, clearly present themselves as historical biographies of a famous life.

The letters of the New Testament follow precisely the epistolary conventions of the other occasional letters we have from this period, complete with traceable itineraries and lists of greetings to concrete individuals. The core content of the New Testament is also plainly historical.

There is of course plenty of theological talk about the kingdom of God, or being justified by faith, or entering into eternal life and all of that. But all of these things are premised on the tangible events of Jesus' life, deeds, teaching, death by crucifixion, and resurrection, all of which come from eyewitnesses. Christianity goes out on a limb

and invites anyone who wishes to come and take a swing and try and cut the branch off. In an odd way then, the barrage of historical criticism directed at the Bible, and in particular at the life of Jesus, isn't just reasonable given the nature of the claims, it's also a kind of compliment. It's a sign that critics understand well the form and the content of the Christian faith. Christianity is tangible.

historical. You can press play now. Tim, what did you personally gain from this epic adventure, apart from lots of flying miles? Yeah, I gained an appreciation of what God has done around the world. I was so thankful to be able to travel far and wide and see these objects and see God has worked fully around the globe. Of course, there are some unreached pockets of the world still, but almost anywhere you go, you can find some evidence of God's work there historically.

I think what it gave me, even more than that, though, it was bumping into Christians, spending time with Christians who are the true artifacts, right? All these objects don't mean anything compared to God's saving souls and God's church existing there in that country and there in that country. And that gave me a real hunger to travel.

travel the world to visit churches, which is actually what I've been doing this year as a kind of follow-up project, worshipping in local churches around the world. So I've seen the history. Now I'm going back around the world to worship with the people who have been so impacted by the history or have come to Christ because of that history. Skeptical listeners might be thinking that the story you tell in this book is really just the story of

of a culturally domineering movement. You know, it's made its mark everywhere because it's a bully. What might you say in reply? It hasn't made its mark everywhere because it's a bully. There have been some places where Christianity has come as a culturally dominant force. And, you know, Australia would be an example where it was Christians who were at the forefront of founding the nation and, you know,

bringing people over from the British world. But there's other places where Christianity went as a small player or as an underground movement. Just recently, I was in North Africa and there, I think the biggest church you would find comprised of the people from that country, not expat churches, would be maybe 15 people. And

And there might be a few hundred of those churches in the country and that's it. And yet the gospel is doing its work there. Jesus Christ is drawing people to himself there. They believe the same things, but there's no cultural dominance. They're the vast, vast minority of,

in that culture, but still they love the Lord and still they're serving him. So you don't have to be the cultural majority to hold Christian convictions and to believe that really does offer the most satisfying answers, that it really is the truth.

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we could really do with a boost. That's undeceptions.com and find the donation button. The whole team really appreciates it. And while you're there, send us a question and I'll try and answer it in our upcoming Q&A episode. See ya. Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley.

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