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.

Well, everyone, welcome to the Bible for normal people podcasts. And Jared and I, we want

to take a few minutes and just explain what we're doing here. Why are we bothering with yet

another podcast in this universe, it's clustered with podcasts. And about the Bible and what

is driving us to do that? What's motivating us to do this? And I can speak for myself.

I've got these questions that really if I stopped to think about it, ever since probably

I was in high school, that I've only been into articulate later on, which is, what is the

Bible? What's it there for? And what the heck do I do with it? Because it is an odd book.

It's ancient. It has questionable morality. And yet it's the word of God. And those are

questions that I've always sort of struggled with. Not always in a bad way, but in a very good way.

And the more I began to be vulnerable about that with other people, Jared and I have had

similar experiences about not always getting along in certain contexts with talking about the

Bible. But the more I began to be vulnerable with people, people are just coming out of

the world works because people don't have anyone to talk to. They feel isolated. They feel

lonely. And there's no need for that. People have been talking about the Bible for a very long

time. And so we wanted to do something talking about the Bible, having guests on practitioners

and scholars, Christians and Jews, talking about the scripture and what it means to them and

what it means to read it and to understand it and engage it. Yeah. And I think as we reflect it on

this intro podcast here before we get into all these conversations, I was just thinking

it's really the seed for this was about 10 years ago. I think it's been now where you know,

UNIP were sitting in coffee shops on a regular basis at a certain point in both of our lives,

...