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The Intricate Weave of Early Christianity and New Testament Structure · The Reality Is

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The definition of a parable is very simple.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: And this man if you ever want to watch a seminary student, a graduate student's head explode, ask him.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: This are parables, true?
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Just think of David with the prophet Nathan, right, david kills Bathsheba's husband and he gets her pregnant, then has the husband murdered and he thinks he's dodged a bullet and he's just going on with life.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: And then Nathan shows up and tells him a made-up story.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: And as he's telling this made-up story about this terrible thing this rich man has done, david's getting angrier and angrier and angrier, until David finally just blows his top and says bring him here, I'll kill him myself.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: And Nathan says thou art the man you are.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: That's you.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: And that is, in other words, the made-up story, and you want to be careful how we use words like that.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: But the made-up story was more true for David in that moment than if Nathan had just walked in and said I know what you did ["The Real Life"].
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the Reality is podcast, where we talk about real life and real faith, and I am super excited to have you back on this podcast with me.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: I've got Ed Gravely with me and he's the New Testament.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: I call him guru in everything, like, if it's New Testament, I just and I bombard you with questions about New Testament, right, and I'm always going well, I saw this and I saw that, and you're like well, joey, you're wrong, but that's okay, let me break it down for you.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: And so we've got some stuff to break down today.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, this is why I want to do this.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: If you don't know our church, we do a read through the Bible in a year.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: And this year.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: We've actually broken it up.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: We say either you could read through the whole Bible in a year, read through the Old Testament in a year, or read through the New Testament in a year.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: And for those people yeah, pick your plan.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, pick your plan, but whatever you want to do and I love that you guys have done that for us but, as we are talking about the New Testament and for those who are reading through the New Testament in a year, they may have some questions.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: They've already dug in, they've been getting into the New Testament and they're going.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: I just don't understand what I'm reading already, and so I'm going to hit you up with some questions and I know you kind of don't like when I just spit ball of question.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: But you're ready for me, I'm ready, you can take it, I'm ready.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: So here's the One of us is a planner.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: The author is not but that's okay, we should tell the during the pandemic.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: The very first time Joey and I did a Q&A for Sunday Night Discipleship, he was like well, we'll just, I'll just get up there and I'll just ask you some questions, like oh, that sounds great.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: And then I sent him a document that had like every question and transition, and everything that was on it.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: I'm like I don't like surprises, so I'm going to be surprised today.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: It'll be fun.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's okay, cause you told me you gave me permission to surprise 100%, and so I said, okay, stump the chump.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: Well, I know I could never stomp you and that's just it, but here's the first thing I want to start with.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: Okay, the first thing I'm going to start with is before the New Testament, there was 400 years of silence.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Okay, right, and then what was happening during that period?
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: Because, as I look at church history, I see, oh well, you know, greece was in power and then, actually, the Romans became in power and that's when they started building roads and that's when they were coming up with, oh well, so why was it so important?
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: What were the important things happening during those 400 years?
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so a couple of things.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: If there's a, you don't have to be a historian, even an amateur historian, to be able to transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: It is a fascinating time, as you said, and if you'll just keep in mind sort of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome, you'll kind of have the gist of what it is you need to know, right.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: So you know, and before the Babylonians there's the Assyrians, the Persian Empire, sort of the Medes and the Persians.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: It's more complicated than that.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Alexander the Great dies and the-.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: But the.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Old Testament only really talks about the two of them.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: Right, exactly.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: And then, yeah, during the, from the time of the ending of the Old Testament until the beginning of the New Testament, yeah, you have the rise of the Greek Empire, macedonians and the Greek Empire, and then Alexander the Great dies and the Empire splits under his generals, the Salutes and the Ptolemies, and there's a lot of fighting over the nation of Israel.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: That strip of land, gaza, which is in the news, is very important throughout all of history.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: And then the rise of the Romans, and the Romans assimilate.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: They basically are Greek in culture but they're Roman in government.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: And that's sort of the world that the New Testament opens up in yes, the, we call it 400 years of silence, simply because there is no scripture being written during that time.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: But it's not silent, it's not like a dark ages, spiritual dark ages, because God was still working, like I look at and go, god was doing so many things, and because people had the scripture, yes, Right, they actually had the scripture.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: In fact, one of Pastor Pete and I's it was his mentor, his colleague of mine at South Easter, named John Salhammer.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: One of the things he used to always say to help us remember this as he said, the New Testament church was the New Testament church for two generations before there was a New Testament.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Wow, and it's not.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: We tend to think, well, all these New Testament Christians are just waiting for their Bible to be written, but if you read the New Testament, it's actually very clear they had a Bible.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: It was the Torah, the law and the prophets.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: It was the Bible that Jesus preached from.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: It's the Bible that Paul makes his arguments from.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: It's the Bible that the New Testament readers, writers, are reading very, very well and so.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: So during that it was 400 years of just having the Old Testament, but that Jesus seemed to think that was pretty sufficient.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: I'm glad we have a New Testament but Me too.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah and so, but if you do read when you, if you were, if you just read through the Old Testament and then you just jump to Matthew, you're gonna have to just take some things in stride, because when you go to Matthew, you know it's like when you leave the Old Testament.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Either canonically or chronologically, israel is in the land.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: They are largely autonomous, but not entirely.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: They are speaking Aramaic, which is kind of a derivation of the Hebrew language that comes out of Babylon, and they have the Old Testament as their Bible.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: And then, when you get to the New Testament era, matthew one, they still have the Old Testament as their Bible, but the Romans are in charge.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Everybody's speaking Greek.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, same language.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: Israel has a king named Herod, who's not really Jewish, he's Idiomian, and the king answers to the Roman governor, which is a weird set of circumstances.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: And then there's all these Jewish political factions which didn't exist in the Old Testament the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Herodians and the Essenes and all of those that these scenes are probably named in the.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: They're probably not mentioned there, but anyway, yeah, and so it's a bit of a different world, and a lot of that has to do with Israel as a people adapting to the new realities.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: Many of those realities were picked up in captivity in Babylon, right.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: So this is, this is probably where the synagogue began.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: A lot of discussion, debate about that, and so you have the Pharisees, who are essentially the religious, what we would call religious conservatives.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Putting modern ideologies on ancient people Doesn't work very well, but they would be the religious conservatives, that the moral majority, if you will, the conservative coalition, and they are primarily in charge of the synagogue and Not accidentally, when the temple is destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, most of those other factions disappear, because without a temple there are no Sadducees and without a king there are no Herodians.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: And so what we think of as rabbinical Judaism is actually that's, the spiritual children of the Pharisees, because they had a this is good sounds a.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: It sounds colder than I intended, but they had a version of Judaism that could survive in the new reality, a reality without a temple.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: You could be a Phariseeical Jew and without a temple, but you couldn't necessarily be a Sadducee without a temple in the same way.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: And so and so, after the destruction of the temple in AD 70, there, only there emerges only two models for reading the Old Testament.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: There's the Phariseeical model, which becomes what we think of as rabbinical Judaism, and then there's the apostolic way of reading the Old Testament, which you see preserved in the New Testament Mm-hmm, wow.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: Anyway, that's no, that's great because, yeah, there's a lot that was happening and I like that you say, yeah, we call it silence, but it wasn't really silent.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: They still have the scriptures and I think that's what people misunderstand.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: It's like, oh well, that they have nothing, they couldn't do it.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: No, they were still able to read their scriptures and as these new sects are coming about, I mean, they still.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: They knew the law, they knew what the prophets had said.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: So they knew, and they were still looking Towards a Messiah right and they, the, the New Testament authors, feel like they, they, they recognize Jesus because of the Torah and the prophets, the coming of the Holy Spirit.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: In Acts, chapter 2 Though I think there was probably some, some surprise in that it was not ultimately a surprise and Peter's preaching a sermon from the book of Joel about the coming of the Holy Spirit in the end of the days.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: And so the end of the days they understood actually quite clearly from the, from from the scripture, which is we would call, which we call the Old Testament.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so something you brought up earlier.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: He talked about chronological okay, and so I remember and I've gone through the New Testament a few times and I remember one year I said you know what, I want to do this in chronological order, and that actually threw me off, because I'm so, you like, I am now in the middle of Acts and then I have to jump to Romans, and then I'm going back to Acts to read and I'm like, wait, this is.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: This is actually a bit confusing for me because I've gotten so used to reading it in the order.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: You, if you will you know right.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: But that's not the chronological order.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: So right so.
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: I have a couple of questions.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: Okay, why is it the New Testament in chronological order?
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: And, and you know, is it best to read in chronological order, or does it not matter?
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, that's a really interesting question.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: This is a question that Pastor Pete and I go round and round and round about, and I think the reality is is that we're both Right.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: He's just right about the Old Testament and wrong about the New Testament, and I'm vice versa.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Because here's what I mean Pastor Pete, I think rightly, although I'm not an expert is, I think he's convinced that there, that the that reading the Old Testament, the Old Testament is put together in what we call the Jewish order, which is a little different than the English order, and that that order is not just, that order is intentional and theological.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: And so to categorize the books as the law, the Torah, and then the prophets, beginning with Joshua, and then the writings, and that there are these and this gets real into technical weeds, but there are these poems and seams that connect the two books, to connect books together that aren't written by the same person.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: So, for example, the book of, you know, the book of judges ends with that horrible, horrible story at the end of the book of judges Don't worry, we won't repeat that here, it's PG podcast but it ends with that evil, evil man who is a he is from the hill country of Ephraim, and then the introduction in the book of first Samuel, or what the Jewish people would call Samuel, begins with there's a man from the hill country of Ephraim and he's the prophet who's gonna identify the king of Israel.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: And so that's it.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: Those are all intentional, those are literary Designs that are to help you read the book well, and so we don't.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: You can ask Pastor Pete and he'll.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: He'll go on in detail about it, and but the idea is is that the, the canonical order, is not a chronological order.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: In fact, even identifying the chronology of the Old Testament in order terms of the writing of the books be incredibly difficult.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: But but there's a, there's a theological order, and that reading it in the Jewish order actually is very, very helpful.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: Now and I know that confused a lot of people, because last year is when you guys started.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: Hey, we're gonna do a read the Bible in a year.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: How many emails we got from people saying why did you skip Ruth?
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, why did you skip Ruth?
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: We did not skip Ruth, no matter how many times we said it.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: We did not skip Ruth.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Ruth comes in the writing anyway, but that through so many, it did all it does and and you guys have to explain over and over.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: That also tells you how similar the two orders are, that people didn't even notice we had changed the order until we got to beloved Ruth missing, yes, so now?
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: So the question that becomes what about the New Testament and the?
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: The problem there's the problem with taking what Pastor Pete says about the Old Testament and applying it to the New Testament.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Some people do.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: There are some people who say that no, that there's a, there's a specific intentional order for the New Testament.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: The problem is is that when you look at the ancient, if you look at the ancient manuscript tradition for the Old Testament, there are clear orders emerge.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: There's basically what we call the English order, the Septuagint order.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: There's the Jewish order, but when you look at the New Testament, we have a such a, we have such a Window into the production of the Old Testament that goes all the way back to within about 30 or 40 years of the writing of the last book Of the New Testament, that we can see little snapshots of the New Testament in its in its pieces.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm not convinced that there is one single order.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: So I know that we can't say, well, let's just go back and read the original order, because I don't know what that is.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: There is clearly, though, a logic to all of the orders in the New Testament, and that logic is this Gospels first and then what comes next is a bit of a question.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: It's almost always, though, the book of Acts and then the letters.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: And now the question is, is it the general letters and then the Pauline letters, and revelation is always last.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: But the idea that it's Gospels, acts, letters, revelation, that seems to be the order in which we're supposed to read it in.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Now the question I say supposed to, that's a lot.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: There's a logic to that order.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Now the question is are there a particular order in which we should read the letters?
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: And that's a that's a matter of some debate.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: I actually don't think that there is, but there is.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: The logic to the layout is certainly helpful because, though the it's gonna throw some of y'all though, the Gospels are among the last books of the New Testament to be written.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Thank you, they.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: You brought that up.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: They are about the beginning, right.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: So so John was written, probably one of the last, the Gospel of John, probably one of the last books of the New Testament to be written.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: But it's about John the Baptist, right, and so, in other words he's writing about.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: So when you say I'm gonna read it in chronological order, does that mean that you're gonna read the narratives in chronological order in which those books were composed, or are you gonna read the narratives in chronological order in which the events occur, based on the year?
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Right, and that's what I was doing, and so if you do that, then the Gospels are gonna come first, and so.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: But as you point out, most of Paul's letters, as well as most of the general letters, were written during the events of the Book of Acts.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah exactly so when I talk to my students about this I usually just refer to it as we're gonna read the letters in the Acts order.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: But I only do that with Paul because there's very little good information to date the general letters and so trying to, you have to make some decisions that I just don't know, that I have enough information to make.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: But you know, I mean I can probably nail down every one of the general letters to within a couple of decades, but the Book of Acts is just a couple of decades, right and so, and that bothers some people so much.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: But I mean, if you can, we're talking about a tooth, just from a secular standpoint.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: We're talking about a 2000 year old religious text and if we can narrow that down to its writing to within a couple of decades, actually doing really, really well, yeah, it's very good Paul's letters are.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Actually you can narrow them down usually to within just a few years because of the Book of Acts.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: And so, yeah, and so when I teach survey over at Charleston Southern, we do the four Gospels and we do them in canonical order Matthew, mark, luke and John.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: That's probably not the order they were written in.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: Mark was probably first, john was probably last, matthew and Luke's toss up.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: It appears to me that Luke knows Matthew, but scholars love to debate that, and so, and then we'll do the Book of Acts, just to get it all the way done, and then we'll read Paul's letters in the Acts order so we can go back and revisit.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: So we'll do first missionary, we do the missionary.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: So Paul's letters come in three major categories.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: There's the missionary letters, the prison letters and then the later letters, and so the missionary letters are the ones that he wrote on the first, second and third missionary journey.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: So Galatians, probably first, first and second, thessalonians, first and second, corinthians, romans those are the missionary letters.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Then the prison letters, all probably written in the same year, so who knows what order they're in Philippians, ephesians, colossians and Philemon.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: Philemon was probably written sometime before Colossians, but whatever, he's clearly in prison.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: During those and we generally identify that as the first Roman imprisonment Paul gets out of prison.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: The Book of Acts ends, paul gets out of prison and then, as he prepares his journey to Spain, he establishes his two disinterns in the East, in Ephesus and Crete, titus and Timothy, and he writes first Timothy to Timothy and Titus to Titus.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: And then Paul heads to Spain, gets re-arrested and then writes second Timothy, okay, so yeah.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: And then the general letters.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: James is actually probably the oldest, probably the first book of the New Testament written.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: James does not appear to know that Gentile Christians exist, and so I think that probably dates up pretty early.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: When James refers to the, to the gathering place of the Christians, he uses the Greek word sunogogay to describe the church.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Most of your English translations say assembly or church, but, and so it's very, very early.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: And then you've got a first, second, peter, probably written in the 60s, probably during the reign of Nero, a time when persecution is beginning to ramp up in the provinces.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: First, second and third, john, probably written very late, probably in the 90s or late 80s, maybe 90.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: And then Revelation.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: It goes at the end because it's the apocalypse, but it's also a letter.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: It's in fact, the revelation was delivered to those seven churches named in Revelation, two and three that are all in, basically what we would call.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: New Testament calls it Asia Minor.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: We'd call it like Western Turkey.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: Wow, okay, so every time you speak, you just give me so many more questions.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: Okay, that's cute.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: So you talk about the Gospels, you know, and the Gospels and in order and those type of things, and you have the letters from Paul and you have James.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: You have all these things.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: So I'm thinking now of the canon and why these letters versus some other letters and what were the reasons.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: These were the letters that were chosen Because I remember when my wife brought me a Bible.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: You know if there was somebody, somebody gave her a Bible and it had other books in it.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: Right, and you probably know the books I'm talking about, the Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox Bible.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: It was a Catholic.
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what it was and I'm going what are these books?
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: And I thought heresy, like burn this Bible, which I didn't actually have it on my shelf.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: Because I like going back and reading it Because it is, to my understanding, historically accurate and it's depends on which ones.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: But yeah, yes, but they didn't make it to what we call our Bible today.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: And so that's when I started researching and going, oh, where there was a canon that was in order, and there was a group of these people who said, okay, these are the ones we're going to pick and these are why we're picking these.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: Can you kind of get into that for me?
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: Because there were.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: Can I just refer them back to our Sunday Night Discipleship mechanic?
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: No, so real quick.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: If I were going to shorthand this as much as possible, I would say if anybody were to ask me why.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: So there's actually four categories of books, right?
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: So there are what we call the Old Testament canonical books, and then there are what are called the Old Testament apocrypha, what Catholics would call the Deuteronical canonical books, and that's probably what was in your Bible.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: That's like first and second Maccabees and the longer version of Daniel and Ezra and all that.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Then we have the traditional New Testament books, and then there's a category, a fourth category that's called the New Testament apocrypha and pseudopigraphy, and so, and I would treat each of those differently.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: So, but if you were to ask me shorthand and they divide into two, right, there's Old Testament and New Testament.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: If you were to ask me, so why?
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: Like the Bible, I have here the Bible that's on my tablet, I use a, I am of adherent to the what we would just call the Protestant Bible, by shorthand, the 39 books of the Old Testament that the vast majority of people watching this podcast know about.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: If you were to ask me why, why does your, why do we, why is that the Bible I approve of and not the Bible that has more books?
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: And the answer is as a New Testament guy, I don't see any evidence that the New Testament writers and there may be one exception that we can talk about but that the New Testament writers either cared about or even knew about the Deuteronical canonical books, the Old Testament, apocrypha.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Jesus never taught from it, he never quoted from it.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: He affirmed the threefold order, the law of the prophets and the writings, and the New Testament is largely it will, completely ignores them with.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Again with one exception, which is the book of Jude, and Jude actually quotes from.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: He quotes from two non-canon.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: So Paul quotes from a couple of non-canonical sources, but he's quoting like Greek philosophers.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: And then, and Jude quotes from both the book of Enoch, which is in the Old Testament, apocrypha, and then he quotes from another book called the Assumption of Moses, which doesn't exist anymore, but we know about it because early church fathers were referring to Jude's quote.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: Tell us what he's quoting from, though that book did not survive.
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: And so that one quote from the book of Enoch is the only quote.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: And I think if you read the book, the quote in Enoch, and you read Jude and we're going down a rabbit hole here.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: You can see Jude is clearly editing as he goes.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: He's making a, just like any pastor might make a pop culture reference in their sermon to help clue the audience in.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: But you wanna be very careful how you do that, because I might commend this.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: This scene in this movie illustrates my point, but I am not commending this movie to you.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: Don't go watch that.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: You'll see Jude doing that same thing.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of crazy in the book of Enoch, and Jude is editing it out as he quotes and so, but it was a source clearly known to his audience, anyway.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: So I say all that to say I have the 39 books of the Old Testament because that's the Bible that the New Testament was reading by and large.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: When you get to the New Testament, it actually becomes a little bit clearer, in the sense that we actually have the writings of those earliest Christians writing about how they thought about the New Testament, and so, in other words, we get to see that the Old Testament comes to us in those two parts right and primarily in the Torah, the law of the prophets and the writings.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: That was clearly the Bible of the Pharisees, for example.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: But it comes to us as a whole and there's very little talking about why these books.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: These are the books that the God's people inherited In the New Testament, though you actually see them.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: You see the church wrestling with even other books that have apostles' names on them.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: That's what Pseudopigrafa means.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, like the gospel of Thomas is Pseudopigrafa, because it was.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: It is a book.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: It really does exist.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: It has Thomas' name on it, but nobody thinks Thomas wrote it.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: Pseudopigrafa means basically, it's false writing, it's got a fake name on it and so and you can actually see those earliest Christians arguing about not arguing but talking about the books, and they're very frank about it.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: So they're.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: These are the New Testament books that everybody agrees on.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: These are the New Testament books that everybody agrees don't belong in the New Testament.
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: But there are also.
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: They also have a category of books that the Christians were discussing and debating about whether or not they should be in the New Testament.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: And don't let that bother you, because here's what it comes down to Ultimately.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: It comes down to very simply, the book, whatever it is, can.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Is that book?
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Was it written by an apostle or can you draw a straight line from that book to an apostle?
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: So Matthew is in the New Testament because it's written by an apostle.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: Mark is in the New Testament because Mark was Peter's disciple and the early Christians tell us very clearly that Peter was in Rome preaching and teaching about Jesus, and Mark is taking the teaching of Peter and composing a gospel.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: And so they.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: Mark is in the New Testament because it's Peter's gospel.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: Luke is in the New Testament because it's Paul's gospel, and John is in the New Testament because it's John's gospel and John's an apostle.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: Acts, luke and Acts, both because they was written under the supervision of the apostle Paul, and then Paul's letters because they're apostolic.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: And then from there you've got it's easy, and in so far as you've got Peter and John in Revelation, they're apostles.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: And then you've got the.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: So the other two question marks, three question marks James, jude and the author of Hebrews.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: And so James and Jude are in the New Testament because those guys, though they were not apostles, they actually knew Jesus in his earthly ministry, their brothers, insist, brothers of Jesus, sons of Mary and Joseph.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: And so, and there in fact, james is frequently named, not as an apostle, but with the apostles.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: In the book of Acts, luke frequently refers to James and the apostles, and so he has an elevated status there and written with the supervision of the apostles there.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: And then the author of Hebrews though I don't think Paul is, I don't think he pinned the book of Hebrews.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: Hebrews was clearly added to the scripture because of its, because the early church believed that it was connected.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: It was sufficiently Pauline to make the cut.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: And what's interesting, there is two things and be careful how you listen to this next part.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Hear me all the way out.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: What's interesting is there were places.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: So if you've ever read the book of Hebrews, you realize there's not one objectionable.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: There's nothing, even any hard, in the book of Hebrews.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: Right, it's like, hey, on this page, how we're gonna say that Jesus is awesome.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: Well, guess what?
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: On the next page, he's gonna be even more awesome.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's nothing controversial in the book of Hebrews.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: And yet there were Christian communities who were holding the book of Hebrews at arm's length simply because they were uncertain who wrote it.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: And that's actually should be very encouraging, because it did not matter to them what the book said.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: It mattered to them whether it was apostolic.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: And so you take a great book like the book of Hebrews, and they're like are you sure that's Paul?
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: And in fact, when the church councils began to form in the fourth century, because Christianity becomes legal and you can meet in one place where I hadn't ever been killed, and they're all like what does your Bible look like?
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: What does your Bible look like?
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: What does your Bible look like?
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: That's when they hammer out some of these.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Oh, so Hebrews was written by Paul Great, we really like that book.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: The other one is the book of Revelation, and I say this I'm a fan of the book of Revelation, but and so I say this delicately but the book of Revelation has always done what it's always done, and that is.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: It's done many things, but one of the things the book of Revelation has always done is brought every crazy out of the woodwork.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: And in the ancient church the book of Revelation brought the crazies out to the point where Christians were like wouldn't it be easier if we just got rid of?
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: this book, yeah, totally.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Right, wouldn't things be so much simpler?
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: But they never did.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: They struggled to understand it like we do.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: They struggled with controversy over it like we do.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: It brought all the crazies out and yet it was always present, simply because it was written by the apostle John.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter what we think of the book and I say that lightly, but it doesn't matter what we think of the book If it was written by John.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: It goes in the Bible and it's ours and we gotta wrestle with it.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: We got it.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: Now I see you brought up Revelation, I mean, but here we go so we have to talk about it.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: I mean, we don't.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: But you were the one I remember a couple of years ago, when we were going through the book of Revelation.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: We did a whole thing about it for Sunday Night Discipleship.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: Yes, we did like a New Testament survey years and years ago, 2019,.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: I think yeah.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: And you said to me Revelation always points back to the Old Testament.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: Correct, like everything in Revelation is not, so much, oh, look at what's getting ready to happen, but look at what already happened, and it always points you back to the Old Testament.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah?
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: So I would yes, I would probably split the difference on that.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: And here's what I would say, because there are different ways of understanding the book of Revelation that have lasted for 2000 years, and one of them is that the book of Revelation is actually not ultimately about the future.
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: It's either about spiritual truths or it's about near history.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: I'm not one of those people.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: I'm a futurist.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: I think the book of Revelation is largely clearly not entirely but largely about the future.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: But I would say that all of the imagery and there's a lot of symbolic imagery in the book of Revelation that that imagery is drawn exclusively from the Old Testament.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: And so if you see something like a number, like the beast with seven heads and 10 crowns, and you're like, what does seven mean, rather than going to CNN or Fox News and trying to count, like the number of countries in the European Union or whatever, your first stop should be in the Old Testament and find out where do these numbers?
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: Where do these numbers occur?
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: Where does this symbol occur?
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: Because, yeah, you got like a glossary in the back of a textbook that has a bunch of terms.
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: The Old Testament is the glossary for the symbolism in the book of Revelation.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: I'm convinced that they're all there.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Most scholars wouldn't say 100%, but I think the vast majority of scholars of Revelation would say well, of course.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the, and particularly the many apocalypse in Isaiah, in Isaiah 6, and the apocalyptic material in Daniel and Ezekiel.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: In fact, revelation 4 and 5 is basically just a it's a reboot of Daniel's heavenly scene.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's what I recall reading that and when we were going through that together, I thought, wow, this is good.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Actually, I remember looking at my commentary.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: My commentary was pointing back to the Old Testament.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: And you were like okay, Joey, that's a good commentary, Don't go with anything else, just go with that.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: Which is why I can confidently say that and this is controversial this'll get views and clicks.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: Make this the title the book of Revelation.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: The original recipients of the book of Revelation, which are basically primarily Gentile people living at the end of the first century in Western Turkey, they knew everything they needed to know to properly understand every symbol in the book of Revelation, not because they had some window into the future, but because they had the scripture, they had the Old Testament, and so you don't need to be a modern person to understand the book of Revelation and I actually now there's lots of, lots of debate about that, but I'm 100, I'm full bore on that you don't need to know anything about Israel becoming a modern state in 1948 to understand the book of Revelation.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: You don't need to understand.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: You don't need about the European Union or about the COVID vaccine or Bill Gates, or you don't need to know about any of that stuff to understand every symbol in the book of Revelation and what it's telling us about the future.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: That's good, Because it seems a little weird that God would write a book about the future in order to comfort people who are suffering and then say, oh, and, by the way, you're gonna have to wait 2000 years and have Fox News before you can understand any of these things.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: At the very least, you don't agree with that 100%, that's fine, but at the very least you should recognize we should all recognize the impulse to take the symbols in the book of Revelation and make them about our day, because every generation in the Christian church has done that and we look back at all of them doing that and we laugh and we say, oh, those people were so dumb, they thought the book of Revelation was about them.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: Everybody knows it's about us.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: And you read Martin Luther, convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist and all that, and you're just like oh silly Martin Luther.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: And then we turn around I'm a kid, I'm a Cold War baby and so it was Gorbachev was the Antichrist and the Obama was the Antichrist.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you've heard so many stories and you just stop trying to pick the Antichrist and just look at what it's like Well, at the end of the Israel's become a nation.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: we're in the end of the days.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: That was like two generations ago.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: At what point does Israel becoming a nation stop being your argument?
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: At the end of the day, is it 100 years, is it 200 years, is it 300 years, anyway?
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: So you don't get me started on that.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: There's another podcast.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: Okay, well, I've got one more thing because we are kind of running up on time.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: But that's okay, you and I, we have always gone over time, I'm not sure what this podcast was actually about, but I've had fun.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: It's about show, we try to understand your brain and I will never understand, and that's okay.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: I'm having a lot of fun, me too.
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Me too I want to bring up parables.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: Okay, sure, jesus spoke in parables.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: And sometimes parables are just confusing and I read through and I go through okay, why Jesus even use that story Like what's the?
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: Okay, come on.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: So there's why parables.
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: And then there's kind of the exponent Now, a lot of times I'll read this and go, oh well, jesus just explained the parable.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: Here's exactly what the parable meant.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: Thank you, jesus, thank you.
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: But sometimes he didn't do that and you kind of left on your own that you're now.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: And then I've realized sometimes people take parables as actual stories of truth, one being the prodigal son.
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: So I've heard people say, oh well, this actually happened.
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: But Jesus is using that as a parable to explain.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so a couple of things to start.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: First of all, jesus did not invent the parable.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: The parables around long before Jesus, I will.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean?
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: Nothing was around long before Jesus, but you know what I mean, heresy.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: Parables were around long before the fourth first century Let me correct myself and they were very popular.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: And so it was.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: And Jesus taught in parables.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: And there's sort of two ways to look at them.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: Both of them are true.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: Number one Jesus taught in parables because they made difficult truths easy to understand, because they were accessible.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: But there's also and Jesus talks about this and you'll see this in Matthew 13, the Parables of the Kingdom, where Jesus also explains that parables can have a dividing effect, because these parables are about spiritual truths, people who have spiritual eyes to see because they're believers in Messiah, they've received the Holy Spirit that they understand these parables, that they can see the spiritual truth in them, where the spiritual truth is concealed from people who, like the Pharisees who were there, who are just looking to hear Jesus say something so they can throw the cuffs on it.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: So both those things.
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: But don't let that second element of parables make parables mysterious in a way that they're not, that Jesus is most of the time using parables to simply communicate complicated truths.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: And the definition of a parable is very simple.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: And this man if you ever want to watch a seminary student to graduate students head explode, ask them.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: This are parables, true.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, so that was what I was saying.
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: Because, on the one hand, he knows that the parables are, by and large, made up stories.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: We can debate the handful right, I think the parable the prodigal son's a parable, but on the other hand, made up stories can be true.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: In fact, made up stories can be true in a way for us that the true event isn't.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: Just think of David with the prophet Nathan, right, david kills Bathsheba's husband and he gets her pregnant and has the husband murdered and he thinks he's dodged a bullet and he's just going on with life.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: And then Nathan shows up and tells him a made up story.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: And as he's telling this made up story about this terrible thing this rich man has done, david's getting angrier and angrier and angrier, until David finally just blows his top and says bring him here, I'll kill him myself.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: And Nathan says thou art the man you are.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: That's you, and that is, in other words, the made up story, and you want to be careful how we use words like that.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: But the made up story was more true for David in that moment than if Nathan had just walked in and said I know what you did and that's also true, which is why the parables can be so visceral and sometimes they have endings that are outrageous.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: So you think of parables like the parable of the unforgiving servant.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: So, first of all, you got to know.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: In parables the details are always exaggerated.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: So when it says that you know the he owed him.
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: What was it?
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: 7,000 talents, I think I forget what the number is.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: I think it's 7,000 talents.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: Anyway, that's there's.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: Scholars have tried to convert that to modern day.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: It's like seven and a half billion dollars.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: It was more a talent, because a talent is actually not a denomination of money, it's actually a measure of weight, and so if you have enough money that we have to calculate it by how much it weighs.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: You probably have a lot of money, and so it was more than the annual tax revenue of the entire province of Judea right.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: So the story starts out with.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: Imagine the story.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: It's like the Butler owes his boss 7 and a half billion dollars, right, and he makes 50 grand a year.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: So it's an outrageous.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: He's never gonna pay him back and he goes and he begs for mercy and the master, the Lord it's the word Korea, it's the word for Lord the Lord forgives him all of the debt.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: Just, that's fine, you're done.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: And of course he's doing a little dance as he goes out.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: He's headed down to stairwell and he meets another servant, a more lowly servant, a lesser servant, who owes him like $250.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: And he starts choking the guy out and he's like I'm gonna have your family sold, I'm gonna have you sent to debtor's prison until you can pay me every dime.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: And the other servants hear what happened and they go back to the master, to the Lord, and they tell him what happened.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: And of course the master comes down like a ton of bricks on this guy and in fact it ends with Jesus saying and then he will have him delivered to the most of your translations say jailers, but it's the word torturers he will deliver him to the torturers until he has paid every penny of the $7.5 billion that he owes.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: And then Jesus, I'm sure there's this moment of dramatic pause where they're like did Jesus just say torturers?
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: And then he looks at his disciples and he says and so will my heavenly father, due to every one of you who does not forgive his brother from his heart.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: And it's like what about, can we have the Jesus meek and mild back please?
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: Right, and so you're not.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: I would be careful about formulating some sort of theology about heaven or hell or forgiveness from that.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: The point is is, if, when you heard Jesus say those words, you felt like somebody just stabbed you in the heart, that's what you're supposed to feel.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: The story is told outrageously, to slap you in the face, to wake you up and realize you are the unforgiving servant and God has forgiven you far more than $7.5 billion.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: And so, anyway, I say all that to say they are made up stories, but they are true.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: Right, telling you that, hey, you should be more forgiving to so-and-so Life truths, right, and in fact.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: And if you look at the parables in the New Testament, they're primarily just about everyday sorts of things.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: There's no knights and shining armor, there's no great warriors and dragons, it's just guys, butlers.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: And if Jesus were telling the parables.
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: In the modern day, it would be about people who like work, the self checkout at Walmart and stock shelves, and construction workers and that kind of stuff.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: Now, here's an interesting thing, though, and to help you understand the parables a little better, I would also say this the parables don't just communicate any kind of truth.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: The parables actually communicate a spiritual truth.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: If you try to make the parables sort of like life advice like you know, here's how to have a better life you'll misunderstand many of them.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: The parables are they're about, they're spiritual truths, about real spiritual things.
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: I like that, and the other thing is, is it?
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: Parables have usually have one of two structures, and sometimes both.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: They have a repeating pattern right, a man went out to sow seed, right, and some seed fell on and some seed fell on, and some seed fell on and some seed fell on right.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: Or they have a story structure which means that there's a rising action, there's a climax, whatever what everything happens, and then there's a resolution, a day-noum-ois, and it's usually in that resolution where the point of the parable actually is.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: And so if you look in, you know you've mentioned the parable the prodigal sun is a trio of parables there it's parable of the lost sheep, parable of the lost coin, the parable of the Jesus says, by the way, the parable of the two lost sons.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: Right, you know, a man had 100 sheep, you know a woman had seven coins and a father had two sons, and so we're never gonna stop calling it the parable of the prodigal son.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: But it's the parable of the two sons and there's a repeating pattern as well.
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: Right, one sheep was lost.
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: He went and sought for the sheep.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: It was found, that was rejoicing.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: One coin was lost.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: She sought for the coin, she found it, and it was rejoicing.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: And then, but the father has two sons.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: There was a son that was lost, he was found, and there was rejoicing.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: And then, yeah, then you have the other son.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: And so and it's in the resolution the climax of the second part of the parable of the two sons is the older son won't go into the party and it says his father came out and begged him and he just lets his dad have it.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: And his father says all these years you have lived with me and all that is mine is yours, and yet it was fitting that my son who was lost and was found again, that we would celebrate.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: In other words, you know, dad says you've lived in this house all these years and your son, your brother, came home and it were rejoicing and you're shocked that I'm doing that.
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: He says it was fitting.
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: He says it's like you don't even know me at all and that's where the parable ends, and of course.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: So if you're looking for more advice, I would probably say also, try not to lift the parables out of their context.
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: I know some of the parables get told in different contexts.
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: Jesus told the parables more than once clearly, but try to go back and look at the setting of the parable Because, for example, there in the trio of parables in Luke, the setting is clearly Jesus sits down at a picnic table or wherever with tax collectors and sinners and is eating with them and sharing the gospel with them, and the Pharisees get real mad.
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: And then Luke says and then Jesus told them this parable, yeah, and so the Pharisees are clearly the older son there.
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: In other words, when Jesus sits down with prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners to share the gospel and the Pharisees look on that and say why are you doing that?
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: God doesn't want you to do that.
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: Jesus says it's like you don't even know him at all.
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: How long have you had the scripture and yet you don't know what your heavenly father is like at all?
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents and over 99 righteous persons who need no repentance.
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: Oh man, that's good stuff and wow.
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: And I would also just at the end don't overthink it, yeah, yeah, and that's it With the parable.
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, don't overthink it.
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: If you think, oh, this seems to be the major spiritual point, you got it, move on.
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: Okay, they're not allegories.
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: Don't find 30 points from the parable, and I think that's the problem with the lot.
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: It's like you really try to break this thing down.
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: It's like oh and no, John Gill wrote.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: A famous Puritan author wrote a commentary on the parable of the Good Samaritan which I could probably explain here on camera in about 30 seconds.
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: Okay, you've got 30 seconds, I'm not gonna do it.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: No, but he wrote a commentary.
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: My point is he wrote a commentary on the parable of the Good Samaritan.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: It's like 125 pages in modern publishing and he allegorized every.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: The bandages were like the Holy Spirit and the coins were the Trinity and the donkey was the church.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: And that's not the point, yeah, not the point of the story.
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: Jesus says which one of these men, which one of these people was his neighbor.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the racist lawyer can't even bring himself to say the word Samaritan.
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: It was that.
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: You know that last guy that talked about it, yeah the last guy they did.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: And Jesus says yeah, you understand, we understand each other.
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: Wonderful.
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: All right, I'm done and I really appreciate your time and I always love sitting down and doing this with you.
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: And I have a lot of fun doing this and I hope you guys who were actually watching or listening got some information out of this.
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: I mean, you know, we were joking.
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: Like what is this podcast even about?
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: It's about understanding the new Testament.
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good and as we're going through and as we're trying to read the new Testament, I think this is going to be very helpful for those who are like now in the book of Acts and they're you know, going.
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: Man, I'm really, I'm just losing it right now.
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: And here I am.
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: I've read these gospels.
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: I've read four different gospels and these are four different accounts and they're four different stories.
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, they're all one story.
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: And I wish I had time to get into that, because maybe one time we could come.
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll do the snoptic problem and let's yes, let's do that All right.
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's do that and maybe we can do.
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: We're doing a revelation and we just three of us just fight about it.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: Ooh, I'm bringing out the boxing gloves and the ding, and I'm gonna sit over here with a bell in every three minutes.
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: I'm just ringing the bell and say time's up.
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: But, hey, thank you guys so much for joining us.
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: We really hope you enjoyed this podcast.
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: Go on, let us know that you're listening to us, like us, subscribe to us and check out our podcast each week, because every week we're going to have a different topic about something we're going to be discussing that we believe is real life what's going on in your life and how you can practically apply it to your life.
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: So, thank you so much for joining us.
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: God bless you.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: Thank you guys, Thank you for joining us.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: My pleasure always have a wonderful day.
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: Goodbye now, umm, see you next time una.