Bible Project: How Two Guys Changed Bible Education on YouTube | How I Write
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This is not a normal episode. There's two guests, not one. Tim Mackey and John Collins. And they're the founders of The Bible Project, a YouTube channel with more than half a billion views, and it is entirely devoted to teaching people how to read just one book. I think that book happens to be the most influential book in the history of Western civilizations.

The beginning of this interview is about how they make these videos. They're so good. How they're researched, how they're written, how they're animated. Then we got into the deeper stuff, and I think you're going to like it whether you're religious or not. Questions like, how should you read the Bible? And what can we learn about all the different writing styles in Scripture? Stories, songs, poetry, proverbs, parables, all those things. Let's rock.

Okay, so my first question for both of you is, like right now I'm in the book of 2 Samuel and when I want to figure out a Bible book, what I do is I go to your YouTube channel and I look up what have John and Tim said about a book. You guys obviously don't have the luxury of doing that. So when you're thinking about making a new video, where do you start? It starts with you. Yes, it does. Yeah, usually the ideas for what we're doing

come from me saying to you, oh, we should really like think about this. A concise answer is there is a whole world of biblical scholarship that I spent a lot of years paying to go to school to learn how to learn from this body of scholarship. So I'm just like in any field of knowledge, you know, there's your nerds who like

learn about that thing into a level of detail that no one thought was possible. And then they give their whole lives and careers to research and write about that. So that kind of work has been going on around Scripture for a couple thousand years. And I became just...

enamored with it, fascinated, excited by it, and it so enriched my own journey of following Jesus that I just couldn't stop going to school for college and then seminary graduate school. So that's it. Really, in a way, a lot of that education is just learning the languages.

And then learning... Like Greek and Hebrew. Those are languages like of biblical texts themselves, a little Aramaic in there. But then the conversation about the Bible has been happening in a cross-cultural way in German and in French and in Latin and in English and in a lot of different languages. So that's kind of what I went to school for for so long was to learn languages so that I could...

in this conversation. But it's all, it's books. So Anna was a community of learning colleagues. So I made a lot of friends in those years that are all in biblical studies, researching, writing, writing.

But it's just a whole world of Amazon lists of way too many books and not enough money kind of thing. And then where does the handoff happen? So how is the baton passed to you, John? Just through dialogue. Because I don't have the patience or aptitude just to sit down and study and read. But I'm just very curious. And so I love this relationship and other relationships I've had in the past where I get to just work with an expert.

And then just drill them and discuss. And through dialogue and through just a lot of asking questions, try to understand it myself. And so then it's in that dialogue that we work through the ideas. And then it is a discovery process, though. I mean, you come with, you know, 75% of what you think we're going to walk away with. But there's some genuine discovery along the way. Yeah. Yeah, for me, it's literally like a professor prepping to teach a class.

So, huge stack of books, lots of weeks or months, putting usually a set of notes together. It would be like what a professor teaches then students, takes students through. But I just have one, like, hyper-curious, insistent student. Who won't do any homework. LAUGHTER

never never does the homework but i'll show up engaged you'll show up engaged it's perfect so you come in cold yeah which is great because i can't take anything for granted and things that i'm just assuming or gaps in my own learning you know where i've like made four leaps in steps of what i'm conclusions i'm making and he'll be like wait how'd you get from there from that

So you don't really accept like logical bridges and stuff like that. You're like, I just need to understand simpler, simpler, simpler. Is that how you're thinking about it or what? Yeah. It needs to make sense to me. And I'll sniff out like logical inconsistencies. They'll bug me. I want clarity on the words we're using. I won't take words for granted.

And, you know, it bugs most people, but it doesn't bug Tim. And so I think it kind of, it works enough. Like, at least you don't show me that it bugs you. It doesn't bug me. Well, so like you said, it becomes a discovery process. So I've done a lot of work, but I also consistently find that when we sit down and talk for five to 10, 15 hours, it's

Not all at once, but spread out. I learned because he challenges me then to write gaps in my thinking. Or he asks a question that I just am like, I never even thought about that prepping for this.

And then we just start working on it together. So it's co-learning. We're learning as we go. Yeah, so it goes from notes to discussion to script for a video to then a lot more content, written content that our scholar team generally does than to like more notes. It's kind of the pipeline. And then where does the art direction come in?

And so the art direction will be, we'll write the script, we'll get the script to a place that we feel like we could pass it off to our animation studio, and then we let them work.

come in and start doing story development and art development. Okay, so there's something here. So you are sort of in-house theologian and then you are the bad student who is just like trying to make everything super clear and you're helping to distill and then there's another animation team after that. Yeah, there's our animation team. So my expertise before this partnership was just making animated explainer videos. So I...

I love the process of sitting down with a client and then learning and quizzing them and being curious and then coming up with a script. But then the whole process after that of then having an artist storyboard it and then come up with the right visuals that help you land the idea in the right way. That whole pipeline is something I love. I've done a lot of. And so we just built our own team here that does that with us. Yeah.

And so we learn a lot when we sit down with them because we'll read a script to them and we'll feel pretty good about it.

And they'll ask us questions and we'll realize, oh, okay, we need to work on this more. So it's like a more community in the script. And then they'll go away and they'll come back with storyboard ideas. And we'll be like, that's a really good idea. In fact, man, we could play up that idea by adapting our script this way. Or man, this is just not working. Why? Oh, because we weren't that clear. We need to rewrite this. So it's a collaborative process there with our artists.

So what's an example of what you were just saying? Break that down for me. What would be a good example? So, well, a project that's in the pipeline right now is a theme study on wilderness throughout the Bible. So we did a bunch of work. So I do read lots of Bible, read lots of scholars on the Bible, create the notes. We talked for 10 hours. We co-wrote a script that we felt great about. Like we were pretty stoked on it. And then, yeah, we gave it to our team and they...

We're beginning to point out the way we plotted the sequence of ideas was actually really hard to display visually in terms of story coherence. So, they just point out a couple spots like that. We're like, "You're trying to set up this pattern but it didn't fully repeat and this and this." And then we're just like, "Oh my gosh, we didn't even notice." So, then we go back, rewrite, they go back, storyboard. Sometimes they'll try and tell the story visually like you're saying.

and then come back and say, "Do you see how we don't have a scene for this, but we do in these two other places?" And we're like, "Oh, we could write a little paragraph and then it would..." So it's kind of like that. I mean, sometimes we're in the draft seven of the script

In that back and forth with the artists. I'm trying to think of a really clear example. I know in like the test video, our artists came with the idea of two doors. So we didn't come with that idea. And then that became such a central image. But there's always some sort of visual that will unlock an idea for us. And

And then the inverse is true as well. There will be a set of visuals where you're like, why is this so murky? Why is this not working? And it's usually because we have something in the script that's just not working. And they're just kind of like, yeah, what do we do with this? Tell me about the illusion of knowing. Well, a lot of people ask me if I'm being sincere in our podcast. Because our podcast is just us having conversations, working through the content.

And most people kind of assume that the podcast is like pre-rehearsed or I know where we're going. And so then the questions is like, okay, well, are you being genuine? Like, are these really your questions?

And I've had to think about that a lot. We've been talking about the Bible for 11 years now. 11 years now. Yeah. And so we'll go back to the same ideas over and over and over. And sometimes I'll be like, I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask again. And the way that I've explained it to people is that we all have this illusion of knowing. I kind of think I know.

And usually I don't fully really know. And the way that just, it's a psychological term about how our brains work, which is if we realized how little we actually understand about the world, we would go crazy. Like I really don't.

There's so much about life that I don't get. But I have to feel and control just to move on throughout the day. Right? So my brain plays this trick on me that goes, you get it. You know. You know how this works. But I don't. And so I just have to... That's the illusion of knowing. And I have to turn that off. So when we're having a conversation, you have to be in a safe and curious place to go, you know, I probably don't know. I think I know. But I probably don't know. And so...

It's muting that illusion of, oh yeah, I get it. And allowing yourself to come to it again, pretending like you don't know, and then suddenly realizing, oh, actually, it's much deeper than I thought. How do you think about that? Because one of the challenges with scripture is that in some way, it's like this marvelous mystery. And it's this glorious mystery. It's like,

God has given us a little bit that we can just learn and learn and learn. We learn so much about God's kingdom, but also there's so much that is just beyond our grasp and comprehension. And I would assume that your position, part of what people expect from you is to have answers, but it's sort of one of those things that as you learn more, you sort of realize, man, I don't know when the day of the Lord is going to be, you know, stuff like that. And how do you

balance sort of like a pursuit of certainty that comes with teaching with a kind of surrender to the grand mysteries of it all? That's a really great question. I think a lot about it too. I think that in my own journey of following Jesus and really attending to scripture in detail for a long time, definitely the hope of certainty has gone out the window.

Not because of skepticism about the Bible, actually because of, I think, the impact of Jesus and of the story of Scripture on me, which is certainty is stemming from a desire to have control over what I think the outcomes of my life are. And if I know the right things, certain outcomes will follow. And if I don't, you know, disaster. And I just really don't.

see that that's a virtue Scripture is trying to instill in us. The virtue of trust, learning how to trust and have confidence in the one that I'm trusting, to me that's a big deal. But that's really different than certainty. So I think...

The story of the Bible is about a botched quest for wisdom and people trying to know or take knowledge that really isn't available to them, or at least not in the way they think it is. Where does that show up beyond Genesis 3?

Oh man, it's what the whole thing's about. David, that's what the whole book is about. Yeah, I mean, it's not about anything else except humans learning how to trust God in His surprising ways of teaching us what wisdom and life really are. I think for me, that's just why I love biblical literature so much and why I love being a follower of Jesus is it actually has been the gateway for me

inhabiting a view of the world where I do have trust and confidence, but I have zero certainty. Zero. I should take that. I'll dial that back. I think for me what matters less than certainty is trust. All that to say is I have no problem knowing that I don't know the answers to most things. And I think you and I share that of wanting to expose the illusion of knowing.

Like you and I both value that and we feel okay being vulnerable at reaching the point where you're like, oh, I don't know. I don't know how it goes together. I need five more years to think about that. But to me, that's just admission of the truth as opposed to like... A traditional explainer video, which is the world I came from, is all about like helping you actually know. So this morning I was talking with our animation studio director working towards this new video we're making on Spirit of God.

And there's so much mystery in this idea that God is spirit. And

To make an explainer video to like kind of smooth out the mystery just feels like the wrong move. You want someone to sit in the mystery. But there's a way to do that. But it's interesting that we have this. I have an explainer video background and it is to try to feel like you can master something and like, oh, I can control it because now I understand it. But there's also just a beauty in being able to understand things

something in a new way and then enter into the mystery through a new perspective. Or even like to honor a mystery doesn't mean that you don't think about it or ponder it. You can actually make a lot of progress in understanding the thing you can't understand. Truly. And actually what you come is to better understand exactly what it is you don't understand. But then I think typically in our experience, we're like, oh, there was a lot that was blurry.

that's clearer now, that helps me honor the mystery of who God is in even, you know, deeper way.

Well, the Spirit of God is such a good example because, for example, we learn the Spirit of God is an advocate. Okay, so we actually know that the Holy Spirit is an advocate. Also, the Holy Spirit is a person, like the third figure in the Trinity. Okay, wow. So this isn't like just because it's a spirit doesn't mean it's shapeless and formless. There's actually a grain to the Spirit which will be aligned with God.

The desires of Christ and also has perfect knowledge of past, present and future. Whoa. Okay. So we've learned all that. And so I think that to your point that you can sit in the mystery and by learning, getting some knowledge, there's a way that the mystery can actually expand because you

As you contemplate it, it actually has form now. Yeah, it's great. Yep, it's a great analogy. I mean, the biblical story is trying to answer the biggest questions. Answer. It's trying to address the biggest questions of like, who are we? Where are we? What's wrong with everything? If there is a solution, like, what is that? Who's behind it all? I mean, they're huge questions and...

Well, knowing the full extent of every one of those, I think it's kind of like a dog trying to learn algebra. Like it's just not going to. But we can learn.

make a lot of progress in our own journey of expanding our awareness of all those questions. And Scripture actually is ideally designed to do that because it's so hard to understand. And that's not a glitch. It's a feature. That's what I've learned through this project is that I grew up in a tradition where the Bible was approached as a reference book. It's

Some sort of, like, you can just dissect it, turn it into a rule book or turn it into, like, a theology book and master it. And I've come to this appreciation of the fact that this is literary art that actually puts a lot of riddles and mysteries in front of you on purpose and is asking us to engage with the mystery and the riddles, not necessarily

So that we can never understand anything, but so that we can, I guess, wrestle with it in the right way. And this goes back to the theme of wisdom. How do you actually learn something? Do you just memorize a list of things? Do you memorize, you know, a taxonomy? Or is wisdom and knowing how to have a good life and how to connect to God, there's this experiential wrestling through wisdom

and turning something really personal through that wrestling. And so we just marvel all the time about how many puzzles are in the Bible, and we just kind of relish the puzzles and keep coming back to them and thinking about them in new ways. I think that's also why we've just enjoyed our learning process, the writing process. And then visual media is

you know, as a way to communicate because you're communicating more than just through words. The script is an important part. But when the marriage of the script plus a visual world and language does something in the communication of an idea that I think we also really value because it's not primarily cognitive or cerebral, like the visuals are working on another level, you know, of human understanding and

I think that is our way of trying to honor both the clarity and the mystery, you know, of God that's being communicated in Scripture. Yeah, I wanted to talk about this because I think that this clip is a really good blend of where visuals and sound and everything you're trying to do come together.

The Bible is such a sophisticated piece of literature. And so all these smaller plot lines keep overlapping, building up the tension. And when you back up, you can see how they've all been woven together into the unified story that leads to Jesus. There's so much there of the tension and then the sound goes up. You can actually feel the tension and then it goes the unified story.

that leads to Jesus. You know what I mean? Yeah. And like, that's so much more than just words. There's all these layers of communication. Yeah, it's great. Congratulations to our past selves. No, but that's right. It makes the point. In biblical literature...

is trying to influence us on all of those levels, you know? Yeah. What you've taught me about biblical literature is that it will, like just the poetry, it'll give you one line of poetry and then a second and just ask you to compare and contrast these two lines. And it's through comparing and contrasting that you begin to find more meaning. And

It could do that with a story. Here's a story about Adam and Eve taking from the tree of knowing good and bad because they saw it and they desired it. And here's another story of King David on his roof seeing and desiring a woman and taking her. And you're just supposed to, it doesn't tell you to do it. You're just supposed to start to

think about these stories together. And by doing that, you're seeing a depth that's kind of under the surface. And what we get to do with the visual media, what we get to do with the visual medium is we get to help explore contrasts and comparing things. In that clip, building tension or showing you

an illustration that kind of tells you the point. There's so much you can do with a visual medium that the Bible doesn't have, but the Bible is doing the same techniques. Yeah. We've made videos about all the books of the Bible, kind of overviews, but the biggest, and then that How to Read the Bible series, you know, that clip was from, but I feel like the biggest demand for us in terms of learning and

challenging us is when we do a theme study of like an idea that's introduced at the beginning of the biblical story and then runs all the way through. Because there, what we're trying to do is trace a pattern throughout Scripture and then replicate it in a short form. But the visuals are so ideal in just like what you're saying, because you can put the story of Adam and Eve there and then right after that have a scene about Moses or about Gideon or Jesus and

But you can make the visual composition of each story parallel to each other. And that visual parallelism is actually an expression of the literary parallelism. And it's so fun. Then it forces us to think literarily about the Bible as words on a page, but then also as parallel images in a storyboard. And I love that process. It's been one of my favorite parts of it over the years.

That's the thing when most people read the Bible they're at a certain altitude and I think a lot of the gift that you bring is zooming out in different altitudes. So one example is with the Sermon on the Mount series. You're like, hey, there's a chiasmus going on here. Here's the significance of a chiasmus. And you're like, whoa, okay, I didn't know I could read something like that. And then if you take something like the number 40, testing, okay, you get Noah's Ark,

Moses in the wilderness, Jesus. And so I think a lot of what you're doing is you're allowing us to go to different altitudes because my Bible studies aren't like that at all. We're really in like, let's focus on this parable. Yeah, sure. That's a great way to engage the Bible. It's not the only way. And my experience is flying high altitude, but having done the detailed work,

is actually how the biblical authors themselves want the ideal reader to engage. What do you mean by that? You know, biblical stories. What's funny is they're often packed with detail. We're like, why do I need all this detail about the shape of these curtains and the tabernacle? Right. You know, but then it like leaves out details that seem really critical.

you know, as the character's motives or why they do the things they do. And all the detail matters, is what you're saying. Yeah, but it matters both in its context in that parable or in that story about Moses or Gideon, but also the Bible is designed in a way that

Those details also should stick in your memory so that they stick out when you're comparing character stories to each other at a high altitude. Kind of so that little visual of those stories stacking on top of each other, that actually is us drawing what I think our minds are supposed to be doing.

And the biblical authors also just assume that the ideal reader of the Bible is going to read it day and night for a whole life and have it all in your head. Exactly. So I'm going to show one more video because I thought that the way that you explained this was so beautiful. And it's exactly what you're saying here.

In Psalm 1, we read about the ideal Bible reader. It is someone who meditates on the Scriptures day and night. In Hebrew, the word "meditate" means literally "to mutter" or "speak quietly." The idea is that every day for the rest of your life, you slowly, quietly read the Bible out loud to yourself. And then, go talk about it with your friends, pondering the puzzles, making connections, and discovering what it all means. And as you let the Bible interpret itself,

something remarkable happens. The Bible starts to read you. Because ultimately, the writers of the Bible want you to adopt this story as your story. Yeah, there you go. We talk about someone a lot and that word, haggah,

is really meaningful to the work that we do. What's "haga"? To meditate. Ah, right. Of course. And it's that murmuring sound. And it's like having the words on your lips, kind of, you know, in your mind, just kind of sifting through them. I'm just always reminded that in the ancient world, you didn't have a lot of media. This was like what you had. And

So I'm confronted with all sorts of things to keep kind of on my mouth and in my mind and I'm scrolling and that shapes you. What you meditate on becomes the thing that you desire and what you desire then you meditate on and this is what Psalm 1 is training you to think. So

We have this ancient media that we're meant to kind of shape our imagination on. And so you talked about, you know, we can read a parable. And when you do that, there's going to be a conversation that parable is having with the rest of the Bible, with the images it's using, the words that it's using. And it's just telling, it's not going to tell you to do this. It's just expecting that you have spent time in these other stories too. And they're just interesting.

they're there in front of you. And you can then begin to go, oh, that's why he's using this image of the kingdom of God being like a tree. Like, okay, there's more here because I understand how trees have been coming up throughout the Bible. And that's to meditate on Scripture. There is a certain tension here

Maybe we feel it in different ways, but we began life as putting explainer videos out there on YouTube as a kind of way to share them. And our goal actually isn't to get people to watch more of our videos. No, right. I mean, it is a goal. We want to share the videos to the degree that they help people. But our goal is that people actually become...

more wise readers of Scripture and spend more time meditating on Scripture so they can follow Jesus with more devotion. That actually is what our hope is. And understanding the Bible better is a really big part of that, and we hope the videos are helpful to that degree. But when we're talking about meditation literature, we're trying to craft the videos so that they're a little like micro visual interpretations of what the Bible's doing.

So people can meditate on them and find little clues and see how we do it. But ultimately, it really is about like the Bible actually, the way you experience this little video is actually what the Bible can be like. At least that's always been a hope for me. You mean in terms of the feeling or in terms of how alive it can be? Yeah, the feeling and making connections. There's something about when the human mind

coherence and connection between what I thought were totally opposite or different things. And you're like, whoa, but it's true in our lives. It's like that conversation I had at the coffee shop, then that thing that happened on the drive home. And then what happened at breakfast this morning, it's all connected. Right. And that's what, those are electric moments in our lives. And what good art does is it gives you a moment to see something that conjures emotion, but then also meaning. Yeah. And,

And the more that you spend with it, the more meaning unfolds. And that's such a craving for us is to find more and more meaning. And another craving is to have relationships with people where this meaning comes alive. And so this wonderful thing has happened to me with the Bible, which is the Bible was this very boring, isolated, individualistic kind of just...

Learn to master this book. It's like grandma's dusty old dome that you weren't allowed to question or ask. Like, lest you have any doubt whatsoever, how dare you? You know what I mean? Yeah. It doesn't need to be like that. No, it's turned into an opportunity to have this wonderful friendship where we get to dialogue and not just us, but then our artists come along and we get to think about these ideas and

And then we get to let those ideas emerge in our imagination. We get to then let those ideas shape the way we think. And we could do that in community with each other. And that's just so fun. And so I've been running this experiment with people where we'll just read Psalm 1 together as a community. And we'll just enjoy the process of enjoying it as literary art and then asking what God's wisdom is for us and saying,

It just begins to just be like, oh, this was fun. This was like a really enjoyable thing to do. Why don't we do this more often? It's like, yeah, I don't know. We should. Yeah. There's so much in Psalm 1 I just saw, and I've been reading Psalm 119, and you just see it all the time, delighting in the law of the Lord is a huge part of this. This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be an utter joy. And that's the thing that...

Can I tell you something funny about that? Please, bring it on. Well, so in college, right, and I gave up reading the Bible right after college. And you were just like, I'm done with this book. After Bible college. After Bible college, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Like you got a degree in understanding the Bible. Yeah, it's actually not that hard to do, it turns out. To get that degree? To get that degree. Yeah.

And so there's this wonderful old man in my church who took me and some friends out to breakfast every Friday morning and read Psalm 19 to us slowly. And it was the most tedious and boring thing I've ever done in my life. Wait, 19 or 119? 119. 119, yeah. And it constantly was like,

I delight in your instruction. I delight in your, you know, over and over and over just how excited this poet is about reading the Bible. And I'm sitting here going, I am so bored.

And I began to despise Psalm 119. Yeah. Wow. And I remember even telling you that at one point we're having a conversation. I don't think you knew what to do with it because you're just kind of like, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. There's a little backstory there. You had some trauma there. And then there was this moment where it just clicked in for me. And all of a sudden I could read a line from Psalm 119.

And just feel this delight in me of like, oh, yeah, I do enjoy this. And it completely shifted for me. And it's because, again, we're doing it in community. We are, we're just letting these ideas really shape us and we're able to enter it with curiosity. And yeah, there's a joy to it. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you could say there's a couple. You can read the Bible with a few different aims, a few different goals. One of those goals, I think, and people are introduced to it sometimes first or sometimes only, which is reading the Bible to synthesize from it a system of coherent theological ideas or doctrines.

And that is a great and worthy task. It's actually even really important, I think. But that's a different way to read a text than to read it and ask, what is this designed to do to me apart from what I want to do with it? Like, what

How do I enter into it on its own terms and just let it do what it wants to do to me? And that's what I became so interested in for all those years of schooling was discovering a tool set and a set of questions to ask these texts that begin to unlock that. And then seeing every book of scripture like a pre-super well-designed roller coaster where it's like, I could...

step aside and like look at the roller coaster at these four moments of the ride and see what they're doing and analyze it or I could just get on it and then just press pause every 10 seconds and be like notice how it jolted you to the right there and then do you notice how you went over that little bump and what's that about?

And you begin to see these authors are doing something to you. Yeah. And sometimes that's by concealing information or not giving you the answer that you want in the moment. And by burying the answer that you have to a question from page one, but not giving it to you till page 50. The Bible has that kind of book.

and reading it with just going on the ride is a different aim, a different goal. That's what I've tried to learn how to do and I forced you to go on that ride, you know, with me. But it's been amazing. You forced me. Well,

This whole thing was your idea. You forced him, actually. Yeah. You invited me. I signed up. Yeah, we both signed up. No, willing participant. I think an example that is really lovely about what you were just talking about is the tree of knowing good and bad. It's such a riddle at the beginning of the story of the Bible. God plants a tree in the middle of the garden. Don't eat it. It will kill you.

And it's called the tree of knowing good and bad. And what do we know about the humans? We know that they are made in the image of God and they're meant to rule and subdue the earth on God's behalf as his representative. Well, you're going to need some knowledge of good and bad, right? Like that's like kind of essential. So why put a tree of something I need in the middle of the garden and then tell me not to eat it and it'll kill me? And then why does that become the unraveling that kicks off the whole story of humanity and the human drama?

And it doesn't tell you why. It just presents this riddle. We've wrestled with that many times over.

And there was this one moment where we got to the story in 2 Kings 3? In 1 Kings. 1 Kings 3. The story of Solomon. And Solomon, so we get to the story in 1 Kings 3 where Solomon is famously asked by God to request anything. He just became king. So he's like the king. He becomes the king and God says, ask me of anything and you can have it.

Famous story. I always kind of remember that story as he asks for wisdom. Right.

What he actually technically asks for is for the knowledge of good and bad. That's the phrase. It's actually hidden in a lot of translations, which is so annoying. Really? Yeah. He asks for the tree of knowing good and bad, essentially. And it's this hyperlink back. And God doesn't go, what? No, that's the one thing that's off limits. God says, I am so stoked that that's what you asked for. I'm going to give it to you. And you're going to be the wisest person on earth. And you're going to have so much discernment. When I started to compare those two stories together...

And think about what would it have been like for Adam and Eve to go, okay, we want that tree, God, but you told us not to take it. Can you give us that? Can I have the knowledge of good and bad from you? Can you give me access to that, to the fruit? Suddenly, like, it started to pop with like, oh, that was the point. He wasn't withholding the knowledge of good and bad. He was trying to train them about

How to get it, which was to ask Him for it. Where to really find it. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And so the Bible doesn't tell you that. It's just something you begin to discover. And suddenly that becomes so meaningful to me in my life and the way that I search for how to control things and how I know what's the good life and not... Well, that's a marvelous example of what you were saying earlier of how if you can really be tied into the specific words...

That then shows you, brings you back up to the altitude of here is how the entire biblical narrative fits together. Because when you said that earlier, I was like, I don't really know what you mean by that. That's what you mean by that. That's what I mean by that. And what's so amazing is after he says, I'm like a little child who doesn't know good from bad.

That's what he says. And then you give me wisdom. So he does get the wisdom and he becomes the most prosperous king in the biblical story up to that point until... He builds a dang temple. Yeah, until he blows it. And that itself, that story itself replicates the Adam and Eve story. He just had a longer success period than they did. Yeah.

And then you're just like, oh man, well... The wisest person in the world. Yeah, if they can't do it, and if he can't do it, like, where do I sit in this whole situation? I'm probably not going to do any better. And that's kind of the point, is to keep putting these characters in front of us who replay in unique and different ways the calling and failure of Adam and Eve. Which is part of what we mean when we talk about the unified story that leads to Jesus. Yes.

is that the four gospel accounts telling a story of Jesus, the gospel authors were such Bible nerds, like they knew all this. So they've designed the stories about Jesus

To precisely link in through their wording in the same way, but as like the inversion or the reversal of all these failures. So let's pop into the gospel. So this show is called How I Write. And John 1 says, in the beginning was the Word, the Logos. And the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word, the Word, the Word is God. The Word is with God. The Word was God. What? Like, what is going on with that? Yeah. What a wonderful example. You're like, how are those two things?

statements true at the same time right yeah is it god or is it distinct from god right yeah well and then also what is going on that's the question you better read the you better read the rest of the story to right to see how that's going to unfold sorry and well and what's with the image of the word really abstract and poetic uh and again it's it's it's this hyperlink to um

uh to the rest of the story of the bible and how how does you know we've read genesis 1 with each other i don't know 100 times um and uh and so you've got the story of god creating with the spirit hovering over the dark waters and then he begins to speak words 10 words

And so that God as spirit over the waters and then God as word that then orders all of creation is just this deeply Hebrew idea that when you get to John and you're like in the beginning, the beginning, Genesis 1, in the beginning was the word.

It's getting you to now go, okay, let me think of Genesis 1 while I think of John 1. Let me put those two stories together because they're talking to each other. And that's just what biblical authors want you to do all the time. Yeah. And what a great riddle that we've tried to unpack different times before because that image of the Word in the beginning is God's Word. It's with God. So it's along with God. But if something's with me like you are, it's distinct. Right.

Like John's with me. I'm not John. John's not me. But we're with each other. So we're distinct. But then John is Tim. Like the word is with God and the word. It makes no sense from one point of view. But think of what is a word even? Like a word is something that's an expression of my mind.

That gets translated into air pushed out through my vocal cords to make sounds that I'm saying right now that you understand. So it's so wild. It's the invisible thing in my mind can become a thing that goes out from me. And then it enters into you. And then now you know the thing that was in my mind through the thing. So a word actually is such a wonderful image for something that's me.

but also goes out from me and takes on an identity distinct from me. And somehow it's me to connect with something else. Well, on that point, I think if he was 412, like the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. And then when Jesus comes back, he's got the word in his mouth. It's like a sword. And then it all comes together there. So like, what is going on with that? This is just why the word? Yeah, the Bible is a

text made up of words. It opens with the story saying the divine word is the most potent creative source in all the universe. It's the thing that makes the universe be what it is. It's the word of God.

And it is remarkable then throughout the biblical story how much what characters say really matters and ends up having a significant effect on the world. So much so that Jesus says, right, that famous saying, no idle word will be ignored on the day of the great reckoning. We'll be held accountable for every idle, every word we, the matter matters.

Because they create. Yeah. They create reality. Yeah, and so writers can understand that. You can create realities with your words that change the way people think and understand. And that's powerful. But what are you doing? You're using...

and strokes of a pen or the shape of your mouth? Like what is actually going on? But there's this power to it. And the biblical authors are literary geniuses. Like they come from a literary culture of just so much care for the word. And so when they think of that power, it's very intimate to them. I mean, that's their world. Yeah.

Yeah, the best analogies, as I've sat longer with biblical literature, the best analogies I can think of are all about musical musicians. Like think of a really tight-knit jazz quartet, and they've been playing together for decades, right? And they just know how to hum and how to work together. And they've memorized it, and they know their scales. That's all down there.

But in the moment they create the new thing, you know, every time those two songs are the same. And biblical authors are working on that level of sophistication in the shaping of these texts, which is why you can read the Adam and Eve story and the Light of the Solomon story and two dozen other stories in between that have all been designed to link to each other. Unless you know to expect that from the Bible,

You won't hear sophisticated jazz. You'll hear, I don't know. You'll hear something else, which is what most people hear in the Bible. They're just like, wow, this doesn't make any sense. It's confusing. Well, you'll get to Revelation and you'll read about the sword coming out of his mouth and you'll be like, well, that's weird. But you'll get fixated on the sword and you'll think of him as a warrior and maybe he's going to...

use that sword to kill people but then you're kind of missing what's going on with that it's it's coming out of his mouth yeah yes why would god speak to us in poetry uh yeah i love i love that dude can you just give me a plain answer yeah like what is going on why did jesus teach in riddles yeah i think we have thoughts i don't know about answers yeah poetry

is a form of human communication where you alter your normal habits of talking, right? And usually you spend a lot of care on using fewer words and you are looking to combine words and images and figures of speech in surprising combinations. And those surprising combinations force you and the reader to make new connections, right?

So poetry, obviously, is famous for using metaphor or figures of speech. But what metaphors are is they are a way of getting your mind to put two things together I wouldn't normally put together. It's a form, then, of a human communication that says more and means more than you can even get on one reading. You need to keep going back to it, and you find it keeps having more layers of meaning to it. And what actually better form of communication is

vehicle of divine speech, which is a great line in Psalm 62. Once God has spoken, but two things I've heard. It's sort of like God's speech is so dense that it actually means many things, even though it's just one set of words. Yeah, we've talked about in our How to Read the Bible series how important metaphor is and

In reality, I think this is how it works. This is beyond my pay grade, but the way we understand anything is through metaphor. And so there's metaphoric schemas behind all of our language and everything that we think. And so how do we learn new things and how do we change how we think? It's by adopting new metaphors. And I think poetry just goes at that directly. Yeah.

You can also try to learn another argument or kind of a logical train of thought, and that's also really useful. But there's something more powerful and enduring by changing the metaphor behind what you believe. I think that's part of why I've enjoyed working in the visual medium, too, for all these years on these projects, because...

No one explainer video we make can say everything about whatever it is. But you can pack every millisecond with so much intentionality that you actually could watch it 30 times. I mean, our artists are this skilled. They'll like,

I mean, they're obsessing over details in the visual language to a degree that I'm just like, whoa, okay, you're like one of the biblical authors. And that itself is communicating the more, the multiple layers of meaning that are inherent within Scripture itself. And

The biblical authors come from a world that actually value indirect communication more than direct communication. I think they assume that the most important ways that our words can influence each other is not by making everything crystal clear the first time, but by sparking a learning journey.

um that will last a lot longer than the conversation well on the visual point there's a lot of metaphor in visual so in the apocalyptic literature video whenever you see a character have a revelation the camera pulls back oh yeah okay yeah so then you have the prophet it's a tight shot it's inwardly focused perception of the world and then you get this broader vision of the cosmos and it's just like us the scene is widening and so you get this kind of

subconscious change that happens through the imagery, through the sound, which is a kind of metaphor. Yeah, it is. It could also be your literal experience. If you're on a hike and you're in a ravine and then you go up to the ridge, you'll see more.

That experience. And then that becomes our language. Like, give me an overview of what we're going to talk about. You're using a metaphoric schema with the way you're using that language by saying to understand something is to be able to pull back and see it as a whole. And that's a beautiful way to understand understanding. There's other ways too as well. And sometimes our metaphors just are really bad and dangerous. And so we just need new ones.

And so it's delightful to be able to be confronted with new ones. In a way, you could say that is a big part of what the biblical story is trying to do is like stock a human mind with an encyclopedia of images and stories and ways, right? Here's a whole bunch of stories of somebody who was given everything they could have ever wanted by God and then how they blew it.

And then about the cascading effect of how they blew it affected everybody around them for generations to come. And you're like, whose story am I telling? I'm telling like about 10 different people's stories in the Bible. I was cycling through it right now. I was like, what is Tim trying to say right now? Yeah. And so, but then that shapes you. If you have those stories in your mind, then the moment I come to a decision like at work or, you know, in parenting or at the grocery store,

And like those, that's what's filling my imagination. And I'm like, oh, dude, I do not want to be like David right now. I don't want to be like Cain. I want to be like Solomon was on his good day or something. I want to be like Jesus all the time. Like that's what it's trying to do. I think in that little clip, that's what we meant by saying the Bible begins to read you. It's trying to help you learn how to read your life. But the way we become skilled readers of our lives is actually different.

parallel to becoming skilled readers of the Bible. I like the idea that the Bible is a window to see God and a mirror to see yourself. It's both of those at the same time. That's a metaphor. There we go. I like that. I will say it does bug me that we can't have a book that just tells me exactly what to believe and what to do.

And I sometimes just feel like that would be so much easier and nicer. Just really simple. Just give me the list of things to believe and the list of behaviors. But then how big would that book need to be in reality to deal with the complexities of life? And so it's actually just impossible. I think it's impossible to create that kind of book. So why does...

Why does God write to us in poetry and in narratives? And why does Jesus teach in riddles? Because in order for us to really be able to get God's wisdom and in the corners of every, you know, nuance of life is, yeah, there's,

There's no, like, instruction manual that will be able to do that. Is there a writer or a kind of writer, I'm curious from both of you, that you have, like, a particular appreciation for? Maybe the way that Paul pens a sentence, the way that the book of Job is written. Is there something that comes to mind where you just get in its presence and you're like, this is, you're awestruck? You know, King James translation has done some really wonderful things with certain people.

or teachings that there is just this cadence and poetry to it that has this beauty and nostalgia to it. But you've taught me to just kind of sit and patiently kind of come and begin to appreciate it on its own terms instead of feeling its beauty on the first pass. Yeah, sometimes it feels a biblical story or poem will feel like chaos sometimes.

Paul bugs me the way he writes. I get really irritated. Especially when he doesn't even finish his sentences. You're just like... Sometimes our translations hide it, but Paul actually breaks off a sentence because something just occurred to him. It happens quite a lot in Greek. Yeah.

But it's so hard that our English translations kind of massage it out. But it's a good example. I think he was writing on the go. He was often dictating, which doesn't mean they're haphazard. But what Paul never did was write like the Discipleship 101 handbook. That also bugs me. But he references that he did have something like that in his head. And he'd be to the Ephesians like, remember the whole pattern of teaching that we taught you about how to follow Jesus and

And so it's like all of that. Remember that. But then now let's talk about this thing. Yeah. So that bugs you. That bugs me a lot.

Yeah. Then he cuts off the sentences. No, the, well, there, yeah. I mean, that his senses are dense and they're run on senses. And then sometimes he cuts them off. Yeah. That's hard to follow. It's hard to follow. And then he's, man, he's writing in Greek and he's thinking in Hebrew. And I'm just this like Northwest kid that just wants, come on. That all bugs me. Yeah.

but then there's also... He didn't write his own systematic theology, but that bothers you. When he would go to a new church community, they would have a Bible study where he would teach them the basics of faith, and he refers back to it all the time. I would love that curriculum. Wouldn't it be great to have that curriculum?

I kind of expect that that's what the Bible would be. That was the original Bible project, actually. Yeah, totally. So, yeah, like, no one wrote that down. Yeah. Or kept it. There was no cameras to capture it. Yeah. Like, we just have the letters that he wrote to churches afterwards to go, hey, about the things you're screwing up now, like, let me give you some instruction. And he'll pull from that, you know, he's pulling phrases from that stuff, but we don't get the complete thing. Yeah.

So that's Paul. The Old Testament Hebrew Bible stories, they're so dense. And Tim alluded to this. Every detail matters. But then there's details you're just like, why are you telling me that? Or you told me that already. Like, in fact, this is the third time you're telling me this one detail. What's the deal? And that bugs me.

a modern reader like myself who wants to know the inner conflict of the character and wants to, you know, hear more of the nuance of a, of a dialogue and doesn't want to be reminded about some seemingly inconsequential detail. If I hear about blood in Leviticus one more time, you know, so biblical authors are just writing in a different way. And they're just like, the reason I'm telling you this again is for a purpose. And you're supposed to,

You're supposed to care about that purpose. And I'm not trained as a Western modern reader to be able to do that. So your question was, what literature just do I just relish? And I think, honestly, it's all very hard. Well, it's funny because when we were talking about making good explainer videos, something you said to me is, say it once.

and say it simply. And then the biblical writers say things over and over and over again. Communication philosophy. And that itself is a part, I think, of the learning journey. We've talked about describing the Bible as a cross-cultural, reading the Bible as a cross-cultural experience. Because in a way, that is what it's like. Anytime you go visit

another culture go visit another family in their home that's just a different family than the one you grew up in it's like whoa this is a different world and there's different language and habits and practices but and who's the author for you

The author, the writing style for you that you... Oh, well, whatever one I'm working on at the time. Yeah. The biblical author. Yeah, if that's what you're asking. Yeah. Then, yeah. I mean, the tricky thing is for many of the books of the Hebrew Bible, they begin life with individual figures like in Isaiah. You've entered the matrix though. Like you're fully in, like you're reading in Hebrew. Yeah. You're like, your mind is switched over like in a way that...

Is there one writer that you feel is the lossiest as I read a NIV or an ESV where you just feel like, oh, so much is lost from the translation? I want to honor our translations in the English tradition as remarkable achievements. They are, truly. But no translation can ever...

capture everything going on if it's you know of what's in the original and that's true in the bible so isaiah has had a hold on my interest in imagination from my earliest days of following jesus yeah and i'm as puzzled as about a zillion things in isaiah as i was when i first started reading it they just have changed and developed the things i'm puzzled about i love the isaiah scroll

It's also one of the few complete scrolls that was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, so you can...

go read a 2200 year old version of it. Jesus was really, and Isaiah. Totally. Yeah. Jesus' top 10 books of his Bible, at least by how often he quotes from it, are the Psalms and Isaiah and Deuteronomy with Genesis coming in a hot, hot fourth on Deuteronomy. So Isaiah really mattered to Jesus. I mean, I had a friend who,

In Bible college, you said that random thing to me, and I was like, okay, well, I guess if I want to get Jesus, I should really get to know those books of the Bible. Yeah, one realization I had, if there was ever preaching to the choir, this is the sentence, but that the Bible is really important. And what I mean by that is we have one story, one example of this. We have one story from Jesus' childhood, and his parents can't find him. He's with the rabbis learning Torah. Yeah, yeah.

There's so much there, even like Joshua 1.8 and what makes Joshua a great leader. He knows the word, you know, keep it close to your lips. And I don't know, that surprised me. Something like that. I marvel at that, that part of being a Christian and following Jesus is becoming Christian.

like a literary nerd of ancient type of literature. Yes. Ancient Israelite. Ancient Israelite texts. It's kind of like, Hey, now that you're following Jesus, you're going to get really interested in. Isn't that weird? Yeah. Now, and here's the thing is I grew up in a tradition where it's like, you know, the Bible is for everyone. And so go and have your personal time with the Bible. And I think that's wonderful. Um,

But to the level that you can geek out with these texts, I don't know if everyone needs to be what you are. No, I think actually that would not be good for the world. We need people to focus on some other things. But how wonderful it is to have a community of people so that when you sit down with your crew and you read some texts, there is maybe someone like you around. The world needs a certain ratio of Bible nerds, but definitely not too many. Yeah.

Because some people need to actually like do the stuff that makes the world make some go around and like do stuff not just make documents longer. But then it's an invitation though that all of us can enter in and level up and appreciate this at a level that you probably didn't think you could. And the way I think our minds work and the intellect of an average person is way more intelligent than we give ourselves credit for.

This is something I believe as an explainer. Yes. Yes. I remember the first time you said it to me. Yeah. We were working on the first or second script and we would pass back edits to and forth from each other, sometimes simultaneously on the Google Doc working. You're up above and I'm down below and I'm making everything longer and more explicit. And you would come through and just...

It was like a lawnmower. And it was like every paragraph shrunk. John the lawnmower, here he is. No, it was incredible. And there's many principles that I've learned from you about communication over the years. And one of them is that if you're clear, people are actually way smarter than most of us give each other credit for. And if you speak to them in a simple, clear way...

Which is what all of us want, anyway. I heard this explained once. I think it's true. Cleo Abram, she's a YouTuber, and I love how she says it. She says most people over...

Most people overestimate how much context people have and underestimate their intelligence. Do the opposite. That's great. That's great. Do the opposite. Right. Lay out the context for people, but then assume they're smart. And that's what I hear you say. That's exactly the same thing. Yeah. There's so much complexity to the ideas that we are discovering and wanting to communicate. And it's easy to think, okay, I'm gonna have to really dumb this down. We don't have the time to get all the context, to read all the books, to do all that work.

But that's because we don't have the time. Like, we actually do have the intelligence. And that's what I love. And my role is I can just sit down with someone who's done the work, has context, and then just kind of like drill, drill, drill until we get to that clarity. And I'm like, cool. If I can get to that clarity, everyone else can get to that clarity.

So I was watching a lot of videos the past few days. And the biggest thing that I kind of biggest x-ray vision that I picked up is how conversational the two of you are. And because it feels conversational, it doesn't feel like a lecture. You give us permission to be the beginner and not to have to be the expert. So listen to this and really pay attention to the back and forth because I want to hear how that comes together.

Each part of the story there is loaded with ambiguities, but all together it makes sense. And this is the literary genius of the Bible. It forces you to keep reading and then interpret each part in light of the others. This is feeling complicated. I don't know if I can do all that. Well, you're actually not expected to notice all of this by yourself or all at once. So I just want to hammer that home because that's actually a really non-obvious way of teaching...

Scripture, because it's not a podcast. It's not a lecture or a sermon. It's something else that's really unique about your style, which makes it, it elevates it, but also makes it really approachable. I don't know why I decided let's write in dialogue because I'd never had written any other scripts in dialogue up until we started working on this, but it felt right. Yeah.

And what we try to do is just capture our voice. So I am asking those questions. I do know it gives permission to the viewer to go, yeah, that's my question too. Or that's what I'm feeling too. And it's usually kind of hidden back there. And I think it's the illusion of knowing thing is we kind of feel uncomfortable that we don't know. So we kind of tuck it away a little bit. But as soon as someone else goes,

I don't know what that means. You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what that means. Thank you for saying that out loud. And so, yeah, I think that's a powerful way to invite people into the process. Do you write that into the script or you do? Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, we'll write our voices into the script. And which is weird because then we are rehearsing and performing a script.

I mean, it is a condensing of an actual conversation that we had. It's not like we're making it up out of thin air, but we are creating a concise form of the learning journey from hours into minutes. And there have been first drafts where you are writing both voices as the first draft. I've done a couple of first drafts where I've tried it, but you're better at it than I am. But what I love is...

is the back and forth. And we are editing each other's voices as we write together. There'll be times where I'll be like, no, you're smarter than that. But I mean by you, I'm not just talking about you, you, but also your persona. And be like, no, I think probably the viewer knows that, but they have a question about it that's this. And then I'll be like, is that kind of? And you're like, yeah, that's right. Or vice versa. Yeah.

So, I don't know, we've made hundreds of these. But it all comes out of the fact that we know each other's voice and we went through the experience together. And so, the question that comes on the page is a question that I was feeling. I'm trying to reverse engineer. How did I come to understand and get any clarity at all? What was the question that was...

creating tension that ended up getting resolved. What's the one thing that Tim said and how he said it that kind of shook something loose? And so I'm just taking that from the conversation and then writing the script. What we're also trying to model is what is true about human development is that we discover our most important insights for our grossest human beings in community, from in relationships to something other than myself.

It might be a book, you know, but that's me encountering another person through their word. Back to that thing again. But truly, I mean, we're a kind of species that develops through communal knowing and learning. We need each other to actually grow in our insight and knowledge.

That's another thing that we've come to really value is a communal reading of Scripture and that it's good to read Scripture by yourself and with your friends, that both are really important. And I think that was something we were unconsciously communicating by writing the videos as a dialogue because we valued that learning process together. Yeah. I had a guy on the show. His name is Dana Joya, wonderful poet, a wonderful poet. And he said...

The third line he likes, it goes, God creates, man assembles. True, not true, eh, I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, there's some beauty in that. I mean, I think you've taught me there's two words for create that are often translated create in Hebrew, right? Barah and what's the other one? Well, there's two words used in Genesis 1. Okay. Yeah, which is barah, which means like...

to bring about an unprecedented thing, the thing that's not been before, the brand new thing. Only God beras in the Bible. But then God also asas, which is to make or produce, and that is a very general word.

But, yeah, it can. God can do it, but also humans do that. But humans do it, yeah. So it is kind of like, or you could say recycling. Yeah, it's that idea, God baraz. Yeah. We can only then remix what God has done, which is a wonderful creative opportunity that is participating in the divine, but not in the same way that God can create something out of nothing. Yeah.

But we are creating order out of chaos. And when we mend a relationship or when we start a business, you know, these are creative acts. Yeah. But you're right. Actually, I needed some time to think about the quote. But I do think I affirm that. Actually, who cares what I affirm? I think biblical authors would affirm that. Meaning that everything that humans produce...

is built upon a whole bunch of things that were given to that human that they didn't plan for or ask for, that were just given to them from their very first breath. And that's just the nature of what it is to be human. But that doesn't make us any less co-creators in the world. It just means our creations have a relative status in comparison to God's. God is creator.

If you look at the English language and you trace back influences, so often you see that it goes back to the Bible, right? So you take somebody like Abraham Lincoln and you read what he's saying and you see a kind of these biblical waves, this biblical rhythm, this biblical language that you see. And it seems like

As I excavate, everything just goes back to the Bible and Shakespeare. So let's talk about the Bible. Like, how has the Bible influenced our language? There are people who are experts in such things. I'm not one of them. I've thought about them. I know some things about it. But yeah, the English translation tradition is only...

about 700 years old. The Bible's a lot older. Like going back to Tyndale or before that? Yeah, Tyndale, William Tyndale, Wycliffe, John Wycliffe, those are the earliest. And then they had a huge influence and it's kind of accumulating. Then each new English translation that was made looked to its predecessors for cues.

And then the King James in 1611 was a culmination of a couple hundred years post-printing press of real flourishing of English. Probably the most that we don't talk about anymore today was the English translation called the Geneva Bible. Right, of course. Hugely. That was Shakespeare's Bible. Shakespeare read the Geneva Bible. And the Geneva Bible was taken by the pilgrims.

to the colonies in America. It was the first, it was the Bible that influenced American English, the Geneva Bible. So all I have to say is there's so many figures of speech that are in, like even like odd ones. I remember when I learned them, Job, there's a ton from the book of Job, but one is the skin of our teeth. So it's a Hebrew idiom that Job uses. And the King James chose not to paraphrase it into like another idiom. They just kept it. And so...

The dust of death. There's so many. There's hundreds of them. So that's on the English language. There's also, I think, categories of thought that have influenced West Europe and American culture that we find it difficult to imagine another way of seeing the world. But then you go to another hemisphere and you're like, oh, wow, it's really, really different. What do you mean? Oh, yeah.

Uh, the, uh, sacred value of a human life. Right. Of course. For example. Look at how the Romans treated babies. Uh, yeah, I just, that's not taken for granted, certainly in human history. It's not taken for granted in the same way on the planet today. I mean, with that, we hold these truths from the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

What do you mean that's self-evident? We are endowed by our creator with inalienable rights. That's the next line. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, these are wonderful examples. And we're so, ah, that the person without power in a certain situation has the moral high ground just by being without power. That is, there's nothing more Hebrew Bible and Jesus style than that way of seeing the world.

And that is definitely not how most humans have viewed. So I guess it's more in terms of ethical worldview or moral worldview. The Bible and the spread of Christianity have left a stamp on

that is still there, even in cultural institutions or in a person's mind, that they're not a Christian and they wouldn't identify as a Christian, but they think actually more like a Christian than like anything else. And a lot of that has to do with the widespread impact of the Bible in Western culture. And what do you think that

Jesus understood about communication that we can learn from. Oh, man. I ask myself that question all the time. Yes, I mean, I grew up in the church and I've listened to thousands of sermons. Thousands of sermons. And the number of sermons that have left any sort of real and double mark on me is...

put on one or two hands and they're actually probably ones I heard on tape from someone who's just like world class gifted preacher so

And, uh, and so Jesus gave sermons, I suppose, but like he taught in riddles and he, um, he's very provocative and he just gave so much space to be like, yeah, you don't get it yet, but that's okay. You know? And, um. On purpose, right? On purpose. On purpose. And if you come to me and you press me enough, okay, then I'll tell you what it means.

Like, that's just such a different way to approach learning with someone. Speaking of context, like we were earlier, I mean, it's good to acknowledge the context of what Jesus was saying and why and when he was saying it. So he lived in a military-occupied land from a foreign empire. And he was making claims about himself that, if misinterpreted, were highly dangerous. And in fact...

He got executed for it. And so he also chose a form of communication that was clear enough to people who wanted to know and wanted to follow him and ask more, but that seemed harmless or silly enough to be dismissed by people who were critics or haters.

And that seems to have influenced a big part of his communication style. It also is clear that he valued indirect communication that forced the listener to wrestle with big questions, but in a way that he didn't want to nail it all down for you. He wanted to force you to do that work yourself. And that's what his parables and riddles often do. And how...

Let's do this kind of as a fire round, but how would you compare and contrast the different writing styles of the four gospel writers? You love to bring me to Luke a lot, I feel like. Oh, yes. At least more recently. He talks about at the beginning of his...

uh, of his gospel about just, just the journalistic kind of orderly account. Yeah. Right. Um, but then he also, the, uh, uh, very Jewish, um, him and Matthew both very, very about all the hyperlinking and structure of the book and the way the words they're choosing and when they're choosing them and the number of times they use words and all the things. Um,

Those feel very similar to me in certain ways. Yeah. However, you can watch moments where he's interacting with one of his sources, at least what I think is one of the sources that... We're talking about Luke? We're talking about the Gospel of Mark. When Luke is interacting with one of his source material documents that we call the Gospel of Mark, you can just set them up in parallel and you can watch him leave out certain puzzling details in Mark, abbreviate a story to...

Actually, it's a lot of similar to what you do to things that I write. Just edit it down. Yeah. And then often he'll shift the wordings of things to use more common or more easy to understand words for his Greek and Roman readers in the first century. So you're actually watching him do a kind of cultural translation of a shorter, more dense and cryptic version of a story that's in Mark.

You can watch him do it. So you can literally watch that. So that's a cool thing to think about. But they are what most people notice, though, is the way that John is different than Matthew, Mark and Luke. My goodness. You said it so beautifully that it's like a Rembrandt painting.

Oh, okay. Wow. You did like an 80 million hour lecture series on the book of John. And I listened to the whole thing. And you're like, it's like a Rembrandt painting, right? Like you look at a Rembrandt painting and it's all the stuff that's dark. And then there's like this little bead of light. And every single thing that the light is on is important.

So if you see a detail in the book of John, it's going to be important. But he's also not going to give you much. It's kind of this like darkly lit room. I thought that was nice. That's a nice way to put it. Yep. That's great. That's a great way. Yep. And he's very poetic and there's a very high relational dynamic there.

And so it feels very human and intimate. I remember when I first started learning the little that we know about John in the late first century. And the Gospel of John registers this. It also is alive in early tradition after the New Testament, that John was the last living of the 12, those earliest. He had the longest time to sit.

with his memories and all the memorized sayings. And he also uniquely, in John's account, recalls Jesus' teaching about the Holy Spirit coming to be your teacher and to remind you of everything that I told you. And I think what John is telling us there is the book, the account of Jesus that you're reading is the account that comes from the decades that he had

to prayerfully recite and meditate on all the content of the work. Makes sense of it. Right. With the guidance of the Holy Spirit and with this community, the we that speaks up at the end of the Gospel of John. And so the Gospel of John actually is the product of the kind of personal and communal prayerful meditation over a lifetime that is, you know, that...

brings us the rest of the biblical text. So John is the word. It's amazing. But every biblical text is actually like that, just in a slightly different way. And then what's going on in the writing style of the Psalms and Song of Solomon? How do you feel like that has inspired maybe our music, like gospel music today? Yeah, there's so many songs written with the lyrics.

from that tradition and the imagery, yeah. We don't have any surviving melodies or music in biblical manuscripts or anything like that. There is a reading, kind of chanting tradition in a certain kind of stream of biblical manuscripts from the medieval period where Jewish scribes developed a fixed way of how to chant in the rhythm.

that they built into a series of markings along the words. Super, super cool.

If you ever go to a Jewish synagogue and hear them reading scripture, they're following the tradition. Well, when I was bar mitzvahed, so I grew up Jewish, and then I became Christian. And my Torah portion, it was Parshat Roshet, and when I sang it, it was, Amen, Ki Akum, Bekir Becha, Yomim, Och Olem, Chalom, Ben Atah, Lelecha. And then that's how it was. So you would chant it. You wouldn't just read it.

So the origins of that chanting tradition go back to the 4th, 5th century A.D.,

and likely is much older. It's probably really old. It's so cool to think about. But how that relates to what the Levites were singing in the temple and how they sung the psalms is a big question mark. It's a whole field of Bible nerds and historians doing their thing. But in terms of the impact of the language of the psalms...

Sometimes it's hard to not read a verse and then hear a song in your head. Hear the song version of it, yeah. Yeah, totally. I think I've been really interested to learn more recently about the way that the psalms were memorized, chanted and sung, both in Jewish tradition and then also in the Christian monastic tradition of monasteries. Because singing...

praying the Psalms by singing them was a habit three times a day for tens of thousands of Christians, probably more for like, it's never stopped. It's still happening here today. And, um, when I began to read, um, early like theologians or Bible nerds, you know, from the three or four hundreds, you can just see that this is somebody who has the Psalms, not just in their mind, like in their body because they sing them every day. Right. And, um,

I was recently, oh, like Augustine, St. Augustine's Confessions is a really wonderful example. It's my bedtime reading right now. And he can't help but just the Psalms leak out of everything he says. It's so beautiful. It's like, oh, man, I wish I sounded like that. I always think it's telling that we say that to memorize something is to know it by heart. Ah.

I think that's what you're saying. That is what I'm saying. That is. And maybe it's back to stocking your mental encyclopedia with the stories and poems. It actually reads you. It becomes the way that you read your life. Yeah. Well, I'm such a new believer, so I've had this funny experience where none of my family's Christian. And as I would spend time with believers who I really admired, I noticed that they would speak Bible.

And they basically had, you can imagine, they just had the Lego blocks of all the words and verses and concepts. And then everything that came out of their mouth was they would just rearrange those Lego blocks. And it would come out in Bible that they would just rearrange. And I was like, I want to go learn how to do that. That's so great, David. Totally. I remember...

being in my early 20s, noticing that. I didn't grow up reading the Bible. My parents were and are believers. They're amazing. But they didn't force Bible reading in our family culture. And so I really didn't start reading the Bible until my early 20s. And I noticed that at Bible college. I noticed that exactly. And I thought it was awesome. I was just like, you can know these texts in a way that they can just

be a part of how you talk. There is also a way in which that can be kind of... Maybe I'll say there are more or less helpful ways to do that. Sure, sure, sure. You know? I know exactly what you mean. Because I think we can so rearrange the Lego blocks that like it's actually our creation, but we think it's the Bible. You know, we kind of remade the Bible and it sounds like the Bible, but actually we've so dismantled what the biblical authors are trying to say and remade a new thing.

But to the degree that our language can be a faithful representation, yeah, of the language of Scripture, I think it's cool. Well, thank you guys. Yeah. Yeah, thank you, David. This has been really fun. You guys have taught me so much, and I just got to talk to you guys about all the questions that I had. And the Word and writing was wonderful. That was pretty cool, wasn't it? Yeah, totally.