Hey everybody, I'm Tim McEy and this is my podcast Exploring My Strange Bible.

I am a card carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is

utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have.

On this podcast I'm putting together the last ten years worth of lectures and sermons

where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites

us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith.

And I hope this can be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology.

You can find those resources at thebibelproject.com.

With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week.

Alright, well in this episode we're going to continue in our series in the Gospel of Matthew.

Here we're going to consider probably the most famous story from the Gospel of Matthew.

It's the Christmas story, the story of Jesus' birth, all the iconic images of Joseph and Mary

riding on the donkey, you know, and so on to Bethlehem.

So what I did was I tried even just for myself to like shake all that familiarity off and read this text

from a new perspective.

And specifically what I tried to do for myself and then throughout the teaching is to put

myself in Mary's experience from her point of view and read and ponder, experience

everything that happened from her perspective because the story uniquely kind of focuses in on her

own personal narrative.

Also what we explore is how Matthew keeps connecting these events in the early story of Jesus

...