The Ideal - What is Christianity? | Fr. Michael Collins

On this episode of The Ideal, we sit down with priest, historian, and author Father Michael Collins to discuss his sweeping work, A History of Christianity: 2000 Years of Faith. Together, we trace the foundational moments that shaped Christian history from the very beginning.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Okay, Father Michael Collins, thank you for joining the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

A pleasure, Sean.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Now, Father Collins, you wrote the book A History of Christianity, 2000 Years of Faith. I want to do a little experiment on the podcast today. I want to treat the subject as of Christianity like it's completely foreign to me and have you go over the fundamentals and the history and really interact with something as if it's new to me. And uh before we get into that, let's lay down some groundwork. Father Collins, how might people know you? What is your background in education?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Uh well, yes, my name is Michael Collins. I'm Irish, born in Dublin 66 years ago, and I'm also a Catholic priest. So I had the opportunity of doing studies in early civilizations and theology and philosophy, of course. And then when I was in my mid-30s, I had the opportunity of studying Christian archaeology in Rome for a number of years, and it was during that time that I had the idea of producing a book, The Story of Christianity, the history of 2000 years of the Christian experience, let's say. And since then I've gone on to write different books on culture, on literature, on history, on music, on travel, etc. Uh, so that's really been my my greatest interest. And then recently I've just finished a book on Pope Leo the Fourteenth, the second American Pope, and I'm just starting a book on the history of the Sistine Chapel.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Yeah, no, it's I I I've so I've read your book, A History of Christianity, and and loved it. Um also looked at some of your other publications, and you've done um extensive extensive writing on the Pope. Why what got you interested in writing so much about the Pope in particular?

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Well, I suppose I'm interested in the fact that there were 266 popes since the time of Peter, 2,000 years ago, and the papacy is the oldest non-hereditary uh elected monarchy in the world. So that's a long time, 2,000 years. And there have been some great popes and some dreadful popes, as you'd imagine in any group of rulers over that span of period. And even speaking about America, I was fascinated, just thinking back, Alexander VI, who was elected pope in 1492, the same year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered the Americas. Um, he was the one who was then invited by the king and queen of Spain to write a treaty or a concordat, whereby a line was drawn down the map of the world through the Azores. And basically, to make it simple, they said everything to the west of that line would belong to Spain, and everything to the east would belong to Portugal. So even today, that's why the Brazilians speak Portuguese and the rest of Latin America speaks Spanish. That's just that's one example, one person. And then I think I was fascinated when I was exploring the life of Pope Leo, which I started writing uh a little more than a year ago when he was elected. Most people knew virtually nothing about him. Even people in Chicago, where he comes from, didn't know an awful lot. And I think they were interested to read about him, but it was really only when President Trump started criticizing him in April that Leo actually came to the fore. And I think the majority of the world probably woke up. And prior to this, I think people thought he was a little bland and pretty quiet, didn't say much of any great interest. And then when he started defending migrants and uh condemning really human trafficking, I think then people began to wake up and listen to another angle uh from an American leader.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Yeah, no, no, 100%. That that was a very interesting situation, kind of feud between our president and uh you know the Pope. Um I'll I'll I'll leave it at that. Uh let's get into the meat and potatoes of the episode today. Yeah. Um I want let's start at the the baseline. Okay. Who was Jesus of Nazareth and how do we know who he was?

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Well, Jesus of Nazareth is a fascinating character. Um in in fact, we know frustratingly little about him, but we are pretty sure that he existed as a human person. So if you were starting off to look at anybody from antiquity, just take any name you want. Let's say Julius Caesar is a name we all know. Okay, well, then you're going to have to look back and find out are there any writings about the name of Julius Caesar? And in fact, there's quite a lot of writings, biographies. He himself wrote an account of his life and his wars, and then there are inscriptions on monuments, etc. So we know quite a lot about Julius Caesar, but in actual fact, if you were to distill it down into one book, you'd probably only fill a pamphlet. It's extraordinary. So even though somebody who's so famous, Cleopatra is another good example. Cleopatra, she's one of the greatest names. She was played by Liz Taylor, of course, in that marvelous movie. Um, but people know virtually nothing about her, and there is little to know about Cleopatra. So when we come to Jesus of Nazareth, we probably would be better calling him Jesus of Sephorus, which is one of the two main cities in Galilee or Palestine 2,000 years ago. And that was a Greek-speaking area, which is interesting for a young Hebrew, a young Jewish man. So when we look at his life, we can just sum up a few historical characteristics if we believe that he existed. We would say he was Jewish, he was male, he was born into a family roughly 2,000 years ago, but the members of that family are completely disputed. We know that he had a mother called Mary or Miriam, but his father, his paternal origins, if you like, are debated because, on the one hand, some people say that his father was Joseph, the husband of Mary, who before their marriage was discovered to already be pregnant, and in order to save her public disgrace, which it was in those days, you know, it was disgraceful to be found pregnant before a marriage, he decided to divorce her. And then an angel said, No, don't divorce her, and explained what happened. So that's the story there. And then we don't even know, did he have brothers and sisters or was he an only child? Some groups of Christians say no, he was the son of a virgin, and we say the blessed Virgin Mary, and others would say, no, he had brothers and sisters because they're mentioned in the accounts of his life, which are called the Gospels. And the Gospels are a very interesting source of information about Jesus because there's probably a handful of gospels, but only four of them are really approved of in the sense of having been accepted by the early teachers of the Christian faith in the first two or three hundred years. So other gospels, which we call apocryphal, they give us other aspects of his life. But basically, within the four gospels that most people would be familiar with and would have heard of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we get the bulk of the knowledge of his life story. There's not a lot of biography, but there's a lot of teaching and a lot of direct quotes from the life of Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Yeah, and so kind of going over the territory you just laid out, yeah, not only the gospels, but we also have Paul's letters, right? Those are written around 1962 AD. We have the Gospel of Mark was the first gospel written, correct?

SPEAKER_01 8:29

Yeah, most likely, almost certainly.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Yeah. But then even outside of the Bible, you know, we we have historians writing about Jesus. We have Josephus, um, he wrote the Antiquities of the Jews. That was around 93, 94. And then we also had Tacitus, who also written about Jesus as well. So Eve, regardless of you know what your faith is, very few people doubt the existence of Jesus, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Oh, absolutely. No, he would really be a person who is accepted to have been a historical character, and you're quite right to point out that there were people who didn't belong to either the Jewish faith or the new version of the Jewish faith which Jesus preached, and these were what we would call pagans, and that's simply actually the word pagan comes from a Greek word meaning people who lived out in the countryside, in other words, people who were less sophisticated than people who who lived in the villages and cities.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

Yeah. But it is also true to say, on the other hand, none of these records were actually contemporaneous with the ministry of Jesus, correct?

SPEAKER_01 9:33

That's that's correct. Yeah, that's correct. And in actual fact, more than that, we can say that it appears that the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, may not have known Jesus at all, and they were writing, therefore, at one remove. So we could say we know that the people in those days they were herdspeople, they were farmers, they paid their taxes, they went to the temple to offer sacrifices, and we can just say that the first writers of the gospels, the four that I've mentioned, and then some others like Judas and Thomas, etc., which weren't accepted by the early Christian community, yeah, um, we could say that those people didn't know Jesus. So they're listening to what's called second-hand accounts of his life.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Yeah. Do you want to kind of go over the territory of how we've gotten the 27 books in the New Testament? How long did that process take? And what was the process over time to get to where we are now?

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Well, that's a very interesting question. To be honest with you, it's very complex. But if I could just maybe summarize it in a sentence, uh, those writings which you've mentioned, the 27 letters and books and compendiums of the life of and teachings of Jesus, uh, you're quite right, but they don't even take in the full amount of other writings, for example, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Um Judas, which I mentioned a moment ago, and some other ones as well. Uh, they don't take those in because some of the people who are listening to them and reading them and trying to evaluate and judge them, they said, no, these don't really fully satisfy the writing criteria which the early gospel writers had Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John. And as you say, Mark was the first. He could have been writing maybe 60s, 70s AD, so that's about 20, 30 years after the life of Jesus. Paul, as you say, quite rightly, was writing within a very short number of years of the life of Jesus. And the last Gospel, John, was written way down at the end of the first century, probably in the 90s onwards. And not only was it John who was writing, but he probably had a few co-writers who'd get together the color correlate the various sayings of Jesus and try and patch them into a biography whereby the sayings hung on the words of Jesus and on the life of Jesus. So uh again to conclude that question, it was really only in the fourth century when the church finally made what's called a canon, which is a rule, a book of rules, and they assigned these books into what's called the the Bible. Because the problem was if somebody didn't do that, we could keep on writing books. You'd have somebody like me coming along and say, Hey, I want my book included in the Bible. So they had to they had to kind of draw a line at the end and say, no, no, that's it, we're finished. Um, but that doesn't mean to say that we we can't keep on learning more about Jesus. And funny enough, Sean, a thing I discovered when I was doing my studies in Rome 20 odd years ago or a little more, was that we now know more about Jesus of Nazareth than people did 500, 1,000, 1,500 years ago. Because we're digging up manuscripts, we're able to read manuscripts. Think of the Comrades Scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were unearthed in the 40s and 50s. They didn't exist 500 years ago in the public domain. So we're learning a huge amount, and in fact, I'm fascinated to know how much more is going to be unraveled with the use of AI. But I think that's pretty much in the future.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Right. Yeah, so I mean that's a very interesting point where we're talking about uh what was it, Athanasius? I mean, he was the first person to list the 27 books. Yeah, and this is around you know the 300ths. So we're talking you know, long after the ministry of Jesus. It would how do you think about that? And how does the church think about that in terms of the iner inerrancy of the Bible? Because we had books, let's say like the Apocalypse of Peter and um the first Espital of Clement, who those books are no longer part of the canon, but they were for you know entire generations of Christians. How does that fit in with the idea of inerrancy?

SPEAKER_01 14:28

Okay, well, there's two things actually uh you've brought up as interesting points. The first I'd say is when you say the church, I mean, what is the church? Because we have formal churches that we recognize when we hear them mentioned, the let's say the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Episcopalian Church, the Presbyterian Church, etc. Okay. But then we also talk about Pentecostalist churches and evangelical churches, and we use one broad expression for all of those together, and yet they're quite separate because the Catholic Church, for example, has a lineage of teaching that, as I mentioned, goes back 2,000 years. But the evangelical churches and the Pentecostalist churches don't approve of that way of doing things, and they feel that they want to be inspired in each generation, inspired by God to be fresh and to bring something new to the contemporary world. So uh you can see the two of those are going to stand at different corners. The Catholics and the Orthodox are going to say, Well, we've been here forever, and we're we've been passing down faithfully from generation to generation the teachings, and yet the new churches will say, Yes, that's okay, that's fine, but we're bringing in freshness and novelty which will appeal to the present generation. So that's the first problem we have now when we talk about the church or the churches. And then the other problem is who decides what to cut out and who decides what to put in, and that really is a very difficult question, and it's not fully resolved because some people say, well, they probably should have put in the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas. That I meant I'm just keeping those two because they're ones which are relatively well known, but there are other ones, and then who makes that decision? And the problem is uh somebody, as I I said before, has to draw a line in the sand and say, okay, that's it. These are all the books we would need to get our knowledge from. And that's why I say it's fascinating to know that our knowledge of Jesus is continuously expanding. And I'd give an example. There was um a scholar called John John Mayer, he was a Catholic priest, an American priest, who wrote a book a few years ago called The Messianic Jew, which was um a study of the life of Jesus. And I think the title was a little provocative because many people would not really consider Jesus as Jewish, and yet Jesus himself would consider himself as Jewish. And that brings you into a very, a very tricky area because if you look at Jesus of Nazareth of Jesus of Sephoris that I mentioned, he's Greek speaking, so he's familiar with the world of Greek philosophy, possibly. Now he he'd have a very rudimentary knowledge of it, but it's just he lives in a city a few miles away from where he's growing up. And does he come in contact with the traders, the travelers in the area who can quote Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Parmenides, all the great philosophers of the past? And yet he's Jewish and he reads Hebrew, he goes into the synagogue when he's a young man, and he takes his right, his opportunity to say, I want to read the scriptures, and he takes a scroll from the selection of scrolls which is available to him, picks up the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, and he starts reading about the Lord's anointed who's going to bring liberty to captives, declare freedom to prisoners, etc. And then when he rolls up the scroll, he then says, This is being fulfilled even today as you listen. But of course, people in the synagogue, there's probably only a handful of people in those days in a small little country synagogue, they were aghast. And in fact, we find in the gospel stories that contrary to what you might believe or expect, the people didn't all fall down on their knees and say, Oh Jesus, you're directly sent from God. Because that was a process which took a little time to develop in people's minds, and certainly at the very beginning, many people thought he was blaspheming. In fact, when he came to his 30s, he began a period of roughly three years, which were very important years, because prior to that we know very little about the life of Jesus, and to be very honest, we have to admit that the whole infancy narratives that we talk about, you know, the Christmas crush, the shepherds, the angels, Jesus laid in a manger, etc. Um, it's highly unlikely that any of that happened because those stories were added in at the end of the process. Right. People were interested in in the time of Jesus was those three years when he was going around speaking about God, indicating that he was sent by God, and in some cases seemed to be self-identifying with God. Now, that is for any pious Jew, that's blasphemy. And to this present day, the vast bulk of Jews, apart from a tiny proportion, would regard Jesus as a blasphemer and really a heretic. He should be cut out of the Jewish faith. And yet Jesus himself, as I say, saw himself very much as a pious Jew. Now, this is where I I actually just lay down my pen and I think I can't figure this out because it's too complicated. On the one hand, Jesus is human, and the gospel stories and Paul indicate that Jesus is, you know, he's like you and me, completely human. And then on the other hand, you've got some of the gospel writers who, especially John, towards the end of the first century, they've been thinking about Jesus for a long time, and they've been, you know, 20, 30 years putting his thoughts and his teachings together, and they are coming up with this idea that Jesus and God are one and the same person. Now that is to me, I I just can't get over that idea. However, that having been said, I'm a chaplain in a school of kids that are aged between, let's see, they're I think four is the youngest, they're like babies, and then 18 would be the eldest. So we have school, school debates, and I love listening to the kids talking about their you know, their knowledge of the world, etc. And this is one of one of the great mysteries which uh I think all of us find so difficult to understand. How could you be completely a human and yet retain your divinity? And that, in fact, it's not even today we've got that problem. That problem was there two or three hundred years for for about two or three hundred years after the time of Jesus, because this is where I'm going back to the whole idea of making a collection of writings, because people were saying, Well, hold on a second, in the book of such and such, Jesus said. Such and such, and in another book he says something else. So, what was the truth? And that's why we have the people confused, really. And even the listeners of Jesus, you know, when they were listening to him talking, um, they were trying to figure out, you know, who is this guy? And in fact, on one occasion, uh, in the gospel it's recorded that they threw him out of town, and somebody said, Well, you know, this is surely the son of Mary, the son of Joseph the carpenter, and here's his brothers and sisters all around us. Now, be careful about that word because Adelphoi in Greek and the Gospels and the writings of Paul, James, and Peter were in Greek. That word means brothers, sisters, and kinsfolk. And in fact, it can at an at a push, it can even mean aunts and uncles and grandfathers, grandmothers. So that just makes life a little bit more difficult for a scripture scholar. But this is this is the night you're getting at. How can Jesus be born human and for all extents and purposes physically and outwardly look human, you know, 100% human, and yet at the same time, he has this divine spark of teaching within him. And that's that to me, I haven't been able to work that out in all the years I'm on the planet, and I'm still trying to figure it out. I accept a lot of it on faith, but that doesn't mean to say that I'm not going to keep on niggling at it and try and understand it a little bit better. But in those three years that I'm talking about, in those final three years of his life, he was teaching more and more clearly that his mission was from God, whom he called father. And he used an Aramaic word Abba, uh, which is translated as dad, it's or pops. It's not even it's not even father, it's more colloquial, familiar, and familial than the word father patter. So here he is, he's speaking and self-identifying with God, and that gets so difficult for the Jewish authorities to stomach that they decide to take them and have them disposed of. Now, at that time, Palestine was part of the Roman province, it had been for over 150 years or more. So the Jewish leaders couldn't do anything themselves, they needed to go to their occupying masters who were the Romans. And I think many listeners will be familiar with the character of Pontius Pilate, who suddenly crops up another historical character, and we only discovered that he actually truly existed a number of years ago when his name was found to be inscribed on a step in one of the uh games theatres, one of the entertainment places. Prior to that, we weren't 100% sure that he existed, so that's why I say we're now unearthing through archaeology more and more evidence for early Christianity. But as I say, coming to the end of it all, they brought him to Pontius Pilate. He didn't really want to get involved with the niceties of Jewish law, he just wanted to get rid of this guy who was causing him problems. So we can be sure of one thing: the long discourse which we find in the Gospels about Jesus being brought to Pontius Pilate and the two of them having a conversation, it's so unlikely that that happened. Because why would a Roman governor speak to a Jewish carpenter? It doesn't make any sense. So what they've done, the writers there, if they they've set this up like on a Shakespearean stage, and they've put Jesus in one corner and Pilate on the other, and they've made a short dialogue. Now they're wise enough not to make it too long, it's only the exchange of two or three lines. Now it could have happened, I'm not saying it didn't happen because I wasn't there to say it didn't happen, but what I am saying is it it forms part of that kind of uh, let's say, narrative element of writing, which was common at the time. You set up two characters and they exchange a few words so they can both put their uh belief system. It's a bit like if you like, if you like, going back to Leo and and Donald Trump, they both put their side and they're both uh both of them in separate corners. So one is speaking in Washington and the other is speaking in Rome, and they're both coming at similar projects such as peace and migration, etc., from different angles. So you need those types of things, and that's why it was kind of good just using that analogy. It was good that President Trump and uh Pop Leo did have that spate, if you like, because it exposed both of their belief system, and then it's up to people who listen to them to say, I think I'll take President Trump's side, or I think I'll take Pope Leo's side, or even if you don't take either side, at least you've heard people talking. So at the end of the dialogue with Pilate and Jesus, as I say, if it ever took place, right? The decision is made by Pilate anyway, that he's a troublemaker and he has to be got rid of, and that's what they do, they decide to crucify Jesus. Now it's at that point in the story, and listeners may or may not be familiar with this, that the death was uh by crucifixion, which was the way for common criminals. Uh, Paul, for example, we're going to find a little bit later on. He was Jewish just like Jesus, he was a devout Jew, and in fact, he killed some of Jesus' followers, which is, you know, more or less in the scriptures, that's what you would do to get rid of um people who are impious against God. He would actually kill them. That's the way they did things in those days. So Paul then, when he comes to meet his death, he's not crucified because he's a Roman citizen, so he's allowed to be sent to Rome for trial, which he takes up as an opportunity. He's brought to Rome, and it's there that, according to tradition, that he was beheaded. And the reason he was beheaded was because being a Roman citizen, he wasn't going to be crucified like a common criminal. So you see that even in death there was a distinction for those people. So at the end of the three years of the public ministry, we call it, of Jesus uh going around Galilee and that that district preaching and teaching and indeed working miracles in the eyes of some people. Uh, at the end of it all, Jesus then, three days after his crucifixion, uh appears to have risen from the dead. But we don't see Jesus, but a number of people, according to the biblical sources, up to about 500 people saw Jesus and some of them spoke with him. Mary of Magdala was the first witness, and curiously was uh a woman who met Jesus on the morning of the alleged resurrection. That was two days after his crucifixion, and you actually measure it as three because the day begins with the dusk of the day before, so that's why we would we would call it three days. So Jesus did what he had actually prophesied he would do, he would rise from the dead, and then he spoke to other people, to Peter and to several of the what we call the apostles, although they weren't apostles at that stage. The apostles simply means apostoline means to be sent as an ambassador, and therefore Jesus uses these twelve as ambassadors to preach the message. Bar one, because Judas Iscariot, one of these twelve close companions of Jesus, took his own life, so he had to be replaced by a man called Matthias. And then, according to the gospel stories and the scriptures, Jesus appeared for several days, a little over a month, meeting people, talking with them, appearing to them, but not at their will. He he just more or less seemed to walk through doors and appear to people. So therefore, with a very small group of witnesses. So can we trust those witnesses? And the question will come up: was a group hallucination? Was Jesus really risen from the dead? And this is where it's fascinating because you've got to go in forensically and try and examine the uh evidence which is left. And the let's say the witnesses speak with the witnesses. Well, they're all dead, they died 1900 years ago. So we can't we can't speak with them. So all we've got is just these old texts, and we've a problem already because, as I mentioned, we're looking back at the what we call the infancy narratives, and many of these infancy narratives are really just cobbled together from other sources and uh narratives of the way unusual people are born. And that brings us into another problem with with the early uh scriptures, because Jesus wasn't the only wonder worker going around Palestine at the time, Galilee at the time, who are other accounts of people who were doing extraordinary miracles, speaking in the name of God, claiming to be God themselves, and in fact, there there's a couple of accounts in the contemporary uh writings of people being killed and then claiming to rise again on the third day. And even in Zoroastrianism, you've got the same idea, the the cult of Mithras and Mithras uh slain a bull. Now, unfortunately, not much is known of ancient Mithraism, but there are similar incidents in that uh Mithras slays a bull and then uh is killed and then dies and rises again on the third day. And even to make life difficult, even in the early fourth century, Constantine, who's the first Christian emperor, he puts an end to 300 years of sporadic persecution of the Christians, which was sparked off by the great fire of Rome when Nero blamed the Christians as being partly responsible for the destruction of the city. And Constantine, his mother's Christian, uh, but he isn't Christian at the beginning. He's a worshipper of Saul Invictus, the unconquered god. So he kind of comes at religion obliquely because he has a vision the night before a battle when he's trying to take control of Rome in 313, 312, he sees uh the sun in the sky, and in the sun he sees a sign which looks like a cross, and the words Alpha and Omega and CH are Cairo, which could be the beginnings of the word uh Christus, which means the anointed. And apparently he he consulted uh a Christian sayer who told him that this was the symbol of the um person of Jesus, and then identified Jesus with a new title, which was an old Hebrew title, but translated into Greek, and it was Christos, and that that was the savior or the messiah. But that title itself was Jewish, and that title itself was Can we double-click on that actually?

SPEAKER_00 34:02

What's sure what does the term messiah mean?

SPEAKER_01 34:06

Messiah simply means anointed one, somebody who's been anointed with olive oil. A king is is anointed, so a messiah is somebody who is going to be anointed, and in the Jewish scriptures, there's a trust, uh, pious Jews believe that there's a messiah going to come to rescue them from great difficulties. But in the Christian point of view, many people see the Messiah as being divine. But we we have to be honest and say that in the Jewish faith, Messiah is not a divine figure, messiah is a great leader, a liberator, uh person who's going to be anointed by God in order to help the people.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

Right. Right, yeah. It's a d in the Jewish context, uh, the Messiah was someone that was going to uh fight against God's enemy enemies and you know yes rule the land of Israel. How did that change over time to the how did Christians change that definition? Because if you if you're just looking at that definition of the time of Jesus' time, uh it would seem that Jesus wasn't the Messiah.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

Well, that's interesting, and you know, Sean, I'm I'm aware that every time you ask me a question, I go off into another um sideline. But the reason is because your questions are very pertinent and they do lead you on to something else. So that that means, okay, we've we've got this idea that the Jewish people saw Jesus as a Messiah, an anointed one from God. Uh, there were some people who felt that Jesus was actually God Himself, but they had to be careful about saying that because this really was a blasphemy and punishable by law, by death. And you had seen what happened, Jesus of Nazareth. So these were the followers. And in fact, many people bore witness and are called martyrs. It comes from another Greek word, um, martyrios, meaning a witness, who bore witness even with their lives, and they decided to die rather than surrender their belief and say that they'd been fooled all along. So now we're going into another area. Why would people uh say that they believed this Christ was the anointed one and who was he? Because they were now going to part ways with Judaism, and Jesus then uh comes along in two, three, four centuries afterwards, and there are still people writing up about him. You mentioned Athanasius, you mentioned well, there's so many. There's Basil Gregory of Cappadocia, there's John Chrysoldham, there's any number of early thinkers. And then there's a lovely group called the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers, people who'd gone into the Egyptian desert in the early 4th century, well, the indeed the late 3rd century into the fourth century, in order just to be away from the corruption of the world and to live a quiet, peaceful life, meditating on what they believed were the words of God in the scriptures. And that was very much following the Jewish tradition. But with all these names that I've mentioned, Athanasius, Cyprian, Cornelius, there's so many of them to choose from, each of them had a different view of who this Christ was. So who was the Messiah? Was he was Jesus simply a great civic ruler? Or could we say that Jesus was a spiritual leader, or could we say that Jesus is divine? So you see, it's very difficult, and all these different writers, Oregon, Tertullian, I I could list the name as long as you're on, all these people they're they're arguing it, and that's what we tried to set out in the book, in fact, as best we could. We only had 240 pages in in the history of Christianity to try and cover 2000 2000 years, so that that was quite a challenge, but that was one of the great problems. How did we deal with the early what we call now the heresies?

unknown 38:16

Right.

SPEAKER_01 38:17

There people were looking at all these angles and they were taking positions, and in fact, some of the great saints were confronting each other and arguing bitterly one against the other. So now we were forming different versions of Christianity. So can you imagine how complex it must have got at that stage?

SPEAKER_00 38:40

Yeah, I kind of want to double-click on something you said earlier, um, uh whether or not uh Jesus uh thought he was God or he was working through God. Was there a consensus in the early church of whether Jesus was literally God or if he was you know performing through God?

SPEAKER_01 38:58

I would have to say from my limited knowledge, and it's a very human knowledge, I would say no. I don't think there was uh a unified acceptance of any or even an interpretation of who Jesus was. And that's why I mentioned even as late as the third and fourth century, we find people still arguing uh what was because you know the thing is we are not Jesus, only Jesus knew his mind. That's the problem, and it's like anybody, for example, if you're a detective and you're trying to solve a crime, only the let's say the alleged murderer or the alleged victim is the one who will know the truth. So all we can do is put together the evidence, let's say, try and reconstruct a crime scene. Well, in this case, it's not fortunately a try uh crime scene, but we've got to try and work out what Jesus thought. Now, there's a very interesting thing, speaking of that, and you've brought a very interesting point up, and that is the issue of one of the central teachings of Jesus when he talks about the kingdom of God. Uh, and he refers to the kingdom of God several times. Now, this will be read by many Jews in a particular way, uh, and in the uh Torah, in the scriptures, the Jewish collection of sacred writings, they have the same concept of God's reign coming into the world. But Jesus seems to say as he's meeting the small community of people who are beginning to follow him, in particular during the last three years of his life, but it could be even before them. He talks, he seems to talk about a kingdom of God forming in the world or breaking into the world or being inaugurated in the world, and he seems to want a transformation so that people would live honourably, generously, in a forgiving manner, in a repentant manner, uh, and also in a grace-filled manner, whereby they would um bring to fruit all the gifts which they had been born with, etc. But the issue here is it's unclear whether that great kingdom of God was an earthly kingdom of God or whether it was a heavenly kingdom of God. You see? And the other problem we've got speaking about this kingdom of God, we call it eschatological. Uh the theologians use the word simply because we're looking at end times, the the issues which are concerned about the end of the world. And it's not really clear that Jesus was talking about a kingdom in heaven. It seems to be that Jesus was talking about the establishment of a kingdom, a way of living which would be parallel to the Jewish occupier, excuse me, to the Roman occupiers, and that's interesting because keep in mind the Romans uh ruled uh Palestine at that time. So they were they were the enemy, if you like, they were the conquerors. So this is the issue. Was Jesus simply trying to get the people to live out a good life as best they could within their own days, you know, the span of life which they would live? Or was he looking also beyond that towards a glorious paradise? And then it's only in the Acts, uh the book of Revelations, which is also called the Apocalypse, again, one of the later books of the New Testament, that we we have these wonderful images of God revealing himself and coming to judge the living and the dead, and that book itself was written. And I always try to say to people, you know, keep in mind that these books were always written in order to be read out loud, because people didn't read quietly like we do today. Until about 150 years ago, most of us, if we were reading, we would read out loud. In fact, if you went to Jerusalem, you see the Jewish people who go to pray at the Wailing Wall, they read out loud their scriptures because they keep with that old tradition. So there we go. That's that's the issue. Um what are we looking at? The book of the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, the Book of Apocalypse, it's the same book, is talking about the end of the world and it's calling talking about the great reward which is coming for people. And it was written to be read, it would take about an hour to be read, and people would have gathered, they had nothing else to do in those days. There was no TV, there was no radio, there were no newspapers, no internet, there was nothing to do, and you relied very much on an oral tradition. Which incidentally is one of the reasons why we can be quite sure that the many of the words and sayings of Jesus are uh quite accurate because people were very proud of their memories in those days because they needed to memorize things properly. So you learned how to memorize properly when you were very young, because if you made a mistake, you know, you got into trouble. So uh this is the issue. Then towards the end of the century, the Christians are beginning to say, well, Jesus did want to bring a kingdom into this world, but he expected it for uh eternity, and the reason for that was because most people believe that Jesus, after he had died and disappeared to heaven, they believed that he was going to come back shortly. He'd said it himself, right? And then people started dying and he hadn't come back. So what happened? So they had to come up with a solution there.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

Yeah, but to double-click on that, I believe the uh a good h historical tool to use is the criteria of dissimilarity. So when we were talking about some of what Jesus' sayings are in the Bible and how you know many of them are accurate, I would say the ones that are especially accurate are the ones that may be uh dissimilar to what you know the gospel writers or early Christians wanted would want to have to include in the Bible. So there's some sayings of Jesus that he appears to be getting things wrong, like he's saying that the end of the world would happen and some of his followers would be alive to see it. Uh, you could invoke the criteria of the similarity there, and you you can bet that Jesus probably did say something like that.

SPEAKER_01 45:38

You're absolutely right. That's a very good point. And again, if we were in a court of law, that's what the the attorney would say, because you know they'll look for something which people have overlooked, and they'll they'll do exactly what you're saying. Yeah, you're absolutely right.

SPEAKER_00 45:54

It and also double-click on the uh book of Revelation, what exactly does it say about um the afterlife and the end of the world? Because I I feel as though many Christians have a different vision of what the afterlife is like than the one that's depicted in Revelation.

SPEAKER_01 46:11

Yes, well, that's a very good point. Again, um I I I always look at the Latin tag quatomines tot sententie. There are as many opinions as there are people. So if you apply that to something like the Book of Revelations, the Book of Revelations is semi-poetic. It's trying to describe the indescribable, so it's trying to uh give a vision to the people who've gathered to listen to a narrator reading it, because there were a few people who are who are literate, and they would listen to them, and they would be just bowled over by this. And it's a little bit like if we could imagine, say, uh a person, I'm just going to take an example that I'm familiar with, a person from a little village in in Germany in the Alps, a little hamlet with maybe 10 or 15 houses and chickens and goats and geese and sheep and all other things like that, maybe even a cow or two. That person who undertakes a pilgrimage and goes down to Rome, they'll have to walk there because a thousand years ago they could only make me take a mule or a horse, but most people went by foot because they hadn't got the money to go any other way. Carts were a little bit more expensive, etc. Anyway, the point is you arrive into a place like St. Peter's and you suddenly say, Wow, look at this, there's gold glittering all over the place. So it's the same concept, what the writers of the book of Revelations, and you know, if anybody wants to take the book of Revelations, the Apocrypha, the Apocalypse, if they want to take the that book down, and you know, maybe this is a good opportunity to to flick over the pages and try and work out what it means because it's it's to it's to drown you in these wonderful images when the angels come down blowing trumpets, calling uh the dead from the graves and summoning those who are still alive to make an account for their lives. And again, going back to art, Michelangelo's wonderful last uh Last Judgment, which is in the Sistern Chapel, is again a magnificent rendering both of passages from the Gospels but also from the Book of the Apocalypse when Christ appears as a judge, and here he is the Messiah, who is no longer simply uh a Jewish leader, a temporal human leader, he's now beyond that, and he's appearing as a divine messiah. So isn't that interesting? And we find Mary is tucked in behind his arm, his mother, and then he lifts his arm either in blessing or condemnation for those who've lived good or bad lives. It's a fabulous, you know. If you've got if you've got your internet open, just just open after the show, after this talk, uh the last judgment of Michelangelo, and just look at all the wonderful images, including Michelangelo's face himself. He he shows himself in the flailed skin of Saint Bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles, and his face is kind of falling to bits. So he's uh he's in there as well.

unknown 49:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:34

No, that's it's it's absolutely like the the images that come out of you know Revelation itself. It is it's very different than what's in the rest of the New Testament, and it's it's very vivid. You know, you get the sun turning black and then the moon turns red. Uh, I think it says something about like every mountain falls out of place because there's these giant earthquakes, and then you got hail and blood rains down. It's it it's very uh crazy to kind of read these kind of depictions when you you know compare it to the rest to uh the rest of the New Testament.

SPEAKER_01 50:08

Yeah, but keep in mind, yes, but that's true. But keep in mind Exodus, the Exodus story, when the Jewish people live leave Israel, the Hebrews leave leave uh I should say Egypt. I'm sorry, uh they leave Egypt and they have the ten plagues, and you know, there's the plague of locusts, there's a plague of hailstones, there's a plague of uh the rivers running red, you know, all these things. So the writer of the book of Apocalypse of Revelations is dipping back into the old Jewish writings because again, make making the point that we made at the top of the hour, Jesus was born Jewish and Jesus considered himself as a pious Jew. Now, beyond that, um every single individual has to try and delve into the mind of Christ, uh, of Jesus Christ, and try and understand who A, whom he thought and believed he was, and maybe B who he was, and that's an individual journey that only people can make themselves. The churches and the Christian communities over 2000 years have formed teachings in order to help people there along those lines, and even from the point of view of learning the basic ABC, the root rudimentary of the faiths, that's all there. That's provided by many of the Christian churches and preachers that's their responsibility to educate and help people understand. But at the end of the day, all of us have to make up our own mind of whom we believe in our conscience Jesus was and is.

SPEAKER_00 51:51

Let me ask you about another figure, um, Joseph of Arimathea. Um, who was he?

SPEAKER_01 51:57

Well, Joseph of Arimathea is a character who just appears a couple of times in the in the Gospels. Um when Jesus was crucified, it happened very quickly. He was crucified as criminal, even though you know he wasn't really a criminal, and according to Jewish law, his body had to be interred by sunset. And in particular, they had to be careful for that evening because it was the eve of Passover, so it was very important that the body would be taken down. And in fact, the gospel the Gospels give us an interesting little piece of information that they just almost seem to pass over. They say the body was taken down because the Jewish followers of Jesus, again, all the followers of Jesus were Jewish, they weren't Christian at that time. They had to go to the authorities and ask for the body to be released, and the legs of Jesus were broken in order to hasten the death, but he probably was dead already at this stage. Then his body was taken down. It was, I can imagine, if you look at the wonderful talking of Michelangelo once more, if you look at the wonderful statue of Mary and Jesus in the Pietà, that wonderful sculptor, uh sculpture sculpted from a piece of Carrara marble when Michelangelo was only about 23. Um, the the the beautiful figure there is of Jesus laid dead on the lap of the mother who gave him his life. And you know, there's there's wonderful um emotions you can see between those two figures, one alive and one dead. And um you you look back and you see who is this person? Well, behind that person, invisibly, if you like, is Joseph of Arimathea, who comes along to offer his own grave to Jesus because the family probably Jesus was he came. I call him a carpenter, which is actually incorrect. He was an archoton, which means he was a builder, he was a labourer, certainly semi-skilled. He'd have known how to use the plane, the lathe, uh all of this type of thing. Nails probably probably didn't exist in in that area because iron was still quite a precious metal and not that easily available. Wood was also quite restricted. Um, but in any event, uh he was he was a builder, and Joseph just came along in a moment of need and he provided for Jesus at that time, and because he did that, he's recorded for his gesture in the in the scriptures. And I think he's a wonderful, a very inspiring example because he's barely mentioned, as I say, in the New Testament, and yet his act of generosity at the end of Jesus' life was transformative because it was from the tomb in which Jesus was laid that the belief grew of Jesus' resurrection and his uh rising to new life.

SPEAKER_00 55:07

Yep. It I I know you had said something about uh Pilate and Jesus' dialogue uh as depicted in the Gospels, probably didn't happen. I mean, what's your level of confidence for someone like Joseph Ari uh Aramafia actually existing? Because I I think to my knowledge, there's nothing really outside the Bible that attests to his actual existence.

SPEAKER_01 55:28

Um, well, funny that that's a very good point. Yeah, you're you're absolutely right. But therefore, that's all the more reason where I I do believe that he existed because uh, you know, he he's just mentioned in passing, and whoever wrote about him, I don't think they actually worked that out. You know, I don't think they really thought out what I've just said that Joseph was a generous, kind person who came to Mary in her moment of need because she'd know we she'd know tomb. Joseph has disappeared already in the Gospels. We don't hear anything about Joseph after the age of when Jesus was twelve. He just disappears and nobody mentions did he die, did he what nobody mentions what happened. Um, and again, when Joseph of Arimathea steps forward, that to me is a very human character and would fill in perhaps the the fact that Joseph had died or was no longer uh in the life of Jesus at that time. So it's fascinating, and um I think that's the beauty of the Gospels and the scriptures in general, because when people read them, they come up with so many fascinating insights. Now, not all of them have to be correct or accurate, but they do, especially in prayer, a lot of people come up with very interesting uh views that probably nobody else has thought of, or um, it's a bit like again going back to the detective story, the detective who comes back with the with the absolute proof of the of the crime and who is guilty.

SPEAKER_00 57:09

So so no qualms about the the lack of records or the the fact that Aramathia not really a place that we know of in history. Nothing about was he a member of the Sanhedrin? Did he vote to have Jesus crucified?

SPEAKER_01 57:25

Uh well again, no, I don't think any of that is recorded, but I'm just thinking back, you you've mentioned you know the histor historicity. Uh we could say somebody, Simon of Cyrene, he's mentioned on the road to Calvary, uh Jesus falls, and the soldiers push him up a couple of times, and then uh they pull in somebody who's just come in from the countryside into Jerusalem, a man called Simon of Cyrene, and they force him to help Jesus carry the cross because obviously Jesus wasn't capable anymore of pulling his cross to Calvary where he was going to be crucified at Golgotha. And uh he's only just mentioned there, he's I think he's mentioned as the father of Alexandra and Rufus, and that's that. There's no further mention of him. So it was sufficient for the readers of that time just to know that he appeared, and yeah, that's it. End of story.

SPEAKER_00 58:25

Let's pivot now. Let's go to I actually wanted to ask you about how you felt about the Church of Latter-day Saints. What how do you view that sect of Christianity?

SPEAKER_01 58:37

Well, I have to declare honestly, I don't know sufficient to make any valid judgment, but it's interesting to think of the numerous churches which established themselves over the centuries, and also the people who've broken off from the main body of the church. And I think going back to for me, which we say for ground, I could speak about uh Martin Luther was an Augustinian friar, in fact, the same order as Pope Leo XIV comes from, and he uh had decided that when he was caught in a storm, that he prayed to St. Anne, and he said, If I escape this, I'm going to become a friar, and he joined up the religious life. But he he was a very good person, Martin Luther. He was uh just scandalized when he went to Rome in 1510 and he saw the corruption there. He just was disgusted by it, and he he wanted to leave the church, and he he knew that that wasn't really uh a possibility, so he thought, well, the best thing is to reform the church. I won't just walk out and go to reform the church. But that reformation led to an extraordinary uh breakup of Christianity in the heartland of Europe, and not only did it break up uh the unity of the Christian people at that time, but it also broke up uh Europe itself because many of the countries from Germany outwards, including France, England, Sweden, other countries, they all got involved in a long war, and it was only resolved after a good number of years, and it was decided that the people of the country would adopt the religion of their monarch, and that was their only way of getting out of the problem. So there is an example. Uh, sometimes when new churches emerge, as in you say the the Church of Latter-day Saints, and I have to say that I'm not remotely qualified to speak about them, uh, I would just say that's one of the issues that there's a splintering of the of the church, and it can have ramifications not only within uh the Christian community, but even in the geography of the land. And if if you think of uh the Mormons and the state of Utah, you think of uh the Seventh-day Adventists, all the uh new churches which have emerged over the last couple of hundred years, you know, they they also bring a richness of faith, they bring a vitality, a newness, which some of the people in the older churches find threatening and find difficult.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:29

Yeah, uh even if you're not as familiar with the church, and uh I I'm in the same boat there. I'm I'm assuming you're familiar with the gold tablets and you know Joseph Smiths. And Joseph Smith, yeah. I mean, what do you think of uh his additions to you know the life of Jesus and what do you think of the gold tablets?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:47

Well, again, you've got to accept that if you believe in the uh stories which were told about more than two and a half thousand years going on three thousand years from the Jewish faith and then into the Christian scriptures, I mean some of them are quite unbelievable, they really are. I've mentioned the ten plagues, which in a sense they almost mirror the ten commandments. Um, I've mentioned uh some of the miracles of Jesus, and some of them are just almost impossible to believe. And in fact, some people would say now that the healings of a blind man or a leper or somebody who was crippled and was able to walk again, that these were set-ups, that they were actually um, you know, the they they they took place in public spaces where it's easy to hoodwink somebody. So applying that same method to the uh the churches that you've mentioned as well, you could you could say that, and you could say, oh well, Smith came along and he wanted to uh hoodwink people and he wanted to found new religion, etc. But can I say that this didn't happen? No, I can't, because I wasn't there. So if I wasn't there, I should keep my mouth shut. And that's one of the issues that uh believing people often have with atheists, because very often somebody says, I I'm an atheist and I don't believe God exists, well, that's fine. But if you really wanted to believe them, you'd have to ask them if they could give you some proof that that God doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:28

No, a hundred percent. And I I think that's a pretty fair assessment because if you let's say you take someone who's an evangelical and you you compare that to you know the beliefs of a of a Mormon, you know, with the Book of Mormon, I mean, we have we know the people who knew Joseph Smith. Uh, I think it was those three witnesses who signed, you know, sworn testimonies saying that, yeah, we we saw the angel descend from heaven and we saw the gold plates. And then on top of that, we have eight people that signed statements basically saying that they they saw the physical plates as well. And even after, you know, many of the eight people who swore they saw the plates, they left the church, they were excommunicated from the church, they um hated Joseph Smith after a you know period of time, and they still to their dying day said that they saw the plates and that you know Joseph Smith was legit. So if you just compare that to the evidence that we have in in the Gospels, in uh Paul's letters, there's a lot of claims. Like we we don't have sworn direct testimony in the same way that we do for the exactly, exactly, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:34

In fact, it's interesting you say that because you remind me while you're speaking of uh an alleged apparition of Mary, which took place, Mary the mother of Jesus, which took place in Ireland in 1878 or 79, I beg your pardon. And the belief was that some parishioners, some people of the local village were passing by the back of the church one evening in August, uh, a wet, damp evening, and they saw images on the back gable of the church, and they identified them as Mary, Joseph, and St. John, and at the centre was a lamb laid on an altar, and they interpreted these uh as being those particular characters. Well, again, I wasn't there, so can I say it did take place, or can I say it didn't take place?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:25

Yeah, that reminds me actually of the miracle of the sun, and that was in 19 uh 17, where it's kind of similar claims that the the Virgin Mary would make the sun dance in the sky. And this was an event that was well recorded, well documented, multiple people attested to that that that yeah, that Mary did make the sun dance in the sky. And the people from different countries even uh testifying to that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:47

So yeah, they the exactly. I mean, to be fair, there are people who had no views one way or the other who are we'll say neutral, and they said, Yeah, there was something definitely happened. They they did observe it. Uh Others would say no, it is mass hysteria, but it is very well recorded. And uh today, unfortunately, uh a lot of these things have kind of faded from the public memory. That's that's one of our problems. We have so much knowledge to to to cope with. We've been inundated with knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:19

Yeah, which Pope witnessed the miracle of the sun? Do you talk about it?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:22

Well, allegedly it was Pope Pius XII, and he was Pope from 1939 to 58. He was Pope at the very uh the the dawn of World War II, and uh he he he was also a very controversial pope because he was condemned for not having uh condemned, in fact, more explicitly what Hitler was doing to the Jewish people in 1942. And the fact is that the Vatican authorities they knew what was going on at the time, and they they took the position that the more that they would complain and um bring it to the public about what Hitler was doing, the more they would be put people's lives in danger, and that Hitler would just uh r double down on his violence. But you know, the reality is that just didn't work at the time, and that's why Pope Leo, I respect Pope Leo because he's been quite vocal in his criticism of what President Putin is doing in in Russia, and you know, that's a clear-cut case of an invasion in another territory, so it it corresponds with all the rules of international warfare. Um, and Leo has you know said what he's got to say. He's not he's not shouting and screaming about it, but he's made his views very clearly and well known, and they're documented. And he's received President Zelensky on several occasions, and he's just trying to get the belligerents to rescue the the women and the children first and foremost, and particularly from the violence that's going on, and equally with the the war in Gaza, and then the present war that's uh going on in in Palestine and in uh Iraq is you know it's it's phenomenal to believe that this is going on. But the fact is, there's this extraordinary violence in Southeast Asia and in the Middle East, and it's it's something which you know Leo has has been very forthright in saying that this is indefensible and it really has to come to an end, that it's not going anywhere, and it it no longer would satisfy the criteria of what used to be called the just war theory. So the just war theory was expounded by Cicero and by many others, Seneca, etc., but notably by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and they made the point that before you go into a war, you've got to know, for example, who your enemy is, you've got to undertake the enterprise with the reasonable hope of a victory which isn't going to leave everybody dead, and it's got to have a goal and it's got to limit the consequences. You know, there's a whole without going into it now, there's there's a whole uh definition. But even nowadays, people are saying the just war theory doesn't work anymore because we're in the era of nuclear bombs and drones. And in fact, a friend of mine who works in that area, the industry of armaments, he was saying that drones are almost more dangerous than nuclear bombs. Um I think he was being provocative, and he was saying, because the reason is a drone can be sent um all over a territory to drop uh nerve gases, etc., which are as horrific as nuclear bombs. I don't know how I I ended up speaking about this area, but it's it's the issue of who is Pius XII and the fact that we need good strong moral teaching in the present world, because if we leave it to politicians, the problem we have, at least in Europe, is our politicians are elected for short periods after which they may go for re-election and even again re-election one term after another. And the difficulty is that um unless they have good strong moral teaching, they could end up just trying to please the populace, and that may not always be the best thing to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:44

Yep. Uh Father Collins, we've enough content here to fill a lifetime. I I do hope we can speak again because there is still a lot of ground to cover, but don't want to take up too much of your time. Um, it's a pleasure. Is there anything you're working on now that you want to plug, or how can my audience on that?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:02

Well, uh I don't know. Maybe I'd plug actually the the biography of Pope Leo, which I'm not sure if it's even available in the States. It was published by Red Stripe, but I'm giving the royalties to a home for elderly people, which was uh very close to Bob Privost when he was working in Chulacanus in Peru, and Bishop Dan Murray, uh Murphy Turley, uh was a great friend of uh Pope Leo when he was a young man. In fact, he was the one who brought him to Peru, and he suggested this uh charity, and I think it's so lovely that we'll be able to help out. In fact, friends of mine have already given generously to this uh to this group of uh sisters who are working with the people. So that's one thing. And then the the other book that I've just started working on is on the history of the Sistine Chapel, not so much from the point of view of the artwork, but the other things which are fascinating. You know, the election of the Pope takes place there, and you might remember when Leo was elected, the the white smoke billowing out of the chimney. Uh the Sistine Chapel choir was uh is amazing. The history of the castrati who were employed in the choir, Raphael's Tapestries, the restoration programme, which took place in the 80s and 90s, which was funded by Nippon Television. Um you're talking about a fantastic uh space, it's all just one room, and uh the book is called The Sistan Chapel, a biography. So it's it's all the things and all the people who've passed through the chapel, and uh I'm really really enjoying that. And even if if it never gets published, I'll still I'll I'll enjoy writing it. It's it's a whole journey of um discovery.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:54

Yeah, absolutely. Listen, Father Collins, I appreciate your time and thank you for coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:59

A pleasure, thanks so much.