Episode 395: I Wonder If You Know Him?

So Padre, for most of us, this is a really familiar passage.

So help us understand something about the place where this is happening, but more importantly, can you try and give us all a sense of how we're supposed to read this and enter into this particular scene before the events of the Passion and the Resurrection?

Yeah, I'd love to.

I regularly, I think, when I'm reading the Scriptures, especially ones like this, I'm trying to not read this as somebody who understands everything that we understand now, but how would they have experienced in real time what it is that's happening? Because remember, despite how we see Matthew portrayed in the Chosen, Matthew's not writing around with a little diary in his hands and a pen saying, oh, I'm going to take this down because I'll bet in a couple of years it's going to be really important to publish a gospel or something like that.

The gospels are written in light of the resurrection.

And so the evangelists are all looking back at events and they're making, I mean Luke just says this quite explicitly, he's carefully selected certain moments of Jesus's life and he's reflecting on those in light of the resurrection.

Matthew's doing the same as is Mark and John.

So let's try to enter into this as best we can because there's some things happening here that that are different than probably how we hear them, okay? So first of all, where are they? So they're at a place where you and your husband Steve and I have been, been there a few times, Caesarea Philippi, also called Panias or Banias, which is at the base of Mount Hermon, which was one of the sources of the Jordan River.

So this was originally a very small town.

It was quite well known for a temple to the god Pan, P-A-N, who, to say the least, was an attractive God because it was exuberant, let's just put it that way, things that were surrounding it, and surrounding the worship of him.

The city was largely rebuilt by a man named Philip, who was King Herod the Great's son, and then he renamed it Caesarea in honor of the emperor Tiberius, so as to distinguish it from other cities, which also had the name of Caesarea.

So there's a Caesarea Maritima, for example.

So Philip adds his own name to be a part of that.

By the time you get to the age of Jesus, this has become a pretty notable Roman administrative center.

So there's a cave there, which was associated with the Temple of Pan.

In fact, when you go there today, you see this big mouth of that cave there.

And many scholars think that's exactly what Jesus is referring to when he talks about the gates of the netherworld, because that was often thought of as something like the mouth in the Hades.

Anyway, those things will factor into what it is that Jesus is saying.

Let's still try to pick apart a couple of things that we're just lingering with.

So first, the question that Jesus asks.

This is a crazy question.

I mean, imagine you, me, Rick, and Albert, the rest of the team, we're out one night, we're having drinks, and, you know, middle of dinner, I just stop everybody.

I say, so what are people saying about me?

I was like, dude, what happened to Father John? Yeah.

Kind of