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 keep exploring the gospel according to Matthew.

We're in the section of Matthew chapter 13 where Jesus talking about parables.

And specifically we're going to look at a parable.

Jesus tells called the weeds and the wheat.

Here Jesus is in a very typical Jewish mode of communication.

He's using images and symbols connected to Jewish apocalyptic literature and tradition.

So he's going to use lots of imagery or you have fire and angels and final judgment and weeds

and grasping thrown in the fire and so on.

A lot of this imagery, I guess, confusing for a lot of modern readers.

And part of that is we don't naturally understand the biblical and Jewish backgrounds to apocalyptic imagery in the Bible.

And so we're going to be sorting some of that out as well.

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