You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet.

I'm Pete Ends.

And I'm Jared Bias.

Welcome everyone to this episode of the podcast.

Today we're going to be talking about the making of the modern mindset.

That's a phrase we've used a couple of times here on the podcast.

And we've contrasted some of our current thinking with this modern mindset.

So I thought it would be good to do a deep dive.

Maybe one or two episodes. We'll do a little series here.

But before we get there, let me back up.

I'm going to make the case for why this is an important conversation.

So one of the foundations of Bible study is understanding the Bible's context.

If you've been around Christianity over the last 50 years, Christians in the West, especially,

you've heard this term, understanding the Bible's context.

And it's true. That is to say, if we want to understand the Bible on its own terms,

we have to understand the world in which it was written.

If we want to understand the book of Matthew, say, we need to understand the important ideas

in Judea in the first century and where those ideas came from because they influenced how Matthew was written.

They aren't cut from a completely different cloth.

It's a product of its own time.

Or if we want to understand the book of Genesis, we have to understand how people in the ancient near east

that is the time and place where Genesis was constructed,

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