Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Extrabiblical Context (Part 2) - How to Read the Bible E4
116 Plays2 years ago
Who are the Nephilim and why does it matter? New Testament authors used stories that were well-known in their time to help communicate important ideas about Jesus. In this episode Nick and Matt chat about the Sons of God, the daughters of men, and how the gospels and Peter use these stories to help show Jesus' supreme authority, and how that should encourage followers.
Theme Music: "Believe" by Posthumorous. More at https://linktr.ee/posthumorous
Interlude Music mixed and produced by the Re-Paradigmed team.
For more fun, check out www.reparadigmed.com
Recommended
Transcript
Significance of Extra-Biblical Literature
00:00:02
Speaker
It's the Re-Paradigm podcast. We're in the How to Read the Bible series, and this is the second part of a two-part conversation on extra-biblical literature and implications on reading the Bible.
00:00:27
Speaker
So Matt, why don't you give us a case study how reading or being familiar with extra-biblical literature outside the Bible, ancient Near Eastern literature can be helpful for understanding some biblical theology that is found within the Bible.
Importance of Second Temple Jewish Period
00:00:42
Speaker
So when you look at this, I'm going to call this the Second Temple Jewish period. So this is basically the Jewish people when they come back into the land,
00:00:50
Speaker
under Ezra and Nehemiah, they're able to rebuild this temple. But most of this time, this second temple period is not covered by biblical history. So you've got kind of this 400 years people call it of the call it of silence. It was certainly not a silent time. It's silent from kind of a Protestant biblical perspective.
00:01:06
Speaker
from a Protestant canon perspective. Exactly. Yeah, we don't consider the writings from this time biblical, but they very much fill in a lot of the history and the background, the context to the New Testament. So when Jesus shows up, when the other New Testament authors are writing, they're all writing with this history, the writings of this, you know, the silent period in mind. So studying this can be really, really helpful for us to understand what's going on in the New Testament.
00:01:35
Speaker
So one of the things we see when we look at the writings of this Second Temple period are a lot of writings about sin. I guess not surprisingly. You've got people who are back in their homeland but in a lot of ways still see themselves as in exile because they aren't in control. They're still waiting for God to come and do something. So they write a lot about, well, why is the world the way it is?
Interpretation of Genesis 6 and Nephilim
00:01:57
Speaker
Why aren't things the way they're supposed to be? And they're thinking about, okay, sin and its effects in the world.
00:02:01
Speaker
One of the stories that they focus on and look a lot at is a story that's based in Genesis 6. So I'm going to read Genesis 6, 1 through 6 here, and then talk about kind of the Second Temple Jewish understanding of this story. Yeah. So Genesis 6. When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them,
00:02:21
Speaker
The sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, My spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal. Their days will be a hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward. When the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them, they were the heroes of old, men of renown.
00:02:44
Speaker
The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created, and with them the animals, the birds, and creatures that move along the ground, for I regret that I have made them.
Book of Enoch and the Watchers
00:03:08
Speaker
So if you've encountered this story in an evangelical church, there's a few different theories you might have come across. What we see in the Second Temple period is that people were pretty much in agreement what this story is about. There's a lot of other writings that kind of fill in more of this context. You know, the story is not real specific about what's going on, you're left with a lot of questions about
00:03:27
Speaker
Who are these sons of God? What are the Nephilim? What was going on here? This is very much... You talk about genres we're not familiar with. This is writing to a genre that we are not familiar with. So we're not intuitively able to know what's going on here. But they write a lot of other books and literature kind of filling in the story around this story. One of the more famous ones is Enoch. This is a book that Christians and Jewish people have had a lot of interesting interaction with.
00:03:53
Speaker
But I think it's really, really helpful for us to understand the ideas around sin and what's going on coming into the New Testament. Enoch fills in this story around Genesis 6 and gives a lot more details. So, in the Enoch story, angels, which he also calls Watchers, so these are angelic beings in heaven, see that the human women are beautiful and want to marry them and have children. So these angels, now led by an angel named Shemihaza, it's a group of about 200 of them.
00:04:22
Speaker
They come down to earth at Mount Hermon. This is a mountain about 80 miles north of Jerusalem to marry human women and to have children. So you've got these hybrid children. Their fathers are angels. Their mothers are humans. So they're like these human-angel hybrid offspring. They grow up to become violent giants. Like Goliath? Yes, but maybe even bigger to start off with.
00:04:44
Speaker
There's another rabbit hole. So these giants in their watcher parents spread evil and violence throughout the whole world big time in all these different ways. And actually Enoch and these other writings that talk about the story go into like really specific detail about the types of evil that get spread. It's quite interesting.
00:05:01
Speaker
In response to this spreading of violence and humanity throughout the world, God sends four archangels to come down to earth to bind these watchers, the angels, beneath the earth until the final judgment when they would be cast into a lake of fire.
00:05:18
Speaker
I don't recall if Gabriel's in there. There's like Raphael. Michael's one of them. I actually don't remember if they're even named in the next story. That's a good question. We should go find out. So he sends these four archangels down to bind these angels that did all this naughty stuff for the day of judgment when they'd be thrown into a lake of fire.
00:05:36
Speaker
these violent giants that they birthed were basically forced to become violent against one another. And upon their deaths, so the deaths of these kind of human hybrid giant offspring, the evil spirits that were in them, because they're half-spirit, half-human, so the human part dies, but the spirit part is now bound to the Earth.
Jesus, Demons, and Second Temple Beliefs
00:05:56
Speaker
And these spirits that are bound to Earth, they come to torment humanity and basically end up becoming what we know of as demons.
00:06:04
Speaker
I was going to say, if this is such a big problem, if this angelic copulation with human women is such a big problem and such a cause for human evil, I was going to be like, well, how did these giants survive the flood? And what you're saying is the body has died and the spirits lived on in the world, and that's what we now call demons.
00:06:26
Speaker
Exactly. So this story is now giving kind of the source of why demons are in the world. And then also because you've got sin that is spread out to all of humanity through the work of these angels who came down and then their Nephilim children, God sends the flood.
00:06:44
Speaker
So when we think about sin and where sin comes from, we talk about Adam and Eve. Like that to us is kind of the whole story. I think within Jewish thinking in this Second Temple period leading up to Jesus, the story is more like, you know, I've seen his spilled milk. Adam and Eve are the ones who tipped over the first cup of milk. And then the watchers came in, they dumped the gallon out all over the floor and then spread it all around the house.
00:07:09
Speaker
So when they look at the world around them and they go, why is there so much sin in the world? The first story they look at is usually this Genesis 6 story. They go, oh, it's the watchers who came down. I'm going to talk about the source of sin in the world or the real cause of why the world is in such disarray. It's because of the angels.
00:07:27
Speaker
So this is what Paul and his colleagues would have been taught in school and in synagogue growing up, or would have this been not sponsored by the synagogues, but just pop culture fun stuff that they're interacting with.
Scriptural and Non-Scriptural Texts in Ancient Times
00:07:44
Speaker
Yeah. I think this probably would have been what was taught. They don't seem to have made quite as clear of a distinction between what they considered scriptural and non-scriptural. Okay. Until a little later. Yeah. Until, yeah, quite a bit later. Growing up in church today, we say, what is the Bible? And we're pulled up a Bible. We've got a very clean line around it. Yep.
00:08:03
Speaker
I don't think they, even within what we consider the Bible, they didn't have quite that binary. They had the writings that were important to them, the writings that helped teach them about God, but I don't think they glued them together and called it the Bible as cleanly as we did today. Sure. They probably held up the Torah or the Pentateuch, let's just say, the first five books of the Bible in highest regard, I would assume, and then all the rest in maybe a hierarchical view.
00:08:32
Speaker
Yep. You're probably reading some of the second type of literature that is not now found within our Protestant canon, but they were just as familiar with that as, say, some canonical stuff like Daniel and other things that we do find within the canon now. Yep, exactly. I guess several of them talk about this watcher event, this angelic sex with women event that is a primary cause for all the evil that's in the world. Exactly. Yeah. Why? Okay. Why does that matter? Yeah, that's a good question.
00:09:00
Speaker
So my first answer is big picture. When Jesus shows up in the Gospels, we've been going through Matthew right now, and one of the things we consistently see is that Jesus is interacting with demonic forces. He's casting them out. He's demonstrating that he has authority over these demons. And if you'd only read the Old Testament up to this point, you're kind of left not knowing what's going on here. It's kind of strange. This is sort of a new strand of the story that you don't see showing up throughout the Old Testament.
00:09:29
Speaker
That's actually a great point. Is there any really demonic possession going on or casting out of demons going on in the Old Testament? There's some interaction with the spirit world. I'm thinking of the witch of Endor and things like that, but it's not the same as a spirit possessing someone or permanently possessing someone and then some prophet or figure casting them out. That's brand new in the biblical story for sure.
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah, you've got some Second Temple writings that will look back at Old Testament stories and kind of retell them through this lens now, seeing more of this kind of demonic or possessive force. Sure. Yeah, I was only saying the canonical stuff that we now have in our Protestant Bible is there is not really any of this gospel demon casting out type stuff that we see in the New Testament, in the Gospels.
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah, certainly not the same way for sure. So when Jesus shows up and starts casting out these demons and showing that he has power over them, if you're not familiar with kind of this Jewish thinking around what the demonic forces are and how they're really linked back to this causation of evil and the spreading of violence and evil throughout the whole world, it's easy to miss that the biblical authors are really trying to show you that Jesus is prying at the very heart and the root of evil in the world.
00:10:45
Speaker
I've never read these accounts in that way. Yeah. Yeah. So you see, like in the same breath, you'll see Jesus is healing and he's casting out demons.
00:10:56
Speaker
And he's forgiving sin. And he's forgiving sin. Wow, you're right. We tend to think of all of these as like really distinct categories and we're left trying to like, okay, I need a demonology that explains something. I need like some understanding of health and sickness and how this ties in and then a separate category for sin.
00:11:16
Speaker
I think for the Jewish readers, this is all
1 Peter 3 and Second Temple Literature
00:11:19
Speaker
linked together. This is the sin and violence that came from, or at least largely from, these angels who came down and left these demons. This is why we have death, disease, and overall this is just problem of sin in the world.
00:11:33
Speaker
this spilled milk world that's rotting and stinking. Okay, nothing bothers me. Just ask my family. Nothing bothers me more than the smell of old milk on carpet or fabric. It is the worst smell on the planet to me. So now I'm just envisioning the entire flat earth, the snow globe planet.
00:11:56
Speaker
soaked in old milk that's been sitting there for a couple thousand years or whatever, however long since these watchers came down and did this. I'm just thinking the whole planet is stinking and having a residue of this. What you're saying is that Jesus is stepping onto the scene and the gospel writers are intentionally being like, yeah, he is confronting
00:12:19
Speaker
this stench, this residue from these demons that have been left on earth and continue to corrupt it and pollute it and destroy people's lives. Exactly. Jesus is coming to deal with sin and it's very rude. He's going to come take care of it.
00:12:36
Speaker
So you see this cosmic, this just big time work of Jesus through this lens, where I think without the Second Temple writings and appreciation of what the demonic forces represent and where they're from, it's really easy to miss. This is a good example of where we could have some understanding of what's going on, just maybe not a full understanding of what's going on without being familiar with this literature that's outside the Bible.
00:12:59
Speaker
So I'm pretty unfamiliar with the intertestamental literature. I'm pretty unfamiliar with this whole motif that you've been describing. But when I read the Gospels, I still get a sense of like, Jesus is an authoritative figure that has authority over all things seen and unseen. I get that idea.
00:13:17
Speaker
And so I can kind of understand a lot of what the biblical text is doing and what it's trying to teach me, but it's certainly not a full understanding and having this story in the background flushes out even more, I guess, that sense of Jesus's authority and also his mission to heal the world.
00:13:35
Speaker
I didn't see his casting out of demons as anything but a power play, and obviously compassion on the people that are affected for sure, you know? But I saw that more of an authority claim or a power play, and it is certainly that, but you're saying it's more than that. It's got more cosmic significance, and it's fulfilling the end of this story that's been told by the Jews for a very long time at that point. Yep, for sure.
00:14:18
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely think big picture, you're going to get the key items out of the New Testament. Even if you're not as familiar with the history of the genre, whatever. Where I think this can really get you into trouble is if you start going into specific passages and trying to draw very specific meaning out of them, and you're doing so without proper understanding of it.
00:14:37
Speaker
devoid of the context. Yeah, you could have some ungrounded ideas for what that means. And there is actually a very specific grounding in those narratives. So, I want to take a look at a passage from 1 Peter 3 because Peter has this story of these angels who came down, spread the sin all around the world in mind here. So, 1 Peter 3 starting in verse 15.
00:15:00
Speaker
In your hearts, revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed for their slander. For it is better
00:15:21
Speaker
If it is God's will to suffer for doing good, then for doing evil. For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the spirit. After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it, only a few people
00:15:48
Speaker
Eight in all were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also. Not the removal of dirt from the body, but the pledge of a clear conscience before God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at God's right hand with angels, authorities, and powers in submission to him.
00:16:09
Speaker
Cool. We see reference to this story a couple times in Peter, but one other spot. In 2 Peter 2, verse 4, he says, "...for if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell..." Hell's probably not a good translation there, that's Tartarus. "...putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others."
00:16:32
Speaker
So, I think with the understanding of this story that Peter's got in mind, this passage becomes fairly simple actually, pretty straightforward. And the points he's making I think become really helpful and are encouraging. The passage should inspire us to go out and to suffer well if needed and to live in a way that's really honoring to God and in line with Jesus.
00:16:57
Speaker
With my lack of understanding of the Second Temple literature that speaks of this watcher's story, I would never use the approach that Peter has used here if I wanted to encourage followers of Jesus to suffer well and to trust in God.
00:17:15
Speaker
Honestly, a lot of what he's saying here, I have a vague sense of what's going on, but it's just the weirdest way to make his point. However, with having some background knowledge of what you just informed me of, this narrative, this story that was very familiar to the Jews of this time, now I'm like, okay, that makes sense what he's doing. I like that. Okay, cool. That's some solid admonition.
00:17:38
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I think that verse 19 is kind of where you either are tracking along with Peter or you start going, wait, what are you talking about? After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits, to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. So if you tune into the story, you know that Peter's talking about Jesus going back
00:18:00
Speaker
And he's making some sort of a proclamation here to these angels who are responsible for coming down and spreading sin all over the world. So through his death, resurrection, ascension, Jesus takes this opportunity to go yell at these angels who are responsible for spreading all this sin and flexing on them. The passage ends with, he's gone into heaven, sits at the right hand of God with angels, authorities, and powers in submission to him.
00:18:25
Speaker
They're at his feet. He's got his feet on their necks, basically. Yeah, exactly. So as bad as these angels were, as much sin as they spread throughout the world, they are nothing compared to Jesus. And as powerful as they were. Exactly. Yeah, they came down and they did horrible, terrible things. Even their kids turned into giants. These are imposing figures.
00:18:49
Speaker
But we as Christians can know that Jesus is above them. He has power over them. So that should encourage us to be able to suffer in the world. That should encourage us to love one another and to go live out his mission. Because we know that nothing we're going to encounter, no sin, no demonic force, is anything compared to Jesus.
00:19:10
Speaker
And then where I think it's very cool is he ties us into baptism. You think that's cool? I think that's incredibly confusing. Yeah, I think it could be. You said it starts to get weird at verse 19. That's definitely true, but it gets even weirder because it starts referencing this other stuff that just makes no sense to me with the angels and stuff, devoid of this contextual understanding that you've now given. But then he ties in baptism and then at that point, I honestly have no idea what's going on.
00:19:39
Speaker
I wrote a Bible study one time for a friend on 1 Peter. And on this section, I just had no clue what he was talking about. Literally no idea. And he's using terms that make sense to me. I know what baptism is, I think. But
Challenges of Interpreting Biblical Texts Without Extra Context
00:19:54
Speaker
he's tying it to these events that already don't make sense to me. And he's tying it to those events in a way that doesn't make sense. Literally, I'm just lost.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and you are certainly not the only one. Looking at this passage, I went and found commentaries on this. And you can tell immediately when you get into the commentaries on this section whether or not the person writing the commentary is familiar with this Enoch story or if they are totally lost.
00:20:18
Speaker
Like those are kind of the two options. And if people aren't familiar with the Enoch story and they're coming into this and they're like, okay, they have to write a verse by verse commentary, they need to make some kind of application or some kind of interpretation of this passage. People struggle with this. It becomes so difficult because you're dealing with all of these themes that are really complicated and heavy themes. You have no precedent for them within the biblical or the Protestant biblical canon. Yeah, exactly.
00:20:44
Speaker
And they'll typically come into this and these like disembodied spirits that Jesus goes and makes proclamation to, they'll almost always assume that these are human spirits. So they're starting off with this strange assumption that these are disembodied humans that are imprisoned under the earth. So then... So hell's at the center of the earth or something? Maybe. Okay.
00:21:02
Speaker
Yeah, so you're left people having to make all of these interpretive moves to either kind of explain away what Peter's doing, or they have to kind of dive into it and be like, okay, well, I guess God took a group of spirits and has held them for judgment since the time of Noah.
00:21:18
Speaker
And then he went and made some kind of a proclamation to them. Some people will say this is like a restorative proclamation, like this is good news for them. Some people will say, no, this is a judgment proclamation. And then after all this, they're having to come up with some sort of explanation for how this is tied to baptism. I've never seen this passage read at a baptismal service. No. And then after all of this, they're left having to explain somehow how all of this working together is supposed to encourage us to go out and suffer well.
00:21:47
Speaker
not working for me. No, seriously, go find commentaries on this passage. I've read some. It's almost uncomfortable to see people trying to explain away what Peter's doing here. Looks like what I would do if I was trying to write a commentary on things that I didn't know what he was talking about. I'm good at coming up with words, dude, but they're not going to make any sense.
00:22:09
Speaker
If all you've got is a system of theology built only on the Bible and you're trying to fit this into this system, without understanding this extra-biblical context that Peter's working into, you're gonna be lost. Martin Hengel, famous German scholar, used to tell his students that those who know only the Bible do not really know the Bible. And I think a passage like this makes that very clear.
00:22:33
Speaker
where all you ever studied was the Bible, even if you knew the Bible front to back incredibly well, you'd still be lost on passages like this because the Bible is speaking into ideas that come from outside the Bible. Yeah. And that's just necessarily the case if the meaning of the text of the Bible is located within the, let's just say, original author-recipient interaction, not within our own brains. Exactly. Yep.
00:22:59
Speaker
Yep. So it is what it is. We just got to get with it, I think, right? Yep. Yeah. I think if we're going to hold the Bible to a really high standard and we're going to say that it's God's truth for us, God's wisdom, we learn about God through this, then we should, I think, be excited to go study extra biblical context and to seek ways that that can help us better understand the Bible because it's worth it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
00:23:38
Speaker
Yeah, so like just to wrap up this whole talk about the value in extra biblical resources, extra biblical literature, being familiar with them. We've referenced them a lot, but just to say out loud, like what are the extra biblical piece of literature that we're talking about? So not to get too specific, we could just categorize them as first any Jewish literature that is contemporaneous with or prior to the biblical writings. Yep.
00:24:04
Speaker
So in large part, we're talking about intertestamental literature, stuff that's found within like the Catholic Apocrypha. It'd be a good start. Texts that are found at Qumran and more recent discoveries. All of that's only helpful for illuminating the theology of various Jewish groups or mainline groups within the time of the New Testament in particular.
00:24:25
Speaker
Yeah, we're crazy blessed to live post the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. There's so much good stuff there. Yes, we need to have a whole discussion about this because we are better positioned to understand the history and culture of the time of Jesus than at any time before since the time of Jesus. Obviously, shortly thereafter people are still familiar with the times and the place,
00:24:48
Speaker
But as the church turns more and more non-Jewish, the biblical text would say and spreads to Asia, to Africa, and to Europe, and that European history is what me and you are familiar with because that's all we're taught in seminary. All right, maybe a separate podcast about that. But as that progression happens and we are dislocated from the geography of the biblical times and places and the Jewish culture,
00:25:14
Speaker
And then as time passes, we're dislocated from the Greek culture and also the Roman culture. As that time passes, we just become more and more and more unfamiliar with the original times and places of the Bible that give insight into what's going on with the original author and recipient of the Bible.
00:25:33
Speaker
and it's actually in recent times discoveries made in the 20th century and now onto this century that were in a better position than almost ever before in European church history to actually understand what's going on at that original time and place of the author recipients of the Bible.
00:25:51
Speaker
which is super exciting. Yeah, it is. We live in a golden age of study of this time. It does create some angst and consternation and disagreement amongst, let's just say, the European traditions today, Catholic, Protestants, and stuff like that. We could talk about that, but I do think that to be faithful to our assertion that the meaning of the text is located within the interaction of the original author and recipient,
00:26:19
Speaker
we have to allow even recent discoveries that shed light on that original context, we need to allow that to reframe some of our theological positions that we've had that are not based in that context. So anyway, any Jewish literature basically is going to be helpful from that time and place.
00:26:39
Speaker
And then other ancient Near Eastern writings that are, like I said, contemporaneous with or prior to the biblical writings would include like Egyptian texts, Hittite texts, Sumerian texts, Babylonian texts, Assyrian texts. Those would be more helpful for the Old Testament. And then for the New Testament, Greek texts, Roman texts are going to be very insightful into what's going on with the New Testament writings, what's going on in the background there.
00:27:06
Speaker
And then I think I just mentioned this, I mean, in a different type of way. We've discussed this quite a bit before. How helpful is church history to eliminating that original context of the author and recipient of the Bible? And I think what I want to say is church history can be helpful, but if the goal is to illuminate the original context of the author and recipient of the biblical text, it's only very, very early church history that can help us to do that.
00:27:33
Speaker
And I'm talking really early church history, like a generation, maybe two generations after New Testament documents are produced. After that, I'm not saying what comes after that is unhelpful, but what comes after that is unhelpful for illuminating the original context, especially as you move geographically away from the cultures.
00:27:53
Speaker
writings by people in Italy and Europe, those are not going to be that helpful in getting insight into Second Temple Judaism in Israel-Palestine.
Enhancing Biblical Understanding with Scholarly Resources
00:28:11
Speaker
people stop writing in Greek and are moving away from Jerusalem and that center of theology and the history of the church that we follow moves away from there. Judaism changes dramatically after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD.
00:28:26
Speaker
So if people are trying to compare the Judaism of their culture to the Judaism that Paul is talking against, they're going to really misunderstand what's going on. If they're not familiar with the Judaism of Paul's day, because they're trying to pretend like it's the same as the Judaism of their own day.
00:28:42
Speaker
And that's just one facet. I mean, there's also just as you move, like I said, not only through time within the same place and within the same historical tradition or culture. What if you move outside that culture? What if you move outside that geography?
00:28:57
Speaker
Then it's just layer upon layer upon layer of context that you're losing as time passes. Yeah. Yeah. As English speakers in a very modern Western country living 2000 years later, we recognize we are extremely removed. Clueless. Exactly. Yeah. It was the John Walton quote, we can't trust our instinct in reading the Bible.
00:29:16
Speaker
Absolutely not. Yeah. So, I guess, can I just say one more thing? Say it. Fortunately, you don't have to go out and learn to breed the Egyptian Hittites, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, and Rome by yourself. We live in a golden age of scholarship, which means there are a lot of
00:29:33
Speaker
really, really smart people who spend their lives studying this huge breadth of literature and context and creating really, really helpful writings where they will boil this down and lots of times even condense this into like, here are the parts of these histories and contexts that are most helpful for illuminating the Bible.
00:29:53
Speaker
So there is a ton of really good sources out there designed specifically to help Christians better understand the context of their Bible, and these resources are incredibly valuable. Yep. And I think what me and you would also add on to that is the biblical scholars, the books and the podcasts, and the teachings that we listen to should be by people who are interacting with the scholarship.
00:30:22
Speaker
that has illuminated these background texts. And they themselves might not be the expert, but if you're a scholar, you know how to properly cite and how to do your research. If people are not appealing to original contexts, when they're offering their interpretations of the Bible, in my mind, their interpretation doesn't have any weight to it.
00:30:39
Speaker
It might be right, and if it is right, it's just randomly right. There's no reason to think it's right. If they try to ground it though, they are going to be interacting with the scholars who are lending insights from Egyptian texts, Hittite texts, Samaria texts, Greek texts. So those are the type of people that we should be listening to, the professionals we should be listening to as people who are not scholars ourselves.
00:31:04
Speaker
And I think that's a good and helpful thing to say, and it probably should be encouraged a bit more, too. Yeah. If I'm going to pick up a book, if it's a topic, something that looks interesting, the first thing I will always do is go check the index. Obviously, I'm speaking here to scholarly type theology writings. If I'm going to read something that I want to help me better understand the Bible,
00:31:25
Speaker
I'll go to the index, and if that index is full of Second Temple Jewish writings and these contextual writings that are going to help us understand the Bible, that to me tells me that this is somebody who's, like you said, trying to go back to these original sources and help us better understand the Bible in light of its own context. If I go to the index and I see just a whole bunch of church fathers from the 12th, 14th, 15th, 16th century, that to me is, like you said, it's going to carry a lot less weight.
00:31:55
Speaker
almost no weight given our assumption that the meaning of the text is located within the original context of the author recipient. Exactly. A good index is not always can tell you that the book is great, but that to me at least tells me that the author is working to try to get to the information from the right sources. Yeah. That the author is trustworthy or that they share your hermeneutical convictions, your view of how to interpret the Bible. Yeah, usually. Yeah. All right, dude. Super fun.