https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Y7b8fq2k0zQ
So moving from biblical theology, biblical theology, you’re looking at the history mostly of one specific nation, right? The Christ as he’s embodied in the life of Israel. How does that expand outwards into universal history? And what do you see the project of universal history as fundamentally being about? Yeah, so as people know, you know, Richard Rowland and I started this series, which we call universal history. And it really was interesting, because I’ve been interested in this idea of universal history for years, like just really, really interested in. And then I met Richard Rowland, who is like, he’s not just interested. I mean, he’s got it down, like he just knows it, right? He’s just such a, he has all the skills I don’t, right? So he has all the details and all the texts and everything, all the references. So the idea, like let’s say in terms of the immediate understanding is to see how, when people would convert to Christianity and in the history of Christianity, one of the things they tried to do was to connect themselves to the Christian story, usually, and also to Rome. It was like Rome and the Christian story. So how can I connect my ancestry back to the Trojan War? And how can I connect it to the Bible somehow? Either the flood or some character in scripture. And when you look at, for example, Jeffrey Monmouth’s text, those first chapters, that’s what’s going on. But the problem is that all cultures kind of have that. The modern historians, what they do when they read these chronicles is that they just chop out the first part, ignore it as if it doesn’t even matter, and then start with like the real history and then see the rest as kind of mythical history. But our contention is that, no, the mythical history will actually be the pattern by which you’ll be able to understand the regular history. The connection that they give themselves to the ancients and the way in which they do it, the characters, even that they say they’re related to, will become a kind of first pattern, which will then explain the rest of the stuff. And so I think that that’s what we’re trying to do in some ways is revive these actual existing universal histories. So you have, for example, the apocalypse of Pseudomethodius, which is this kind of grand history of how all the peoples connect and the place of Alexander the Great and Ethiopia and all these nations. But you see echoes of that, for example, like in the history of Great Britain or in Scandinavian history, different countries will have their own version of it. And so we’re trying to, in some ways, bring that out because one of the things that happens in these universal histories is that they will not, they will not, they won’t have the tendency to completely deny their pagan sources. So they will connect both to the Christian source or try to reorient the pagan ancestry into a Christian thread. And I think that that’s very useful for us to understand the way that Christianity was even understood by peoples that were converting. It’s like, no, we’re not trying to make you become something completely else than what you are. What we’re trying is to reorient what you are into something which is good, into the good. And so I think that all of that can be useful for us today to understand how they did that, why they did that. And it can give us a key at understanding even why the West even exists. So was there a particular nation or story which kind of stood out to you as a glaring example of this pattern, of this phenomenon going on? Well, I think, so I think the most glaring example is Alexander. I think Alexander is probably the one that is the most visible. Because what happens in the story of Alexander the Great is because he’s this great conqueror and he kind of unifies the world together, there are all these legends that end up spreading about Alexander. And then they start to be collated and collected together. And one of them is, of course, they come from different countries, but one of them is that Alexander goes to Jerusalem and he encounters the priest of God. And when he encounters the priest of God, he declares the unity of God. Like he makes a kind of declaration that God is one. And this is a Jewish legend, probably. And I’m not sure they even know exactly where all the legends come from. But what happened with that is that because of that, Alexander is in the Quran, like Alexander is a character in the Quran. And so Alexander then becomes this figure. So there’s another story, for example, of Alexander who makes these, he takes these four griffins and he wants to see what’s in the heaven. So he ties it like a rabbit, I think, to the end of a stick and he puts the stick up and then the griffins fly up to eat the rabbit and he ascends up into heaven. Then as he gets near the highest spheres, like towards the sphere of Saturn, I think he hears a voice telling him, this is high enough, like a man should not go any higher. And so then he obeys the voice and comes back down. And so it’s like this kind of mythological storytelling gets included in Christian storytelling. And so Alexander becomes an image of the righteous king who knows who is ambitious, who can manifest the positive aspects of the political class, but also knows his limit, like knows where to stop, that he shouldn’t transgress the boundaries of what it is to be human. And so that’s a good example. And then his legends become some of the most popular stories told in the middle ages all across the world, from England to India, basically. Wow, India. Oh yeah, yeah, there are Indian versions of the, but also it’s also because of Islam. Like there’s an Islamic, because of the Mughal empire, you have these versions. I went to see a show in London, by the way, a few, like a month ago, which had all these legends, like all these manuscripts from everywhere in the world and all these different versions of manuscripts. Like it was an astounding show. Like I was so happy to be able to see it. And yeah, there were versions from basically all the way into Persia, because you took over the Persian empire, down into India, there were versions from Byzantine empire. There’s a whole massive, the most illuminated manuscript of the Alexandrian legend is this massive Byzantine book that has the whole legends all illustrated, very much like icons. Like it looks like icons, but it’s the story of Alexander. It’s amazing. One of the images that I found really intriguing in just looking at what the church is doing or has done in relation to specifically Greek culture is that image in the prophecy of Noah as God enlarging Yapheth and bringing him into the tent of Shem. And it’s really interesting to me that Paul, whose profession is a tent builder, is the one who specifically sees himself not just as uniting Jews and Gentiles, but he’s always using that phrase, Jews and Greeks. And it seems to me that that’s something that’s really integral to the church’s mission. And when a people converts, it’s not just that their history is now kind of cut off and they start new at that point, but they’re actually bringing something in, something which God has been growing in them for a long time. And it’s part of the church’s mission to bring that into the body of Christ. And so I think that’s exactly right. And I think that that’s in some ways representing that story and representing the reality of it in the legends, right? In all of this gathering in of the ancient stories is a way to also answer the secularists or answer the atheists who says Christianity just wiped out the old practices. It’s interesting because you have both. It’s so fascinating. On the one hand, you have some people that are accusing Christians of wiping out all the ancient practices of being these horrible, controlling civilization bringers. And then you have the other people saying, ah, Christianity is just infected with all these pagan practices. It’s basically just a pagan religion with the Jewish veneer. It’s like, okay, well, choose which one, I don’t know. It seems like it’s actually somewhere in the middle where it’s exactly the way we’re describing it.