My name is Dan Koch. Like many of you, I've been on a complicated faith journey for a number of years now.

And while I tend to find myself on the progressive side of Christianity, my goal is not to make liberal converts.

I want this show to be a resource for Christians to my right and to my left, as well as

former Christians and non-religious folks, anyone who finds themselves asking difficult questions

about God, science, prayer, fate, suffering, evangelism, and more. So many of us have been given bad answers to those good questions, often by people with

pure intentions.

I want to say that you have permission to take both Christianity and the modern world very

seriously.

And I hope to facilitate that by introducing you to people seeking God across

the Christian spectrum, engaging hard questions in a multitude of ways. Thanks for listening.

Dale Allison, thank you so, so much for being here. Your work has been quite helpful to me personally.

I first read your book, The Historical Jesus and the Theological Christ. Like a decade ago before I knew Pete N's personally, I emailed him because of his books.

And I was like, who should I read on the historical

Jesus? And he said, you and Luke Timothy Johnson's The Real Jesus. I bought them both. I read them

both. I found them both very helpful. I never have spoken with you about that, but I'm thanking

you for that now. Well, thank you, although that's very interesting because Luke Timothy Johnson and I have a different approach to two things.

It's interesting that you can get something for both of us.

I guess I don't know the breadth of your guys' work, but on that question of the historical Jesus,

where you both, broadly speaking, came down on my reading

was something like, Jesus of Nazareth was roughly this kind of guy who roughly did and said

these kinds of things. But we don't, but it would be overly confident to say we know to whom

he said what, when, in what order.

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