Making of the Bible [Extended Version] Tim Mackie (The Bible Project)

alright hey everybody how are you guys happy Saturday [Laughter] so you guys are here instead of watching cartoons or whatever you do on Saturday morning I trust that you know that taking a whole Saturday morning to hear somebody talk about the Bible it's not normal behavior for modern Western folks like yourself even good-hearted Midwestern folk like yourselves is still not normal behavior so Cheers give your self a hug or something or a hand whatever you want to do yes it's really great really great to be here I spend two years since I was in in town and then another two years before that but we our whole little clan came out that was a gift that mark and the door Creek community gave us was the invitation to I come out here with all my whole family so our two little boys and Jessica and if their first time coming back together they came as babies and we swore we would never fly with infants again bad bad idea so but anyway so they're like they're getting out of the bit yeah there you go yes the Curtis the clan holy cow so yeah so Roman I'm on the right well on the right is Jessica all right then Romans the bigger guy he turned six to summer and he was just nine months old when we was back to Portland from here and then August was was born he'll turn four in June so he was born there and there you go so thank you guys for bringing us all out we got to show Rome in my hospital he was born in and the house that we took him home to you was excited to see all that so Cheers thank you guys for having us out all right this is our mission to we choose to accept it and you're here so you're kind of captive to the mission but nobody's keeping you here you can leave it if you want so here is our mission we're going to do a crash course on the history of the making of the Bible for our first session just kind of clean that one up so we're going to rock until I can o'clock 10:00 a.m. and then we'll take a break potty break and if you need just listen as I tell my son's listen to your body and it might tell you you need to go before 10:00 in which case please do that so we'll take a break at 10:00 then we'll come back after the break and then I just want to put a few things on the table of implications of the first things that we explore implications then for what it means to read a book like the Bible whose origins is like what we'll explore together and then we'll do some QA and we'll be done by 11:00 sound good great awesome so let's see our so our mission is to talk about the history of making the Bible why this is some of you are just history nerds and this is interesting to you or maybe you've been following Jesus for a very long time and so you care about the Bible and it's interesting to you to think about where it came from but that's not normal behavior it's our culture for the most part like why would learning about the origins of an ancient text written in languages that nobody quite even speaks those languages that way anymore and why would you care about this how many friends or coworkers do you have that make a habit of reading an ancient text from the other side of the planet on a regular basis anybody oh so you have some of you this is a university town so I understand that but but my point is are you with me like nobody does that it except religious people in our cultures you know either Jewish or Christian or Muslim people like so what what's that about why is it that all three of those religious traditions which all go back to their roots and Abraham have this thing for these ancient texts and so really what I want to start talking about is is why and maybe let me kind of couch it in a narrative so what brought me and Jessica before we had kiddos to Madison Wisconsin was the wonderful University of Madison Wisconsin and it's very it's all been restructured now even but there was within Jewish Studies at the University of Jewish state department there was a department of Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism and I was well thoroughly a Bible geek at that point in my life and I wanted to take a deep dive into the language and the history and the origins of the Bible and so here's something interesting that happened I had a in my undergrad which was in biblical studies and my seminary degree which was also in biblical studies was just a thing the problem I have both of I had incredible incredible mentors and guides and professors who helped give me a framework for not just the confession or the conviction that the Bible is God's Word although that was really core to my early experience of following Jesus in my early early 20s but hand-in-hand that went with an understanding that the Bible is also a human book with the thoroughly human history and that's what I was fascinated with that connection and Jesus's Jewish heritage and where the Bible came from and all of that I just couldn't get enough of it and so a Jewish Studies department where I could study the Hebrew Bible ancient Judaism and early Christianity as a Jewish messianic movement I was in heaven Dead Sea Scrolls the whole thing he was just wonderful but here's something interesting that I discovered so you know I'm it was the very it was a diverse department in terms of religious backgrounds so they were Jews and Christians in the in that graduate department and and Jews of all stripes and Christians of all stripes and something that I noticed was as we were taking seminars and like ancient Israelite religion or in archaeology or something like that and we're getting exposed to the very earthy pun intended earthy historical human origins of the Bible what I notice is that some of my colleagues who I know are people of faith or their followers of Jesus and we're having cups of coffee you know on Friday afternoons to close out the week and they're having a crisis of faith as they're learning about all of this and I'm having exactly the opposite experience like I'm just falling more in love with what the Bible is and where it came from and how it points to Jesus as I learn even more than I ever knew about its human history in origins are you with me and so I was really perplexed I was like what what's happening is their understanding of what the Bible is that when they learn the history of its origins it's a scandal to their faith and then I started teaching like you had to do student teaching experiences at the universities you're going getting your PhD and so you know I'm doing these big lecture classes for all these freshmen like intro to Judaism or intro to biblical literature and I'm having cups of coffee like you wouldn't believe on State Street with the all of these undergrads who are having a crisis of faith because they're learning about the very public openly accessible knowable human history of the Bible are you and I'm so then it began to dawn on me like something's broken in the system of Western churchianity something where somehow people are being raised and acculturated with the view of the Bible that makes its human history scandal and so I've really tried to get to the bottom of this and and so I at least that's why I'm doing what we're doing here this morning is what I find is that many people who love and they want to follow Jesus and they have a high view of the Scriptures a high view of of their of their authority and origins as a divine word to God's people and that's a conviction that I hold to but what I find is that people tend to hold that view in a way that makes the accessible knowable look it up on Wikipedia history of the Bible actually makes it somewhat dangerous there's some category shifting that needs to take place and I at least want to put the categories on the table help us identify the problem and maybe this isn't your problem but I guarantee that's a problem for somebody that you know and care about and it's a problem for many people who actually can't can't by the Christian belief package anymore precisely because they took intro to biblical literature or they've heard the self professed expert on YouTube whatever about the origins of the Bible and the dirty secrets behind the origins of the Bible and there is no dirty secret that's ridiculous but people think that there is and so this is this is our mission should you choose to accept it and you have no choice for this morning is not just to learn about the history the origins of the Bible but more what I want you to think about is what does it mean for a community of Jesus's followers to believe that a text that was produced by humans through a public like accessible history that we can know and learn tons about what does it mean to be a community of people that have that kind of text and to also claim at the same time that it is a human and divine word to God's people that through this text produced through this kind of history through that text God speaks to his people that's a conviction that I hold and my hunch is that most of you are here probably not all of you and so I'm not trying to speak for you if you're not a Christian and if you don't hold that view of the Bible that's fine I'm not either actually going to try and persuade you of that point of view but it is a conviction I hold and a bunch of you what does it mean to say that a human text speaks God's words to his people and that's a question I am convinced every single one of you needs to be thinking about because all of your neighbors and coworkers are thinking about it and they don't know why you believe what you believe and maybe some of you don't know either and so I hope we can either hope we can make some progress on that front there you go that's my short speech my short story about why we're doing what we're doing you guys ready okay first let me show you a picture of MC Escher but we're gonna mmm yep just to make sure this is working cheers okay anybody MC escher holy cow MC Escher so I grew up in Portland and I didn't know it at the time but it was a childhood very much a part of Portland culture and fits in if you watch the Portlandia seriously very much fits in to that though it didn't seem that way to me at the time so my dad's an artist or a painter he had a really great career in engineering as shaping huge metal pieces to go on ships that was his like career training but what he really loved with cars and hot rods and and graphic design and so when I was a baby the second child was born he left his very viable career to start an independent pinstriping hot rod painting business and that's what he did all my years growing up in his shop was in the garage and the back and it was awesome and he loved his job all of my growing up here is because he was doing what he's passionate about and he was able to raise her family doing that and what that meant was the garage was this incredible huge art studio with every every kind of paint and brush you could imagine and then our living room was this huge stack of coffee table books of just all his favorite artists and so he had a stack of them C Escher books that he found really inspiring and then when I found them when I was like 10 I was like what is happening to my brain right MC Escher anybody yes so his whole MO most of his body of work is all about exploring visual paradoxes and optical illusions and the ways that our brains interpret what we see in the world how the world seems like a very normal place to us but that's just because we've gotten bored with it and actually it's full of visual puzzles that are constantly in front of us if we have eyes to see them so we love to play with paradoxes and contradictions in anyway you guys know the ascending staircase that's the other famous one then you're like it just keeps going up anyway so this is one of his most well known drawings he was mostly a pencil charcoal drawer of drawing hands and you know you can stare at it and be like it's two hands whatever drawing each other but it's it's embodying a lot of different things what I love about this is it's a visual depiction of something that we we come across in nature and human experience really often and that is there are some things in our world that are so complex that you can't just say that they are one thing they have multiple causes they have multiple complex interweaving causes and it's really hard to say which one is the cause of the other one chicken in the egg just like the silly one which came first you know I suppose like love is it just chemicals in my brain or is it something else that foggy that happens to me when I see my wife or something like that right it's are you with me there so like life is very complex and this image has been with me since my childhood - give me a frame Lisa category-four yes some things in life are inexplicable except to just account for all of the different things that go into making it and saying it's one thing it's one yet it's also many the same time so which hand is causing the other hand it that's just the wrong question to ask it's just the drawing hands that's what it is and this has been helpful image for me to think about Jesus about the historic claim that began from what Jesus said and did himself that he was both a human i he was born he had a mom he got a family and he pooped you know and he ate fish and he spoke Aramaic and he grew up in a place that you can go visit today you know a part of the world he was a human but the overwhelming impression that he left on people that he talked to and he changed their lives was that he was more than human that he was the embodiment of the God of Israel who is the creator of the world and the early Christians right from the first his first followers right on down you we have the New Testament you know to thank we say I have them to thank for the New Testament they just had a way of saying yet Jesus he was human and he was God and for 2,000 years people who hear that claim want to separate the hymns and say well actually he was probably with almost certainly more one than the other and so we if you could if you're good with Photoshop you could turn up the transparency on one of the hands right and you began so well if he was God then he can't really have been fully human so let's make one of them invisible or make a 50% transparency you know how you can do that on Photoshop okay so are you with me so all and but the historic Christian claim about Jesus is we know it's crazy but what else do you say about what he said and did and who he was the paradox that was Jesus that graced our planet two thousand years ago he was both it's not he was kind of human but also it's he was a human and he was divine and that's what historic Christian orthodoxy is called the Incarnation and if you already if you have some kind of category for that in your head then you also should in your head a category for what the Bible is that it's a book that was produced by humans and the book actually says that many many times as we're going to see to like just read it as many of you are doing and you're discovering like as you read it oh yeah the Bible actually has quite a lot to say about the human historical social economic political circumstances in which it was written and out of which it was written and to just tell you that in the Bible itself but for some reason in our culture especially in the last couple centuries in modern Western culture we have this thing that says somehow if it is a divine word then that human history is incidental at best and you can just play this out if you begin to ask yourself images of what comes to your mind when you think of how the Bible was written if we hold the the Bible theology nerd term of it as inspiration if you which is a view that I hope that God inspires spirit inspired the biblical writers to write what they wrote so that he could say what he want to say to his people so it's of uses that I hold but if you get underneath that for many people what that means is that the human authors authors were just these empty vessels and they one morning woke up Ezekiel woke up and he was like that with a Holy Spirit trance or something and just sort of you know just started writing and this kind of thing and and and I'm making fun of it but if you're honest with yourself there are many of us who believe that that's if the Bible is God's Word then that's how it has to have come into existence because how else could it be a divine word to God's people except through that kind of process and to believe that is there's problems without on every level first of all just the Bible itself and how it tells you it came into existence but second of all these you see you're dividing something that that is not supposed to be divided the Bible presents itself and with the same paradox Jesus presented to people and it's because Jesus in the Bible are very closely very closely connected to believe that the Bible speaks a divine word to God's people in no way diminishes it's human history of production and origins and vice versa to learn about its human history of its production and origins in no way has to compromise or jeopardize a conviction that it's a divine word at the same time it's this are you with me so I'm going to do this a lot this morning just to remind you of the drawing hands we constantly want to separate these it's more one more the other it's either/or and you just have to you have to say well you don't have to say it becoming a Christian is accepting that Jesus is this and that the scriptures that he said bore witness to him are also are also this at the same time and what I find again is that most people who have grown up in church he anity have been ingrained that the Bible is a divine word I call it the golden tablets falling from Heaven's view of the Bible that because the Bible is the Divine Word the human authorship of the Bible gets gets diminished so mostly what I want to focus on is what the Bible has to tell us about its human origins and then what's accessible to us from history and archaeology and Dead Sea Scrolls and I'll show you all kinds of awesome stuff about where the Bible came from and that it in no way needs to diminish your view of the Bible as a Divine Word just the opposite I think it enhances and makes a more robust view of what the Scriptures are and how beautiful they are as a human and divided word hey guys done okay there you go so that's our mission pop quiz I'm a professor so there's no punishment I can't take the coffee away for failing clickers or whatever but well whatever so and this is a fun one added you know get-together tonight that you're going to have with friends if you're reading through the Bible what is the first time that the writing of bible is mentioned in the bible if you start at page 1 and there's your reading where do you hear and read about the writing of the Bible for the first time in the story of the Bible itself it's a fun fact can you guess the person involved Moses yeah good job great work you pass right you pass well 50 percent so but Moses we're doing what it's very interesting it's not where you might expect at the foot of a mountain with a cloud and tablets and Ten Commandments it's not that's not it it's not it it's a handful of chapters before that it's a story in Exodus chapter 17 so you've probably seen the movie or I'd let my people go Exodus and all that whole thing right so the God chose the family of Abraham out of the scattering at Babylon in the book of Genesis and he made a covenant with this family that he was going to restore divine blessing to all the nations somehow through this family family grows they end up in slavery in Egypt so Moses God raises him up as a deliverer and through mighty acts of justice God delivers his people out of slavery so they are coming out of Egypt and they're wandering this huge band of escaped immigrants slaves former slaves wandering through the desert they're ripe for plunder and this people group living in that region called the Amalekites see this great opportunity for plunder and spoil and helpless people and so on and here's the story the Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites a treci demon and Moses said to Joshua choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the staffs of God in my hands do you guys know the story it's a strange story isn't it right because Moses goes up with the Steph and he starts praying and when his hands are outstretched in prayers the Israelites down in the battlefield are doing what winning and then but he's a very old man so if it's tired right knees and his arms start go down and then when he stops praying and arms go down what happens we start losing strange story but there it is this Exodus chapter 17 so he gets two friends Joshua and another guy and they hold up his hands and he's praying and they win win the battle and then immediately after they win the battle this is the line at the bottom of the screen there then the Lord said to Moses writes this on a scroll as something to be remembered it's the first mention of the writing of the Bible in the Bible and you were expecting something more exciting where do you work you it's a little anti-climatic nothing about the Holy Spirit descended upon Moses and his eyes rolled back you know and he are you with me it's just very nor it's like normal that's why is it seems anticlimactic this is it oh this is the word reward now this is the origins of the Bible this is the origins of the story that is in the Bible and how it came into existence seems a very natural process God just a remarkable difference of these people who are almost destroyed in slavery they just got rescued and they're almost destroyed again and God in a remarkable way delivered his people and Moses senses God saying to him he's aware of God speaking to him saying yet write this down so that you never never forget it write what down write this on the scroll what just the story of what just happened and for what purpose so that you never ever forget it and so you know just you can imagine Moses gets out a tablet I'll show you some ancient tablets or perhaps the ancient piece of papyrus and he just writes down a short little account of what happened and there it is it's very normal this is what you might do after a great family reunion something you know so that happened you know you write it down but so yeah there you go it's the first mention of and so what this is a story okay a story about what story about how God is rescuing and delivering eight people first mention of the writing of the Bible in the Bible is a part of now is this the first time God's rescued as people know this is a much more dramatic rescue that happened earlier just a few chapters earlier right the ten plagues and let my people go and so on and where the Israelites to remember that deliverance also yes through a text it eventually was written down in a text but if you read is that the first way they were to remember that store how are they supposed to remember that story through a meal through a ritual meal that has all these symbolic foods and every part of the meal retells the story so every year since it's one of the oldest oldest still practice religious ritual meals in the history of the human race in terms of people practicing it for now millennia this meat telling the story so sometimes God will tell his people to remember the story by eating the story there are other times that God will tell us people to remember the story by writing it down and it's a very normal workaday lead the people write the story kind of process and there's no scandal here it's just are you with me so that's the first mention to writing the Bible in the Bible I'm I'm not a one-trick pony but this just for another another example what's the second mention of the rising to the five oh and this would be the last one don't worry about it so the second mention of the writing but a significant segment it's maybe the one that you first thought of what I said what's the first one it's what happens once the people go through the wilderness and they arrive at the foot of this mountain what's the name of the mountain Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb has two regional dialect names Horeb or Mount fun and so so where do we go between exodus 17 and then here 24 the second mention of the writing of the Bible and the Bible so they get to the foot of this mountain and God wants to deepen his covenant commitment to these people and he wants them to deepen their covenant commitment with him so he says I saved you guys out of Egypt I'm going to give you guys all of these these terms of the Covenant we call them commands or laws they called them words or statutes or acts of God's justice and what the firsthand are very famous 10 commandments and then what follow in the next this book and then the next three books of the Bible Exodus and then Leviticus numbers Deuteronomy is 613 total terms of the Covenant but he eases them in with the first tent right so first 10 those the most famous and he says if you guys follow these terms you are going to become out of all of the nations a kingdom of priests and a holy nation and so what these are some of you were like ah finally the divine rulebook dropped out of heaven no there's so not what's happening here right God has rescued a people to himself and he wants to form them into a unique people that will be priests people that will mediate God's character and justice and wisdom and generosity to all of the other nations and if they obey the terms of the Covenant they're going to become this contrast community among the nations and new and different types of human communities that lives by a different value system and so what happens is God speaks those words to Moses Moses goes up to the mountain and right this all like becomes clear to him and so he comes down off the mountain and here you go Moses went and told the people all the Lord's words and laws and they all responded with one voice everything the Lord has said by golly we're going to do it and then Moses wrote everything down that the Lord said and he got up and he built an altar and he goes through this whole elaborate ritual ceremony that's not on like the ceremony that they do it Passover slaughtering a lamb and so on a ritual meal but here the ritual animal slaughter and so on has to do with blood symbolism and Leviticus if you guys read Leviticus yet if you're doing the read-through it's very strange it's very strange but but in there its cultural setting these symbols were deeply powerful symbols about God's grace about God's mercy and about God's justice and so but there you go I'm really glad we don't practice our faith this way anymore but it was very meaningful to them but here you go there's the second mention of the writing of the Bible in the Bible and even then you know Moses was up in the cloud on the mountain you know and something remarkable happened there he had a very remarkable set of encounters with God and his eyes probably did roll back in his head I don't know but when it comes to the writing down of those words and the writing down of the story about those it's just another one of these like oh yeah you just try to dip it are you with me so this is significant I think whether you think this or not your neighbors and your co-workers who don't follow Jesus think that you think this and therefore that's what they think about the Bible that it's like a divine behavior manual dropped out of the sky and that's not at all how the Bible presents itself it presents itself as telling the story for the first mention telling the story of what God has been doing in history to save and to form a people and then secondly it's about how God has invited those rescued people into an intimate covenant relationship where they will adhere to a whole new value system in a whole new way of life together so that together they can mediate God's blessing and a different vision of the human community out to all of the nations that there you go I said it that's the Bible that's the Bible now of course the Bible is just beginning to be written here but the meaning of the Bible it's all right there that's the meaning of the Michael it's telling the story of what God has been doing to save and form a people and then it invites those saved people into a covenant relationship so they can become his his emissaries out to all of the nations that there's a different way of being human because of the love and the mercy and justice of God it's the meaning of the Bible that's it it's telling a story and inviting you into a personal connection with the God who created you and whose rest provided rescue for you that's how the Bible presents itself and a presents itself as a thoroughly human document that speaks a divine words to God's people hey you guys with me so it's not it's actually not that complicated I know the Bible is a very long book and there are lots of complicated things about the Bible but on this point it's not that complicated and the problem is that there are all kinds of rival versions out there about what the Bible is it's a divine behavior manual dropped out of heaven to tell you the bad things that you should not do and the good things that you should do so you go to the good place not the bad place after you die how many people think about what the Bible is and do you understand that's not how the Bible presents itself like not at all it's first and more most fundamentally a story about what has God has done whether you like it or not to save the people and then it's an invitation to those people to enter a covenant relationship now I start with that we're actually going to end the morning coming back around to that idea but this is how the Bible presents itself fundamentally as a story and as a covenant the covenant document okay so here's where we go from here I I forgot to go here but that's what that last five minutes was just about okay so here's what I want to do the Bible when I say the Bible sorry cuz give me to talk about the Bible I didn't even get my not yet so here we go so when we talk about the Bible what are we talking about we're taught you know you might have it you might not even read a print version anymore you read on your phone or tablet or device or something like that and so whatever form in which you encounter the Bible we encounter it as one unified document write a book we so this is the form in which like most Westerners encounter it and then a lot more on their phones too but so this the fact that it comes to us in this form also predisposes us towards all kinds of assumptions about what the book is and how the book came in into existence because you open it up and if you look at the table of contents one of the first things it'll stand out to you is oh this is a small library of much smaller books and the smaller books are divided into two large to many libraries within the book as a whole and of course the titles the Christian titles for these two categories are the Old Testament and the New Testament so and and each of those collections came into existence through a separate related but distinct history and each one each collection has a different history of origins and formation and how it came into existence so that's our mission until the potty break is to crash-course the history of the making of the Old Testament and the history of the making of the New Testament and by design it's simplified by design we're going to do this in like 45 minutes and it's like fact firehose is what I'm going to spray you with right now and so it's like it's fine I've done a handful of different versions of this talk in four hours one and a half hours I've had to do this in like 45 minutes total and so whatever that's all on my website of all versions of that if you want all the details and handouts and so on that's the point isn't to get all the facts the point if it gets the big picture and to see how these different histories of the formations of these two collections coincide with this right you with me okay so let's start with the Old Testament which is what Christians call the first 3/4 of your Bible and Jewish tradition is just called the Bible or it's called by an acronym to knock and this is actually the oldest form and shape of the Hebrew Bible that's what I'm going to call it kind of the most neutral term it's written in Hebrew with some and Aramaic and the oldest form as far as we can tell that goes back to hundreds of years before Jesus is the Hebrew Bible had this a three-part shape as a four part shape in our modern English versions it has the Pentateuch first five books connected with the story of Moses then you have the history books then you have the poetry books and then you have the prophets so for part shape in our modern English Bibles and that's a very old shape of the Bible but it's not the oldest shape the Bible Jesus encountered first of all wasn't encountered like this it was encountered as a whole collection of Scrolls the II almost certainly didn't have in his home growing up these scrolls would have been the possession of his community that he grew up with in Nazareth and they would have been all located at the local synagogue and you go on Shabbat I'm Sabbath and you hear the scrolls being read aloud and but you've already committed it all to memory because you don't have Twitter to melt your brain today right so the the hebrew scriptures in the form of scrolls are the media they are the main media of Jewish culture in Jesus's day and so he encountered his Bible as a series of scrolls that were at the synagogue and the framework for how all these scrolls fit together and are unified is in a three-part shape the Torah which is a Hebrew word that just means teaching or instruction then you have the collection of the Neva team which is the Hebrew word for prophets and then you have a collection of the cat Devine which is the Hebrew word for writings and the internal order of each of those three sections is also different than the ordering of your your English Bibles and sorry it would take a whole semester to unpack why this is awesome and amazing but there you go will impact a few things a few things about this so what I want to do is quickly just dive in to each of those sections and look at some of the internal clues just like we looked at already what does if you start reading these books what did they tell us about how they came into existence and it's the same kind of thing that we've already seen it's usually not that remarkable it usually is fairly mundane but fascinating so for example we'll just take one for the we're going to go through each of the sections so in the Torah if you look at clues within the Torah or the near the historical books to follow Joshua judges Samuel Kings you'll notice something and maybe you've noticed it already there's about over 40 times where the narrator will speak up and say dear reader do you want to know where I got that story that you just read yeah it's a little it's a story it came from here it's from the scroll of the Wars of the Lord dear reader do you want to know the story about that battle then Joshua and gibeom that you just read oh yeah it's in the skin the scroll of Yashar dear reader do you want it to learn the history of the kings of Israel go to the scroll of the annals of Israel's kings the books of see this is a great irony I mean maybe you notice this notice what section what we call the historical books is in what section in the Jewish framework of the Bible Joshua judges Samuel Kings and what's the name of that collection that they're in prophets no did you did you notice that it's a very very significant fact so when we hear Joshua judges Samuel Kings we think oh this dis ancient history that is not not the original conception or the or the Hebrew conception of what's happening books these are books that are retelling the story of Israel from the point of view of Israel's prophets in Israel's prophets were a minority in their day they were calling the people to be faithful to that covenant they at Mount Sinai and most of the Israelites like we're not faithful at all that's why when some of you when we when I said the people responded with one voice every by golly everything the Lord has said we're going to do because if you've read the story of Joshua judges Samuel Kings what does the people go on to not do any of it right they just walk away completely and be abandoned abandoned the Covenant but following from Moses there was a long succession of these individuals that goes through Joshua and then on to figures flecks Samuel and Nason and GAD and Holda ride these prophets and prophetesses and and they were the ones following from Moses who crafted all of from Genesis Exodus Leviticus numbers Joshua judges Deuteronomy Joshua judges Samuel and kings this long this long work all the way from the beginning of Israel's story to their exile in Babylon and they didn't just sit no one person just sat down and like had a Holy Spirit trance and cobble it all together they tell you many people were involved over a thousand year process of the production of these texts and these texts main goal isn't just to inform you about things that happened a long time ago the narrator says oh if you want to read that go read the scroll of the animal of Israel's kings if you if what you're looking for is a a divine perspective on the failure and what hope is there for the future of this covenant people that God wants to use the bless all of the nations if that's what you're looking for the meaning of Israel's history then you've turned to the right books it's a prophetic interpretation of Israel's history yet remember that movie Minority Report it's it's the the Hebrew Bible is a Minority Report on the history of Israel it's the point of view on Israel's history that nobody paid attention to until the words of the prophets the warnings came true and so we're told like within the books themselves that there are many different sources that went into the making of these books now two things that are interesting first of all about a hundred almost 100 years ago now I was like nineteen yo oh yeah over 100 years ago now this is like 1908 or 1909 up in Lebanon so modern-day Lebanon which is a little kind of little sliver of the coast modern-day Israel Palestine and then Syria and then Lebanon's a coastal nation-state right here on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and they were doing some archaeological surveys and they hit upon some old buildings and well like a decade goes by and they uncover an entire ancient Canaanite city from precisely the time period that the ancient Israelites were entering into the land and setting up their kingdom and so on and what it's called a garret or some other people you look on Wikipedia it'll be Ross genre or called Igorot but it was what's remarkable in the middle of the big city complex was a royal palace and then a temple and in the temple they found all of these cases of texts hundreds and hundreds of texts written with an alphabet that's not the Hebrew alphabet but the language represented by the symbols is very similar to Hebrew because they were Israel Canaanite neighbors and they all shared a same language and so this is so amazing this is like fine this is as exciting as the Dead Sea scrolls were for the time of understanding the time of Jesus the tablets of Gujarat are for understanding the times of Joshua and the judges and Samuel and so on because these are like contemporary texts and a lot of them overlap with things that we find in the Bible there's lots of ancient epic poetry baile who's mentioned in the Bible Bale was patron god of the city he was the God worshipped here there's poems about Bale and how great he is and he made the heavens and the earth and kinda it's remarkable it's really remarkable so what this is the kind of writing technology gee that exists on the scene when Moses is doing what he's doing you got papyrus down in Egypt and that's where the people were but as they went up to where the people of Israel are in the land this is the predominant writing technology these little tiny clay tablets that are soft and they use like these chopstick type tools and they in Cid's an alphabet 228 symbol alphabet and they write it and then they fire at an oven and then they deposit it so this is one of the oldest writing technologies that these authors that these authors would have used so that's interesting I guess done did you ever know about jugar it just Google jugar it and you'll lose half an hour of your life and you'll thank me for it it's really interesting right but it's really interesting okay so that's that now let me combine that with another interesting story so within the last hundred years the most exciting textual manuscript find for understanding the the Old Testament in particular was what in the last hundred years the Dead Sea Scrolls without a doubt right 1948 47 48 is when the first ones kind of hit public news and then holy cow unbelievable we'll talk more about the Dead Sea Scrolls but in the hundred years before that what was the most exciting textual manuscript discovery related to the Old Testament some of us don't even remember our great-great-grandparents names right so it's not a surprise that we wouldn't remember the most exciting rhythmic so the most exciting Zion happened in Cairo Egypt there was a Jewish synagogue in Cairo Egypt you can still go there today and they were doing some remodeling and they were expanding one wall to make to make the room larger and it was the wall that was up front where the Torah scroll is held and and so on and so they're blowing out this wall and they discovered that there was this empty space there was an exterior wall and then the interior wall was by us it had an empty space about this big there was just the empty space and so they broke through it and what they find is oh my gosh nobody's even known about her been in the space for like four hundred years and what's in there is all of these manuscripts tons of old scrolls and manuscripts and a lot of them are about events of the life and times of this community there's like land of land deed sale receipts and so on there's divorce certificates but among them were lots of ancient biblical Scrolls and so the fellow that they invited the scholar they invited was a Cambridge scholar his name is Solomon Schechter and he was a scholar of Jewish Studies at Cambridge University and so he took a boat to get to Cairo Egypt and then there he was one of the first scholars to go in and then he sifted and got all of the manuscripts out and then the rest of his career was about sorting out which pieces belong with what and he published them all in these Official Edition this was his career was this fine and remarkable really old manuscripts of the Bible and there you go here's the average what a classic picture this is an average day in Solomon's checkers life how do you think he feels about his life anyways it would be like the most complex jigsaw puzzle ever but there's no cover actually it would be like 60 jigsaw puzzles all dumped out on the floor together with no are you with me and that piece goes it's really so he spent the rest of his career doing this so here's what here's what I'm doing why am i why am i telling you all of this the books especially from Genesis all the way to Kings and then think of books like chronicles or Ezra Nehemiah these narrative books in the Old Testament they tell you within the books themselves that they were consisted of a variety of sources more ancient than the author whose brings them together at the stage that is bringing them together and these books you can just read through them and you can see oh this is a successive editorial lair this book went through many phases of production it's not at all like what we do today where we just kind of crank out a thing all at one go and then maybe do a copy edit to make sure the grammars you know correct or something like that we're talking the Hebrew Bible is a collection of collections of collections that were curated and preserved by a whole chain of prophets and scribes who came after Moses and the books tell you that they just tell you that there's no scandal there's no secret room of old insecure religious men wearing white robes who want to take over the world and so they make the Bible you're not I'm saying well I guess just Israel history from the point of view of the prophets preserved in a very public way like there's no religious dirty secret of the Bible is are you with me it's and it's awesome I could go on through much longer but I have to keep going so that's from the first section the tour from the white section in the yellow section then you get to the second half of the prophets which is the books of the prophets themselves that you might be familiar with Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel and you might think okay haha finally we get to the part where the holy spirit seizes them and their eyes roll back in their heads and and so on not so fast there are multiple places I could point to I'm just going to show you one example of how one of these books came into existence and it's the same process these prophets we're out on the street corner or riding protest poetry against you know the worship of bail or Ashura or whatever and at different points they collected all of that material into first editions committed them to their disciples or their students who then formed them into second and third editions until we get the books that we have them today in the shape we have them today and the books tell you that's how they came into existence for example this is from the scroll of Jeremiah which is actually the longest book in the entire Bible in terms of the amount of words longest not in terms of chapters returns the amount of words and in chapter 36 we read this right in the fourth year of your hiking son of Josiah king of Judah this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord take a scroll and write on it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel Judah and all the other nations from the time I began speaking to you in the reign of Josiah till now no sub pause if you're following through the Book of Jeremiah from page 1 and you've been keeping tabs on the dates of different things that Jeremiah is doing but you that just told you something that just told you Jeremiah hears becomes aware of God directing him to collect everything he's been saying and writing for 25 years no just stop and think about what that would involve just think about that he has an active teaching and preaching ministry for 25 years and then he wakes up one day and is like oh I'm supposed to collect and edit all of that together I can't even imagine how much work but what are you with I've only I've been I I just I've only been preaching regularly for seven years and I can't even imagine the kind of work that would be involved with collecting all of that into one place are you with me it's an enormous amount of work and your could and you would have different poems and different essays from all different time periods nearly like oh I definitely didn't have my coffee that morning when I wrote that you know and I could just whatever like that and so we used to collect all of it together it's actually so much work that he doesn't even do it himself so Jeremiah called Baruch hey buddy I have a job for you Baruch son of Neriah and while Jeremiah was speaking right he just imagine him sifting through all of this and he's speaking what he said and all of the words the Lord spoken to him and Broocks their writing and putting it all into one scroll so he's I would imagine that an average day looked about like that alright are you with me here okay so here's what's really here's what's fascinating so what goes on from here is brueggen Jeremiah take the scroll doesn't say how long it takes them but just by the mechanical technology involved it would take them quite a while so they've finished edition number one of all this material yet from beforehand and then Baruch goes and starts reading it aloud in the temple courts and the kings and it's a Minority Report because when the Kings servants hear about it and how he's accusing the leaders of Israel being for being unfaithful the king and they're like what oh this is horrible you're hearing this is like treason of the worst kind and so the King gets a hold of the scroll and he starts reading it and half of the poems are about how he's a terrible person and so he starts we're told in the story go read the whole chapter for yourself he gets a knife and he starts cutting off columns of the manuscript and throwing it into the fire well this is what he thinks about the word of the Lord spoken through Jeremiah and you know you can imagine Baruch just like all that work oh no should have made a copy so so right after that here we go after that story so Jeremiah took another scroll and he gave it to the scribe Baruch son of Neriah and as Jeremiah dictated Baruch wrote on it all the words of the scroll that joy came king of Judah had burned in the fire and many similar words were added to them that's the last line of the story and then you read on it's another poem and another story so what is that supposed to mean so apparently the second edition of Jeremiah's sermons and essays was longer than the first edition are you with me and how much longer app it just had more words that were similar well it's maddeningly ambiguous right so is all whose word Jeremiah's words what is similar words mean words of Jeremiah that is similar but just they forgot or he's like I found a couple more well that was burning in the fire or is it words of another prophet are you with me it's just totally and the story descends and so all you're left with is going oh the Book of Jeremiah has a complex history has it very has a multi edition history and the editions were different from each other and here's what's fascinating is when the Book of Jeremiah showed up in the Dead Sea Scrolls this is precisely what we see there are multiple editions of Jeremiah floating around even still in the time of Jesus there's a longer addition and a shorter addition the Hebrew Edition that gets translated in our English Bibles is the longer Edition but there were multiple editions of Jeremiah floating out there ever since this happened it's fascinating this should not bother you this should not bother you at all it's wonderful it's amazing it's incredible and you can get a PhD in all of this and learn all about are you if there's no scandal here through this kind of process emerged a set of texts that tell the story and invite those saved people into a covenant relationship because that is after all what the Bible is for that's why it came into existence in the first place okay one one more example oh yeah no I have to show you this so okay so there's constantly archaeological digs happening in and around Jerusalem that's where Jeremiah lived that's where Baruch lived and a very common form of writing your signature wasn't to write it but you would carry something like your personal signature as a necklace or in your pocket in the form of these little seals and if you would write a letter then you would pour wax on it yeah it's like medieval movies about castles and kings and stuff like that you know you've seen it before pour the wax on the scroll this kind of thing so they're constantly finding these little seals are like this big and they dig them up all over Jerusalem and so in the late 1990s there were two of these found and lo and behold who does it belong to it's Baruch son of Neriah described and this is a fossilized in imprint and can you see this thinks tiny so it's whole Sun would cover it could you see look at the upper left what is that those are think those are thumb prints indentation are you with me she broke did this right and some prints the fingerprints of a biblical author right there come now this is unbelievable it's really remarkable it's remarkable and it's not a remarkable because it fell from heaven are you it right it's remarkable because holy cow like many similar words were added and this is odd this is a history of the Bible and this shouldn't I'm yeah it's awesome it's the coolest thing in the world okay here's another example right so this is one from the captive beam this is very very similar the books of the Hebrew Bible often name a person who's connected with them Moses or Solomon or David but when you actually read the text with your radar up for oh how did this book come into existence what you find is oh even a book that has someone's name at the front doesn't mean that they themselves wrote the whole thing at one go for example the book of Proverbs the first line of the book of Proverbs says the Proverbs of Solomon son of David king of Israel and you go on to read a series of speeches from a father to a son and you're like oh this is Solomon Solomon wrote this book why wouldn't you think that that's what the first line of the book says until you get to chapter 22 and there's a collection of poems there that say these are the sayings of the wise ones like who were the wise ones who are they I don't know then you get to chapter 25 and it says oh here's some more Proverbs of Solomon okay well that's what it said at the beginning but they were compiled by the men of Hezekiah the king of Judah and if you're a Bible history nerd you know that Solomon and Hezekiah are separated by 200 years so we're talking about a collection of Solomon's poetry in Proverbs that were not a part of edition 1 and they sat somewhere else for 200 years until the scribes of Hezekiah put them in and then the last two chapters is the best chapter 30 begins with this heading the sayings of odwar son of Yaakov who's that who's awkward who toggler it's the only time in all of ancient literature he's ever mentioned and he wrote a chapter of the Bible it's even better the last chapter of the book the sayings of King yet let me well who's that never heard of him anywhere and it's not even his own work it's what his mom taught him and and with all seriousness write the final scribe who's formed all of this together can look you in the face and begin this book with a line that says oh this is the Proverbs of Solomon that's what this book is like he's not like oh I forgot there's a sing from Lemuel like it's written that's ridiculous are you with me this is this is a book that that began the life with Solomon's brilliance and wisdom but went through many stages of composition and editing and so on until it came into its final form we go through every book of the Hebrew Bible and tell a similar story and it's amazing it's fascinating and what's especially fascinating why the Dead Sea Scrolls were so significant was because there's a handful of books Jeremiah Samuel Ezekiel's what I did my dissertation on here at the University of Wisconsin the Book of Daniel there's a number of books that there you can still see in the Dead Sea Scrolls different editions a longer Edition a shorter edition there were multiple editions even of these books that still coexisted until they were brought together in in their final shape and it's so amazing it's beautiful and it's incredible and these these are the texts that Jesus said point to him the bare witness to him and this is the Bible now let me just do one last thing if it's so again don't think about this technology of the Codex the we encounter think of how Jesus in Canada's Bible a collection of Scrolls and you're raised with this awareness that all these Scrolls exist in three collections and if you look at the final sentences of the Pentateuch scroll which would be the last sentences of Deuteronomy you'll notice that the last three verses look like a little quino's added on to the story because they tell you about the death of Moses he certainly didn't write that and then they also tell you dear reader you know no prophet like Moses has ever come among us and you know wolf okay so that's somebody who's like way down the line who's reflecting back on Israel's ancient history from like somewhere are you with me and saying dear reader no prophet like Moses ever came then you read the first paragraph of Joshua and Joshua is meant to be not just a army general but a Torah scholar like a Bible nerd who's supposed to read the scriptures all of the time and then if you look at the last pair the last three verses of the scroll of the prophets which is the book of Malachi it's another little sticky note I call these prophetic sticky notes right or editorial sticky notes and it reads very similar to the end like the sticky note at the end of the book of Deuteronomy and then if you look at the first beginning of the scroll of the third collection it's the Book of Psalms and you read the first sentences of Psalm 1 they correspond exactly to the sticky note at the beginning of are you with me this is called signs of intelligent life the signs of its intelligent editorial life the whole Hebrew Bible has been edited together at the late phases its composition into one beautiful beautiful unified whole with a coherent message that when Jesus started hearing these texts read aloud to them and however this process happened with Jesus he became aware by his adult age that these were about him but these were about his calling and his identity and these these the Hebrew Bible was telling a story that he was supposed to bring to its completion and that's precisely where as we're going to see what Jesus thought the Hebrew Bible was a unified story that led to him and that he was going to do something to repair the broken covenant relationship between God and Israel and all of the nations hi guys good it's just that there you go it's a very Socratic course I was a fire hose effect and I already have to edit a handful of things down let me just land the plane for the Old Testament then we'll do a quick crash course of the New Testament as well here's one of the world experts on the history of the formation of the collection of the Hebrew Bible his name's Roger Beckwith he's associated with the Christian tradition he wouldn't like identify like I love and follow Jesus like he's not that kind of Christian but your way he's like a cultural Christian he's British because one of the world experts on the history of the formation of the Bible you this is an NSA from it one of the standard dictionary like reference books it's not religious at all you get my point here he's not he's not trying to defend anything and here's his observation on looking at all the manuscript in the historical data of how the Hebrew Bible came into existence he says it's very striking that over a period ranging from the second century BCE before the Common Era that's the the more neutral way to sort of thing before Christ but it means the same thing so from the first 200 years before Jesus to the first century after Jesus it's striking that so many writers and Jewish writers of so many divergent groups Palestinian Jews Hellenistic by which he means Greek influence Jews Pharisaic Jews scenes down by the Dead Sea Christians Messianic Jews they all show such agreement about this three part Hebrew Bible they're constantly quoting from it they're all taught everybody's talking about it you get to the time to two hundred years before Jesus the Hebrew Bible has been edited into its unified whole and then it's just like a boulder thrown into Jewish history and just the ripple effects everybody's quoting from these texts everybody appeals to them as a divine in human word as a source of authority and guidance for their communities and look at this observation he makes he says none of these witnesses are concerned with asserting the authority of these books rather they all assumed scriptures authority what they go on to debate is how to interpret the Scriptures he goes on it's very clear that these groups don't speak simply for themselves they represent Judaism as a whole and what does that tell us what that tells us is any inference like the History Channel's retelling don't ever watch the History Channel's anything about the Bible on the History Channel right because there will be all this ridiculous stuff about how the insecure religious men in white robes who want to take over the world and made the Bible right or paid Constantine to make the Bible it's ridiculous any inference that the Canon the collection of the Hebrew Bible was decided by counsels must be abandoned the role of later councils which there were was not to decide oh this books in the Bible that books not in the Bible that's not what those councils were about rather they were confirming decisions about the Canon already reached in other ways so it's as if the Hebrew Bible that comes from Moses and then the chain of the prophets was such a powerful divine and human word that these texts asserted their own authority is they dropped in too late Jewish history and once they did everybody is reading and talking about the Hebrew Bible nobody's debating is should that wouldn't be a notion that would not be in there that's not what it's about it's about what they mean and their significance hey guys doing so that's an interesting fact it'll correspond to something sorry sorry sorry here we go all right so when we get to the New Testament we turn into the New Testament here's what you find you find Jesus saying things like Brit the resurrected Jesus telling the disciples this is what I told you guys when I was still with you everything had to be fulfilled that is written about me in the Torah of Moses in the prophets and in the Psalms this is Jesus's way of referring to the whole Hebrew Bible and do you see it the three-part shape and do you remember what was the first book of the third action the never the Quecha seem to remember where azmuth yes Holmes was the first book so he appeals to the Torah to the prophets and then to the book that opens up the third section of the Hebrew Scriptures what Bible did Jesus read he encountered a collection of scrolls in his local synagogue and in his community that he thought of as a unified three-part hole that bore witness to himself that was about him and what he was doing to bring that story to to his fulfillment and as you go on into of the New Testament itself it's a it's a very similar story for example we're just going to go forward you read we're going to do touchdown for like a couple minutes just on each of the main sections of the New Testament if your bladders are hurting feel free to go get up but we've got about 12 more minutes on the New Testament the New Testament in 12 minutes right it is only one quarter of the Bible right so we did three quarters right there so we have one quarter left okay so we have four accounts of Jesus and lo and behold one of them begins by telling you how it came into existence the third one the Gospel of Luke and look at what he says many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word with this in mind since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning I too decided to write an orderly account for you most excellent Theophilus so that you may know the certainty of the things that you've been taught so how did the Gospel of Luke come into existence is Luke aware of other accounts and stories and teachings of Jesus that are being told and passed down in the church communities yes there are others and what he wanted to do was produce a fresh account where he's gone back to the testimony of the closest circle of Jesus's followers the people who saw him and heard him and he wanted to ride up a fresh account in order to emphasize the themes that he that he wanted to order in particular and there you go once again it's like he doesn't I is my deep conviction that the Holy Spirit was at work as Luke went to work on Monday morning like Solomon Schechter right and he was working and he's got these got these stories about Jesus saying something about tearing out your eye and he's got something Jesus sayings about sex and forgiveness and he's got these stories about how he healed people and here is he's praying lord help me today where's my coffee and he goes to work he goes to work and this is how he tells us the Book of Luke came into existence and this is one of the texts that speaks the divine word to God's people telling the story of what God has done to save people through Jesus and invite them into his covenant his covenant family so one way visually to think about it mister think about this so there were a handful of biblical scholars who wanted to at least get a more accurate depiction of what Jesus might have looked like so what they did was they located every archeological dig that's ever dug up the skeleton of a Jewish man from the time period around Jesus and they did these 3d scans of all these Jewish male skulls so I'm just kind of gross but they did it of all and then would they created a composite of like an average Jewish skull and then they hired a forensics a British forensic specialties team that does this right the create face masks out of skulls to reconstruct faces you guys know I'm talking about here yes so there you go assist now I'm not telling you that's what Jesus looks like what I'm telling you is that if Jesus looks like anything he looked more like this and not the white frail European white Jesus you know I'm saying that we encounter in in most movies and pictures and so on so on the shorter side dark scruffy hair there you go so there's imagine there's Jesus in those at that time period he's going around teaching and saying and doing things what we have are the four accounts in the New Testament that came into existence near the end of the first century and you've got a gap you can just see it right there you've got a gap of about 40 years and for some people that gap is very significant and it's people think that somehow the stories and teachings of Jesus what happened to them is what happened at your junior high sleepover when you played telephone and you whispered in your friend's ear like 12 rhinoceroses or riding the pink bubblegum train and then you know maybe you like do it all around are you with me and so like I know I know professors at universities who do that in their classroom to teach them about how this process worked it's I don't even know what to do with that level of ignorance in our university system are you with me it's just so ok ok you're telling me you're telling me that a Jewish rabbi comes onto the scene teaching and doing things that are very remarkable that mark these people's lives forever and you're telling me that from the person who heard Jesus say love your neighbor as yourself or are you with me whatever some famous saying of Jesus and then for 40 years that person never said that again out loud to themselves and then Luke comes knocking at their door and like what did Jesus say that one day 40 years ago and like ah what did he say again was it a pink rhinoceros was it a you know I'm saying it's so ridiculous that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard so weird and this has been well-documented all these cross-cultural studies of oral cultures cultures that aren't brains aren't melted on Twitter and so on and people whose lives hang on passing down these the traditions faithfully that form their group identity and so on and in Jewish culture they would memorize and still do memorize huge huge amounts of text and materials of the sayings of the rabbis it's not unlike what happens when somebody asked my wife and I how we met each other and how we like data then got married it's not like we look at each other like oh yeah how did that happen again I think were you at the library I don't remember was either you know what I'm saying like from day one we've been telling the story for 15 years every dinner we've gone to with someone new we tell the story we've actually told it so many times that we worked out the part you know and it's like no you are the one who talked to me first I was the one and and we've also what we've also done is we condensed the story because we don't want to bore people right and so they'll be like we'll have like two events that represented significant conversation we'll merge into one event in the retelling of the story are we bad historians we were there your thanks but for the sake of our communication purpose over the dinner table we abbreviate and condense are you with me here and so this is this is how the Gospels came into existence and so think of how like think of how like a quilt is actually my wife's a grandmother's quilt that's hanging in our house think of how a quilt comes into existence you think of each saying of Jesus or each story of Jesus doing something as a quilt piece what we have in the Gospels are these final organized quilts that represent many many many hours of painstaking thoughtful care and attention and creativity is the dating it's the time the date the quilt was finished can you equate the date of the quilt with the dates of the individual pieces that went into the making of the quote or us me so there you go so that's precisely what we have in the Gospels is we have four accounts that are themselves collections of collections just like the Hebrew Bible was a very similar process but didn't happen over a thousand years it happened over just 40 years and all of the people who were there and heard Jesus still are alive while these quilts are being made into their final are you with me here isn't me like no that's actually not what he said what he said was this and that's why Luke says I investigated the eyewitnesses thoroughly he's telling us how these these books came into existence hey guys done ok the fire hose is about to shut off here's the oldest manuscript fragment of one of the four Gospels it's a piece of John chapter 18 we're within I mean if when John was written if you John was written when you were a teenager like this manuscript was on the scene could have been read at your church and here we have we have a piece of it still here today it's amazing we have so much manuscript evidence for the Gospels in in the book of Acts here's another this will be my last my last example when you're reading in the letters this kind of like The Book of Proverbs you're reading the New Testament letters Jesus commissioned these apostles he made them like his deputies at the end of Matthew he says all authority in heaven on earth has been given to me you guys go now and make disciples of all the nations and teach them all that I have commanded you and lo and behold what's the next big section of the New Testament it's the letters of the Apostles doing what teaching new followers of Jesus everything that Jesus commanded and so many of these letters begin telling you exactly who wrote them for example Romans Here I am Paul a servant of Christ Jesus I'm an apostle that means I'm a deputy of Jesus Jesus pointed me to speak on Jesus's behalf and I'm writing to the followers of Jesus who are in Rome so you read the whole letter and you're like this is the letter of Paul to the people of Rome nobody disputes that for one second the last chapter of the letter to the realm is classic he's never personally been but he says all kinds of friends that have moved there so last chapter is of him saying hello to about thirty-eight people say hi to Priscilla say hi to you know Aquila and all this kind of thing say hi and look at this is so great look at what is just right buried in the middle of that paragraph Timothy my coworker he says hi oh so does lucius and jason and so sapater my fellow jews i tertius who wrote this letter hi hey guy hey guys hey guys whose hospitality I am the whole church here enjoy yep he says hi Erastus this director of public works he said Quartus and they say hi and you're like oh I guess who wrote the letter of Romans who wrote the letter of Romans there's no dirty secret here yes turkey has wrote the letter of Romans so we have this image of Rembrandt the famous Rembrandt of the Apostle Paul you know and he's like sexed and varieties like the consummate literary genius writes poring over his letters all of our ancient medieval Christian depictions of Paul or of him laboring at a desk and the letters themselves tell you that that's not how they came into existence all right so that's why in the bioproject poster we tried to get history right this time but of it's Paul you imagine Paul pacing around his cell and he's he's composing maybe it was a process like with Baruch and Romans went through a number of additions as he worked it out with tertius and so on in his cell and there you go because the books just tell you that this is how they came came into existence okay what we're gonna do oh yeah and then here's a really old manuscript of one of Paul's one of Paul's letters Oh act I had two of them together Philippians the end of Philippians and then the beginning of Colossians okay so again this the hope the point wasn't to give you every fact or try and be comprehensive the point was just to make this point the Bible is a human document and this should not bother you because it's a human document it has a complicated history what else would you expect is God's going to commit himself to redeeming our world and redeeming humans it means getting involved in human history and the moment God begins to work with people he begins to work with people who are very complex and work through processes are very complex and out of those human processes emerged his the Hebrew Bible the writings of the Apostles and it all points to Jesus all of it points to Jesus and then the New Testament both points back to Jesus who launched the kingdom of God and then they point forward to his anticipated return when he'll reunite heaven and earth and that's the Bible and it's this and the human history doesn't need to scandalize you but what it ought to do is raise a ton more questions for you that you could spend the rest of your life learning about and that's the wonder of being a human being and a follower of Jesus what I'm going to do is declare a potty break we're going to come back and reflect more on the implications of all of this for how we read the Bible and think about it going forward I got John okay so two things one I want to play a bioproject video that will summarize everything it just got thrown at you maybe you've seen it already I think it came out a month ago we're starting a new series that we're going to make over the next year and a half on how to read a book like the Bible but the first one is about where the Bible came from in short so anyway there you go I thought it'd be a good way to summarize and make a transition we ready to rock cool the Bible it's one of the most influential books in human history it explores the big questions of why we exist it's inspired many people to do amazing things and confuse many others and you've probably got one sitting around somewhere so what is the Bible actually well the Bible is a small library of books that all emerged out of the history of the people of ancient Israel and in one sense they were just like any other ancient civilization but among them were a long line of individuals called prophets and they viewed Israel's story as anything but ordinary they saw it as a central part of what God was doing for all humanity and these prophets was literary genius really yeah they expertly crafted the Hebrew language to write epic narrative very sophisticated poetry they were masters of metaphor and storytelling and they leveraged all this to explore life's most complicated questions about death and life and the human struggle so there's a lot of different authors writing this book yeah and these texts were produced over a thousand year period starting with Israel's origins in Egypt then leading up to their kingdom with their first temple but eventually they were conquered by the Babylonians who took them away into exile then at a crucial moment in their history many Israelites returned to their land they built a second temple they reformed their identity and this is when the Jewish Scriptures begin to be formed into the shape that we have them today okay the Jewish Bible what's in it well in Hebrew it's called by an acronym to knock the T stands for Torah sometimes called the law that's Israel's five books foundation story the N stands for it never aim the Hebrew word for prophets and this section consists of the historical books that tell is a real story from the prophets point of view then you get the poetic books of the prophets themselves the K stands for Ketuvim the Hebrew word for writings this is a diverse collection of poetic books wisdom books and more narrative and the Jewish people believe that through all of these literary works God speaks to his people no there were other Jewish writings being produced during this Second Temple period as well yeah a really diverse group of texts and these two were highly valued in Jewish communities and there was debate from ancient times about whether or not some of these should be considered part of their scriptures so this is a lot of different writings over a long period of time why did they put them all together like this well altogether these texts tell an epic story about how God is working through these people to bring order and beauty out of the chaos of our world and it all builds up to a hope for a new leader who would come and renew all creation and then that's not concludes and this leader never comes so it's an expertly crafted work but it's missing an ending that's exactly right now a few centuries later a Jewish prophet comes on to the scene named Jesus of Nazareth he claimed he was carrying the Tanakh story forward yes oh Jesus did a bunch of cool stuff was killed but his followers claimed he was alive from the dead yeah they said that Jesus was that long-awaited leader who would restore the world and so his earliest followers called apostle they composed new literary works about the story of Jesus they called these good news or the gospel they formed an account called Acts about the spread of the Jesus Movement outside of Israel and then they circulated letters to different Jesus communities all around the ancient world and they saw these writings as part of the scripture yeah the Apostles wrote all of this was the fulfillment of that epic story found in the and they were continuing the literary genius of the Jewish tradition they also believed that God was speaking to his people through these text alongside the scriptures of Israel so that's the Old and New Testament but what did the early Christians think of the other Second Temple literature well different groups had different views about some of these books but we know they read them and valued these texts because they pass them along with the Jewish Scriptures okay so we've got the Tanakh the Jewish Scriptures we got these other Second Temple period works then the writing of the Apostles about Jesus and that's a lot of literature so what's in my Bible so the Christian movement has taken different forms over 2,000 years and from the beginning all Christians recognized the Tanakh and the New Testament as Scripture and for centuries much of the Second Temple literature was read as part of the biblical tradition the Catholic Church eventually made it official and called some of the books from this collection the deuterocanonical books some Orthodox churches used even more books from this Second Temple literature and then in the 1500s during the Reformation Protestant Christians wanted to go back to the oldest writings of the prophets and apostles so they accepted only the Old and New Testaments okay I think I got it but how did the collection of books produced over a thousand years by all these different authors tell one unified story yeah that the question will address in our next video did you guys see Jesus at the hotdog stand at the end so anyway we just thought that would be fun haha it was probably not kosher ha ha ha ha ha ha maybe it could be kosher dogs in New York anyway huh um ok if we go to our slides I want to skip forward to some things actually the picture of my two little guys is the one I want to start at then I'll let you cheers okay so here's what I want to do I'm just going to take you know two about 20-ish minutes to again remind why I think that brief history and you even just beginning to care about the history the making the Bible why I think that's really important and why I think it will actually set you up for success for the rest of your lifetime of reading the Bible it'll also keep you from avoiding pitfalls that people and our culture commonly have about the Bible and those pitfalls happen for this reason so these are my two little guys Roman and August they're they're incredible they also behave like cavemen and that's in fact what we call them our little our little cavemen and Romans emerging from caveman phase into a more civilized individual and that's wonderful because it's we wondered and August is just so it's unbelievable just pure impulse you know and it's not even like we're staying with some friends here and August just like put their remote control in a big glass of water and we're just like you know in a seer and we and you just like I just I wondered what would happen I just you know it wasn't an even malicious he just was like this could go in here and like you know what I'm saying so one of the petals that we have probably have to buy the manure so what will one of the battles that I had is what they they constantly are breaking our stuff you know our stuff at home and it's just whatever we've just given up and the only we picked our battles there's some things they can't touch or ever break but whatever day-to-day life things happen so one constant battle we have is with my tools that are in my tool hope shed we have a little garage and the backyard we've given over to the cavemen for just just their big dig pit and jessica has a garden in her front yard and the backyard there it's not very big we live in the city and so but it's there so what they do constantly is they go raid my tools and then they re appropriate them for purposes that they were not designed for right and so it happens all the time the most reason is like you know a few days ago when I get home and I ride my bike to work so I ride home is a rainy day and they're out there digging in the rain you know and then the mud literally mud pits and so on and so I go out and they have all of my screwdrivers I have like five different kind of screwdrivers have all my screwdrivers and they're using them as disease like there's a shovels essentially they use it to break up the dirt and then to like dig and and I suppose that's fine except that for 20 20 times before I've asked them always go wash them by the hose and then put them back where you got them because I find them three weeks later I'm like where's my screwdriver and all that it's in the mud pit yeah and then I go find it or whatever so it's raising kids why am I telling you this story they in there they're still learning what things are in the world and what things are for and what they don't have they're still forming a categories that you learn what a thing is for by understanding what it is if you don't know what something's for you actually don't know what it is and if you think you know what something is but you actually aren't using that for what it's really for you need to go back and rethink whether you really understand that thing is in the first are you with me and I if I could summarize the problem and all those cups of coffee with people having crises of face back here and met it when I was a student and so on I think this is the heart of the issue is that we in in late modern Western culture in querque annecy were raised with a conception of what the Bible is that isn't actually true to how it presents itself to us and we shouldn't be surprised therefore that we have a hard time actually then using the Bible for what it's for if we have a misunderstanding what of what it is so let me just first CS Lewis always puts it better than I can so let's let him put it the first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used the first thing is to understand the object before you because here's problem as long as you think a corkscrew was meant for opening cans or a cathedral for entertaining tourists which is a common thing in Europe you can say nothing about their purpose or you'd get it he puts it in a fancy way I do but you get it and so it seems to me this is at least one major factor of our problem I think many people raised in churchianity or who have become followers of Jesus and then are learning what to do with the Bible in modern Western Christianity is we're presented with a view of what the Bible is for that actually isn't wrong but what's happened is that we've drawn conclusions about what the Bible is that I don't think helped us accomplish what those things are for and there's at least three that I think are the most prevalent and you will probably recognize this so the vibe if the Bible is telling the story about what God's doing rescue the people in rescue our world and how it leads up to Jesus and then it's inviting people into God's new covenant family the people who discover their identity and discover how loved they are because of Jesus and discover screwed up we are in comparison to Jesus and how Jesus wants to change that and save us and make us new right if that's if that's your view of the Bible then answer this question for me is one of the purposes of the Bible to change fundamentally how we view the world and our values and how we live as human beings so that one of the purposes of the Bible say yes quickly say yes yes the one of the purposes of the Bible is to address how we tend to live the patterns the human communities across cultures tend to find themselves in that are destructive they're selfish and that don't create a flourishing and life in God's good world and do not participate in his kingdom rule over the world so the one of the purposes of the Bible is to address our behavior and how screwed up it is but here's what's happened is that somehow in our in modern Western churchianity that right assumption about what the Bible's for has produced a shallow conclusion about what the Bible is namely it is a divine rulebook dropped out of heaven to tell you the things that are not good and to tell you things that are good so you can go to the good place and not the bad place after you die and what happens is what I call a flat reading of the biblical story if you read the Bible like a law book first of all it's going to be very frustrating for you because there's actually only a little bit of it that contains what you could call laws or moral rules and then the rest of it'll just be like I don't know stories about ancient history or something right all right you with me and once you've made that move you've missed the those stories are the thing those stories are the thing all right and the rules fit into different moments of the grand story that address different phases of God's covenant relationship to this family with a family they for him and then the people of Israel and then when they were in a kingdom I don't live in an ancient Near Eastern agrarian farming community do you yes so the laws that God gave to those people are not to me are you with me I'm I just I'm a follower of Jesus like I come in at a different part of the story and the way that I relate to Jesus so to treat the Bible as a flat divine rulebook is it's it's embarrassing what it shows is the ignorance of what that Bible actually is and how it how it presents itself to us here's another right assumption about what the Bible's for I think is led to a long wrong conclusion about what it is is is part of the purpose of the Bible to influence and shape our beliefs and by beliefs what I mean is our way of seeing the world our imaginations and our view of what kind of world do I think I'm living in and what where where are we and who are we and what's the real problem in this world and what is the solution if there is any and what hope is there and how do I know if I'm a part of the problem if I'm part of the solution now who teaches view these things growing up you learn them in your family environment you learn them in your cultural religious environment you begin to form these convictions over time is part of the Bible's purpose to influence how you think about those questions say yes quickly right so yes quickly but here is a here's an interesting thing that's happened in our culture is that is that that right assumption has produced a whole other part of the Christian tradition that treats the Bible like a theology dictionary dropped out of heaven and so its main purpose is to help me answer my questions about about God's sovereignty and free will surely if the Bible is God's Word it would give us a precise answer to that question and then you get people who believe that they really do have found the answer in the Bible and they're directly in opposition to other people who think that they found the precise or that question in the Bible and then they hate each other and then they make their neighbors who aren't Christians thinks these guys are idiots like who are you with me and so what we it's it's like reading the Harry Potter stories in order to find out how to like cast a spell something you know and you're like what no you can you can learn interesting things about how whatever like people do that but that's not what the purp the purpose is to entertain you and to invite you into this new imaginative world it's like reading I don't it's like reading oh here's a great example anybody like Ezekiel bread at the store do they sell Ezekiel bread here in the Midwest it's perfect example right so right on the front of the bread is a verse from the Book of Ezekiel with this recipe for bread have you ever gone and looked up look that line up in the Book of Ezekiel it's the most is so embarrassing it's so embarrassing Ezekiel is told to make this bread and bake it over human poop as a symbol of the low-grade bread that the people of Israel will eat while they're imprisoned in Babylon I'm not joking you I'm not joking you go read it and Ezekiel says holy cow I was training to be a priest that's impure in every way god I don't want to do that and so God says okay cook it over cow poop instead right go read Ezekiel are you with me so we think that the Bible is a like of theology dictionary meant to answer every question that I have like what kind of bread should I eat right and what we do is we make the Bible then say things that the authors were never trying to talk about meanwhile we're missing the things that they actually are trying to talk about and it's a right assumption the Bible supposed to influence my beliefs that does not mean it's the theology book to answer all of my questions and in the end especially as the culture gap that we live in from the culture of the origins of the Bible if that gap gets chronologically wider there are many questions right related to modern issues but they just simply don't have any parallel they don't exist and so what you need is not to be like what chapter and verse what you need is to know what story you're in and to be inspired by the spirit of Jesus and as you follow and sit at the feeds of Jesus and memorize his teachings and live by them you begin to become the kind of person who will make the wise decision as we encounter new problems and situations that the biblical authors themselves never faced so it's very different than treating the Bible as a theology are you with me last one the Bible the purpose of the Bible is for God to speak to his people so yes very quickly a good job by the third time you get there so so yes yeah I mean that's a fundamental to what these texts are and that and to say that it's the Word of God doesn't mean that it's not a human word or wasn't written by humans that's what we discovered already it's to say both at the same time to say that Jesus is the embodiment of the Creator God of Israel the god of the Covenant the god of the Exodus Jesus is that God become human to say that is not to deny that he was a human who was born and pooped and ate fish and spoke Aramaic not alien right so it's this right here and so yes the the purpose of the Bible is to hear a word from God but once again our churchianity creates a culture world therefore how would I prefer to hear God speak to me well what I would prefer was a language I could understand okay well that's not what happened you guys God revealed himself in history which meant these authors wrote in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek god bless the brilliant brilliant minds who are way smarter than me in terms of linguistics who produce our modern English translations there's such a gift there are such a gift to us and we can have confidence that we're hearing the message God wants us to hear but when Paul dealt with new converts say in the Church of Corinth that he wrote two letters - that we have in the nude none of those people knew Hebrew there were Greeks and Romans and they learned the Bible in Greek and Paul was very confident he wanted them to have confidence that when they heard the Old Testament translated into Greek that they were still hearing that same divine voice so the fact that we're reading translations doesn't mean we're not hearing God's voice but what it should make us do is take on the mindset of good tourists so some of you might have I've been using this illustration for a long time but I can't think of a better one if you go to Paris for example today and you step off the plane and the first thing you do is put on your shorts and pull up your tube socks right with the one red stripe and then go around asking people in English like where's the McDonald's you know are you with me don't ever do that don't ever ever do that right what's that's that's cultural arrogance and ignorance in the worst way when you go into a new culture that has a different language different ways of thinking about things the first thing you do is get a phrase book and you at least make yourself familiar with how these people talk and hopefully you're flying across the planet not to go eat a McDonald's but to like have your tastebuds exposed is something totally different and all of a sudden this is what we called cross-cultural wisdom and respect and somehow we've we we say we value that as a society right healthy respect for different cultures but we disregard that same respect all of the time when we open up the Bible reading the Bible is always a cross-cultural experience always and so there's a sense in which it doesn't matter how I might prefer that God would have spoken to me of course I wish I wish it was like when you're in the UN meetings and everybody has those headphones and so when Stephen speaking German but what you hear is English I would prefer that sure who wouldn't I would also prefer that God dropped independently prepared packages of salvation down to every human being that he could all huh but that's not how God has revealed himself he's revealed himself through history through the history of Israel and the covenant story that led up to Jesus and so what I have to do is like dissenter myself and humble myself when I open from the scriptures and when I if I want to hear from God what I'm hearing how I'm hearing from God is on the terms of how these authors wrote and actually talked about God which means lots of narratives lots of poetry and lots of letters if you look at what the Bible fundamentally consists of what is the Bible how is it the God's spoken to us there's two clues two very simple observations to share first of all the first sentence what's the opening line in the Bible then it's off right there what kinds of books begin with a line like in the bee sting in terms of types of literature narratives narratives yeah and not just any kind of narratives right so certain kinds of narratives is really interesting so think about the opening line of the Bible think about the last sentence of the second to last paragraph of the Bible so the first line and then the last sentence of the second degress paragraph of the Bible and the with forever and ever what is the Bible to get to see us lewis's question and what I hope my sons will one day grass without my screwdrivers what are scoop what is the Bible look at the beginning and end what type of literature is it if they knit Sepik narratives it's one huge epic narrative with lots of interweaving plots and subplots and a huge time span lots of characters that come in and out the only single continuous character is God from beginning to end and into that narrative is woven a huge diversity of different types of ancient literature and this is what that whole the video is the first part of a fourteen part series that's going to be all about this very thing but here's just like a quick sample if you boil the main types of literature in the Bible down so they're different types you have narrative poetry and discourse which would be like just prose speech or letter-writing here you go just like count it up by chapters I got my calculator there you go there you go so overwhelmingly what is the Bible it's telling a story and we should have already done that from the first mention of the writing of the Bible in the Bible shouldn't we it's fundamentally telling the story of what God has done to save and form the people and invite them into a covenant relationship the next most dominant form of literature in the Bible is poetry which is not meant first and foremost to convey information at all certainly not a dictionary poetry is a creative type of literature that you condenses language in a way to engage your imagination and your emotions a third of the Bible is not trying to give you information it's trying to give you an experience and make you feel something so just stop and think about a a third of the Bible its primary purpose is to stimulate your imagination and make you feel something deeply dictionary's do not read like this are you with me rule books do not read like this epic narratives read a lot like this and of course discourse you have the long speech of Moses in Deuteronomy to the people before they go into the Promised Land you have the speeches of Jeremiah or Ezekiel and different prophets you have the letters of Paul and Peter and what all of them do is they fit into different moments you can't take them out of context that flat reading of the Bible is a rule book we're a dictionary if you read each speech and discourse at where it occurs in the story and how it weaves into the to the overall plot line that's just fundamentally it's just what what the Bible is and we should have known this already one of the clearest and most incredible and the plane here one of the clearest and the most important statements about what the Scriptures are comes from a book written fairly late in the history of the making of the Bible it's from the Apostle Paul it's a beautiful description to a young pastor named Timothy who's working at a church in Ephesus it's a very difficult situation and what he wants Timothy to do is remind him of how important it is to read the scriptures aloud as a public community just read them aloud constantly have your people immersed in the story of the scriptures and look what Paul says about this this is a second letter to Timothy he says but as for you Timothy continue and what you've learned and what you've become convinced of because you know those from whom you've learned it how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ or Messiah Jesus all scripture is god spirited that's my own translation inspired or God breathed is what our modern English translations read and it is useful for what for telling you things you never knew before teaching for getting in your face about the things that you say you believe but don't live consistently with rebuking correcting pointing out the ways that you're living in an unhelpful or destructive ways as a human correcting for training and righteousness teaching me what it actually means to be a fully human being alive to God's grace and mercy why so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work and and just study that phrase it appears about 14 times in the New Testament and every time it's connected to giving yourself on behalf of the poor in the name of Jesus what what are the Scriptures for there a divine gift they're divine and human word for what purpose they actually gives two purposes here look at the first purpose is where the yellow starts when Paul thinks about what's the Bible for what's the first thing that comes to his mind wisdom not answers not answers not rules wisdom wisdom about what wisdom about what God has been doing in history to save the people how by having them come to the end of themselves and realize the only hope we have is something that has to be given to us as a gift that we receive by trust and face who is giving us that gift how does that divine gift come to us through the Messiah of Israel Jesus of Nazareth that's what the Bible is for the moment we turn the Bible into a bread recipe engine okay or what you're not I'm saying half of our problems in the Bible in the public square in American culture come from our fundamental misuses of the Bible to try and get it to say things that it's not fundamentally trying to say this is a divine word and a human word to God's covenant people for what make us wise about what God's doing to saves people as they come to faith and trust in the Messiah Jesus and it's God's spirited it's this God's Spirit always always in the Bible works in and through human beings just just get out your highlighter do a full Bible read through and get all the spirits that you can God's Spirit only once does it ever work independently of a human being and that's in the second sentence of the Bible because there's no humans around yet on the second sentence of the Bible the fundamental work of God's Spirit is to empower humans to become fully human and wise to God's presence and love and this is how God brought the scriptures into existence it's a divine and human word that does all of those things and so there you go this is this is this is my one-trick pony and the horse I feel convicted to ride and I think once we begin to read the Bible with a new paradigm based on how it actually presents itself to us we will discover a life more than a lifetime's worth of discovery and learning new things that have never occurred to me before because we're actually hearing the Bible as it was meant to be received so let's do one last one last exercise tell me what you see you see some animals you see a wombat wombat what else you see and you see some books what do you see you see some bats and some owls see some starfish floating in a black sea whatever is going on there what do you see hey done you've seen this before oh just googled photo mosaics and you'll waste two hours of your life my favorite is the John Lennon face made out of Beatles album covers it's really incredible anyway uh here's how most of us experience the Bible oh don't cut the hair off your sides of your heads don't boil a goat in its mother's milk why did lot get drunk and sleep with his daughters what is why did that guy kill that person what I just I just need to get to Jesus okay finally Jesus so okay here's a life verse like you know love your neighbors yourself and don't hate your enemy want that but think about divorce or that thing about give all your money away ah too way too much okay it's on to Ephesians and are you with me that's how we treat the Bible you know what I'm saying and we're lost and it's because we don't we haven't we're not listening well right when think about what Paul just said about the Bible he said the Bible is that and once you understand that now you have context for how to dive into each individual portrait and allow it to sit there it's meditation literature Psalm one tells you this is meditation literature you're it by design you're not going to understand everything by the first read-through you're not going to understand it by the 403 through at least incompletion it's designed to generate a lifetime of reading and reflection that's how the book is made in the first place and it's made as a pointer to point us to the person of Jesus that's what the story is the Hebrew Bible does that's what the story of the New Testament does and all of it points to the return of Jesus and the kingdom of God and the reunion of heaven on earth and so I hope this has been helpful at least to kind of stir the pot get you thinking in some new categories and questions and we're all on a journey we're all trying to be faithful to Jesus and I hope that this has been helpful for you along the way it so I'm going to land I'm going to close with that uh-huh and we there there are people watching kiddos we want to honor their time but we do have some time for Emily just to create a put a filter on the self awareness filter if there's a question that you think odds are ten to thirty other people in the room are wondering this question then feel free raise the hand I'll be happy to respond to it and I might even just edit it if I think it's only for three people yeah yeah yeah yeah so the question is this Moses is the first named writer in the Bible he's certainly not the first character in the story line there's a lot that preceded him so yeah we don't know and the story doesn't say I think we have to presume that this people had an awareness of their ancestral history and lots of cross-cultural research has been done about tribal communities that preserve their history through an oral history actually one of the experts on tribal oral history cultures is a professor here at the University wisconsin-madison his name is John Van Sina and so there yeah there's lots of so there's that certainly that kind of thing going on and then there's also there are a number of signs about some of the narratives in the pre Moses section from the book of Genesis that by their language they act and by the way that they talk and think they actually seem to have come from a period after Moses in other words the the paternity presents Moses as the the first writer and the one with whom the Pentateuch began it doesn't present him as the only author who ever contributed to it once again I think we have to reckon with a chain the prophets and scribes like Brooks who received the Mosaic Torah from Moses but then also contributed and shaped it in light of Israel's developing history so but as a short answer we don't know and it doesn't say and so I think we have to be really humble about how we answer those questions but I could do a whole class on that but yes yeah yes yeah yeah so a friend a mentor crystal sin across town at blackhawk picked up a line that he got from a Hebrew Bible scholar named John Walton who's I really look up to yeah that the Bible is is not fundamentally written to Western Christians living in the 21st century but it is for all of God's people living in any culture and in any century and the difference between writing to someone but for a wider audience that's very different conception then it's just a rulebook dropped out of heaven to me which is how I think actually most people conceive of what the Bible is yeah thank you it's a good clarification yeah oh well I mean no no sentence in the Bible was written context-free well so sorry the question is how do I know if I am honoring the meaning of something in the Bible can i is it okay to like you know for my grandma to have cross stitch some verse of the Bible and put it on a wall even though that may not be exactly what Paul intended or something are you with me so so yeah well here's what the Bible is for so it does all of these things so we should use the Bible to do these things and one of them will be to place Scripture in my environment or in my memory in a way that it reminds me of who God is and who and so yes it's a work of literary genius so crust it's that thing all over your house okay and put it on your screensaver and this kind of like absolutely but at the same time don't do with the Ezekiel bread people did don't do that so it forces you to become an intelligent reader of this literature that if it's your conviction speaks the Divine Word to you and you may not feel like you're a scholar or whatever and that's fine you don't have to be but if you want to know Jesus through these texts which Jesus's followers have from day one says that's what these texts are for it doesn't mean I need to become a better reader even if it's just of this book that's fine but you didn't part of discipleship to Jesus will mean learning how to respect these writers and what they wrote and learn to read and take what they said in context and not just repurpose it from my own whatever but yes use the Bible for all of these things that's what is for but it's not just for one-liners it's actually meant to be read and meditated on yeah hi I'm sorry can you speak up a little bit ah yeah yeah that's right Prabhat probably all of those yes yeah probably all of those okay here yeah here's one here's one example this is just my humble opinion but I've become more convinced of it through time it's my homeland so mark doesn't know if I'm gonna say this I don't know where his view is whatever but it's so I'm so sorry what are the unhelpful ways that people use the Bible and then the comment was are you sure you don't want to say what are the harmful or deadly ways that people misuse the Bible certainly there have been people groups and nation states that have treated the stories of Joshua and people going into the Promised Land for example as a framework for thinking about manifest destiny and my tribe and people going into this land and these people are like the Canaanites and how many how many people through history have viewed themselves in their group as Joshua going into the Promised Land many many and that's its destructive and it's an absolute betrayal of the teachings of Jesus in my humble opinion another example that's a little more Hot Topic but I think I have a deep conviction that it's a dead end and it's not helping anybody is treating the Bible as if it is a manual about the timeline and physical processes by which the few physical universe came into existence I think the author of Genesis one through three in particular had just totally different purposes for what he's doing on those pages of the Bible and that we're actually we're hurting our Christian witness by making those chapters refer to what we think are the physical processes by which the physical universe came into existence and I just made a bunch of lis angry and so Alice and that's fine we're followers of Jesus we can sit down and have a loving intelligent debate about these things but that's what I'm talking about reading this literature in context means honoring where it came from and what these authors meant when they wrote it in their cultural setting and once you start doing that on a regular basis I begin to see everyday ways that I've misunderstood or misappropriated the Bible and so that's just the journey that we're on you guys God didn't give us the UN headphones he gave us Jesus first and foremost a living breathing person and he gave us these beautiful God's spirited text the bear witness to that Jesus to make us wise about the salvation through faith that came about through his life death and resurrection that's what the Bible is first and foremost for and so despite all of our disagreements we can agree on that amen amen spend a gift to be with you guys have a great Saturday [Applause]

Channel: Tim Mackie Archives

Views: 685,747

Rating: 4.6561427 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: eaqKzYJ151Y

Length: 129min 11sec (7751 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2017