Hello and welcome to the scriptures are real podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about

elements of the scriptures that help them become more real to us because we believe that the more

real they are, the more we can apply them to our lives, and we need that application.

I'm your host, Kerry Mealstein, and I'm very happy to have with us, now a common co-host that we've had with us a number of times.

This is Josh Mattson, who teaches seminary. He has, we've talked to him before. He has degrees in, I think, Ted C. Scrolls in

Hebrew Bible and so on. I'll let him introduce himself. He was with us kindly last year to talk

about some of the minor prophets and also Malachi. Well, he's also a minor prophet. But anyway,

we're just happy to have you on. Welcome, Josh.

Thanks, Carrie. It's great to be back. And I'm grateful to spread my wings a little bit, as it were, out of the Old Testament and into the new. Yeah, that's right. And well, and you lived in Israel and studied there for quite a while, so you're very familiar with a lot. In fact, you lived up in the north, which is closer to where a lot of these parables were given.

So you're familiar with the area and the culture.

Yeah.

And it's interesting, Carrie, because the year we happened to live in Israel was the year that they rolled out,

come follow me for the church curriculum.

Yeah, which was New Testament, right?

It was.

So if you remember in 2019, when we rolled that out in January, one of the things that we

tried to do as a family was to take advantage of that and to be in the locations as much

as possible as we went through

the Come Follow Me study. And so especially living up in the north, our branch, well, our area

that was part of a branch, we took in most of the northern part of Israel, which included

the Sea of Galilee and the cities like Nazareth and

Tiberius. And we had that opportunity to be in the places where the Savior's mortal ministry

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