Hey everybody, I'm Tim McEy and this is my podcast Exploring My Strange Bible.

I am a card carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is

utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have.

On this podcast I'm putting together the last ten years worth of lectures and sermons

where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites

us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith.

And I hope this can be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology.

You can find those resources at thebibelproject.com.

With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week.

All right, well in this episode we're going to be continuing to explore the Gospel according to Matthew.

We have gotten well into Jesus' final week, his passion week in Jerusalem during the week of Passover.

And we're to the point we're going to explore Matthew chapter 24 today, which in modern,

especially American Protestantism has become a really controversial text related to

biblical discussions about the end times, what some communities call the set of ideas in Matthew chapter 24.

This is controversial territory.

And I was introduced to all of this, like many of you, when I was a new at following Jesus in my early twenties

and I was introduced to the whole package deal about the end of days and rapture stuff.

So the longer I've gone on to learn more about the Bible, learn more about how Jewish apocalyptic literature works

and how symbolism works in apocalyptic texts and in Jewish writings.

My understanding of all of this literature in the Bible has really deepened.

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