billion dollar question. What do the beatitudes mean? We have put a ton of time

and thought into this together. It's been very fun to try to break this down into

little pieces, to try to look at the big picture structure of the whole thing, to even go and look

at some of the extra biblical stuff that might give us clues about how the original audience would have received it.

We've done all that work. Congratulations, high-five. That's what that sound was.

You have put in the effort and the time and in a way I feel like now we have kind of earned the ability to look at this

together and maybe make an assessment of what it most likely actually means in whole.

So starting from the top you got the option that we've rejected several

times I still think it needs to be rejected overwhelmingly and that is that this is a

list of commandments I understand how a reader could pick this up and at

first glance feel like that's what they're seeing. I could especially understand

how someone who has been around the version of Christianity

that is rooted in behavior and formulas about behavior. They get social

acceptance and where you earn acceptance from God by doing nice things or behaving properly in the community.

I get that and I get how this could be really attractive to that person because I've been that person,

that version of my faith crashed against the rocks, but I've really run that scenario in my

brain, I've run that simulation, and I think that version of my brain would have been likely

to look at this and setting logic and reason aside would have been like oh

There are things that you're supposed to do because the Bible is about things that you're supposed to do

But the other side of the faith-breaking divide version of my brain says, I don't know, it looks more like the Bible is the story of the main character God, and the plot is God choosing to redeem a seemingly broken wrecked thing and the power of that

redemption is entirely within God and through his character and through his power, meaning that

I don't know if that's kind of the

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