Today, my friends, this is the 10 minute Bible Hour podcast.

Thank you for hanging out with me.

I know you got so many things to do, 10, 15 minutes, it ain't what it used to be.

It's tough to find those kind of blocks in the rhythm of a day.

And yet here we are, having this conversation, inching our way through a 2000 year old document

together, trying to better understand how that would have come off to the original recipients

of that document, how that's come off to people across the ages, what that looks like and

what it means now and how it all fits into a larger historical, cultural context.

It's really fun for me to have the opportunity to try where possible to come at it with a

neutral text-based read instead of an exclusively persuasive read where I try to get you to

think every single thing exactly the way I think it, I mean, it's an important book and

it's a big book and it's a complex book and it takes a while to think about and it's

possible that we might read it and come to slightly different conclusions.

And I love that we got a room full of people here, some of whom would say, I'm not really

in a position of faith, but I am very interested in the Bible, I'm very interested in the book

of Matthew, I'm very interested in better understanding, my friends, family, members,

my neighbors who would ascribe supernatural prominence to the Bible and I want to learn

about this stuff.

I love that there are also people in the room who would say, I think there's a God behind

it and I'm a person of faith and I want to go deeper in my faith by better understanding

Jesus and the book of Matthew and there just aren't very many diverse rooms on the internet

anymore.

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