Yeah,

so my person is by far the biggest blank slate of the people who will be discussed tonight.

Most of you, I'm sure, have never heard of this person, but he's one of my favorite historical figures.

There's a book about him called The Sense of the World that is one of my favorite history books.

It's definitely my top five.

James Holman was a traveler.

He did exploration throughout Europe, North America, Africa, Australia, South America, in the Regency era approximately from the early 1800s to about the 1830s.

Are you thinking more dramatic or whimsical? Whimsical like Around the World in 80 Days? You know, it's interesting you mention that

It would focus

exclusively on his relationship with slaves and, you know, take 2023 political issues.

Exclusively is the right word, yes.

I will say, Turn was okay.

You mentioned that.

And there is some shoehorning of contemporary events.

And when I watched it, I thought, I can just imagine the studio notes and producers trying to make it even worse than what it was.

So who knows?

But how do we separate myth from fact in ancient history when it comes down to one of the most beloved and well-known stories of all time? Let's join Scott Rank of the History Unplugged podcast and find out.

What Father Longenecker has done is to look at the story of the Magi that appear in the Nativity story of Jesus and what could be the historical reality of the Magi.

Father Longenecker, when this group, the Magi, comes and we get into the nativity story itself, it never mentions in the Matthew account that there are three wise men.

I don't think we know the number, but what kind of group do you think would have been showing up? What would it have looked like? Would it have been a few people, a lot of people, high-ranking delegates, low-ranking? What's your take on who showed up there?

It's only when the Gnostic traditions grew up in the second and third centuries and Christianity shifted north and west that the east started to mean Persia.

Right.

So that explains a lot more where they're closer in distance, probably closer in culture.

I'm talking about Mary and Joseph and the Magi.

But how do we separate myth from fact in ancient history? How do we do this when it comes down to one of the most beloved and well-known stories of all time, the Nativity? Let's join Scott Rank of the History Unplugged podcast and find out.

What Father Longenecker has done is to look at the story of the Magi that appear in the Nativity story of Jesus and what could be the historical reality of the Magi.

The Matthew account never mentions that there are three of them.

He just says that they are wise men from the East who see a star and go to Jerusalem and wind up in Bethlehem.

What he's done is look at the history and look at the politics of the area of Judea in the first century and found that there very well could be a place where the so-called Magi could have come from.

And it's not Persia.

It's not the Orient, as the song goes, but Nabatea.

My own view is that they were stargazers, and that the fourth theory is that there were probably numerous things they saw in the star charts which made them draw that conclusion.

But how do we separate myth from fact in ancient history? How do we do this when it comes down to one of the most beloved and well-known stories of all time, the Nativity? Let's join Scott Rank of the History Unplugged podcast and find out.

What Father Longenecker has done is looked into the three wise men.

The story of the Magi that appear in the Nativity story of Jesus, there are a lot of embellishments to the story.

The Matthew account never mentions that there are three of them.

He just says that they are wise men from the east who see a star and go to Jerusalem and wind up in Bethlehem.

There's been a lot of details added to the story over the centuries.

Names are given to these three kings, Balthazar, Melchior, and Caspar, who come from Arabia, Africa, and India.

So that 500 years later, the time of the birth of Christ, you find this thriving, fabulously wealthy civilization there in northern Arabia.

But how do we separate myth from fact in ancient history? How do we do this when it comes down to one of the most beloved and well-known stories of all time, the Nativity? Let's join Scott Rank of the History Unplugged podcast and find out.

Our guest is Father Dwight Longenecker.

He is a Catholic priest in Greenville, South Carolina, and he's finished a fascinating new book.

What Father Longenecker has done is looked into the three wise men, the story of the Magi that appear in the Nativity story of Jesus that you can see in any Christmas pageant in America or the Christian world.

Songs like We Three Kings of Orient Are.

Well, Father Longenecker knew that there are a lot of embellishments to the story.

The Matthew account never mentions that there are three of them.

That's lifeaudio.com forward slash The Good Word.

Let's tackle the Massachusetts Salem Witch Trials that took place in 1692 with Scott Rank of the History Unplugged podcast.

the Salem witch trials.

Salem began as a limited witch hunt aimed at notorious women.

The local magistrates, John Hawthorne, Jonathan Corwin, and Bartholomew Genny, presided over the first phase of examinations.

Beginning with Sarah Good, Hawthorne interrogated the defendants in an attempt to force confessions.

Questions led with an assumption of guilt.

Rather than asking whether Good injured the four children, Hawthorne asked why she did it.

Overall,

Did witches really exist? Why were witches harassed and oppressed? Were witches men or women? What was behind witch hunts, persecutions, and burnings? Let's tackle the Massachusetts Salem Witch Trials that took place in 1692 with Scott Rank of the History Unplugged podcast.

Let's set the stage for 17th century Puritan culture.

For the Puritans, who were a breakaway from the Anglican church and believed that there didn't need to be a clerical class or a magisterium to act as an intermediary between them and the scripture, scripture was practically pumped into the air and water of the new world and they understood scripture to be a living, breathing thing.

If scripture was a word of God and it spoke into their contemporary lives, then why not govern themselves according to it, even passages from the Old Testament? So in 1641, when colonists established a legal code, one of the first capital crimes was idolatry, which stands to reason because it's mentioned in the Ten Commandments, and laws against idolatry are all over the Old Testament Levitical code.

The second law was on witchcraft, which is also mentioned in the Old Testament and there are laws against it.

The code said, if any man or woman be a witch, that is, has or consults with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death, which is what the Massachusetts body of laws read.

Blasphemy came next, and then murder, poisoning, and bestiality.

That's lifeaudio.com forward slash The Good Word.

But relying on hearsay or wild estimates for the death toll of witch trials is

unnecessary because witch trials were meticulously recorded.

If we have any good records from the Middle Ages or early modern period, it's church records or inquisition records, and the church thought that witch trials were its domain.

Based on reliable accounts and compilations from historians such as Brian Vivac and others, the total for everyone executed in the witch craze from the late 14th through the 18th century across almost 400 years were around 45,000 and those persecuted about 90,000.

And that's a terribly high amount of deaths for executions based on little more than mob justice.

But it's not 9 million people.

And most of those deaths can be attributed to religious animosity in the wake of the Reformation, rather than paranoia over the supernatural.

Puritan-style witch hunts.

Let's look back at the European history behind witch hunts, persecutions, and burnings with Scott Rank of the History Unplugged podcast.

As we head up into the Renaissance, witch hunts slowly received endorsement from the church and state.

But the witch burning craze didn't reach full hysteria until the years between 1560 and 1630.

A tipping point occurred when theologians, professors, and philosophers agreed on the existence of witches.

The doctor Procelsus and reformers such as Martin Luther validated their existence and agreed on their persecution.

The most zealous prosecutor of witches was French reformer John Calvin.

When he arrived in Geneva in the 1530s, more than 500 were convicted of witchcraft and executed during a two-year period.

That's lifeaudio.com forward slash The Good Word.