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 keep exploring the Gospel according to Matthew.

We're in the 20s of Matthew which means that we're in the Passion Week, Jesus' final week in Jerusalem for Passover.

Here Jesus is involved in a series of controversies with different groups of Israel's leaders in Jerusalem.

And what we're going to ponder today is a controversy Jesus is in with a group called the Sadducees or in Greek the Saddukios.

There's the descendants of the line of Zadok or Zadokites.

Actually the word Sadducee comes from the Hebrew word Zadokite or the descendants of Zadok.

Anyway, that one's for free.

So the point is that they're priests.

They're very suspicious of Jesus and they try to actually trap him.

And kind of like a scripture puzzle.

And he just won't fall for it. He gets right in their faces about it.

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