The Stand-Up Theologian
James Cary, BBC comedy writer, author and touring stand-up theologian is on a never-ending quest to understand comedy, the Bible, culture and the church.
The Stand-Up Theologian
Why are we so weird about reading the Bible?
The Bible is a rich and stunning tapestry of woven wisdom and truth - and yet we are bizarrely resistant to reading it. Why is that? And why do we treat it differently from other books and media? How can we read it more, and dig deeper? James Cary, the stand-up theologian, talks to Andrew Sach, author of:
Dig Deeper into 1 & 2 Kings by Andrew Sach, Alasdair Henderson
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Hello, James Carey here. I'm the stand-up theologian. Welcome to the podcast. This one's about why the Bible is so brilliant and why we don't want to read it, and when we do, we're pretty weird about it. That's the topic of this podcast. We should have like a golden cuff when that's in the Bible, isn't it? Well, um, yeah. Uh it it is. Um. And there's some other stuff afterwards, I can't even remember what. No, no, no. I think you should really go back and find out what the other stuff was. I think it was ground down into powder and they were made to drink it. I mean, that is really off the chain. That's my guest, Andrew Snatch, who politely laughs as I basically talk too much. Ah, thanks, commentators, for nothing. How can we read the Bible better, understand it better, be less weird about it? How do we deal with characters who aren't as good as we thought they were? Are we the baddies? Here we go. So I'm with author and pastor Andrew Satch. He's written a couple of books, which we'll get to in a moment, but thanks very much for being on the podcast. Nice to be here. I'm in your house in my house. That is true. Today we're going to talk about the Bible. The Bible's amazing and brilliant, and yet I fundamentally don't want to read it. What's going on there? There are other books and things that we like that we never tire of, and we'll go back to them again and again and again. Are there kind of books or movies or you know, or TV that you've just never tired of?
SPEAKER_06:We're talking about radio comedy, and I when I find something funny, I want to play it to other people. And the Michelin Webb cash register sketch I've probably heard about. Do you know that one? Which one is that? Uh it's basically a shop that sells cash registers. And then they try and ring it up on the cash register and get the wrong one. That's basically the gag, but it lasts for about five minutes. Yeah, yeah. I've heard that a lot of times.
SPEAKER_02:This is one of the best cash registers on the market.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm sure you know your stuff when it comes to cash registers. I've I've never seen so many cash registers in one place sold. Excellent choice.
SPEAKER_02:Let me just ring it up. Oops, silly me, that's not on our actual cash register. That's um that's one of the ones we sell. I'll um I'll just ring it up. That's not it, I'm either that's um that's a display model, trying again. Sorry, wrong one.
SPEAKER_04:The the one sketch that has gone around the globe on that is the uh where they're they're presenting to be nuts.
SPEAKER_03:Recently. The badges on our caps. Have you looked at them? What? No. A bit? They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them? I don't. Hans. Are we the baddies?
SPEAKER_04:For me, you know, I just want you want to show them to your friends. Yeah. And then 20 years later, I want to show them to my kids because I want the kids, my kids to find it as funny as I do.
SPEAKER_06:And you laugh again at the joke, even though you know the joke in advance. It's like Catherine Tate's sketches, isn't it? And you you know, they're the same ones in every episode, but you let, oh, is this gonna be the lower and one?
SPEAKER_04:And then you're already laughing because in anticipation of And the Far Show in particular, where they just it's just a whole series of catchphrases. And so we are very giddy. We mentioned last night uh the an episode of Black Adder, Inc. Incapability. The best episode. I love that.
SPEAKER_06:Samuel Johnson's dictionary.
SPEAKER_00:I believe, sir, that the doctor is trying to tell you that he is happy because he has finished his book. It has apparently taken him ten years. Yes, well, I'm a slow reader myself.
SPEAKER_04:It's just incredible, isn't it? I mean, how many times do you think you've seen that? Ten, fifteen. Yeah. Yeah. And you would just happily, and if it was on, if you were flipping through the channels and it was halfway through and it was on, you would you just stop and watch it to the end, right?
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, you would, absolutely. Yeah. And join and join in. You told me that you'd almost learnt by heart.
SPEAKER_04:That's one of the ones, that and the Duke of Wellington episode. I always used to say that I would probably have memorised the Bible by now if they'd gotten Rowan Atkinson to read it. If there was an audio Bible read by Rowan Atkinson, just you'd be waiting for him to say zerubbable, wouldn't you? So we're thinking about stuff that we just watch again and again. Why aren't we like that with the Bible? If we're Christians, which we both are, and probably most of our listeners are as well. We're pro-Bible, and some of us have an incredibly high view of scripture. It's it's inerrant, however, you understand that, it's inspired. Do you have any ideas why we are so resistant to reading a book that we obviously know is so brilliant?
SPEAKER_06:I think the fact it is so weirdly hard to do is testimony itself that it's a supernatural thing. Because I mean it's it persuades you that there is a devil and he doesn't want you to do it. Because I mean, anything else that you decide to do every day, you know, I will brush my teeth every day. It's not that hard. You manage to do that most days, or I'll go to the gym every week. Oh, actually, that's a bit harder. But lots of habits are quite easy to develop. The fact that this one is weirdly hard to develop, it's an uphill battle. And I think it makes it makes you realise there's something spiritual going on. Yeah, uh, there are forces at work that want to keep this at at arm's length. So um I think that's part of it, and then the other thing is maybe we just have the wrong expectations. Like the Bible is much more interesting and funny and engaging, and um e even the supposedly hard bits turn out to be not as hard as we thought. I think there's a unfamiliarity can can scare us.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and yeah, I mean what's what's amazing to me about the Bible is how easy it is to read. There aren't lots of place names and strange names, those are slightly unusual. Also, when you're sitting there in a r in church and someone's about to read them and you're already on the edge of your seat just going, Oh my goodness, here we go. Uh this is going to be uh a bit of a shocker. It's actually very straightforward to read, isn't it? The imagery and the ideas. I mean, I've I've I've been writing some stuff for uh for Advent and for Christmas based around John 1. In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, and the word was God, and that whole section that there's not one single word that's hard to understand.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, and the Bible was written for ordinary Christians, it wasn't written for PhDs or for theologians in institutions. I mean, there's nothing wrong with using your brain to work hard at it, but it James and John were fishermen. John wrote for his for as wide an audience as possible to say I've met the Messiah. Yeah. He's not trying to be inaccessibly academic. Now, there's a lot of thinking to be done, there's lots of depth to it, but it's not meant to be far off the preserver of the professor only.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Yeah, but also it withstands the investigation of the professor. To me, it always feels like I don't know what fractals are, and you probably do, but there was a period at some point in the last 30 years when fractals became a thing, and the idea was no matter how far into it you go, you then discover further complexity and beauty uh within these kind of what you know they're like mantelbrot sets or that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Infinitely zoom into it.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and scripture always seems to me, no matter how far you go in and how far you zoom out, there's always just amazing patterns. And I mean, to talk about your journey with the Bible, because obviously uh I do know that you were a sceptic at university and come came to Christ, and so therefore you started reading the Bible. But so how has your relationship with the Bible changed?
SPEAKER_06:Before I was a Christian, I couldn't really make head or tail of it. And the Bible says that it's a spiritual thing, doesn't it? In 1 Corinthians chapter 2, he says the man without the spirit cannot understand the things taught by the Spirit of God, their fruit foolishness to him, he's not able to understand them. And that was true of me. I had I had a Gideon's Bible, they gave us at school, and sometimes when I was in a crisis or you know, as a teenager, I would dip into it like a spell book expecting magic, and it never really delivered. And I couldn't, um so I never really tried. And then I remember coming to trust in Jesus at university and turning to him as my lord and starting reading the Bible, and suddenly it was a different book, and it was I could understand it. I mean, I couldn't understand all of it, obviously, but it just was um it was to me from my father who I loved, and so that that was the big thing. Coming to trust Jesus to become a Christian, yeah, have his spirit, that's a big thing. Um, I think being in church with other people for whom hearing the Bible's part of our weekly practice really helps because you know we all have trouble developing our own personal by-breeding habits. But if you're in a church and every Sunday you're hearing scriptures and in small groups every week you're working through the Bible. So I think that's probably got me into the bits I was scared of because I've been in churches where their aim was let's hear the whole thing, right? Not you know, we we don't just have the New Testament, we'll have also have Zechariah, and he's a series of Ecclesiastes, and we haven't done one and two kings for well, let's do that. And I probably wouldn't have ventured into those places as a young Christian, but I was in the church, which tricked me into those places, and it turns out all they're good as well. So that that's really helped.
SPEAKER_04:It's interesting though, because evangelicals particularly have this slightly odd thing whereby we tend not to have as many Bible readings as that's true, our sort of Anglo-Catholic friends who just go by the lectionary and oh, right, we're gonna have Zachariah, we're also gonna have Mark 7, we're also gonna have a Psalm 9, and we're gonna have a um Galatians 4 as well. And evangelicals are like, no, no, no, just read the bit you're gonna explain because otherwise people won't understand it.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, I think the pressure to understand something deeply as well can make you scared to read it casually. Yeah, and I think we can do both. So I I think you know, to to spend time for a whole week, two weeks thinking about a single paragraph's really good thing to do. Yeah, but you don't have to do that every time. Um, I remember what the first time I tried to read the Bible through in a year, and I tried to make a habit of that um for a few years. Um succeeded, yeah, and just think, but I succeeded when I realised it's okay if I don't understand it all. As in today I'm gonna read these two chapters, uh I think it's four chapters a day on average, and you go, I can't understand everything in those four chapters. That's okay. Yeah, I'm gonna read them again next year. Yes, and and letting yourself off the hook that I don't need absolute complete understanding before I'm allowed to move on. Yeah, and actually you do pick up quite a lot just by osmosis, and you get the contours of it and the and the sort of proportion of it, even without I've nailed every single verse. And so I think sometimes the pressure to understand it rightly can make it too intimidating.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, we have such a modular view of learning because of the way in which education has developed in the last hundred years or so. It's like we've got a bit of a tick-box, okay, Mark's gospel, yeah. Done that. Um, I did that seven years ago.
SPEAKER_06:I was at a church where we used to read Mark's Gospel in our small groups with everyone who was new.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Um, and I remember some people saying to me, Oh no, I've done Mark, and thinking, Yeah, yeah, I really doubt that he has no more to say to you.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I write Bible notes for Pathfinder leaders because I just can't I can't find any. There just aren't enough out there, which is a very strange situation to be in. So I I write them, but one of the things I write in the introduction is, you know, if you're doing Joshua chapter one, don't panic. They are gonna read this chapter again a dozen times in their life, God willing. You don't have to tell them everything about Joshua, so they never read need to read Joshua again.
SPEAKER_06:I think the food in large is good, isn't it? Like man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. And I've eaten mushrooms for breakfast like on more than one occasion. Yeah. And it's not like I only needed it to do it once to taste what a mushroom was, because you need to do it just to keep alive nutritionally. So there's something about the Bible isn't just once you've acquired this bit of information, you don't require it again, but it continues to nourish you, and you'll need you know you have to eat every week.
SPEAKER_04:How can we do more regular reading of the Bible for ourselves? I mean, I think for me, like audio is not cheating. I think sometimes we think that listening to the audio Bible is is not no, but I listened to four chapters of Joshua on audio this morning, and again it's just like because I've got to write some stuff on it, but it's like I just need to keep hearing it again and again. And it's so weird how I will sit down to maybe even write notes on it and be unwilling to read the thing I'm about to make notes on because I read it a couple of days ago. It's incredible, isn't it? But audio is good.
SPEAKER_06:Who do you listen to? Do you do David Suchet?
SPEAKER_04:No, I've just got the ESV app. Okay. I've got a guy with a fairly deep voice. Yeah, fair enough. And it's it's fine.
SPEAKER_06:I can't do the one. Sometimes you get the one with sound effects, you know, when John the Baptist is baptising Jesus and the Jordan, you can hear the water lapping. I can't cope with those things.
SPEAKER_04:Don't need that, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:But there are a lot, there's a lot of good ones out now.
SPEAKER_04:I mean, I do that, so when I when we have Bible readings on a thing I another podcast I produced called The Faith in Kids Podcast, which is for families to listen to, I might sometimes add effects to the reading, but only just to lift it and give it a sense of it. Do you do it live? Do you have a sort of whole pad of possible sound effects? Foley. Foley, yes. Foley artist. No, we don't. That's there's logic.
SPEAKER_06:Jesus sent the demons into the pigs, and then you have the oink button.
SPEAKER_04:The oink button would be amazing. I want an oink button. There's audio, I think, is can be good, and it feels like we've got it on our phones. We could so easily just try not listening to Joe Rogan for three hours. Why don't you listen to Joe Rogan for two hours and listen to the Bible for half an hour and then maybe somebody teaching you about the Bible for half an hour? I don't know. It feels like we can just in little ways up our intake.
SPEAKER_06:I like reading it out loud as well. I don't know if it's just because I like the sound of my own voice, but but I think certainly if you're reading something again, say if I'm studying something for church, I try to read it once a day, like the same passage. And but if I the second day I don't actually read it because my eyes just bounce over it because I think I know what it already says. But actually, if I read it out loud, I have to read every word. Yeah. And I actually quite enjoy that. I think the it slows you down, it just uh you you hear it makes it a bit more memorable.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Do you ever copy it out by hand? I found that I can do that, and I have I mean, during lockdown, I wrote out John's Gospel, I wrote out Genesis, I did Exodus, but I did also manage to work out how I didn't need to pay attention whilst I did it.
SPEAKER_06:It wasn't as it's really hard to keep to keep your mind engaged. I think that's why for me, reading out loud stops my one mind wondering.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Something about having to say the words. But yeah, I agree. You can you can be half reading and your mind can be thinking about all sorts of things.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:So try to kind of keep yourself focused and pay paying attention is not the same as you can read without paying attention. Yeah, that's what Jesus says, isn't it, in the parables, like he who has an ear, let him hear. Yeah. Because it's possible to hear, but not with an ear.
SPEAKER_04:I've just been doing stuff in Psalms as well, and I've got a a collection of psalm devotionals coming out at some point. What I found was that commentaries are not actually that much use. I've got three Psalms commentaries. So I would read the Psalm, I'd actually copy it out and think about it, and then I'd read a commentary by Kidna, which is quite a short one. And then I'd read a commentary by a guy called Golden Gay, who's very good on the original language Hebrew stuff, who oddly doesn't really ever mention Jesus, which is quite strange. And then I read Hamilton, who tries to persuade you the whole psalm is a chiasm, uh, because he's obsessed with chiasms. And they all have their uses in a way, and I kind of make notes on them. But when I go back to the psalm, I just go, oh, so the psalm basically means what it appears to say. I don't actually find commentaries all that helpful because I think that you they're good to kick the tires on stuff, but you know, and I've I've I've seen your commentary collection in your in your house, um, and that there are a lot of commentaries, and I've just thought, oh, I'd love to actually, oh, I wonder what that one and that one, that one. But actually, my my feeling of commentaries are generally frustration. I mean, what what what are they useful for?
SPEAKER_06:I mean, I think it depends. Like sometimes they're really insightful, but they're not magic, it's just it's just like having another dialogue partner in your Bible study group, isn't it? It's like but the person in your Bible study group just thought about a bit more. But I think you did I would say to people, don't read a commentary straight away because it's a shame if they take away from you the joy of working out what it's saying. Yeah, and I think study Bibles are um a bad idea because the the self-discipline required to not let your eyes drift to the bottom of the page to find out the answer. Whereas actually discovering it is part of the joy and the excitement. I don't want somebody else to um have the fun of saying, and this is the big twist in the chapter, and I'll find it myself. So I I read it myself first, and then after a couple of hours of puzzling over something, then I'd look at a commentary and say, and that then you kind of know what your questions are, like, oh, I'm stuck on verse four because of this. I wonder if the commentary can help me with that. And then it turns out that they also dodged verse four. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, they always do that, they always miss out that one thing that you already know.
SPEAKER_06:You're like, thanks. Yeah, I got I got verse three already. But what about verse four?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. But then there are exceptions. I think so some commentaries, like Brees Walk here on Genesis, is like one of my favourite ever commentaries because it's just endlessly insightful. Okay. And he does he doesn't just do that pedestrian thing where he goes to every verse and tells you what you already know, but he just he notices the big things like in this in this um whole chapter is um of Genesis, there's a play on this word, and this is the pun that had a lot of oh yeah, so there is, and that kind of thing. Or um here's the plot twist, or he has this thing about um gaps and blanks where there's something left out that really ought to tell you, but it doesn't, and that that's deliberate. So and he makes you think about the author's choices, like that. Yeah, the fact that we don't find out what happens to this is part of the point. Yes, that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_04:Well, that is um another really interesting thing I wanted to sort of bring up, really, because we don't really apply to the Bible the same things that we would apply to a movie uh or a novel. So when I approach particularly the gospels but or the narratives, I look at it from the point of view of as a script writer and focusing on, oh, it's interesting that this is being repeated. I tell you what else is interesting, this other thing is not being mentioned. That's weird. Okay, let's assume that the writer is not a moron. Let us assume that he's intentionally not telling you something.
SPEAKER_06:I mean, that thing about repeated, and that is a good example because in in the old days, like last century, people were very cynical about the there's the feeding of the 5,000 and the feeding of the 4,000, and then people say, Well, obviously it only happened once, and so they've accidentally included two different versions of this story. And it's like, as you say, they they treat Mark as if he's an absolute cretet, you know. Whereas actually the whole point that there's two of them and they're st almost the same, but not quite the same, is is actually the the key to the whole thing. Yeah, the the idea that the Bible writer might not have noticed that he literally wrote this in the last chapter again in the same words.
SPEAKER_04:I mean, I think people don't realise quite how unbelievably difficult it was to write stuff down in the same way that it's really, really difficult to film stuff. So i in a movie, if you've got a 90-page script, if it's a movie, you're filming five pages a day. If you ever visit a a set of a movie or a TV show, I can tell you what's happening. Nothing. Why? Because they're resetting the lights. Okay, most of the You said that yesterday.
SPEAKER_06:You said the most fun bit about writing sitcoms was writing them, and filming them was not your favourite thing.
SPEAKER_04:Filming is just the worst. I absolutely hate it because it's so so so so slow. It's very, very difficult to make a film, and it's completely written and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten, and then it's edited, you know, so 20 minutes of it, but it doesn't even make it into the final cut. And in the same way, I think we just thought, oh, they just wrote pages and pages and pages. No, paper was ferociously expensive, it was written down by scribes, and it had to be so the idea that something could be repeated because they couldn't think of anything else, like all the repetition.
SPEAKER_06:I find the repetition in Daniel really funny about the prefects of sap traps to governors and all the you know, yeah, and all the officials just sort of shuffling around, following behind uh the emperor, and then there's going to be uh a sound played on the trumpet and the heart and the loot, and there's I tried to I made a video of this in lockdown with my friend, and I tried to the gimmick was that I would change costume for every time I changed the name of official, so the sat traps, the pre-casting, and then once a second my outfit would change, and it'd take ages to film, and I would spent the whole time getting changed, and then trying to line up my face exactly with the way I had been in the previous frame, so that I would yeah, it kind of worked out fun.
SPEAKER_04:No, it's fun, but that was an immense amount of work in the same way that writing a gospel is an immense amount of work, and therefore you think, do you really think that Mark would have written a feeding of the 4000, and then at no point someone have just said, Mark, is this the same stuff? Oh, hang on, is that eight? Oh, sorry, sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get rid of that. So no, and yet modern scholars say unbelievably stupid things like that, don't they?
SPEAKER_06:And actually, like you say, it because it's a bit like a film, as in the Holy Spirit inspiring the biblical authors, they are amazing narrators. Those kind of things actually are the key to the drama. So it's like in Exodus, when um they have to get out of Egypt from the Pharaoh because of plagues, and then they come out with great possessions, and you think, Oh, I I know this story because in the beginning of Genesis, that's what happens to Abraham, because he goes out of Egypt um with plagues on the Pharaoh with great possessions in what is it, Genesis chapter 12 there. And I've seen this before, and of course, that's that's the whole point. It's like a it's a trailer because God's telling you, Yeah, I've already got this on control. But um, so sometimes the little the sense of deja vu or the those sort of subtleties are part of the storytelling.
SPEAKER_04:That's a very strange scene as well, isn't it? Where Abraham, it's like a again, there's a very odd detail in that, which is it's the cutting of the coven new covenant, the animals are cut in half.
SPEAKER_06:That's Genesis 15, you know.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, 15, sorry, 50. But I've always thought in that birds come down, and Abraham's just like, oh, get off, you know, and he's like shooing away the birds. And you think that's an odd detail to throw in. What is that? You know what I mean? It's like that's very it's very eyewitness, isn't it?
SPEAKER_06:Because of course, if it's just uh a stylised story, yeah, then you just cut it in half. If you actually do it, then birds come down and try to eat it.
SPEAKER_04:As well as like, you know, you can't flies and everything with all these wasps and stuff.
SPEAKER_06:So yeah, that's what actually would have happened.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. So yeah, there's there's a there's an element of it which is there's an authenticity part of it, but there's another part of it, and I'm quite influenced by James Jordan and Peter Lightheart and the typology guys who are very much about, oh, because birds represent this, or because that you know, so there are all of these kind of types and typology, which I think is generally very helpful. I think you can get a bit carried away with it, but overall, I think if you ask those kinds of questions and you just notice it, then you kind of see these things coming back and they just enhance your understanding. And it might be that in 25 years' time you finally understand on the 12th time of reading. And because you read all the way through this book of the Bible, you then read this other book and you just go, that's a very strange way of putting it. And I've heard that before, and you can look it up and suddenly you and it is much more fun seeing that for yourself.
SPEAKER_06:Again, the Bibles have cross-reference columns and a commentary would tell you, yeah. But it's so exciting when you realise for yourself, oh hang on a minute, I was reading that the other day.
SPEAKER_04:But it's just a question of just checking, is there anything here? And you as long as you hold them lightly as well, that's what I like about so James Jordan has all kinds of speculations about this is linked to that or linked to this or linked to that. He doesn't particularly hold any of them very, very heavily. No doctrine really rests on them, but it's just a very artful way of reading scripture, which is kind of a delight and a bit more like uh a load of movies with callbacks and and uh like a box set which just goes on and on and on and on and on.
SPEAKER_06:There's a great line in um Peter Lightheart's commentary on Revelation, yeah. Uh, two volumes on um Revelation chapter 12, it's describing the dragon, and there's seven adjectives or seven phrases about him, and then um he has this great line, he says, As ever with lists of seven, one is tempted to look for correspondences with the days of creation. One cannot always resist this temptation and then off he goes. I love that line.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. So, how about this? And I and I do I do enjoy that because it is uh although sometimes some would say oh this is over-reading, you think, well, I'd rather kind of lightly overread it and geek out a bit on it rather than just think, oh, it's just seven adjectives. If we're prepared to be excited by scripture and enthralled by it, I I think it rarely disappoints us, really. Hello, just interrupting my own podcast in order to remind you that if you're interested in any of the issues raised by any of these podcasts, you can geek out and chat to me over on Facebook. And there's a s there's a private group there where we can refer to different bits of episodes and talk about this, that, and the other. People are trickling in, people are joining, so that might turn into full-blown conversations at some point. Why not come over and have a chat? If you want to support this podcast and get extra access to early episodes, including an extended version of this episode, which clocked in at about 52 minutes. This one is shorter. So if you want to hear what we really said, then why don't you become a paid subscriber to the Wycliffe Papers? That makes you a loyal lollard. So I'll put a link in the show notes to the Wycliffe Papers. I referred to that a little bit, I think, in the second half where there are some jokes. And also, if you like jokes and you're serious about the Bible and church history, you will find the Wycliffe Papers funny. There's a Facebook page for that too. Anyway, I'm still touring the UK with my show God the Bible and everything. And over on YouTube, I've made a documentary about Bishop Hugh Latimer. It's 45 minutes long. It took up an unbelievable amount of room on a hard drive in order to make it, but I hope you enjoy it. That drops on the 16th of October. That is Latimer's Day in the Church of England calendar. So go and have a look at that and some other videos which are already there if you're listening to this on the moment that it drops. So playing with fire is the new Latimer documentary. Go over and have a look. And I've got so many other things coming up in the future. And if you become a loyal lollard, then you hear about all of them first and you just kind of can ask me about this, that, and the other. So there we go. Let's get you back to the podcast. Um, you've written a book called Uh Dig Deeper. In fact, you've written a few books called Dig Deeper. Your latest one is on One and Two Kings. So, what is your approach in that book? Because you haven't written a commentary, and I'm and I'm glad of that. But I do like books that kind of send you off in the right direction so that you can dig deeper for yourself, presumably that's the aim of the book.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, it's kind of like a cross between a comment it's a bit like a commentary in that we explain some bits and try and um try and help with that, but it's also more like a sermon because we have application and illustrations and that kind of thing. But it's also a do-it-yourself workbook. So it's a sort of mixture between uh um a study guide, a commentary, and a sermon, I guess. With um a lot of silliness as well.
SPEAKER_04:Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. No, that's exciting.
SPEAKER_06:I mean, some of the silliness is from One and Two Kings itself, because it is quite a funny book.
SPEAKER_04:Well, yeah, tell me, tell me about One and Two Kings. I mean, what what drew you to that? Because you've done ones on on Mark and um Mark and Exodus. And Exodus. But I mean One and Two Kings is like, oh okay. I don't was were people asking for this one? What what was it?
SPEAKER_06:No one was asking for it, but like any bit of the Bible that you don't know very well, and then when you read it, it turns out to be a lot more interesting than you thought it was. Yeah. And I think that I mean that's always my And present for now. Yeah, yeah. We read it in church, I thought this is amazing. I can't believe I didn't know this these bits, and people think it's gonna be sort of dry history, which it really isn't. Um, and they think it's gonna be depressing, and it is kind of depressing, as in the whole book is like a downward spiral, yeah. As Israel goes into exile and Judah goes into exile, but it's full of hope as well, and there's these little cameos of saviour figures that are just like Jesus in uncanny ways, and yeah, so I don't it is not meant to be read this just to be depressed about how awful things are, yeah. It r it really is, you know, it's got um gospel treasures everywhere, yeah, and and comedy everywhere. And my my my I don't know what you think is the you're the comedy writer. What's your what's your most comedic thing?
SPEAKER_04:Oh, Modern Two Kings.
SPEAKER_06:Um I'll tell you mine.
SPEAKER_04:Okay, I've got a bit about that in my show, God, the Bible and everything. Here's when I did that bit to a slightly startled audience near Sheffield. What's Solomon known for? He's known for being wise, and he's been given wisdom by God. And God says to him uh in 1 Kings 3, he says, um, anything you want, you can have. Anything. And Solomon says, Well, because I'm going to be king, I need wisdom. And it's what God says in response that I thought I just think is uh incredibly funny. He says, uh the Lord was pleased that Solomon had asked for this. Said to him, since you have asked for this and not for long life or wealth for yourself, nor have you asked for the death of your enemies. I will give you well, hang on. Do you think I would wish for the death of my enemies? And it's like, yeah, yeah, didn't it? Can I? I didn't know that was on the table. Can I can I change my choice? I want death of my enemies. You shouldn't have said you know anything. I didn't know you meant death of my enemies. I just know it's too late you're gonna have wisdom. No, no, just can we just start again? Could I be invisible? No, you can't. Okay, I could I read people's minds. Can I fly? No, you can't fly. You've got wisdom. You'll be the wisest man who ever lived. There will be no one as wise as you ever again. Oh I've got stupid wisdom now. I won't even have any enemies.
SPEAKER_06:My favourite one is when Gerald Bohm, he's uh a baddie, so he's just made golden calf altars and got everyone to worship them and and turn away from true worship. And then he kind of knows that he's been bad, but he needs to consult a prophet to find out if his son is gonna be um is gonna recover from an illness. And so he thinks, well, if I go, the prophet doesn't like me because I've been evil, so I'll send my wife in disguise and then she can ask, and then he won't know it's us. And you you think he hasn't really thought this through because like either this guy's a prophet, in which case he's gonna know, or he's not a prophet, in which case he can't help you anyway. Anyway, the the chapter is she gets elaborately disguised and you know, unrecognized when she's halfway down the down the the path, and um the prophet calls out, Come in, Gerald Bonesworth. And I just imagine her face falling. So this elaborate false nose, and yeah, it's all been in vain. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:I did write a thing, I wrote a joke for the Wycliffe Papers about um Witch of Endor embarrassed that uh King Saul, you know, King Saul's disguise is absolutely hopeless. Because it's like he's the tallest man in Israel. He's like, you know, I imagine her going, he had a false beard over his actual beard, and you know, he came in and it was like, oh my goodness, I had kind of had to look away. They're very human stories, aren't they? They're kings kind of trying to get away with stuff. I mean, even just when you mentioned they're the golden calves, that's presumably a callback to a golden calf that was in Exodus.
SPEAKER_06:What was he thinking of, right? So he he like he knows the Bible well enough to think of the idea of a golden calf, but not well enough to remember how it turned out the first time.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. We should have like a golden calf when that's in the Bible, isn't it? Well, uh yeah, uh it it is. Um there's some other stuff afterwards I can't even remember what. No, no, no. I think you should really go back and find out what the other stuff was. I think it was ground down into powder and they were made to drink it. Drink it, yeah. I mean, that is really and then everyone died off the chain, you know, that's kind of super super strange, isn't it?
SPEAKER_06:And I think this is one of the bits where One and Two Kings is really prophetic for our age because he's very pragmatic. So there's been a civil war and Jeroboam's king of the north and Jerusalem and the temples in the south, and he figures out well, if everyone's gonna be going to Jerusalem all the time on pilgrimages, they'll pretty soon figure out that the king of the south's better than me and the kingdom down south is nicer than here, and you know that the country will be reunited. So to solidify my rebel state, we need our own worship solution. Yeah. So what should we do? And it's it's entirely pragmatic, and he makes a worship solution.
SPEAKER_04:Sounds like a terrible 2020.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, it is it is that it can be it's convenient, it's near you, you don't have to travel far, and then he he basically makes it all up. So he makes up his own well, I'll just I'll read it. Verse 32 Jeroboam appointed a feast on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, like the feast that was in Judah, and offered sacrifices on the altar. So he did in Bethel, sacrificing to the calves that he had made, and he placed in Bethel the priests of the high places that he had made. He went up to the altar that he had made in Bethel in the fifteenth day of the eighth month, in the month that he had devised in his own heart. So it's like it's kind of religious, it's kind of gives a nod to God, but it's entirely out of his own head. Yeah. And it's just worship that serves him, and it's just it's really frightening to think, could could we do that? You know, could we oh we have people want to go to church to worship God, but what would what would fit best with our lives, dark valleys, and yeah.
SPEAKER_04:But it particularly comes out as you read it out loud that he had made here. You you can hear yourself say that in a way that wouldn't necessarily be as obvious if you were just reading it, because your brain would start to filter out he had made after the second time. But actually, as you read it aloud, it's it's funny. And that's I remember going to see Bruce Kuhn, uh, who's an actor, a broad Broadway actor, who would just he learnt scripture, he just learnt the book of uh the Gospel of Mark and performed it. And the one of the funniest things uh about about it is you watch an audience watch him and they start laughing because they hadn't noticed any of the comedy before, all the callbacks, all the strange bits, or I think I might I saw him do Luke with a lot of there are a lot of angels in Luke, aren't they, at the start, and they all say fear not, and so by the time like the third one turns up and says, Fear not, you know, it's like oh I remember a carol service once, an all-aged carol service at St.
SPEAKER_06:Helena's Bishop's Gate, and I think it was a Naron had either he was hiding or he'd hidden somebody else, um, on top of the the door as you come in, it's like this massive old wooden door case, and they hidden an angel there, and at the right moment when he appeared to Mary, he this angel suddenly. And then he hadn't worked out you know, trial how exactly how frightening would this be for children, and the idea was off the scale frightening, and some of the children were inconsolable for the remainder of the surface after this. So I thought it's actually quite authentic because meeting an angel is quite frightening, yeah. Hence the opening line instead of hi is always fear not.
SPEAKER_04:Fear not. What is one and two kings about that is not maybe immediately obvious? So as you as you read it through for yourself, and if I if I were reading it for myself and I would get to the end, I might notice quite a few things or whatever. But as you go through it a few times, what starts to emerge? Well, it's about kings, obviously, just take the obvious. Yeah. And it's almost entirely about kings, isn't it? Which is, you know, I I don't know. It's uh you again you'd forget that you're seeing it, but it is about every single king, one after the other, in the northern kingdom, the southern kingdom, and the prophets.
SPEAKER_06:Some of them get just one paragraph, others of them get eleven chapters. So it um some kings are more important than others. I mean, as you think about kings, and you you're a Christian, you think of Jesus being a king, yeah. But I think you're looking you're seeing things that are like Jesus and things that are unlike Jesus.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:So, you know, Solomon, there's a great scene when the Queen of Sheba arrives. Um, you know, they're all thinking of the wedding music from by Handel. And I think actually, now this is the thing that you you'd enjoy.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:When the Queen of Sheba turns up, I reckon it's the first occurrence in the English language of three really famous phrases because the first thing that happens is when she saw all of his stuff, she it took her breath away. Is that the first time anyone ever said that? I think it is.
SPEAKER_04:Oh wow, that might be a Tindale original.
SPEAKER_06:And then she says, I wasn't told the half of it. And then she says, I saw it with my own eyes. So all in the space of one paragraph, maybe three famous phrases. Um, but she says, Wow, everyone is happy here. And she's got this wonderful line: God must really love you if he's given you a king like that. And I think as a Christian, that's an amazing thing. Because she she sees your king is so wise and so prosperous and so generous, and wow, God's favoured you. And you think of that, yeah. We have the Lord Jesus who is incredibly wise and incredibly rich, and he owns the world and and he shares it with us, and you think, wow, God's been kind to us. People say you get the rulers you deserve, and she's like, You haven't though, have you? He works way better than you deserve. So that's lovely. But then it turns out that Solomon was a rotter, and he got married. You alluded to this in your sketch last night. He got married 700 times, which is once every three weeks, I think, if it was evenly spaced.
SPEAKER_04:How he doesn't spend his whole whole reign on a stag weekend or a honeymoon is is incredible.
SPEAKER_06:His economy is a scale, I guess. You know, he's on the phone to the florist, hi it's me.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, he's basically he's probably got an account by now after the 30th wedding.
SPEAKER_06:But I think one of the interesting things about the way this story is told is you don't find out about the weddings until right the end of his story.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:So even though I guess they've been gay on the whole time, yeah. Um, the author chooses to hold that back because he wants you to enjoy what's brilliant about Solomon. Yeah. And then he tells you, Oh, by the way, there was there was a fly in the ointment, there was something that was wrong, and it all comes crashing down.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:And we're a bit two-dimensional with characters that someone's either a goodie or a baddie. Are we the baddies? Solomon's a goodie, and there's something wrong that he keeps from you, and then you find it out. And it's I suppose it's like these scandals that you get in the church where you thought something's fine and then you find out it wasn't. But it's actually written like that, you you get to find out afterwards. And it's this chilling line um where God warns him that if you intermarry with these um people who worship other gods, they'll turn away your heart. And the line is when he was old, his wife turned away his heart. In other words, he got away with it for so long, it seemed like the consequences would never kick in, and then they did.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Yeah, it's really tragic and sad, isn't it? And this is the person who's been given wisdom by God himself and been given absolutely everything.
SPEAKER_06:I mean, the other big thing about Kings is the typology you mentioned earlier, when you realize that Elisha is in every way like Jesus. I mean, so so like Jesus.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, because Elijah gets a lot of the credit, and people really forget that Elisha does twice as many miracles as Elijah. I mean, he is absolutely astonishing.
SPEAKER_06:And Elijah's the warm up act, in the way that John the Baptist is the warm-up act. So, you know, John the Baptist famously goes to the costume higher place in Galilee and says, Can I get the Elijah costume higher? I'll get the full Elijah, please. And you know, and they recognize him because aren't you dressed a bit like Elijah? Yeah, that's the point. So but if John the Baptist is Elijah, then Elijah hands over to Elisha. John the Baptist hands over to Jesus. Um, they hand over at the same place, so it's at the Jordan River that they the crossover happens. Uh the spirit of Elijah is on Elisha, and when John baptised Jesus, the spirit of God comes on Jesus. Yeah, they do this not just similar miracles, but the same miracles. So Elisha does the feeding of the 100, which is you know 50 times less impressive than uh feeding of the 5,000, but nonetheless, still quite impressive.
SPEAKER_04:Um, so it's just he that's another that's another story where I read two or three commentaries on feeding of the 5,000 that didn't mention the fact that Elisha two Kings 4 Kings 4 fed a hundred soldiers and also that they were barley loaves. Because the other thing I I was interested in is like, but why is it barley loaves? Because it specifies barley in John, I think it specifies barley, and it's like barley's like animal feed, animal and barley is not good, you know, it'll do.
SPEAKER_06:It's like oats in Samuel Johnson's dictionary.
SPEAKER_00:This book, sir, contains every word in our beloved language.
SPEAKER_06:I think it says oats, a grain, uh, which in England feeds the cattle, but in Scotland suffices for the people or something like that. It's a very yes uh reference to porridge. Yeah. But bar barley, you're saying.
SPEAKER_04:But yeah, so the barley loaves, uh, and it kind of I struggled to find why are they barley loaves? Why is it specified barley? And it's actually it takes you back to this story. And I was like, oh, thanks, commentators, for nothing. Um, you know, but again, if I'd been reading the Bible over and over my whole life properly, then I would have just gone, oh, there's barley loaves in the thing. Or then you read the story in the old testament, you go, hang on, Jesus does one exactly like this. I mean, this is all then wrapped up with the fact that Joshua is crossing the Jordan, Joshua, who has the same name as Jesus, Yeshua.
SPEAKER_06:Um you basically get three pairs because Moses hands over to Joshua, Elijah, he's a bit like Moses, because he goes up Mount Sinai, yeah, um hands over to Elisha, he's a bit like Joshua, and then John the Baptist hands over to Jesus. So you get like these sort of two by three grid of things matching up, and then what's the point of that? And this is the most exciting thing, I think. Elisha is introduced in 1 Kings 19 as an assassin.
SPEAKER_04:Wow.
SPEAKER_06:So God says to Elijah, enough's enough. Um, Ahab's gone too far, it's time to send in judgment. Send in, and he has three of them there's Hazael, king of um uh Syria, there's Jehu, king of Israel, and Elisha. And basically he's told, Elijah's told these three are gonna wipe everyone up, they're gonna they're gonna clean up. So you know that Elisha's an assassin, and then he turns up and there's that famous scene that people think that I would enjoy where he's taunted for being bulled, yeah, and then I'm challenged follicly, um, and then those who taunt him die. Let that be a lesson to you. Actually, people are shocked by that. It's not very shocking because he's an assassin. What do you expect him to do? So the fact that he kills people, obviously, but the really surprising thing is that the person who's meant to be the assassin judge then spends the next five chapters just saving people.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:And the idea that the coming judge is first the saviour, yeah. I think is such a beautiful picture of Jesus because Jesus is introduced in the Bible as you know, John the Baptist says his winnering fork is in his hand to gather the wheat into the barn and the chaff he'll burn with unquenchable fire. That's before right at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, he's the one who burns up things, he's the judge, but then he spends his whole ministry and the whole of this age saving people first. So I think you get this picture of you get to meet the judge on friendly terms early, yeah, before you meet him on judgment day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's one of the big things I think in Kings.
SPEAKER_04:And that then maps on to your other book, which is about Mark's gospel, uh, which where again the k the kid the king is coming, and the first thing he does is he drives out a demon in the synagogue, and then he's uh healing people, loads and loads of people, and driving out demons.
SPEAKER_06:When we were young, everyone felt the need to apologise for exorcisms because our contemporaries would read it and say, Oh no, we don't believe in that, like how primitive and yeah, misdiagnosed schizophrenia or whatever. Um, but now it's not really necessary because we're sort of aware as a culture there is evil and there is a spiritual world, and the Bible doesn't apologise for it because it was just obvious to them that it real evil exists, and we are very, very weird for not thinking that we're the outliers.
SPEAKER_04:Anyway, I think our time is up, and I've said we've we've also briefly gone on to your other book, Dig Deeper into Mark's Gospel as well. And I think they're just really fab, helpful introductions just to kind of help you because in a way, wouldn't it be great if you didn't need to write books like this? Because everyone's doing it for themselves, you know. That's that's the idea, isn't it?
SPEAKER_06:And the idea of it is I mean, the title Dig Deeper is just there's a bit more here than you realised. I think that's the point. And you don't need us to show you. I'm not saying yeah, you know, we are the gurus who can exclusively reveal, but it's just come with us on a journey where you look a little bit more closely than you did before, yeah. And as you look more closely, you'll find there's all sorts of stuff.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because the the stuff that's always worrying is when it's like, oh, it appears that all of this means literally the opposite of what it appears to mean, or there's a secret gospel here. This is what they don't want you to know, you know, the YouTube video about the truth about whatever it is, and it's not that at all, it's just showing you what's been hiding in plain sight.
SPEAKER_06:And that's why your fractal thing's good, I think, because it's like as you zoom in, you find layers of it, it's really the same thing, but you're just seeing it in more dimensions, I think. Yeah. So it's the oh, you mean Jesus is the Messiah? You know, it's the thing it's the obvious thing that everyone realised the first time they read it, yeah. But it's that a bit more three-dimensionally, yeah and in a bit in a few more cool ways.
SPEAKER_04:And yeah, yeah. Who knew that the Bible would be much more interesting than it first appears? Dig deeper into one and two kings. There's so much to enjoy in one or two kings and be frankly perturbed by. Uh, and also Mark's Gospel as well. Andrew Sachs, thank you very much for being on the podcast. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Leaving already, don't I? Not staying for your pendagestatory into Ludicury.
SPEAKER_04:Links to lots of things we mentioned in the podcasts will be in the show notes. Thanks very much for listening. The extended version of that is on the Weekliffe papers if you become a paid member. And I am touring the UK with God, the Bible, and everything that show you heard a clip of when I was being facetious about the wisdom of Solomon. Go to jamescarry.co.uk and you'll find out where I'm on. And if I'm not on anywhere near you, well, you could make that happen. Get in touch via the website. Anyway, speak to you next time. I shall return interfrastically. Is this how it ends? Yeah.