Welcome to the Neck-A-Bible Podcast Episode 53, Question and Answer. Number 3, I'm

Dr. Mike Bajazer, Dr. Mike Bajazer. I'm doing pretty good. Well, this episode we have about 8 questions.

There are about, so that's pretty exciting. I just want to remind everybody who sent in your questions last week and this week.

I'm saving those, so please continue to send me your questions. We probably have enough questions for another 1 or 2 shows, so we will certainly get to them in time.

So feel free to email me at TraceChiclin at gmail.com. You can get that email on the website, Neck-A-BiblePodcast.com. And with that, Mike, do you just want to jump into these questions?

Sure, let's just get it going.

Okay, well, the first one's from Mike, and with all of the books on Revelation, what are some good, textually accurate sources for study you might suggest?

He finds it difficult to find books that don't lock into a single view.

Yeah, well, that's pretty normal. I presume by textually accurate that the questioner means something like something that engages the original text.

There were something that sticks to the original text, not just the translation. If he's talking about textual criticism stuff, what the right text is, part of what I'll answer here will deal with that.

But I'm assuming that he means commentaries that engage the original text as opposed to English.

And, you know, I'm sympathetic here because it's basically impossible to find a commentary on Revelation that doesn't take or at least favor one particular eschatological view.

So my advice on a question like this is always have more than one and have more than one that is seriously engaging again the original text.

So you have to realize interpreting Revelation is driven by presuppositions and nobody can really sort of avoid that.

And so you can have various commentators, various scholars engage the text real seriously and come out at different places because again, where you come out in Revelation is really driven by presuppositions.

Is there a hard and fast distinction between Israel and the church, for instance, that's one of them.

Or how should we interpret Old Testament prophecy? Do we have this idea of sort of rigid literalism one-to-one correspondences or don't-way?

You know, questions like that. When was the book written? Is it pre-70 AD or is it after 70 AD?

And none of those things are self-evident on the surface.

And so scholars have had to make decisions about the text before they even look at it, before they even get there.

And so that's why you can have serious people come out at different places when it comes to interpreting the book of Revelation.

Often more so than practically any other book. Again, here's one of them.

...