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

Serious talk about the sacred book, I'm Pete Ends. And I'm Jared Byas.

Hi everybody, welcome to this week's episode of the Bible for Normal People podcast.

And our topic is Divine Violence, specifically Jesus and Divine Violence. And you know,

regular listeners to the podcast, you'll know that we had a guest on Brian Zahn a few months ago

who wrote a book, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, which looks at this issue. And when I wrote

the Bible tells me so, aka the yellow book that came out about three years ago, that's the first

big question that I addressed. And the reason is because everybody's talking about it. It's,

it is an issue. You know, why does God seem to have sort of this go-to way of solving problems of

violent ends? And you know, killing or plaguing or sending soldiers and, you know, attacking you

and things like that. Why is there so much violence in the Bible? That's a big issue. That's

the question it's not going away. Our guest this week is somebody also has thought a lot about

Divine Violence. And that's Greg Boyd. And a name that I sure a lot of you know, he's the

co-founder of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he's a senior pastor. He's also a

professor of theology. He was for 16 years at Bethel University, likewise in St. Paul, Minnesota.

And he's written a ton of books. Most recently, two books came out further close to each other

on the same topic, Crucifixion of the Warrior God, which is two volumes and

long. It's about 1400 pages. And then right after that, the shorter version, under 300 pages,

Cross-Vision, a more popular version with less technical footnotes. And that's sort of thing.

And you know, Greg has thought a lot about this. And he has his own unique take on how to

address the issue of violence in the Old Testament. And we're going to let him do the talking,

but specifically, you know, generally, his, his approach is to read the violence through

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