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Welcome to Mormon Stories Podcast. My name is Brian Johnston and I will be the guest host today.

By way of introduction, I've done some other podcasts on followers, stages of faith, a podcast on LDS spouse disaffection and marriage relationships.

And I am also one of the co-founders of staylds.com, which is a site that explores middle-way Mormonism, faith disaffection and practical advice on LDS religion and spirituality from that perspective.

I will be interviewing Jared Anderson, who is a New Testament scholar. He completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Utah in Middle Eastern Studies with an emphasis in Hebrew and also studied Greek and Latin with Margaret Tuscano. His honors thesis was on Joseph Smith's study and use of ancient languages.

Jared went on to complete a master's degree in religious studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and during his graduate school had a chance to work with some top scholars from UNC and Duke.

He is currently finishing up his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His advisor is Dr. Bart Irman, who some listeners may be familiar with. Dr. Irman has written some popular books on New Testament history and textual criticism, such as misquoting Jesus, Jesus interrupted and God's problem.

The topic of Jared's dissertation is going to be the form of the Gospel of Mark used by the author of the Gospel of Matthew. Jared plans to continue on afterwards and publish books on the history of the Bible, how it was formed, transmitted and translated.

How does that sound, Jared? Welcome to Mormon stories.

Sounds good. Let's get into it.

Yeah, so tonight Jared is going to be talking about the New Testament. We're going to be exploring the New Testament from an academic scholarly perspective, which is a little different than a lot of us are used to.

Could you start, Jared, why don't you describe what this perspective is?

Yeah, and one thing, I think people who appreciate the scriptures religiously are potentially a bit touchy or at least uncertain about an academic perspective.

For one thing, they don't know what it means. When I tell people that I am getting a degree, getting my PhD in religious studies, they don't even know what that means.

Does that mean you're going to be a minister or a lot of people don't even understand that you can study the Bible academically?

Yeah, that's a good question. I appreciate the fact that this is new territory for a lot of people.

And it is worth mentioning that when we are discussing any scripture historically and academically, we are going against the grain of the document.

Because all scripture of any religion is primarily a faith document. So as far as the New Testament goes, this is, it is a testimony about Jesus, his role in God's plan, how to live a faithful life.

The purpose of the New Testament is not so historians, thousands of years later, can pick it apart and figure out when what book was written.

So why do you go ahead and do that then? Because it's still worth doing. And so I'll lay this out. One analogy that I think of is, it's like making a goal of discerning the ingredients in a dish of a master cook that's not what the cook intends, you know, the cook just wants you to have that taste and even emotional experience of eating.

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