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 going to be the first of a three-part series called the Torah Crash Course.

It represents one long evening of lectures that I did when I was a

teaching pastor at Door of Hope many years ago. My desire to do this Torah crash course came out

of a conviction that grew over a number of years of teaching the Bible and pastoral ministry.

I came across so often people having deep misunderstandings

of Jesus and what he was all about, I found that those misunderstandings were typically rooted,

not just misunderstanding him, but not understanding the larger story that Jesus was a part of and that Jesus saw himself contributing to

and fulfilling and bringing to its climactic fulfillment. And so it's kind of like if you were to not

watch the very first Star Wars, episode four, A New Hope, and you were just to dive in and very first watch

Episode 5, Empire Strikes Back. You know, you could like follow what's going on, and you could

track with the plot line of the movie, and you would come to like, Han Solo anyway, he's a likable

character, but you would be wondering, like, oh, clearly like he and Leah and Luke Skywalker,

...