News and the New Testament

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the weekend edition and we try to do something a little bit different usually.

So we're going to look at, since it's Christmas, this is our Christmas weekend edition and we're going to look at the New Testament, particularly the Gospels.

Dr.

Hansen has taught the Gospels and has read them in Greek, so I thought we could look at the Gospels from the point of view of such a scholar.

So we will be headed for that, but we're going to look at a few news stories first because we like to finish up the day and the news stories.

So we will start there.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back after these messages.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to hometitalock.com victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple arc protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home titlelock.com/slash Victor.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website, victorhanson.com.

Please come join us there.

We have a subscription for $5 a month or for $50 a year and you get all of the VDH ultra material.

The website does have lots of other material, articles, and podcasts that are, of course, free because they're published elsewhere.

So it is a repository of just about all of Victor's work.

I suppose one or two things escapes us, but it's definitely a great website to tap into.

So we'll welcome everybody.

Well, Victor, there's lots going on today.

Maybe the first thing I think you might want to talk about is

Dr.

Claudine Gay

apparently has more plagiarism that has been found.

This is really egregious and really kind of depressing, I think,

that she's gotten away with so much

taking of other people's work.

And I was wondering, I know you had a few more things you wanted to say about that.

Well,

I think now of her 11 articles with the latest disclosure, she's up to 60% of everything she's written has borrowed language.

What's the word they use for it?

Duplicative.

Duplicative language.

So

they don't use the word plagiarism for her.

They kick people out otherwise and do call them plagiarists, but not her.

I guess this is the age of the great plagiarist Joe Biden that has normalized plagiarism.

But there's accusations she plagiarized her PhD thesis parts of it.

So from the very beginning, and I mentioned on the earlier podcast that

when I first got to Hoover, she was up for tenure at the political science department with four articles, which no one ever gives tenure for for four articles at supposedly an elite university, but she got it.

So, what I'm getting at is she's made a career of two things.

One, getting special treatment on the basis of her race and gender, not accorded to other people.

And two,

serially, insidiously accusing institutions and people of being racist or sexist.

And that is the trajectory that the DEI candidate has today.

You have to do two things.

You have to accuse people 24-7 of being racist or sexist, homophobe, transphobe.

And then you have to be in that protected class as a victim.

Do that, and you can plagiarize.

You can tell the world that if you call for the destruction of Israel or the destruction of the Jewish people at Harvard, there's going to be no consequences.

And that's what she's done.

And, you know, Harvard, 17% in early applications, usually early applications, you know, applications for early admittance, those are the more motivated or the stronger candidates who feel that their dossiers are so strong in the old days before the rejection of the SAT or the abolition of it.

Those were the people who got the perfect SAT scores or near perfect, the perfect GPA, and they just wanted to get it over with and get their admission.

17%

dropped?

And so

she is lording over the veritable destruction of Harvard University.

Like Yale, about 80% of the people get A's, and they have to get A's because they are admitted

with qualifications that will not allow them to do the work as it has been expected, institutionalized until about five years ago.

So you get a whole group of students who have never taken the SAT test.

their GPA,

you don't know how to evaluate it, and the SA and their race and gender.

And then you expect them to do the traditional work that you bragged about was so difficult?

No, no,

you've inflated your grades.

And

the epitome of that, or I guess

the icon of that, would be the president of Harvard herself.

who can't meet the standards that she applies to students.

If she was a student

and she had duplicative language or emulative language, she would be kicked out or put on suspension, guaranteed.

And so everybody knows that.

And we know that Larry Summers was fired for suggesting there were biological differences between men and women that might account for cultural differences, that might account in the proportional underrepresentation of women in physics and math.

We know the Stanford president was fired for enhancing an illustration that went too far in suggesting this co-authored scientific paper's conclusions were conclusive.

And we know the South Carolina president university was fired for what, lifting two paragraphs in a graduation speech, but not Claudine Gay, who says that she's been singled out when we know that Liz McGill, who was next to her, was fired for saying the same thing as a white woman.

I think everybody's sick of this.

They're just sick sick of it.

And as I said earlier, it's going to go Bud Light Disney

target very quickly because once

we're into the third year of this post-George Floyd

reparations as far as retention, tenure, admissions,

and these people are going to start to come out into the workplace, and they already have.

because it started a little bit earlier, but not to the same intensity.

And employers and people in the general public are going to see these people

of all different races, all different genders, and they're not qualified to be, or they're qualified to be at the new Harvard, but they're not elites.

And yet they're going to expect elite treatment.

And people are going to say, you know what?

If I ask you what Shakespeare is, you don't even know three plays.

If I say River to the Sea, you can't tell me where the Jordan River is.

If I ask you,

What's the Pythagorean theory, you don't know.

If I ask you to distinguish a Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian column, you can't do it.

You don't know anything except these therapeutic studies courses.

And so

she's reigning over the destruction of the Ivy League.

She really is.

She doesn't even know it.

It's kind of like Declaim Maloney, right?

He was reigning over the destruction of America's most popular bear, and he didn't even know it, what he was doing.

Yeah.

And yet he destroyed that brand.

Don't you think that the board is hoping that she'll step down?

But I have a feeling she's

on the chessboard, she's not going to move.

No, because they know that if she does not step down, the only people are going to complain are a few alumni.

They have a $50 billion endowment, so they don't need to raise another penny the rest of their lives.

And

maybe they'll say something, but if they do fire her or she steps down,

you've got the Middle Eastern students, students, you've got the DEI students, you've got the left-wing socialist students, you've got the

media, you've got the squat, you've got all of those people.

That's what they're scared of.

When they were testifying, that was the one thing they were scared of.

They thought, you know what?

I will say or concede anything except even the slightest smidgen of an attack on DEI.

So when they asked me about normalizing hatred of Jews or the destruction of Israel, I don't care.

I can say that.

I can say that it depends on the context.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to say at Harvard.

But if somebody asked me, would you say that about black?

Yeah.

I mean,

I'm not going to be fired.

So they know, they put their finger in the air and they know where the power is and they make the necessary adjustments.

So she's going to stay in it just to protect that exclusive group of people that are there.

It's not even exclusive anymore.

It's the majority.

If you look at the class class that's coming in at Stanford, it's 20% white.

And the majority are DEI people.

And the faculty that are hired are DEI.

It's the strangest thing in the world that

we've created this mythology that the last 30 years there hasn't been something called affirmative action.

I can remember...

I think it was 1980, I'll be very candid.

I had a PhD at 25 and a half.

And I went to, I was about the only military historian in the United States.

And

there was a great job at the U.S.

Naval Academy for a classical military historian.

And I applied.

I did a great job, I thought.

They asked me dozens of questions,

Greece and Rome, culture, history, language.

And then I remember this officer coming over and he said, you know,

I don't, you did a very good job and we'd like to hire you, but we're not going to hire you.

We're sorry.

We're going to hire a woman.

It's just the the way it is.

And I said, are you going to resign?

Because you're a white male.

And he said, no, no, no, no.

We have to.

So don't feel bad, but you're not going to get this job.

And I went there, you know,

22 or three years later, and it was still the same.

So this has been going on for 45 to 50 years,

but not in the repertory and the idea that it's not gauged to proportional representation anymore.

We're going to have over-representation to make up for supposed pathologies.

And basically, the subtext is, if you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, these universities are saying,

we don't want one working-class white male, not one, because if we get down to 20 or 30% whites and we have 55% women, we're down to about 9 to 15% whites male.

And the only people we can accommodate are the $10 million donors and some athletes and the children of deans and provosts and full professors.

And there's no room for you guys from Missouri who are merucratic.

Just don't even apply.

That's the message.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn now to Israel.

And I know that the

Israelis are getting a lot of pressure from our administration not to or to hold back.

Do you think they are are holding back or how do you think the war is going in?

They're taking a lot more casualties than they need to.

Yeah, I think they are.

They're not doing what we did in Fallujah.

They're dropping leaflets, they're texting, they're being very careful what they do, but

who are they fighting against?

They're fighting against people, and they've killed about 8,000 of them, that don't wear uniforms, that blend in with the population, that are shielded by the population, whether voluntarily or by coercion.

They're tunneled in a subterranean labyrinth, multi-billion dollar complex, and they're under Moss hospitals and schools.

And they've got a Tody press and

disinformation officers in Hamas.

We know now that the head of one of the largest hospitals who's been telling us about all of the

statistics on deaths is a Hamas operative.

And Hamas was really running the hospital.

So yeah, I mean, they're going into the gates of hell.

They're going into the ninth level of the inferno.

Are they getting the job done?

And they are.

They do.

I think they're about 60% done with destroying the high echelon, the labyrinth complex beneath the city.

I think they're filling it full of water.

That will take a couple of months.

And the next big step is they've got to go after the people in Ghadr and Beirut who are probably fleeing to Turkey for asylum to our stalwart, loyal NATO ally under Mr.

Erdogan,

who said he would like to send missiles into Gaza and to attack the IDF after he had said a year ago that he wanted to send missiles in to kill the Greeks

in Athens.

After another year, he said that the Armenians should be dealt with in the way that his Turkish grandfathers dealt with him.

Make the necessary conclusions.

That means a Holocaust.

Why that scoundrel is even in NATO, I don't know.

Yeah, yeah.

Well,

last topic that

we've been, or that this of this week, sorry, last topic of this week,

there's more decadence going on in Jill Biden's, among Joe Biden's staffers.

And I was wondering.

Decadence, that's a value judgment.

Decadence?

You mean a deviation from the norms?

Perversity, I don't know.

You say Mr.

De La Rosa doesn't have a right as a gay man to go through three security checkpoints into an off-limits area of the Spanish Intercontinental Hotel because it's under tight security, because he is the press secretary for Jill Biden, the wife of the President of the United States, and he must.

He must obey certain security clearances so he doesn't talk or breach secrecy that might affect the security of the United States in these NATO discussions.

Wait, but didn't he bring a person with him that he had just met?

Yeah, he picked up a guy.

He said, well, we had Tapas at a restaurant.

It was going well.

And I went to, it wasn't on an app.

I met him in person.

So I met a guy and I wanted to have a one-night.

And I almost got through.

I got through two of the three checkpoints.

And then they said, what are you doing?

He said, I'm bringing my gay pickup.

Are you a homophobe?

And they said, sorry, he's not cleared.

And he did it, they said, twice.

And he said, only once, and then he started leaking.

And why did all this come out now?

That was in 2022.

Oh, really?

I thought it was just this week.

No, no, no, no.

It came out now because he was a nobody, a nothing burger, and he thought he would inflate like Anonymous did his credentials.

So he went on MSNBC and he went on CNN after he was fired, and he talked about his intimate knowledge of the first family.

And Ashley Biden had COVID and the cat did this.

And they got angry at him.

So they said, you know what, that SOB is exaggerating his role in the White House, and he's disclosing things that are embarrassing to us.

So we're just going to leak and call up a couple of reporters and

tell them why we fired him.

And so I guess your point is, you asked me about embarrassing.

So the connection is that we had the,

we discussed last time, the Hollywood party where those guys, some of them were allegedly trans dancers in the White House at Christmas, as if it was a carnival at Halloween.

And then we

had the guys, you said, that took the oath with the pornographic gay books instead of the Bible.

And

we mentioned that at the White House party, the topless trans

sex dance.

He was very proud of his bought

breasts.

He was.

They weren't his.

They were somebody gave them to him, either through implants or hormone.

They were implants.

And then we forgot Mr.

Sam Brinton.

Remember him?

Oh, yeah.

The lipstick, the bald head, the moustache, the dress, the serial thief that would steal clothes from people.

And then

he would lie about, oh, I just picked it up.

I opened it up and there's a bunch of dresses.

How did that happen?

Yeah,

why do they all collect in this administration?

Could it be?

One of two reasons, one of three reasons.

They have made it clear that they want to destroy norms as we know it, and so that attracts a lot of people.

I'm being facetious, but I'll throw it out there.

Choice two,

that people

who have deviant behavior look at the first family and they think, wait a minute, didn't Joe Biden walk around naked and scare

Secret Service agents when he was vice president?

Yeah, I remember that.

Didn't Ashley lose her diary and say that she took showers too long with her dad?

Yeah, I remember that.

Didn't Hunter take pictures of his own phallus and Coke with the cooker?

Yeah, I remember that.

Didn't Frank Biden, the presidential brother, take selfies of him in full nude

photos?

And they ended up on a gay porn?

Yeah, I remember that.

Hey, I want to join that group.

I like to do that stuff.

Didn't they have an Easter, they had

an Easter bunny that was twerking?

Yeah.

Yes.

They did, I remember.

It was so weird.

Yes.

Yeah.

So they all, so

the subtext was, if you've got hatred of American norms, the, you know, the heterosexual, traditional family with its bourgeoisie tastes and its 2.2 kids and its suburban three-car garage and the rat race, and you come to us and we are where it's at.

And that's sort of what they said.

And we're going to unite the country.

That's what we're going to to do.

No more Donald Trump.

We're going to unite the country under these values.

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

All right, Victor.

Well, let's.

Oh, wait, one thing he said.

I remember he said one thing.

He said, it's not as bad as the Secret Service.

And what he meant was, you remember under Obama, the Secret Service was always getting arrested for partying, prostitution, drunk, because Obama had all these hires that had not been vetted?

Well, he's saying they did it.

So we just followed in their footsteps.

Yeah.

You know, when you were talking about it, I was remembering the South American incident where those guys, that was the big one, where they, I don't know what they did, they were drunk.

They weren't seeing hookers and they had wild parties and they were drunk.

And, you know, it's.

The usual debauchery of an administration.

No, they same thing in the military.

They had an officer who they there's some kind of gay group and they dress up as they put canine type of costumes on and they have a club.

And this is in the military.

And then they wonder why they're 40,000 recruits short.

You don't want to join?

Yeah.

Why wouldn't you want to join?

This is the kind of stuff we do.

It's great.

Why wouldn't you want to join?

Oh, you think that we're hunting out, just because we said we're hunting out white rage, supremacy, and privilege?

Hmm.

Who cares if you got vaccinated

if you had COVID three times?

You've got to get vaccinated or you're out.

Is that why you're not...

They're just.

Every time I talk about this, I get some letter from somebody in the military.

It's CC'd usually.

Mr.

Hanson, I don't want to break the news to you, but you're totally erroneous.

There is a reason why people are not joining the Army.

It's because they're obese and we're in dire competition with the private sector with low unemployment.

Some of them are taking drugs.

Some of them are in gangs.

So we don't have the pool that we used to.

It has nothing to do with the fact that we are woke and we go after certain demographics that are not DEI.

Okay, if you want to believe that,

but all you have to do is look at the demographics that you keep, not me, and see which particular group has not been in listing

in the past.

And it tends to be white males from rural and southern states.

Yeah.

Case made.

Let's go ahead and stop there and

for take have a few messages and then we'll come back and talk about the New Testament for our Christmas episode.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show and Victor has spent 20 years teaching and part of that time was spent teaching especially the Gospel of John in Greek.

But he has read the entire thing in Greek.

And so I'm kind of excited to learn about the Gospels from

a scholar's point of view, Victor, and what are we supposed to think about them and how are we supposed to understand these Gospels and when were they written and all that kind of stuff?

Go ahead, let us know.

Well, I could, I mean, that's a, I'm a classical scholar, not a biblical scholar, but I have read the New Testament several times in Greek and the Apographa, and I've read my favorite is Revelations, I confess, although it's very difficult to read.

But

I taught at Cal State and other places the New Testament, and especially the Gospel John.

And so there were all these, in the period after Jesus' death, roughly from, I don't know, 50, 60 AD all the way into the 200s, there were competing narratives, and some of them were based on an oral tradition, because everybody thought Jesus was coming back to life.

So they felt no reason, you know what I mean, to chronicle his life.

They thought any day he would be back on earth.

So most of it was an oral tradition.

So by the time people figured out that he wasn't coming back, or had not coming back, or that people who said they were Jesus

and had been resurrected were not, they began systematically to write down what they remembered either.

And these are people who were probably not alive during Jesus' life.

So they were dealing with either a mysterious, I don't know why, I can't remember, it was Q or something, it was an unknown body of literature.

that doesn't exist now, but they had access.

And we know they had access to it because in the four gospels,

except for John, there's similar passages that must have come from an original, which we lost, originals.

And so there were all these competing gospels.

There's the Gospel of Judas.

I think when I saw the 30 coins, you know, one of those weird episodes in that Spanish horror movie,

they were talking about Judas as being sort of the savior of Christianity.

I think Satan was saying that.

And the idea was that,

and I think that came from the Gospel of Judas, because I have read that.

And the argument is sort of:

if I hadn't tested Jesus and I I hadn't betrayed him,

then he might not have been crucified.

And if he hadn't been crucified, then he wouldn't have suffered for your sins and have forgiven.

And therefore, I'm really to be praised.

Okay, God is.

And I think they picked up on that gospel.

They have little suggestions of that in that series, which I kind of like.

But there's four of them that were canonized by the first century, and the most authoritative of the early one is Mark.

And

then Matthew and Luke are based on Mark.

I think they're called, they have a word for it, the

synoptic tradition.

And they have themes about, we're going to tell the story of his incomplete life, where he was born, you know, the Gospel of Luke.

The whole world was to be taxed by Caesar Augustus, the baby and the man.

It goes through the life.

And then there are the miracles.

And the miracles are to show you in those gospels that he has supernatural powers, and only God could,

only a person who was acting through God or with God or by God's order could do those things.

And Mark is, as I remember, around 60, 65 AD, the Neronian age, during the persecution.

And these are written somewhere in eastern Mediterranean by people who either were pretty good writers, probably Aramaic speakers, but they wrote fluently in Greece.

And we don't know these names mean.

These names were attached to these Gospels, not at the time they were written, probably.

And then

Mark and Luke then follow in that tradition.

Of all of the four, the most beautifully written is Luke.

It's more of a classical Greek

and it's kind of difficult.

Mark and Matthew are kind of difficult.

There's certain

word order,

they don't repeat vocabulary

and they follow classical rules of using the optative and subjunctive, et cetera, in primary and past sequence.

John is a whole different story.

That was the last one.

I think Luke and

Matthew were written around 90 or 80

and maybe earlier, 75.

And then John is 100, 110.

And we don't know who that John is.

I don't think it's John the Apostle, because when you read it,

there's no intimacy implied that he knows these people personally.

And I don't think it's John the Divine, the author of Revelations.

So

there was kind of a,

I think they have a word for it,

Johannan, a Johnian sect of people who were followers of the Apostle John.

And out of that group, they sort of collectively wrote something and they applied the name John to it.

But it's very different.

It's the easiest Greek.

And I don't mean easy because it's not good Greek.

It's just,

and most Greek is, but not always.

It's subject, verb, predicate,

and it repeats vocabulary.

So you can read the Gospel of John with a Greek vocabulary of about 1500 words, maybe even less.

And it's very rare into past sequence, so there's not a lot of octaves.

The main verb is in the aorist or past tense, you don't get subordinate clauses necessarily in the octave as classical grammar would dictate.

You do, but not all the time.

There's not a lot of

use of what we call the oblique cases.

So Greek is very intricate because

As everybody knows, the nouns change their spelling depending on, nouns and adjectives, depending on how they're used grammatically in a sentence.

So we have a nominative, when it's the noun, it's spelled a certain way, when it's the possessive or genitive,

when it's the dative or indirect object, and when it's the accusative.

But as this koine spread throughout the Mediterranean and it became more accessible to millions of people,

they began to use either reduplicative prepositions.

So rather than just saying,

I talk to you, and you would put

that soi in the dative,

they would put para, they would put our pros, or

an additional preposition to give you a second chance, so to speak.

And the cases are not so intricate.

If you read Aeschylus or in poetry or Thucydides, Those cases can mean a lot of different things.

And it's very hard to know the exact complexion of them without help

from prepositions.

And so that's why, you know, you can take a sentence in Greek, and it's two sentences in English.

It's so concise

and Tacitian, to use the Latin term.

Tacitus is that way too.

But my point is, it tries to help a person understand in every possible way the Greek language can be simplified.

But it has a beautiful rhythm and tone to it.

And it begins with, you know, inte arge in hologo, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, from God.

And it's more metaphysical, and it's trying to explain

Christianity or God through

the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

And the Holy Ghost is this logos, this rational plan for the universe.

that is part of God's plan.

And so when you look at the miracles, I think there's not very many of them.

There's the raising of Lazarus from the dead and feeding of the hungry and walking on water, the famous ones, and turning water into wine.

But they're not there to show you how powerful he is, or they're not there to show you that he is divine.

They're there to show you the mystical powers of belief in God, that he can transcend the physical world and he can do things that don't make sense unless you believe in the Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirit,

the manifestation of God in the physical

corporal world on earth.

So the Logos is kind of like the Holy Spirit.

And so the whole Gospel of John,

it doesn't seem to be derivative of the archetype Mark in the way that Matthew and Luke were.

And those three, the synoptic gospels, are just different.

And it's very valuable because

it has some information that you won't find in the three other gospels.

And just because it's the last one doesn't mean that it's inexact.

Some of the topographical references when he's traversing the Holy Land are more accurate than the other Gospels.

So whoever this group was that collectively wrote it, or one person within these disciples of John, They had some pretty accurate information through the oral tradition that goes back to the life of Jesus.

But more importantly, they had

a mission to show people.

The main purpose of John is to assure you that if you believe in the divinity of God as manifested through Jesus Christ and you accept him as your Lord and Savior,

then you will have everlasting water, the water of life.

You will be saved in the next world.

And that

there are times in John when that almost suggests even if you are a sinner and you're not part of an organized religious cult or group group or,

you know,

observant church, you can still have a relationship with this Holy Spirit, the Lagos, and Jesus Christ as a window into God's will and plan, and

you will inherit everlasting life.

So it's kind of a mystical, a direct appeal to a person.

And it's from that gospel, I think, in some ways,

during the various manifestations of the later church, the Reformation, came up this modernist idea, and you heard it in the 60s.

I can talk to God myself.

I believe in Jesus Christ.

I read the gospels.

I follow the Ten Commandments, and therefore, even though I haven't been baptized or had communion or whatever particular ritual, I can still go to heaven.

There are areas in that gospel that would justify that

in a way that the other three are not concerned with it.

So I found that if I had students

and I had them in one semester

and I went through, let's say, two-thirds of Greek grammar and I was able to impart a vocabulary of a thousand words, they couldn't read Thucydides, obviously, and maybe they would struggle with Xenophon and Lysias.

But if I gave them the New Testament, especially with the American Bible Society, has a lexicon in the back.

In fact,

if the students had Latin, there is a wonderful edition where you have Latin from the Vulgate translation of Jerome on one page and then you have John on the other, or all of the Gospels.

So then I could have students could, if they get stuck in Greek, they look at Latin rather than just kind of a lobe English Greek.

So I found that it was very effective.

And then once in a while I would offer it as an advanced class.

And I learned a lot because I had some very devout Hispanic Catholic students that had gone to Catechism in those days, and I had a lot of

evangelicals, and so

they were just fascinated by particular words and what they meant and how they were interpreted in the English versions that they'd read in church.

So it was a pretty good class.

It's a good thing to teach.

I read it from now and then,

not just to keep up with Greek, because it's not the type of Greek that's going to, the vocabulary is different than classical Greek.

So if you're going to sit down, And you just want to relax and you want to read, say, John, not Luke, but but say Mark or Matthew, but especially John, if you want to read it, you can read it about 50% of the rate of English.

But if you really want to be taxed and you want to read classical Greek, even Xenophon and Lysias, it's a little slower.

But if you want to read something like Polybius or Thucydides, it's outside of the speeches.

I mean, even the narrative is difficult.

It takes a lot.

So it's a relaxing way to read Greek.

And then the content, of course, is why you read it.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Do you think that the nature of

John's gospel, the nature of the language and the words when it's translating into English,

does it translate well?

Is the English still

similar to that?

Is it...

I think it's a little different, Colt.

When you read Luke, and all the world shall be tacked, it's beautiful in English.

The King James Version captures pretty well the elevated tone of the Greek.

But when you read

John, it's more, it's moving, and it's not bad Greek, it's just very easy to understand.

It's colloquial almost.

And yet the King James has an elevated translation that's a little bit two notches above what I think most people who read it, who were Aramaic speakers.

It's designed for people in the...

in the Holy Land, I think, but also in the evangelical movement whose first language was in the Holy Land Aramaic,

and then maybe

Koine Greek.

In other words, somebody in the Hellenistic,

what is now Asia Minor, or somebody down in Alexandria, who couldn't understand classical Greek very well, but they could understand Koine.

It's written in Koine Greek.

Koine Greek just means that the vocabulary is not as big.

The classical rules of variatio, you don't repeat vocabulary are out the window.

There's a greater tendency to have an English word order.

The sentences are,

you don't have a lot of purpose or result clauses that go on and on in subordination.

So

the sentences are maybe 15 to 20 words rather than 50.

There's no articular affinitives, very few, which are a way of denoting purpose in classical Greek.

It's just much easier.

It replicates the spoken Koine language much more than classical Greek represents classical spoken Greek.

We know that because in Aristophanes' comedies we see characters are speaking as if they're just alive.

And to some degree in Euripides too, when you have a stychomythia, two characters bantering back and forth, and you compare that with the narrative of classical Greek, it's pretty different.

If you were an Athenian, in 430 and you heard Pericles' funeral oration, it would be like somebody from Fresno trying to understand somebody read the Federalist Papers.

It's that difficult.

That could not be understood by most Athenians, the way that that's composed.

It was written by a brilliant stylist, Thucydides, but not to replicate, to imagine what he said,

or to convey what he said, but in a way that Thucydides would pick and choose how to make it more persuasive in his manner of writing and styling emphases.

Yeah.

So

you think that John was written so that non-Greek speakers could read it.

And, you know,

they may not be Greek speakers, but they probably had some access to some of the Greek language.

And so it was meant for.

Not just them, it would be people.

Remember that by the first century AD, the locus of power in the Roman Empire,

because of the acquisition from the Sulukids and from

the Atalids and from the Ptolemies and the inheritance of Alexander's kingdom.

The biggest, most powerful, and richest cities, say, in the first century AD, were starting to be places like Alexandria and Antioch and

Pergamum and Ephesus and no longer just, you know, Syracuse or

Rome or even New Carthage.

So,

and those who were speakers of Greek, their first language was Greek.

What was interesting is, say, in the 6th century AD in Constantinople under the Byzantines was that Justinian and Belisaris were actually Latin speakers.

That was rare.

The official language of the Eastern Empire, probably by the 4th or 5th century, 5th or 6th century, was Greek.

And all the scientific work was in Greek.

So they're trying to take this Aramaic oral tradition and translate it into a common Greek with no affectation.

It's not like the second sophistic, that's a fancy term for Roman scholars and students who in Roman times tried to write like Thucydides or classical Athenians,

very difficult to read them.

Aelius Aristides is just out of classical Greek, even though he's a Roman.

But my point is that it's written for two audiences.

the Greek-speaking Eastern and majority of the empire, and especially for people

who are not Greek-speaking, but they have some knowledge of Greek, and that knowledge would allow them to understand a Koine written Greek with some difficulty.

Yeah.

So it was intended to

spread the gospel.

Yeah, I mean, the gospel,

somebody will probably be listening because I'm doing this off the top of my head, but

it's the spiel, that Germanic Anglo-Saxon word for news,

and then then

gut, got G-O-D in Anglo-Saxon early is, it's not related to

God

doesn't, the word good is not from God.

They're two different roots, even though they sound almost the same.

But it's from the root good.

So gah spol is good news.

And that is an Anglo-Saxon Germanic word to try to capture what they were known as.

The Gospels were known as Evangelismos, Ev the I U,

we would say in English, good,

and evangelismos.

An angelos is not just an angel.

An angel is a messenger, a messenger of news.

So these are good news.

These are things you can read that feel good, and

they're holy, and they're upright.

And so you read them.

And then that was translated as gospel in the Middle Ages.

Got it.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Victor.

Let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about the Department of Defense.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back.

Victor, so I was recently looking at the Department of Defense has failed its audit audit for the sixth year in a row, and it can only pass seven of 29 components.

So

you were talking about the terrible recruitment, but the

DOD itself is just,

I can't,

it's shocking that they don't have to pass their audit, especially on more components than just seven.

I think we've got a big problem.

I mean, if you look at some of, we just had another crash of the osprey.

I know that in hours, total hours of use versus

wrecks.

I don't know what it is.

Maybe it's only three wrecks per 100,000 hours of use, but it's too high.

And that concept of a helicopter that turns into a plane was problematic, and yet they went ahead with it.

The Marines did.

The F-22

has been stopped at about, I don't know what, is 170 planes.

And even the F-35 is way overcost, and we're not going to build as many of them.

We had something called the littorial ship that was supposed to be able to operate in shallow waters, maybe even an amphibious, that's kind of scrapped.

The latest Gerald Ford carrier, I think the price went up.

They had a new type of catapult.

It went up from something like 12 billion to 14 billion.

So what these audits would show if they were there is that whatever the Pentagon says that this is the price and what they need.

is not going to be the eventual cost.

And then when they say they need so many platforms, they're never going to get as many platforms.

And so, what won World War II was we were able to make thousands of B-24s, B-17s, even B-29s cheaply.

And they were easy to operate.

And we had 12 million people.

But when you have a military that's at the smallest number since World War II,

we are doubling down on these very, very expensive, very scarce weapon systems.

So when you lose an F-35, you're losing 100 million bucks.

If you lose an F-22, you're losing $140 million.

And you don't have very many people.

But

we're facing enemies now that are

churning out $100,000 drones,

thousands of them.

And so when these Houthis send over all these drones that are Iranian or Chinese designed,

They cost about $100,000.

And they may have, you know, three or four hundred pounds of explosive they can take and make a big hole.

And we're spending three or four million dollars with sophisticated guided missiles that take them down.

And that's the whole point.

So if you had an outside audit that looked at weapons

acquisitions and the need for them and the utility and how many hours of maintenance versus operation, like we used to.

I mean, after all, that's how Harry Truman became vice president.

He was on a war munitions audit board, and he was looking at aircraft engines that were defective and et cetera.

And so

how do you rectify that?

And I know I'm going to get a lot of people angry that some of them I greatly admire, but I do think

that we have to have a window that if you're a two, three, four-star general admiral and you retire,

you cannot for four or five years be a lobbyist or a defense contractor board because they're not hiring you for your brilliance in thinking up of a weapon system.

They have people to do that.

They're hiring you because of your contacts in the Pentagon in acquisitions, deployment, and they want, you know, Northrop versus Raytheon versus, I don't know, Lockheed versus General Dynamics.

They want their guy to compete with the other guy's guy to get a contract.

And you've got to have an audio.

You've got to stop all that.

No more revolving doors.

I mean, Lloyd Austin came right out of Raytheon.

It's not good.

No.

I'm not suggesting he's done anything wrong.

I have no idea whether he has.

I doubt he has.

But I'm just thinking that you can't ask a person who's getting several hundred thousand, if not several million dollars a year, to be in the Pentagon when he sees his former employer with a weapon system to be disinterested when he knows he's going to go back and work for him when he's done.

It just, it's crazy.

So they need to have an audit.

They need to audit manpower.

They need to look at...

I mean, look at the chief recruitment officer for the Air Force.

I won't even mention his name.

All he did

was harangue pilots that were white males.

We've got 85%, you know, our pilots are not going to look like them.

And he just kind of destroyed the idea of merit.

And then he retired.

Oh, I did that.

I'm gone.

My lucrative retirement.

And so there's no accountability.

And that's why

You know,

that's another, I don't want to beat another dead horse, but if you have a uniform code of military justice

and

you're going to can or court-martial

an enlisted man who takes a picture of a submarine and he happens to have the console in it and he sends it to his wife, and that's disclosing top secret information, and it is,

and then you're going to have generals who who violate the same code of military

behavior when they disparage publicly, serially, insidiously the commander-in-chief, and they use words like Nazi and liar

and Russian puppet.

And

what did Hayden, the retired Air Force general, said Trump is like Auschwitz in his border policy?

There's a big problem there, and we've got to look at it.

And then you look at the military academies and they have these woke programs.

And part of the problem, to tell you the truth, is when you talk to high-ranking officers, they're very loyal to the military, and they should be, they're very good, but they feel they're not in a position to be critical.

And they're not.

And so I think you need an audit of recruitment, you need an audit of who is leaving the military and why,

and why people, which demographic is not re-enlisting, and why,

and which weapon system is being chosen, and why.

And we've got to get away from this idea of multi-multi-million-dollar platforms, whether vehicles or rockets or

aircraft, and very few of them that we cannot afford to use or we can't afford to lose, where we need cheap weapons, a lot of them, and automatic weapons.

We should be blanketing

the Pacific with

submarine drones, with surface craft drones, with air drones.

You know what I'm saying?

That's what our enemies are doing.

Yeah.

I want to turn then to Lee Smith, who had a really fine article and tablet.

It was titled The Global Empire of Palestine.

And he was looking at the support, not just the Palestinians themselves, but that throughout the world there was all these protests and that was part of their empire as he had it.

And he comes to

near the end where he says that once this crushing military defeat has been suffered by the Palestinians, the United States, Europe, and the Gulf Arab states are going to just go in there and revitalize them.

And he says this about that, and I thought it was very interesting.

By continually revitalizing the Palestinians, by giving them new life, the stewards of global affairs have engendered something that by definition cannot survive in nature on its own.

A society that celebrates death as its highest value.

And I was wondering if you had some reflections on that.

Well, you know,

after the Six-Day War, I think the PLO was formed a couple years before that, and then Arafat was ahead of that fatah, then they made him, after the Six-Day War, I think it was,

the head of the PLO.

And that's when we started to see the global phenomenon of Palestinian hijackings and terrorism over the loss of the 1967 war and the acquisition of the West Bank and Sinai, etc.

And then all of the attacks in Europe, Munich, etc.

And from that moment on, we've had a half a century of people from Gaza and the Middle East and Libya and Arab countries.

and bin Laden is the greatest example, who have terrorized the West and

terrorized

autocratic

Middle East countries, especially oil-rich Gulf kingdoms.

So my point is that when you ask yourself, why are the Palestinians coddled?

Why are we giving money to Hamas?

Why is the UN in favor of Hamas?

Why are they giving so much money that when you look at that,

gosh, when you look at, There was a picture the other day of an earth mover in Gaza.

I mean, they were taking the most sophisticated British and German technology and drilling holes as if they were going through the Swiss Alps.

And where does all that money come from and why does it come?

And the answer, of course, is it's dangued.

It's a bribe.

It's blood money.

It's, we're going to give you all this and you're going to behave and don't hurt us.

And every once in a while, it's just like the mafia that goes around to mom and pop stores in the 1940s and says, here's your monthly check.

And if you don't pay, then you may, you know, have a fire.

Well, if you don't pay us this money, you might have a terrorist incident, especially in places like France.

So they shake down this money and then they did something very brilliant.

In the last 20 years, the Gulf kingdoms, and I just mean the Emirates, but especially Ghadar, Saudi, Kuwaitis, they wanted to be protected as well from Palestinians and Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Muslim Brotherhood.

So they began lavishing Western universities, but in particular American universities and not Cal State Fresno.

Talking Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale,

Duke, places where they had prestige and they turned out the nation's next generation of diplomats, military, a whole elite.

And they started creating these huge Middle Eastern programs.

And then these Middle Eastern programs got students and they proselytized and got American students.

They were the conduit for hundreds of thousands of people on scholarships that come from the Middle East that paid tuition.

The universities loved it.

And the next thing you know, they

institutionalized the idea that the Israelis were horrible people and settlers and interlopers and the Palestinians were noble victims.

And nobody ever said,

wait a minute.

Why are they the only refugees?

You know what?

I shouldn't say nobody.

Did you see Sammy

Robert Kennedy on Ville Maher?

Yes, I did.

Oh my God.

I have never seen a politician speak.

No, it wasn't Vill Maher.

It was CNN.

And he just shredded that host.

I have never seen a politician be so blunt and honest.

And he just tore apart Hamas.

And she gave all the boiter plate stereotype little rejoinders, and he just ruined them.

He did.

He said, they could have been Singapore.

You've seen seen the beaches.

They have billions of dollars.

Why are they the only refugees?

Why is a million or a million Jews that were ethnically cleansed for the Middle East, they're not refugees?

Why aren't Cypriots refugees?

Why aren't Armenians that were expelled from Turkish?

Why aren't Greeks that were ethnically cleansed out of Asia Minor?

Why aren't Germans that were forced marched out of Prussia?

But why are they the only refugees?

And

why are the Israelis the only one who have to be proportionate?

Did anybody at Harvard, did Colleen Gray, say, you know what?

It is October 7th.

And they went in and murdered over 1,100 men, women, children, mostly unarmed civilians, raped them, mutilated, decapitated them, committed necrophilia, put babies in ovens.

And the IDF hasn't done anything.

It's now October 27th.

They still haven't replied.

It's been three weeks.

But we're still going to condemn them for being disproportionate, and they're settlers.

And that's because she understands where the locus of power is, as I said earlier.

But it'll all stop if people say, you know what?

We're not going to do it anymore.

And if you come over here from the Middle East and you commit a felony, you're going to go back immediately.

We're going to lift your student visa.

And we're going to stop accepting money from foreign donations, just like we shut down the Confucius Institutes, which are resurfacing under different names because they were fronts for communist China.

And we're not going to let people who work for the Iranian government come here and teach at universities.

It'd be like in 1945 asking,

you know,

I don't know,

you would ask Alfred Rosenberg to come over here and lecture on genetics at Harvard

from the Third Reich.

Or,

I don't know, it just doesn't make any sense.

And when they look at this, I think everybody has to understand that our

magnanimity is not winning admiration.

They hate us for it.

They look at that and they say, what decadent people.

If I were them and I said this about them, or if somebody said this about me the way that I've said this about them, I would go ballistic and I would respect people for that.

And that's what,

you know,

they can call Trump a dictator, but, you know, you just get down to the reductionist man in the street.

And when they look at those four years, they say, hmm,

Iran didn't do anything, did they?

Solemny lost his life.

Did they do anything?

Nope.

Who?

The Houthis?

Were they

destroying Red Sea navigation and commerce?

No.

Was Vladimir Putin going into

trying to have a thunder road into Kiev?

No.

No, no, no, no.

Was ISIS bragging about beheading on TV with making people wear jumpsuits so they cut off their heads?

No.

They stopped that.

And was North Korea saying, I'm going to take out Portland?

No, they'll take out Seattle.

No, no, no, no, no.

Was he sending missiles over Japan?

No.

Was Mr.

Oberdor bragging about green lighting millions of people?

Ha ha ha.

We lost the Mexican war, but now we're winning.

Ha ha ha ha.

No.

He was afraid of getting out of NAFTA.

He was afraid of big taxes on remittances.

And so that should tell you something about human nature, that there is such a thing called deterrence.

And they know it, too.

And, you know, Donald Trump may have, you know, erred by being a little bit crude in his tweets, but he saved a lot of lives by restoring deterrence.

And

Biden destroyed it.

And people died.

A lot of people died.

Yeah, you know, when I I was reading about the DOD, it said that the DOD was forced into these audits in 2017 when Donald Trump was in, and that for two decades before they hadn't been doing it.

So just to give Donald Trump another chalk one up for him.

He's a business person,

and he was trying to,

he was always bragging how he renegotiated the helicopters for

Helicopter One and Air Force One.

And

they, again, I've said this on these broadcasts, but the problem that we're having is the left looks at all this and they're looking at Trump and they're saying, oh my God,

we impeached that SOB two times in his first term the moment he lost his majority.

My God, we tried him as a private citizen.

Oh my God, we created this whole Russian collusion hoax and ate up 22 months of his administration.

Oh my God, we won that election with it.

Right before the debate, we got away with having having a bunch of lying 51 intelligence authorities claiming that Hunter's authentic laptop is Washington's information.

Oh my God.

We took a buffoonish riot and turned it into the greatest insurrection in American history.

Yeah.

We've done all this.

And guess what?

He's, and now we're, we raided his house over this dispute over classified documents.

And now we've got four prosecutors and the guy's still alive?

and we haven't killed him or bankrupt him or driven him insane, and he's leading the Republican pack, and he's polling at least ahead of Joe Biden.

If I was Donald Trump

and I had suffered that from us,

and I was a viable candidate for the president, I know what we Democrats would do.

The moment we got in there, we would make these people pay.

So he must, he has to think just like we do.

And actually, he doesn't.

And that's why they call him a dictator, and they're going crazy right now.

Well, I would like to end this episode on a high note, so I'm going to go down the Hunter rabbit hole for just one second.

Well, the Bidens are trying to suggest that James Comer's 160-acre farm is like Hunter Biden's shell companies.

And I was wondering if you had at least a defense of James Comer on that accusation.

You know, I had a,

when the Iraq war got really heated, I, you know,

I said the surge was going to work, and I supported David Petraeus and all that, and I got in big trouble.

And I had some journalists come out, and one of them wrote something about,

I'm going to interview Victor Hansen.

He called me up and said, I hear you have, your family has 180 acres And when he doesn't know anything about California farmland,

and you know, that 10,000 acres, 100,000 acres.

Is impressive.

Yes,

180 acres shared by five separate families turns out to be 35 acres per family.

So

this person, I won't even tell you their gender or the newspaper they came out.

So they came out with a story and they asked me, and I said, you know, this is going to be very interesting.

And they said, we want to meet all of your Mexican servants and all this.

And

they didn't meet any, right?

And then they saw people who were working side by side with my brother, my kids that happened to be Mexican, making the same salary as my children and working side by side.

And they looked around and they saw these decrepit buildings.

And my house was falling apart.

And

everybody had old cars.

I had like seven wrecked cars in the driveway.

And this person says,

instead of thinking, we can't write the story she said

I shouldn't say she this is pathetic oh man as if I was a loser you know she got even happier she didn't write the story she went back and wrote something about me that I was a nut but she didn't say that I was an exploitive anti-Caesar Chavez grasping farmer but more or less that I was a failure and that you know it's kind of like Mitt Romney when he ran they all had this bain capital that he put you know that he has a picture with dollar bills, and then that didn't really work.

So then they started writing articles that,

well, compared to a normal Wall Street multi-billionaire, he only made 500 million.

He's a failure.

He thinks he's rich.

And that's the way the left is, man.

You just scrape a tiny little millimeter off that fake veneer, and you get under who they really are, and you start to see some pretty dark places.

And one of them is

not all, but a lot of people become left because they're overeducated and they're rhetorical and they don't have the money they think they deserve.

And they have an

unquenchable thirst for material things.

They want label clothes.

They want label cars.

They want label kids.

They want label degrees.

They want the whole expensive granite counters, the whole kitchen stuff.

And they let that out.

And they have contempt for people who don't have that.

They really do.

I've met so many snobbish, left-wing people and acquisitive.

Yes, and status-seeking, of course.

Yeah, I've met so many academic Marxists that I've been in meetings where they argued for three hours over $50 of travel money.

Who's going to get it?

And I've had so many people are talking about, I remember it was Ron Wagon, all of his...

Henry Salvatore and all these people.

And then you'd go out in the parking lot and they'd have this

really expensive bobo that they couldn't afford.

And

they would be smiling as they waved to you as they drove out.

I'm in a bobo.

Exactly.

That's the academic mind.

That's what you're dealing with, partly, the pseudo-Marxist.

Yeah.

And it's all about, you know, it's.

Is that what James Comer is dealing with?

I think his farm is going just fine.

Yeah, Comer's fine.

I don't have any money.

No, I know it's no money, but it's perfectly legitimate business.

I think he was an ex-financial officer at a bank.

That's why he's good at what he does.

He says, follow the money.

He knows if you write a check and put on the little left-wing line at the bottom of the check, loan repayment, then you have to actually have a loan to exist, and he can't find one.

I think everybody who gets salary can just say, loan repayment,

I don't have to report it.

it that's another thing that gets me really angry and I think a lot of people listening get really angry that SOB Biden excuse me he went around the country and he did all those intonations of pay your fair share you got to pay your fair share what's wrong with paying your fair all I'm asking is and then he did that creepy little

I'm just saying pay your fair share

And it was creepy.

And then while he was saying that, his daughter wasn't paying her taxes.

His son wasn't paying his taxes.

He wasn't paying his taxes.

His brother wasn't paying his taxes.

His sister wasn't paying his taxes.

Pay your fair share.

Creepy.

Yeah, and then he said,

I'm going to unite us.

I'm going to bring back normal values and standards.

And I talked to a friend I really like.

I won't mention any detail.

I really like him.

And I asked him who he was going to vote for.

He said, Biden.

I said, well, you don't want to vote for Biden?

Because he's going to bring back standards and values again.

And I thought, oh boy, about a year into it, I thought, hmm, values.

You blow on little girls' hair, you call them out.

Your daughter's diary surfaces where you took a shower when she was 12 or something.

That's normal.

And he's normal.

And there's Mr.

Britt is normal.

And topless trans people in twerking rabbit costume at Easter is normal.

Come on, give me a break.

And United, when he got that Phantom of the Opera set with all the red lights and satanic glow, and then he started doing that ultra-mega semi-fascist Phantom of the Opera speech.

We're going to bring everybody together.

Don't believe that stuff.

No, absolutely not.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show by a lot.

You know what?

And that one last thing.

Go ahead, yeah.

Two last things.

I felt bad for Milena.

I mean, everybody says, well, how can you feel bad?

She said,

but she really tried to do that Christmas thing.

I mean, it was really tasteful.

Yes.

And she was trying to communicate.

And when you look back at her first

ladyship, she tried to bring taste.

She wasn't arrogant.

You remember when

I think I had this right, and you listeners know better than I do, but I have a vague recollection that when

a first lady is at the inauguration, she gives a gift ceremoniously to the incoming so that Laura Bush gave a present to Michelle Obama.

Well,

when Trump was outgoing, Melania, I think, gave some type of crystal, you know, or a very nice, expensive gift to Michelle.

And she went on a talk show and gave me an interview.

Like,

what am I supposed to do with this?

I'm supposed to think I, what?

I didn't even know what to do with it.

Whoever thought this up?

She was just lying.

She'd got one herself.

And I thought that was,

you know,

I thought it was really bad.

Yeah, it was.

They treated it well on the table.

They treated her really terribly.

And then next time, you know, we were going in order with the Odyssey.

I want to do,

he's a very under-estimated oral poet.

I shouldn't say that, but he's famous, of course, 2,700 years ago, but I thought I would do The Works in Days.

Okay.

And then we'll get into Greek lyric poetry and then the great triad of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus.

That sounds nice.

And we're going to work all the way down to Hemingway and Faulkner and Thomas Wooff and and

Joseph Conrad, my favorite novelist.

Yeah, so we'll start, it will be our New Year's episode next week.

We'll be alive, don't worry.

We're going to do famous works of literature, and then maybe if we're still alive, we'll do famous generals in history.

Yeah.

Victor, thanks to our audience, and thanks to you.

That was a wonderful discussion of the gospels, just really

and different for our Christmas celebration.

So, Merry Christmas, everybody.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.