Welcome to Form Now. I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustin Institute.

And joining me is Dr. Michael Barber, who's a professor here of Scripture.

And we're going to continue our Bible studying the Gospel of Matthew.

So you're welcome to grab your Bible, open it up, and we're just kind of,

in a leisurely way, working our way slowly, but carefully, through the Gospel of Matthew.

And I hope you can join us.

We're in Matthew chapter 12, and we're going to start off with verse 9.

So we're going to talk about the healing of the man with a withered hand

in the midst of the synagogue with Jesus.

And the Pharisees, you know, staring Jesus down and upset that he might do a healing on the Sabbath.

So let's start this story, Michael.

You want to give us the first few verses and set this stage? Sure, actually, I'd just like to start

with the first verse because there's an important detail there. He went on from there and entered

their synagogue. Now, this is a really important verse for many people in discussions of how to place the gospel of Matthew.

A lot of people have taken passages such as this one where it talks about your synagogues or their synagogues to say, well, clearly here Matthew must be written by a Gentile.

Here we have a non-Jewish perspective

because they wouldn't talk about their synagogues

because the Mathian community,

those people first reading the gospel,

would have identified themselves as Jews.

So this idea of their synagogue

must necessarily point away from an early origin of the gospel, from a Jewish

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