Hello, my name is Matt Whitman. This is the 10 minute Bible Hour

podcast and here's exactly what's going to happen in this conversation. We're

going to talk about the ideas of servanthood and slavery in Bible

times in the ancient near east in classical Greece in classical Rome in Judea and it's

very difficult for us to have this conversation without immediately

summoning to mind and imprinting anachronistically on the first century our

notions of slavery from the transatlantic slave trade, from the American slave

trade, from the British slave trade, from the Antibellum South. And while the

transatlantic slave trade and American slavery has some things in common

with slavery in the ancient world they're different and so to think clearly

about this and to understand important words from Jesus examples

where he includes the notions of Servanthood and slavery. We got to

disambiguate these two things just a little bit and compare and contrast one awful institution

with a different flavor of awful institution from another time and

another place in history. So that's what we're tearing into and here is

exactly the passage that prompts us to have to go there.

In Matthew 24, Matthew's recording the fifth of the five great speeches around which the book of Matthew is structured.

The disciples came to Jesus and they were like, hey,

sounds like you're going to die and be resurrected and you're going to be gone for a

while and you're coming back later and like the temple's going to get destroyed or

something. Can you just walk us through? What it's going to look like when everything goes down, how is history going to

unfold.

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