Episode 151 - What If Modern Translations Makes Us Blind to Mythological Creatures?

A world that only ever feels “just normal” is not neutral, it is trained. We start by pushing against the modern reflex to explain everything away: just wind, just waves, just birds, just matter. Scripture offers a sharper claim: the whole earth is filled with the glory of the Lord, and the problem is not God’s absence but our dulled perception. We talk about re-enchantment in a Christ-centred way, not as make-believe, but as learning to see the world as the prophets and saints saw it.

Then we step into the foggy borderlands between the mythological and the mundane with the shoebill. Accounts describe an almost impossible stillness, a presence that looks like a grey statue until it moves, and a forward-facing, human-like gaze that people say they can barely endure. Add the clattering call compared to gunfire, and the shoebill starts to sound less like a “mere bird” and more like a guardian of swamp wilderness. We also tackle a thoroughly modern twist: AI-generated videos and why online “proof” can make rare creatures harder to verify rather than easier.

From there we move to the griffin and a different kind of hiddenness: language. Why do ancient sources and the Septuagint point one way, while modern Bible translation often softens strange creature terms into something acceptable to Enlightenment tastes? We explore how theological liberalism pressures readers to force Scripture into a pre-approved picture of reality, and what is lost when we do.

If you care about biblical imagination, Christian worldview, and reading the Bible with historical honesty, come along. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review, then tell us: what have modern habits trained you not to see?

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Welcome To A Re-Enchanted World

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Well, welcome to the Christ-centered cosmic civilization as we continue to explore the overlap between what some would call mythological and what others would call mundane, the mythological and the mundane. And it just strikes me more and more how difficult it is to maintain these clear distinctions between what may people call mythological and what people call mundane. And that in a way, what we're trying to do with this whole project of the Christ-centered cosmic civilization is to re-enchant our vision, our minds, our hearts, so that we begin to look again at the world in the way that our ancestors did, and the way the prophets did, and Moses and the ancient saints in the Bible. And they recognize in that that the spirit is inspiring the trees to clap their hands and rejoice and praise the Lord. And when the waves crash onto the beach, they hear in that this worship of the Lord. And I think many of us don't do that. We just see oh, it's just trees blowing in the wind. It's just the tide coming in. It's just birds flying. It's just flowers growing. It's just, and we've been reduced to what they used to call the confession of the just man. Because everything is just this. It's just that. It's just this. It's just that. And nothing is anything. And it's just that incredibly, it's what the Bible would call the creepy, crawly view of reality, where you're gazing only at the mud and you cannot see the stars. And what we're trying to do in this podcast, as you know, is over and over again, in different ways and in all kinds of facets and dimensions, trying to destroy this captivity of our minds and hearts and eyes to re-enchant the world or to really see how it is enchanted. How I was reading Isaiah 6 today, and the living those those wonderful cherubim creatures or seraphim say, the whole earth is filled with the glory of the Lord. They see it, they see his glory, the glory of Jesus in everything. And we have been indoctrinated and enslaved to not see that and just see, well, just we see just the most superficial surface of everything. Now, that's what we're doing in this as a whole, and it's what we're doing, particularly in this little mini-series that we're working on at the moment. And we may come, we may, we be uh PJ's with me here uh for this, and we're thinking of returning to this theme. We might do this episode and then we may take a break from this theme for a while. We're not sure, but we've got a lot of these examples of creatures that overlap the mythological and the mundane, and we may return to this in the future because there's another series wanting to get into soon, looking at uh politics from the perspective of the divine empire emperor. But today we're still in this the creatures of the mythological and the mundane, and I want to talk about a creature that people have told me about, and people have written about this, and to see this creature is very difficult. Very few people today have ever seen one. Some I'm not I don't think I want to say it's an unseen creature, because we've come across the creatures that we think are properly belong to the unseen realm because they are normally in the unseen realm. So I don't I don't want to classify it fully as that, but very, very I've never met someone, for example, who's physically seen one. Though I've come across many, not many, but some people who've testified to seeing one with their own eyes. But I've never met a person who's physically seen one of these creatures, but you do come across testimonies of it. And it is said of them that they only live in the most remote swamp places, they're will like wilderness far

Escaping The "Just This" Mindset

SPEAKER_00 5:48

from human civilization, I guess. There's examples we've come across those sort of fey creatures in the past that that only live illally at the borders of things. And these are worth more than that, they don't even live at the borders, they live far, far from humanity in the most remote swamp regions that are almost impossible for humans to get to. That's what's said of them. The ancient Egyptians called these creatures bird gods. Bird gods. They thought of them in this way. What is it like to see one? Well, witness is fragmentary, but those accounts that I've come across one of the most interesting things is they say that initially to s when you see what such a one, because in these swamps that are kind of often with fog and mist, that initially they seem to be simply like grey statues that are utterly immobile for you know, not just seconds but minutes or even some must say hours, just absolutely like a statue. So something that they they have a sort of form that they revert to that is a an actual statue form that and when they they become an actual statue and are absolutely stationary, such that a person could walk up to it and not realize that this is a living creature, they are as they're as tall as a human, they're as tall as a human, and they have human eyes, and this apparently is extremely unnerving because their eyes and and whereas birds in general, if you think of a bird's head now, where are the eyes on it? There's kind of eyes on the side of the head, aren't there? One on either side of the head. That's how birds see. So they have a kind of field of vision that's very different to ours, humans. And birds have this kind of an eye facing in each direction on the sides of their heads. But these creatures, these the gray statue creatures, their eyes are forward-facing and human eyes. That's what people say about them. And that when they turn their gaze upon you, they look directly into your eyes with these human eyes and look directly at you and can come slowly toward you, and few can handle that. It causes most to run, run from that. They can't, because not only do they do that, and few can survive the gaze of such a creature, but they can then, if they get close, they I'll come to what kind of a beak they have or said to have in a moment, but they can make this like a chattering. No, it's not chattering, it's like a noise that some people say modern people who've encountered them say it's like gunfire. But in ancient times it was described in different ways, like a clattering sound, which is very loud. So if you manage to overcome its gaze power, looking it directly into you, and you manage to survive that, and then it draws close to you, you must now endure the sound that it will inflict upon you. These are creatures, now then, there's an interesting feature of them, which is that now. In let me first of all say this I came across people in Uganda who say that they are somewhat familiar with these creatures, and the white Uganda's wildlife education center say of them that if you're a stranger, they they will just look you in the eye and so on.

A Swamp Creature Few Have Seen

SPEAKER_00 10:28

But if you are known to them and you have earned their friendship, then you can bow to them and they will bow to you. That there's a bowing ritual occurs between humans and these creatures. And now the reason that fascinated me, and look, this is well attested from the very few who've ever encountered this creature. You'll remember in some of some of you may have seen the Harry Potter film where there's a hippogriff that's like this. And if you approach the hippogriff without earning its trust, which is acknowledged through a bowing ritual of greeting, then it's too dangerous to try to touch this creature. Well, this the I think that that in the Harry Potter film and the Harry Potter books, that is derived from this creature, this creature, which has this bowing ritual, which it will do with a human if the human earns a favor. So you what you cannot be a stranger, but if you are known to it and it respects you, it will perform the this bowing ritual of social acknowledgement and respect, and then will allow you in its presence. What is this critical? I think it's sometimes called the shoe bill. The shoebill. You can look it up, and people have even claimed to have footage of it. Whether, I don't know, you know with it what it is with AI these days. Are they real? These the footage, or is it just like people because is the you know, it's it's hard, is this, is this is this like I say, the word is it a creature of the seen or the unseen? But if you the the shoe bill is definitely a creature that challenges this boundary between the mythological and the mundane. And uh the even now, having read a lot about it, looked a lot about it, seen people's death, even now it's a bit like the giraffe. It's a creature that I'm not sure it is, but does belong to the mundane. And it seems to me either it isn't real or it is clearly in the mythological or the fey or belongs to the unseen or something. This is especially true of the shoe bill, and its beak is very strange, very large, and makes the sound, which you could you could, if you look it up on YouTube and things, you'll find plenty of people who either really have met it, but it turns out that a lot of the videos that claim to be videos of the shoe bill are just AI fabrications. So you have to bear that in mind that the creature is much, much harder to see than people claim, you know. They'll say, Oh, yeah, I've seen it. And I think mostly, if a person claims that in your presence, you should mostly defy them to prove it. Because they're they'll probably be lying. So, but nevertheless, there's a question. Now then, with that in mind, that's the shoe bill. This problem of boundary uh between the mythological and mundane, and the way that these shoebills have this kind of guardian character. They sometimes are described as guardian statues because they have this ability to be utterly immobile for immensely long periods and to become like a like a statue. And they have been described as guardians that guard something in the locations that they are, like statues that only come to life when there are intruders. They're almost like that. Now then, there is another creature that has this guardian quality to it, and it is the griffin. But like the shoe bill, there's a problem of seeing them. The griffin is hard to see physically. We might come on to what reasons why the griffin is not seen physically so much, but also it's hidden from us linguistically. The very words that are before us in the Bible and in other texts thing things are done to hide this creature from us. So it's not uh do you get the point that it's not just that they're physically difficult to see, they're linguistically difficult to see. They're also obscured and hidden, denied by people. Like it's as if people who got have power over text wish to hide the griffon and prevent us from seeing it even in the text. So, first of all, PJ's with us here. First of all, I'm gonna ask him what is a griffin? Just what are we thinking about here? Is it some kind of frog or is it a dog or what what kind of creature is the griffin? Just first of all, a definition, just so we've got something in our minds. What kind of a thing should we be visualizing? And then I want him to explain to us why and how it is hidden from us in language. So a griffin is a creature that has the head and sometimes some other parts, but mostly the head of a bird and then the body of a mammal. And those two things can change a bit, but it's that sort of do you mean change that there's variance of it? Yeah, yeah, there's different uh birds, different bird heads, different uh mammal bodies, but uh it's that sort of um formula we we see, you know, in in in this species. So what we see is using art and things, so it's very well attested all throughout history, but especially in these sort of same areas, when different people groups come into an area, they come into contact with these creatures, and then it often captures their imagination and they start putting in lots of art. So we can see all the different cre all the cultures that have interacted with these creatures over the years. They they there were loads and loads of them in the sort of steppes of northern Europe and Asia, what the sort of Greeks called hyperborea, you know, or you know, the sort of Arctic regions that sort that probably are native to that region, but the ones in that area have the heads of eagles and the bodies of lions. So in a lot of fantasy, you're probably quite used to that. But the sort that were in Egypt and the Levant, so the sort that Moses must be describing had the heads of vultures instead. Ah, the vulture-headed, yeah. So they the interestingly as well though, the Greek were so the Greeks came into contact with the sort of lion eagle sort, much more as time went on. So that sort of ended up dominating their art. But their word for it, or like is like grips or grips, or you know, it's that sort of word. Grips.

The Statue Stare And The Thunder Call

SPEAKER_00 18:02

And that's related to, I think it's like gips or goops, which is like a vulture. So it's a related word. So originally they mostly thought of griffins as vulture-headed, and then as time went on, mostly eagle-headed. So just to show you, it's quite a varied species, quite, you know, or a genus, maybe. And these might be different species of griffin within the genus, it might be more like that, because they are quite different. But nevertheless, you you do see throughout the ancient world, people constantly report seeing either a mammal with a head of a bird, or others would say a bird with the body of a mammal, things like that. And interestingly, the Bible does weigh in on that about whether we should consider it a mammal or a bird. And the Bible says it's a bird, quite definitively. Moses says that explicitly. That's what griffins are. So that's just interesting. That's the way the head seems to determine what you are more than the body. So that is interesting that you could have like 80% of your mass a lot being lion, but you've got the head of a vulture or something. So the Bible's like, Vulture. Yeah. Quite interesting that. So the reason it gets obscured was sort of um. I wonder just on that, yeah. That could have deep theological significance in that Christ is the head, we are the body, and it's it's the head that gives the identity to the body. Yeah. So it probably has a deep theological meaning that. Yeah, yeah, definitely. That yeah, it's very interesting that. So that is how we should be thinking, and very interesting that we we have moved on from that. So we do see you're a mammal if you sort of give milk or give live birth, or give, although some snakes do live birth, but I mean, you know, give milk is a big one. So that's something that happens in the lower part of your body, not like lower than the head. Lots of the definitions of mammals live around that, whether you've got hair around your body and things. So we've made that all about the body, so we've totally switched it around, which is very odd, very interesting. But yeah, so for Moses, it's a kind of bird, and so he mentions it in Leviticus and then Deuteronomy. Alongside carrion creatures or birds of prey, and next to a vulture. So, what usually seems to be happening when Moses is going through all these different creatures saying what's clean or unclean, he sort of gives like a reason, he's like these things like kill with claws, so don't eat them, or he says, you know, things like that. He'll say, Don't be like these things, they do this, and then he'll list sort of things, and usually or seem to be things that are as distinct from each other as possible. So he's sort of laying out the boundaries of like not this nor that, and he picks really different things. But a very odd thing, and he mentions more than one extra mundane creature. The very odd thing that's happened in the modern period, like especially like very accelerated since the Enlightenment, is people just say, with all these things that are that they cease to believe in around that time, they're like, Oh, that's probably just some kind of vulture. So they have like it says, Don't eat vultures, don't eat griffins, is what Moses says. And then people are like, Oh, it probably means stuff. So they have it like, don't eat a Eurasian vulture, don't eat a bearded vulture, don't and so like he goes into very big categories of very distinct things, and then he just suddenly gets hyperfixated on vultures. Like, I just want you to know, none of these, and then so what the Israelites you would imagine would take away from that, right? Really don't need vultures. I guess we can eat other things, we can eat stalks, we can eat whatever, who cares? But like vultures, these are gone through so many different categories of vultures. Yeah, yeah. So you think, well, it's not that, it does, it doesn't fit the pattern of it. And then you think as well like, this is God writing the law, and we know he's created unbelievable amounts of species of beetle. But then he's just like, yeah, don't eat things that crawl on the ground. So it doesn't even say beetles that it's just like any creepy crawley, don't eat that. But it's like, well, this is the living God who loves constantly making new beetles. He must have made new ones because whenever like science is like that's it, we've got the beetles on there's just like a million more, or maybe a million's a bit too much, but barely. I mean, it's there's a lot of beetles, but then supposedly the very same God who just keeps creating beetles. So, yeah, the very same God who goes,

Earning Trust Through A Bow

SPEAKER_00 22:48

Yeah, I've got like tens of thousands of species of insect, but let's just call them creepy calllies, right? But when it comes to vultures, he's like, Oh, I can't, I can't put them in one category, I've got to go to each and every different variation of others. Yeah, that makes no sense. They can't. So they could are you saying then that obviously doesn't make sense that when the Bible translators go, oh, don't eat the bearded vulture or the sea vulture or this uh that behind that he's actually talking about radically different sorts of creatures behind those words, and that would ultimately make it helpful because you can imagine for if you're just thinking of it primarily, God knows what he's doing when he's talking, he's a great communicator, and he's just saying, and this is God the Word, who so he has to be a fantastic communicator, it's in his name. So when God the Word is talking to Moses on the mountain, he's communicating himself quite well, and he knows what will be clear, and he knows that just saying creepy crawly, that writes off all these things. So that's a perfectly good word that captures all these things. He's saying, Don't eat these. So that's perfectly fine. But then if he's just like having to go with vultures, this, this, this particular thing, so people are like, ah, right, so the West Eurasian bearded vulture, that's fine, then. And it's like, so that would be very poor at communicating what he's trying to say. So we know he's not doing that. So what we do then look at is like the Septuagint. So this is written by priests. So these are people who have lived out the law of Moses in ancient sort of Israel, and then they spend some time in Egypt. We've gone over the story before, but it's these priests that they then write the law of Moses in Greek, and this is how they understand that this word peres, they understand it to be griffin, and they just translate it that way. So that that is what they understood it to be. They didn't understand like to have like a very sort of 18th-century country parsons style, meticulous of all the different kinds of vulture, yeah, but no differentiation at all over beetles and ants and things, yeah. So, in fact, the Lord is gathering to is is addressing large, you know, buckets, like so. He's got a bucket that in which is all the creepy corners. Then he's got another bucket in which he says, Griffins, don't eat griffons, yeah, any kind of griffin, yeah. The vulture-headed ones, the eagle-headed ones, the blackbird-headed ones, no griffin, even if it's like blackbird head, hippopotamus body, no, doesn't matter. Any griffin of any kind, don't touch them. And then when he uses, there'll be other words, and when he uses this other word, he's not, he's not now talking saying this is a different kind of vulture. It's actually, you might be saying, don't eat any chimera or something or whatever. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then there's the thing you have to always remember is that the Israel was a kingdom of priests, it was a beacon to convert the Gentiles. And then, as we see in Acts, there were God-fearing Gentiles everywhere the apostles went. Like they did a great job of presenting the law of Moses to people and converting them. That's what, you know, they they'd gotten a little bad by the time of Jesus. But even then, as I'm saying, there's lots of God-fearing Gentiles everywhere. So the law of Moses is evangelistic at its heart. It's meant to be able to, like you just read through it, you see it practiced out, ideally, you know, that's kind of, and so people saw that throughout the Old Testament. They saw it, well, not the whole Old Testament, but from Moses onwards, they saw it get X in out, and then it made a message very clear. So all these nations that so easily take on board the law of Moses and they love it, and then from the Septuagint onwards, they are always using that, they're not a sort of enlightenment mentality group of people. So when we see, is you know, in in Hebrew, in the Hebrew or the Greek of the Old Testament, or the Aramaic in some parts of whatever, when we see a word used that everyone around it knows to mean something that enlightenment people don't believe in, then it must be trying to say that. It's not as if like you've just got this one little island of absolute enlightenment, 18th century coffee house rationality. And like everyone around them, they all believe in griffins and everything. But people within this sort of, you know, like Voltaire's debating club in the middle of the Bronze Age, yeah, yeah, they know. Oh no, Griffin refers to the griffin vulture, which is a kind of bearded vulture. And it it's

AI Footage And The Myth Boundary

SPEAKER_00 28:10

just not true. Like, oh, you have to just think this is like too much of that context stuff is obviously terrible. And we, you know, we've often talked about that, like when people try and link it too much and they get lost in all these other ougaritic stuff and all that. But in the very least, just noting this is the language they were talking, this is what this word meant in that language. Just to sort of note I remember having this discussion with a chap who just could not believe that these were that the the Bible could be referring to these sort of creatures because he was saying, we know none of these creatures exist. Well, I said, yeah, but like this word used when it's translated in the Septuagint or when ancient church fathers referred to it, this is the vocab this is the vocabulary they use to describe it. But he kept saying, yeah, but what but the original thing is like basically, yeah, like yeah, but like Moses was clearly like Voltaire or something, and he is refuses to believe in anything to do with superstition or mythology, and he's just keeping it absolutely like uh 19th century or like 19th century text. And I just kept saying to him, but like nobody in the ancient world who read these texts thought what you do. They or everyone who read it, as far back as we can go across an enormous range of cultures and people believe that, like the and at the time we were using thinking about the unicorn. And I was saying, when they read that word, they believed it referred to a unicorn, pretty much. I said to him, as your daughter believes in, but you don't. Your daughter would be able to be much more culturally connected to the you know, the ancient readers of these texts, and she'd go, Oh, it's a unicorn, and they go, That's possibly quite a colourful one, but nevertheless, yes, we're talking the same framework. And I said to him, But you're not like you, uh, but you believe yourself to be being faithful to the Bible, even though everything we can see about the text of the Bible and the ancient people who read it is not what you think. And they and I couldn't get him to accept that the words used in the Bible, evidenced by the way ancient people understood those words, was not what he thought, but that he was on a little cultural island, not the Bible. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And uh obviously some people just sort of need that. And we've thought about like Augustine and things, and when he was struggling with philosophical thought, and he was like, I just kind of have to believe Moses was more of a philosopher, and then he but then he mellows out as time goes on. And so we obviously hope everyone does. And so when people are new believers, of course, we are used to thinking, all right, maybe you have to imagine Moses as a sort of enlightenment thing, because like that's what I am, and I just can't think beyond that. But the goal, obviously, as Christians, is to say, let's just move into whatever Jesus is saying on any page of the Bible, that's what we're believing. And like you get it similarly. Some people are like, they just see Jesus talk about the story of Jonah as absolute history, and they're saying, Oh, you remember when Jonah did this, and they're like, No, we can't because it didn't happen, it's a silly story. And it's like, well, he doesn't think so. Yeah, he thinks, and Adam and Eve he thinks are true, and Job, and you know, he thinks all these people are true, and so do the apostles, so do his brothers. They all think this, and so people often struggle with that, and they're like, I just can't read that passage yet. And you think, oh, that's fine. But then it's so odd when people who have gotten all the way, you you would imagine translators of scripture should be some of the most spiritually mature people. It's not it's not always been my experience, but anyway, yeah. Yeah, that they they certainly should be. So you should imagine they go all this way to end up in this position, and then they're able to think, now I'm in a position of absolute trust. So I'm just gonna read the original language of the scriptures, and then whatever it tells me, that's what I'm writing down. Like the elders of the Septuagint did, those priests. That's what they did. And so, really, they were always described in ancient times as writing scripture in Greek, not translating it to Greek. It's like it was just this is properly what it is. They were just totally honest and they weren't trying to find equivalents and things. That's what how people felt about it. It should sort of be like that. We're just trying to say this is what Moses actually said. He said Griffin. Yeah, he said griffin and unicorn and all the rest of them. So, I mean, I mean there's so much we could say about it. I'll tell you what, we'll come back to the details

From Shoebill Guardians To Griffins

SPEAKER_00 32:48

of the Griffin in the next episode. I think it's a good place for us to end with this concept of it's what has happened. The modern age is the age of theological liberalism that kind of gets invented at the beginning of the 19th century. Actually, it has existed right since early church times because what the liberal project does, and in a way, it's a it there's let me tell you what's good about it first before what's bad about it. What the liberal project does is say, look at these amazing truths or goals or ideas that are in human culture or human philosophy, and then see how Christ and the Bible fulfills them or is the best expression of them or something like that. And so you get that idea where ancient people did this in the ancient in the early church times, as we call it. I mean, the early church is actually the time of Adam and Eve, but I mean, the sense of the apostolic church 2000 years ago. There were people around then who had this idea, oh, look at the great ideas in Greek philosophy. We can find things in the Bible that kind of like go, you know, we can mesh it and syncretise it a bit. And they meant that as a good thing, but we've come to realize that normally was a terrible thing. Because what would happen is kind of make great it made Greek philosophy look better than it is, but it made the Bible worse than it is, as the two kind of melded to produce this amalgam and bad chimera kind of thing. So it's not actually a new project to do this. And specifically, there's one, even though we love him, St. Oregon the Scholar, he is a kind of liberal at times, although he often says he gets taken out of context and stuff, so we won't totally hold it against him. But some of the stuff that survived seems the sort of liberalism of the ancient world. And he literally gets into that with this these passages of the books of Moses, because he says there's a word, one of these creatures called a Yale in Hebrew or a tragelfarm in Greek, and that's another hybrid creature, and so I can't get too much into it today because of exactly what it's like. But just to note, that was a hybrid creature, and it's one that Aristotle used as an example of something that definitely isn't true. So then Oregon's like, oh, Moses must be trying to say, don't even eat this thing in concept or something, but it's not true. And he like tries to get around that just saying, like, well, Moses seemed to be saying this thing's true. I can't believe it because Aristotle says it, it isn't true. So that's a great example of a Christian being tempted by liberalism because he's like, Aristotle's awesome. Moses this totally head-on disagrees with him. I've got I've got um, it's my loyalties are being tested here, and he struggles to go with Moses because he rates Aristotle so highly. And that in the 19th century, that was this huge problem after the 18th century. Where the 18th century are like Europeans, we figured things out, we know the way the real world is, and and we can see that the Bible's wrong about loads of things. And so there was that huge problem. And so what they did was say, we're gonna say, we know what the real world is. Let us find a way to fit the Bible into the world as we know it to be. And then what that produced was this hugely reduced, truncated, disempowered form of Christianity, which you know that we know all the problems, slavery, world wars, everything else. Now, that is what's going on with translation problems, to say these words are used, we don't believe the world the Bible gives to us, we know better. So we will find words that we that are belong to the world we do believe in. So to go back to why is it when we read, you may

Translation Choices And Modern Liberalism

SPEAKER_00 36:56

say, I've never heard I can't see griffins either physically or I can't see them in the Bible either. Well, you could we can't because of this problem that the translators won't translate what is actually there. What they'll do is give you a word like the West Eurasian vulture or something, and you're like, what? And actually, there's a griffin standing on the page in front of you, but hidden by these words.