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It's the turn of the Christian era. Augustus is emperor, Jesus is an infant, and a Roman soldier stationed in Alexandria in northern Egypt, the wild west of the Roman Empire, writes to his wife, Alice. Hilarion to Alice, many greetings. Know that I am still in Alexandria. Do not worry. I ask you and entreat you, take care of our child. If I receive my pay soon, I will send it up to you.
This brief, shocking letter is one of thousands of scraps of paper, that's papyrus, found throughout this region. They're now stored in museums and universities around the world.
Letters like this provide a powerful window into ancient life, its troubles, its personalities and its ethics. A few years after Hilarion and Alice, a group of people with a very different view of life would arrive in Alexandria with a message that challenged many of the assumptions we find in the letter. The eternal power of Rome, the divinity of Caesar and the value of individuals, especially girls.
These Christians, as they'd come to be called, left their own writings in the sands of Egypt. And without doubt, the most important of these is 86 pages of the letters of the Apostle Paul, author of much of the New Testament. Hilarion's letter is catalogued as P.O.C.Y. 4744. Paul's letters are known simply as P.46.
and they are among the most precious artefacts of ancient history. And today, we get to play with them. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Every week we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that is either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
Today, in our first episode, we're going back almost to the beginning, to about as close to the writing of the New Testament as we can get. This is our environmental room, affectionately known as the vault. That's a nice thick vault. This cabinet here is where we keep all of the leaves of the vault. Okay, so this is a locker within a locker within a locker. Exactly, a locker within a locker within a locker.
Oh, beautiful. Yeah, I'm a bit of a kid in a candy store here, surrounded by bits of paper. Two millennia old. Theta sigma, the first and last letters of the word are usually what is written. And then that abbreviation of the sacred word or the sacred name is indicated with a line over the end of it. Yeah, so not underlining, overlining.
Brendan Haug is the head archivist of the papyrology collection at the University of Michigan. I've handled ancient manuscripts before, but this was special. Normally I'm under really strict time conditions because I'm filming some docker or whatever, and I'm trying to say my lines to camera while absorbing the significance of these precious things in my hands.
But here at UM, as they call the University of Michigan, it's kind of chilled. After we recorded the interview, Brendan just let me sit there with these pages for an hour or so by myself, reading the lines, noticing scribbles, words underlined or overlined, as the case was in the ancient world. And this is our earliest copy of Paul's letters to Rome, Ephesus, Galatia, and his second letter to Corinth.
Each page, just so you can picture it, is about half an A4, or for US listeners, letter style. And it's got like 23 to 26 lines per page, just depending on what the scribe wants to do at the time. And it's all on papyrus. And we get the word paper from papyrus. This is strips of papyrus plant laid in vertical lines. And then you get a second layer and cross it horizontally. And then you press the whole thing down.
You dry it out, then you cut it to size. It's heaps cheaper than what's called parchment. This is pages made of stretched, dried animal skin. Later biblical texts, when Christianity was a little more prominent, a little wealthier, are written on parchment. But P46 is way earlier.
Now, I didn't grow up in a Christian home, nor one that did any history, actually. And so I just assumed that someone wrote something down in the Bible or some other ancient document in some funny dead language. And then someone else came along a little while later and copied it out in some other funny dead language. And by the time it gets to us in English, you know, who knows if what you're reading today...
is what was first composed. It's a really common view and it sort of makes sense, but P46 gives us a chance to test the idea. Is this the guy in question here? Yes, indeed. Oh, dear, oh, dear. Lead the way, sir. Very well. So we're a little bit different than some collections. We still put some restrictions in the sense that
I don't want you to eat, drink, or smoke while using these. No licking them, no putting them in your mouth. You'd be surprised what people will do if you don't tell them.
It's remarkable that anyone can just make an appointment at the University of Michigan Papyrology Department and come and have a look at these. Brendan actually told me to tell you all to drop on by. Preferably email him first. He's easy to find online. But how on earth did the oldest copy of Paul's letters end up here in the Midwest of the U.S.?
Collection here at the University of Michigan comprises – we estimate anywhere between 15,000 to 18,000 fragments. That is separate pieces of papyrus. We've never counted them all because that's a task that's beyond us at the moment. But those fragments are grouped under a little bit over 7,100 inventory numbers. And really they span –
many centuries of Egyptian history. But in between that, that sort of multi-century span between the Ptolemaic Hellenistic period, the Greek-ruled period of Egypt, to the Roman period of Egypt and into the late antique period, that's where the strength of our collection lies. Greek documentation produced by the central administration or by the demands of the central administration made on everyday people.
Really, anything that you can imagine committing to paper today, you'll find some rough analog in the papyrus. Everything from government documentation down to an invitation to your kid's birthday party. Have you got a love letter? I don't believe we have any love letters. We have some very unhappy letters between a husband and his wife. But no love letters, I'm afraid. Not that I've come across.
I think I have a love charm. I have a love spell. So I really do as well. The collection at the University of Michigan was gathered in the early 20th century. This was a time when trade in historical artifacts was rife. And Brendan tells me that UM wanted to bring a little bit of the Mediterranean world to their students, many of whom would never get out of the Midwest and have a chance to travel to Europe.
So in the early 1930s, the university had a large budget to acquire antiquities, including papyri. So when 30 leaves of Paul's letters turned up on the market, they jumped.
The leaves of Paul are part of – Michigan's leaves of Paul are part of a larger corpus of biblical papyri that are known by the collector who purchased the vast majority of them, Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, a copper mining tycoon, Irish-American, later naturalized citizen of Ireland, who was a major collector of antiquities.
This portion of the so-called Chester Beatty biblical papyri came onto the antiquities market in the very early 30s.
Antiquities dealers didn't usually put high-value, sort of high-demand pieces like this. The shirt would attract major attention. They wouldn't put them all out at once. They would let them out, let them go by dribs and drabs to drum up interest, to drum up competition, increase the price and so forth. And we acquired these leaves from the dealer at some rather extravagant price, some multiple thousands of dollars in 1932 dollars, which is –
quite an outstanding sum. We were unable to secure the remaining 56 leaves that survived. Those were purchased by Alfred Chester Beatty. We negotiated with him in the attempt to get the entire corpus. He, of course,
understandably refused to part with his leaves. So those two portions of this ancient codex remain separated, the Chester Beatty Library. Sorry, just a couple of things to clear up here. Who is Paul? Paul used to be called Saul. He's the one-time persecutor of the early Christians. But in the year or so after Jesus' death, he's making it his personal mission to get rid
rid of Christians and he has the original Damascus Road experience. We get that phrase from him traveling to Damascus to persecute Christians. It's the year 31 or maybe 32. We have his own eyewitness testimony in the letter to the Galatians, which is one of the letters I got
to play with at the University of Michigan. And he basically says that Jesus appeared to him. The risen Jesus appeared to him. You can make what you like of that. But it changed his life from that time until his death maybe 30 years later. He traveled throughout the Roman world, not just
preaching like a modern evangelist who moves on to the next place, you know, the next day. He would preach, gather disciples into little clubs, which probably looked more like schools to onlookers. And in these schools, he stayed with them for months, sometimes a couple of years, training them up. And then he'd go to the next town and stay in touch with his little schools, what we call churches, by letter.
And in the New Testament today, we have a bunch of these letters. Some of them are the manuscripts we have in front of us. So it's kind of sad. You've got 56 leaves over there in Dublin, 30 here. That seems a tragedy. It is unfortunate. It's the reality of the antiquities market. So that's the reason why
institutions like ours no longer purchase but because it encourages the dissolution of things that should be kept together they get scattered to the winds in fact our earliest papyrus we have in our entire collection in fact in the book of the dead another portion ripped off of that is in Germany because an Egyptian dealer realized that if he had one piece he can sell it to one person if he cuts it in half he has two he can sell it to two so the antiquities market encourages that sort of
separation of material, it's understandable. - And sadly, somewhere in there, they lost some pages. So we can tell that this was originally 104 pages.
So I'm pretty sure 30 plus 56 is 86. There's some missing. There are some missing pages. That's the question. So either they never survived at all or they were destroyed at some point either knowingly or unwittingly by people who had acquired this codex from, well, wherever it came from. We simply don't know where it came from. A codex is
is just a book rather than a scroll. The pages were folded in half, forming four panels like you might do with a modern A4 page. And
And then the pages were sewn together to create what we just take for granted now as a book. Well, that's a codex. And the amazing thing is Christians were amongst the first to use this technology anywhere in history. By the 400s, pretty much everyone's trying to use the codex form. But the Christians were doing it in the 200s and maybe even earlier. We don't know why. I know that may sound bizarre because Christians sometimes are...
You know, a little behind technology. It could just be random. Some Christian's uncle in Alexandria might have been experimenting with this new method and the Christians just adopted the local innovation. I call this the Uncle Bob thesis. But perhaps more likely, the Codex was really easy to carry. Much easier than carrying bags full of scrolls rolled up.
And one thing we know about the early Christians is that they traveled and wherever they went on their missionary journeys, they took their New Testament in a little book that they can put under their arm. Back to our little codex. What's the date of this thing? That's a tough question. So, uh,
Papyrologists can date documentary texts. By documents, I mean anything that isn't what we would call broadly literature. That's because a document for the most part has some sort of official life and it will … Aaron Ross Powell Like it will say fifth year. Matthew Feeney It will say – it will have a date on it. If it's a tax receipt, it will tell you often the month, the day and especially the year.
Private letters don't have that. Those are still documents, so those are a little bit more difficult. But by and large, we have such a mass of dated documentary texts that even a documentary text that doesn't have a date or the date wasn't preserved because the text is damaged, we can look at the handwriting and a trained papyrologist can estimate to within a century, sometimes within 50 years of where that document fits, and they are generally more or less right.
If you go to an archival library today and if you compare all the handwriting of American presidents over time, you'll see that handwriting changes. If you take out a handwritten text by Abraham Lincoln and compare it to a handwritten text by George Washington, even if you don't have names or dates or anything on there, you can tell that this handwriting dates to a specific period because this is how students are taught, this is how they're acculturated into writing. Scribes are no different. You heard it right. You can date things, seriously, by handwriting.
It's called paleography from the words old and writing. It's just the study of ancient hands. However, when it comes to what we would call books literature, so that means anything from classical literature, Christian scripture, um,
The handwriting styles are relatively fossilized. They change very slowly over time. Scribes don't begin a text of Homer, they don't begin a text of Paul or the Gospels with, "Hi, my name is John the Scribe and it's 1 AD." They don't write these sorts of things. So the only way we can, with 100% accuracy, date a literary document, whether Christian or non-Christian,
is to have it written on a scroll that was then reused and so we can at least have a rough date. We can see that the back was used for, say, a dated marriage contract or something. Something like –
Or if they're found in an archaeological context that gives us a rough approximation of the date, that is also very helpful. Something like the Paul Codex, which was acquired on the antiquities market from unknown provenance, it's extremely difficult to date. So the date ranges anywhere from the 2nd century AD up to the first half of the 4th century AD based on what any one particular scholar feels in his heart about the paleography of the text.
Brendan is probably being a little cautious, modest, by placing P46 in the 4th century. Most other scholars and most publications put P46 somewhere between 175 AD and 225 AD. Let's just say the year 200, give or take.
Whether it's the late 2nd century or the early 4th, everyone agrees P46 is super important.
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.
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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.
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and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions.
Hey, we're back in my happy place, playing with some really old bits of paper, otherwise known as P46, the earliest manuscript copies of Paul's letters to Rome, Ephesus, Corinth, Galatia. They're right in front of me in the reading room of the papyrology department at the University of Michigan, where I'm talking to the head archivist, Dr. Brendan Haug, and he tells me what we can learn from these flimsy leaves of papyri.
I like to point out that a document like P46 shows the sort of slow and halting creation of a canon. This is a book that is bound together containing most of the letters of Paul, not, I believe, the pastoral letters. So even the corpus of Paul is still in the process of formation. Hey, canon is just a nerdy word.
scholar term for like a rule. It comes from the Greek word meaning measuring stick. And it's like, what are the official documents of the Bible? That's called the canon. The letters are not presented in the canonical order. They're presented in the New Testament today. And they were almost certainly not part of a larger corpus that we might call a Bible. Mm-hmm.
This is a period in which Christianity is beginning to form its canonical body of scripture that we will come to know as the New Testament. Yeah, I mean, one of these pages ends Romans and goes into Hebrews. Yeah, so we have Romans ending here, Hebrews begins here. Which is not how it appears in the New Testament. Certainly not. But...
You can already see that here, let's say early 4th century, that this author, Paul, already has an extremely high stature. This would have been a relatively expensive document to produce. If you think, as I tend to, that it is early 4th century and you go by the then contemporary standards of text production, this text would have cost anywhere between, say,
two and four years of a day laborer's salary. So imagine working for two to four years at minimum wage in the United States and spending every penny of that just to own most of the leaves of Paul. This is how expensive this document would be, but it already shows that in the minds of the people who had this copied, Paul already occupied an extremely, I think, extremely high position. So he is in the process really here of becoming
a canonical author. That said, when you put this document beside other roughly contemporary texts in our collection, you'll see that an early Christian library is made up not just of documents like the Letters of Paul that are now canonical but numerous other apocryphal texts such as the Shepherd of Hermas, which you would know if this is the second century. Most Christians don't know it today. Aaron Ross Powell
If you've never heard of the Shepherd of Hermas, don't worry. In this very early period, there was no fixed canon, no rule about which books were in and out. There was universal agreement about the four gospels, the book of Acts and the letters of Paul. But some of the other texts...
We're regarded as possibly authoritative writings from the apostles or their colleagues, and some they just weren't sure about. And so some got in in some versions of our New Testament and some didn't. And Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas are two such texts. They almost got in.
In a copy of the Bible from the mid-300s, a beautiful copy called Sinaiticus, these two texts appear at the back of the New Testament. So you've got the 27 books that are now in a modern New Testament, and then these two thrown at the end. You can almost detect that the copyist didn't quite know what to do with the two texts, so they're not in with the other letters, which is
which is where they sort of logically should be, they're thrown at the back kind of like an appendix. So we'll keep them here so you can read them, but we're not quite sure of their status.
The church eventually decided not to include them anywhere. This wasn't because they didn't like what was in it. It wasn't for political motivations. It was just because they weren't super confident that they came from the apostolic period. And that's really what they wanted, stuff that had the authority, the glow of the original apostles.
And frankly, it's just as well, because every scholar today now knows the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas to be written in the name of those characters in the second century, long after those guys were dead. The gut instincts of the ancient church are verified by contemporary scholarship.
But it's true, in this early period in which P46 was copied, there wasn't universal agreement about every New Testament text. All sorts of various documents, texts that are almost forgotten today except amongst the rarefied world of New Testament studies.
that make up really a, it's a sort of, it's the wild, wild west of Christian scripture. Studying these leaves of Paul also gives us insight into how texts like this were produced. When I say scribe or Bible, you may have a picture in your head of some holy monk writing
in a room with candlelight, you know, sort of in prayer as he copies each line and then illuminates it with gold and draws little pictures of saints in the margin or something like that. Maybe I'm just making that up. But the thing is, in this very early period with P46, that picture couldn't be further from the truth.
For us in Egyptian antiquity, this text is produced by a scribe who might also be the guy that you go to to dictate a private letter. This is the guy that you'll go to to –
draw up a contract for the sale of a donkey to your neighbor. The public scribe does anything and everything that you need. So we can look at this text and know immediately that this is not a monk copying it because at the end of every letter, here we're looking at the end of Romans, the beginning of Hebrews, at the end of every letter there's a...
scribal notation that indicates how many lines he's copied because that's how he's going to be paid. I find this really interesting. I hope I'm not the only one. These people copying out this stuff in this very early period were not priests or religious officials. They probably weren't even Christians. These are disinterested, semi-professional scribes.
Their whole gig was not to innovate or do any theology. They probably couldn't have done any theology. They had to just copy what was in the original in front of them. So this is a normal scribal transaction. One imagines that when the scribe is finished doing this, he might go off and copy Homer. He might...
write a marriage contract. He might do whatever it is he's contracted to do. So here at the end of Romans, for instance, we have an abbreviation of the word stichoi or stichi, which means lines, and then a symbol that means 1,000. He estimates roughly 1,000 lines for Romans. It's a bit of an overestimate. Each estimate is a little bit over, a little bit under. A little over, a little under. He comes out more or less right. But this is part of an everyday transaction.
The big question is, what's different in P46, this really old copy of Paul's letters, compared to a modern Bible or even a copy of the letters of Paul from a century or so later?
There are differences, usually really small ones. In P46, you get some weird contractions of words, especially holy words like the word God, Spirit, Jesus, Christ. They're reduced to just a couple of letters. And then the scribe overlines, which is the ancient equivalent of underlining.
There were other differences like in Romans 16.20, right toward the end of Romans, a page I got to play with. In a modern Bible, it goes, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you. But in P46, it goes, the grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. No Christ. Right? So that's a, you know, it's a difference.
And in Romans 12, 1, a really famous sort of pivot point in the letter. Normally you get, therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, etc., etc. But a really funny thing happened in P46. The scribe goes, therefore, I urge, brothers and sisters,
And then went, oh, I forgot the word you. And he scribbled you above brothers and sisters. And that causes some confusion in the copying after that. There is one pretty big difference at the end of Romans that does raise the question, is some Chinese whispers going on here?
In most of our Bibles, the letter to the Romans ends with this lofty paragraph called a doxology. It goes, Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past. And so on. Worth opening your Bible and reading it. That whole paragraph...
doesn't appear in p 46 p 46 literally ends with kuatos ho adelphos that's basically kuatos says g'day and then it's just full stop and then the very next line of this page goes to the next letter the scribe was going to copy which is the letter to the hebrews
We mentioned Codex Sinaiticus earlier. It's like the beautiful, full-on copy of the Bible produced when Christianity was now officially legal as a religion in the Roman Empire. And so the best scribes in the Roman Empire produced this one. It's very different from our P46. But even with this missing paragraph, P46 is still a very good copy.
This is a very fine copy. It's not – the quality is not at the level of some of the highest – Like Sinetica. So yes, something like that. But there are also copies of –
classical literature from some of the larger cities in Egypt that are clearly produced at – they're the Maseratis of ancient literature. Really fine. This is maybe a step down from the highest production in terms of just the layout of the text itself.
The line lengths are sometimes not exact. In the most expensive text, it will be exactly columnar. Everything is measured. But in terms of the general accuracy of the text, that's where the scribe is scrupulous. He'll sometimes misspell words here and there in terms of –
of misspellings that reflect common pronunciation of Greek in the period. But other than that, the text is a fine example. So was I right as a teenager to think that the New Testament is really the result of a kind of Chinese whispers? You know, once we get our final copy today, it's nothing like what was in the original. I think the simple answer is no.
It's true that in P46 you get little bits and pieces that are different. Missing word, Christ here, different spelling there, a grammatical error. But here's the cool thing about New Testament studies. We have so many copies of the New Testament. We've just been talking about P46, the earliest. But
But we have hundreds of manuscript fragments and huge portions from different periods of Roman history in different parts of the empire. And we can line them up all together and work out where the variations have taken place. I mean, if you have just two copies of a handwritten letter,
And one of them is different from the other, just at one line. You can't, with two copies, work out which is the original and which is the variation. But if you have 50 copies of the same letter, you're more likely to work out what is the variation and what is the standard. And the great thing is, in New Testament studies, everyone realizes this is the best preserved version.
text from antiquity. That's not just something I can say in the safe confines of a church. You can say this in any classics or ancient history department in the world. The copies of our New Testament are so plentiful.
We can work out the variations. And the other great thing is a modern Bible very often tells us where the little changes or variations have taken place. So if you just open a modern English Bible, you'll often get little footnotes saying the earliest manuscripts add or the earliest manuscripts don't have or some manuscripts have this word. And so everything's very, very upfront.
So what about that missing paragraph at the end of Romans? It's not there in P46, but it's there in our modern Bibles. Well, here's the thing I didn't say earlier. It's actually not at the end of chapter 16 in P46. It's at the end of chapter 15. It's there.
But just somehow, it's a chapter earlier. We don't know why. Other manuscripts later have it at the very end of the letter. It looks like a more formal ending to the letter. We may never know why the P46 scribe had it at the end of chapter 15 and most manuscripts had it at the end of chapter 16. Either way, it's there. Music
Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. Christianity has a problem. Only one, we might ask.
Unlike other religions, it gambles its plausibility on supposed historical texts and events. Christians don't just say otherworldly things like, God loves you, we all need forgiveness, heaven is open to all. None of that sort of thing is the least bit confirmable or falsifiable. Listen closely and you'll often hear them saying things like, Jesus lived in the Galilean village of Nazareth.
Or he had a wide reputation as a healer. Or he caused a scandal in the Temple of Jerusalem in the late 20s, early 30s AD. Or he suffered execution under a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate. Or even his tomb outside the city was found empty a few days after his crucifixion. Statements like these are not completely immune from historical scrutiny.
They touch times and places we know quite a bit about. They intersect with other figures like Pontius Pilate, about whom we have reasonably good information.
The alleged events all take place in a cultural and political melting pot, Roman Galilee and Judea, for which we have thousands of archaeological remains and hundreds of thousands of words of ancient inscriptions and written records.
When people proclaim an intangible thing like God's love is universal, they're in safe territory. But as soon as they say that their guy was crucified by the fifth governor of Judea, they're stepping onto public ground, secular ground, and someone's bound to want to double check.
As it turns out, an entire industry of double-checking has developed over the last 250 years. The study of what's called the historical Jesus is a vast secular discipline today, found in major universities all around the world, including the two with which I'm closely associated, Sydney and Macquarie.
While there are certainly plenty of active Christians involved in this sub-discipline of ancient history, there are also a great many half-Christians, ex-Christians, Jews, lots of Jews, as well as self-confessed agnostics and atheists. This makes it very difficult for anyone to get away with publishing theology under the guise of
of history, or privileging the biblical documents over the non-biblical ones, or of pretending we can prove most of what the New Testament says about Jesus. The process of peer review, where scholars publish their work in a professional journal only to be double-checked by two or more independent, anonymous scholars of rank, might not be foolproof, but it certainly filters out any work of preaching.
under the guise of scholarship. It also reduces the risk of fraudulent claims and keeps scholars constantly mindful of the rules of the game of history. Adherents of other faiths bear no such burden.
Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, to take the next three largest religions, don't risk their credibility on historical claims. I've often thought it'd feel quite safe to be a devout Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim in today's sceptical West. I mean, sure, they get criticised, but they're unlikely to have some History Channel documentary that explodes the truth about their founder.
For better or worse, Christianity's central claims are historical. The form of the New Testament documents is recognizably historical. The Gospels clearly present themselves as historical biographies of a famous life.
The letters follow precisely the conventions of other occasional letters from the period, complete with traceable itineraries and lists of greetings to concrete individuals. The core content of the New Testament is also obviously historical. While there's plenty of talk of the kingdom of God and being justified by faith and entering eternal life and all that sort of stuff, these things are premised on the actual events of Jesus' life –
his deeds, his teaching, death, and, yes, his resurrection. All of which, so the documents themselves say, are reported by eyewitnesses. Without these events in historical time, nothing in Christianity has merit. Christianity seems to go out on a historical limb and invites anyone who wishes to try and cut it off. In a strange way, then...
The barrage of historical criticism directed at the Bible and the life of Jesus in particular is not just reasonable, it's a kind of compliment. It's a sign that critics understand the form and content of the Christian faith. Unless Christianity's claimed events really happened and left some indications that they happened, the whole thing is empty. You can press play now.
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Why kick off undeceptions in the papyrology department looking at Paul's letters? I think the simple answer is because it's foundational. The truth of Christianity flows from this foundation and so all of the deceptions flow from misunderstanding this kind of foundation. Have you got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them and we'll answer them or
or try in upcoming episodes. Leave your question as a voicemail by calling 02 9870 5678. That's 02 9870 5678. Or head to undeceptions.com. And while you're there, check out everything related to this episode and the others. And sign up for the Undeceptions newsletter to get access to bonus content and plenty more from each episode.
Next episode, to continue the theme of technical ancient history, we're looking at American football. See ya. Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon. Produced by Kayleigh Payne. Directed by Mark Hadley. Our theme song is by Bach. Arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing is by Bella Ann Sanchez. Head to undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and everything related to the episode.