Over at Twitter, there are various topics of Christianity that come up from time to time that capture everyone’s attention for a week or two. Recently, after comments made by Kirk Cameron, there was a big debate over Eternal Torment in Hell and Annihilationism. Back in 2023, I wrote about that topic (in “The Meaning of Hell“) after Catacomb Resident and Ed Hurst (of Radix Fidem) both made some unusual claims about Hell.
Back in November there was a big hubbub when Pastor Rich Tidwell announced on Twitter that he had two wives. Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox all attempted to claim that scripture, rather than tradition alone, condemns the practice. I weighed in with an unprecedented and massive 226-post thread on the subject. Now, Catacomb Resident (of Radix Fidem) has his own take.
Let’s discuss.
The Bible is a Hebrew book. Jesus was a Hebrew man, teaching a Hebrew faith. If you can discover what the Hebrews believed about their world, you will have what Jesus Himself believed. What Jesus believed is what we should believe, or else we can make no claim to follow Him. If you don’t embrace His teachings, you cannot claim the label “Christian”.
We’ve also said Jesus was not Jewish, because He said Himself that Judaism was a perversion of the ancient Hebrew religion. Judaism is a sharp departure from Moses.
The central premise of the Radix Fidem cult is one that I agree with. To understand Jesus and the Apostles (i.e. the New Testament), one must understand what came before (i.e. the Hebrews, the Mosaic Law, and the Old Testament).
This very important point is the primary reason why this is now the 70th article (or so) in which I’ve mentioned Radix Fidem, its members, and/or its teachings. The problem, of course, is that Radix Fidem does a poor job at achieving this goal, in large part because it has imported a healthy dose of Greek philosophy and labeled it as being of the “Ancient Near East” (e.g. mind vs heart).
If you are confused, bear with me. We’ll shortly see why this matters.
Jesus as the Son of God corrected Moses, tightening up the moral demands of the Covenant in general. That was a major element in His mission.
Wherever Moses got it right, Jesus offered no correction. Moses condemned all kinds of sexual deviance, and Jesus had no argument with that. Rather, He said Moses was rather loose on some issues of human sexual conduct. Instead of listing all the ways His people got it wrong, Jesus affirmed the sanctity of one man, one woman, for life. It takes serious moral perversion to imagine He was okay with queers and trannies when He wasn’t okay with any sexual activity outside of conventional marriage boundaries.
The New Testament is very strict with human sexual behavior and Jesus openly condemned the common peccadilloes of His society. As part of their Talmudic perversions, Jews had made up a lot of silly rules catering to their fleshly lusts. We’ve said it before: Judaism is a religion of worldly material comforts.
I’m going to say something that will upset most people. Nowhere in scripture, including the words of Jesus, was marriage limited to one man and one woman. You can find places in scripture (e.g. Genesis 2:24) where scripture refers to a man or a woman (i.e. with the indefinite article), but, outside of Paul’s ambiguous and debated “one woman man,” monogamously exclusive language is never used.
Readers here know that I love to quote scripture, but in this case I can provide zero quotations that show Jesus saying that marriage is between just one man and just one woman. Nor could any of my interlocutors. While I tend to agree with the tradition that polygamy should be avoided, there is no biblical basis for calling it a sin. So, when Catacomb Resident uses the words “one” here, he is putting his own words onto the lips of Jesus. Jesus never said any such thing.
Now, here is where it gets really interesting. It turns out that the ancient Hebrew practice of polygamy was abandoned starting with the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile in 597BC. Monogamy was a distinct cultural phenomenon of the secular Persians, Greeks (in Alexandria and Egypt), and Romans (in Rome and Italy). The greatest cultural and legal abandonment of polygamy and embrace of monogamy-only occurred around the 2nd and 1st centuries BC in the Greek and Roman areas.
Preachers are notorious for building up such mythology because it supports a message that may not be biblical but suits their own cultural background. God save us from religious leaders who work only to confirm their cultural biases without letting the biblical background correct it.
The post-exilic period—from 597BC until the time of Jesus—coincides precisely with the transition development of Judaism and the abandonment of the Hebrew faith. Thus, the abandonment of polygamy corresponds exactly to the very thing that Catacomb Resident (and Radix Fidem) claims to be most aware of, concerned with, and fighting against: Anti-Hebrew Judaism.
Monogamy-only is a secular, man-made practice rooted in a mythology of tradition. To the modern teacher, opposing polygamy suits their own cultural background (as it does my own) without conforming to scripture itself. Catacomb Resident is teaching his own cultural biases without letting the biblical background correct it.
Errors like this are among the many reasons why I do not—and cannot—embrace Radix Fidem, despite its lofty and laudable goals. In an attempt to get back to the ancient Hebrew understanding of God, Catacomb Resident promotes a self-refuting view that is rooted in first-century anti-Hebrew Judaism. And, if it turns out he is like most Christian men teaching online, he won’t be amenable to correction.
Again: We should examine what Jews commonly believed and what rabbis taught and compare it with what Jesus taught. We are obliged to believe what Jesus believed.
It turns out that we can know an awful lot about that. More to the point, we are in a position to contrast what Jesus believed against what churches teach today. When our community quotes from people like Heiser, Benner, Boman, etc., we are taking advantage of the best scholarship available for understanding what kind of religious knowledge was in the mind of Christ.
Indeed, we ought to believe what Jesus believed. But, the “best scholarship” is woefully inadequate.
For example, I own Boman’s book. I also followed along with Ed Hurst’s series on the subject. Boman’s portrayal of Hebrew thought is a woefully simplistic caricature that makes the Hebrews look like unintelligent prehistoric cavemen. The idea that Hebrews didn’t use abstract concepts is ludicrous. Boman’s work is certainly helpful in illustrating differences between the formal Hebrew written language and more common Greek, but its use of that work in understanding “Hebrew Thought” is vastly overblown. Using it to understand the mind of Christ is fraught with peril.
Similarly, Heiser’s work (I have the audiobook and is also available here at the Internet Archive) is highly speculative and suffers from numerous flaws, including novelty. The most important flaw, IMO, is how Alan F. Segal’s “Two Powers in Heaven” (1977) relies so heavily on post-Hebrew, post-exilic Jewish ideas. Heiser’s work also relies quite deeply on the assuming the veracity of extra-biblical materials…
…such as the Books of Enoch and Giants (uncovered in 1948) and the Ugaritic texts (discovered in 1928). When I want to understand the mind of Christ, I don’t reach out first for the uninspired material or for ideas that none of the Apostles taught. But, more to the point, Heiser’s thesis is based on questionable scholarship.
Jesus affirmed the the ancient Hebrew principle of marriage found in Genesis 2:24. That is what we should believe, not the modern cultural practices of sex, marriage, divorce, and adultery.
This is illustrative. I’m aware of the mythology of that location. I wrote about this in “Dr. Michael Heiser.” Here is what I wrote:
After watching this video summarizing “The Unseen Realm,” I walked away underwhelmed. Much of what he presented I’ve known about for a couple decades. For example, he talks about Mt. Hermon and the Gates of Hades in the context of Peter’s confession and the transfiguration. And he discusses the Nephilim and Tartarus. These are all topics that I’ve long been familiar with. I did not find his dramatized presentation, starring actor Corbin Bernsen, to be particularly convincing. It’s a lot of theater, but not a lot of substance, like the praise-and-worship style of his former church.
Having knowledge of ancient Hebrew thought is clearly no guarantee that one will understand the mind of Christ or understand his teachings. Jesus rooted his teaching on marriage in the ancient Hebrew notion, the same notion the permitted polygamy. This is why we can say, without hesitation:
Jesus affirmed the sanctity of a man and a woman bound for life.
For those who are interested, the Bible universally—without a single exception—defines or describes adultery as “a man having sex with a woman married to someone else.” The marital status of the man is of no importance whatsoever. It is never adultery for a man to have sex with—to bond; to marry—an unbonded woman. This is why polygyny—male polygamy—is not only permissible, but the fact of which is a necessarily and obligatory logical deduction from the principle of marriage.
See “Hypergamy or Adultery” (and the follow-up “Hypergamy and Adultery“) for an explanation on why illicit de facto polygamy (i.e. adultery) and illicit de facto divorce are behind the issues near and dear to the Manosphere.