Hey, everybody. I'm Tim Mackie, 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 20 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 all be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

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

You can find all those resources at Bibleproject.com.

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

All right, well, this is the first of a three-part series about the making of the Bible.

It's trying to condense 3,000 years worth, more than 3,000 years

worth of biblical history and manuscript, text, history, and formation in just a series

of three lectures.

So no pressure, right?

I became convinced that this was really, really important for Christians to start talking and

knowing more about through my own personal journey. I became fascinated with the Bible in my early

20s in college and just fell in love with the storyline and the literary beauty and artistry

and the overall story it's telling. And I really wanted to learn Greek and then Hebrew

and be able to read the biblical texts in their original languages for myself. So as I started to do that,

I started to learn about the text and manuscript history of the Bible, which is so fascinating,

and it's extremely complicated. And so this became kind of my first

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