This is the Baymaw podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host Brent Billings. Today we begin to

examine the letter of Hebrews and learn from its potential context, hearing the call for us to be

people who suffer well and persevere in the faith and struggle authored by Jesus himself. Yeah,

Hebrews is going to be another one of those books that, in the scope of our podcast,

our episodes here are series, if you will. It's kind of tricky to figure out how to do it. It's

kind of like Leviticus back in session one. You can either do it verse by verse or you can take

the 10,000 foot view. Like we could go through Hebrews and its entirety. Like we did Galatians and

Romans, but that might be slightly overdone. It's one of my favorite letters. I feel like I'm saying

that with every new testament letter. Hebrews is so good. I wish it was one of the ones we're doing

verse by verse because it's just a gold mine. And I was tempted. I really was when we kind of

drafted everything out and I'm still tempted today. It's one of my favorite books, but I think

I may actually hurt my own purposes for the overall podcast if I do that. So instead,

we're going to point you, but before we're done here, we're going to do one more episode on Hebrews

next week. And before we're done here in this episode, we're going to have pointed you in a

few directions and a lot more directions in the next episode. And you'll have plenty of work

that you can do on your own, which I really, really encourage you to do. But we're going to do just

enough here today. Session one reference. So first, the context of Hebrews is debated. But recent

scholarship is changing our assumptions. Scholarship used to believe that Hebrews was written before

the destruction of the temple, which would have been AD 70. And most of the reasoning for this was

the way that the book discusses the temple and the Levitical priesthood in the present tense.

The book doesn't talk about the temple that used to be standing. The book talks about the temple

present tense. It doesn't talk about a Levitical priesthood that used to be. You remember the priests,

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