Okay, this is John at the Bible Project.

We are entering into the last stretch in our conversation on the identity of God.

This has been a really long conversation.

We've gone through the Hebrew Scriptures and looked at the complex identity of God.

We then turned to the Gospels and looked at how Jesus and the Spirit are related to God's

complex identity.

We looked at how Jesus thought of himself in relationship to God the Father.

And now, in this episode, we're going to turn to the Apostle Paul.

So here's something significant, and it's counterintuitive at first when you hear it.

The earliest expressions of Christian belief that were written down are the letters of Paul.

The way he talks about Jesus is the same kind of highly exalted view that we find in the

gospel narratives.

Paul was a first-century Jew, and like all of his family before him, he would daily

recite the Shema, which goes like this.

Hero Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.

But Paul does something interesting.

He takes this prayer that was so embedded into his being, and he adapts it.

First letter to the Corinthians chapter 8.

So let's drop into the psyche of Paul the Apostle, how he thinks about Jesus.

And we exist through him.

It's a little poem.

He's made a little Messianic Jesus-style Shema prayer right here.

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