What happened? And we start talking. And we're going across Jerusalem. And we're just talking about, you know, what does he believe? Or, you know, where is he going and what's happening? And somehow we we land on Isaiah. And we're going back and forth, citing passages from Isaiah in Hebrew, in biblical Hebrew, but we're speaking modern Hebrew. All right. And we're talking about these things. And at a certain point in the conversation, he turns to me and says, Now you are Jewish, right? I'm like, uh, actually, I'm not. I'm actually a Christian. What? So it the conversation turns because he's like, but you know the Bible really well. I'm like, yeah, because it's your greatest gift to the world, is the Bible. And Messiah, who is talked about in the hidden passage of Isaiah 52 and 3, is like, oh yeah, okay. And he says, Why do Christians hate us? I said, We don't. We're just your greatest success story because we we we believe that the Messiah came and came for you and for us. So we have a whole conversation in Hebrew. In all in modern Hebrew in Israel, and we get after, you know, it's 35 minutes because a lot of traffic, and we get there, and I'm dropping him off. He's gonna run to the bus and make it to a synagogue by Sabbath or something. And he says, Well, this has really been great. You really, you know, I I'll think about this. And I said, Would you do me a favor? You can find anywhere in on the internet the gospel of Matthew, Matityahu. You can find the Gospel of Matthew in modern Hebrew. Would you just promise me in return for my ride, just read it? Oh, it's all I asked. Just read the Gospel of Matthew and just try to connect some dots and may it go well for you. And you just couldn't believe that there's a Protestant Christian who speaks modern Hebrew and is citing his scriptures and is yeah, is part of his clan, but not part of his clan, and cares about him and is trying to push the envelope to say, hey, he's my messiah, but he's more your messiah than even mine. I challenge you to get with the program. And I have myriad stories like that. Actually, rabbis telling me, some at the Wailing Wall, even, but saying, You're so big on scripture, we're all about the tradition. Scripture is given. We haven't memorized at age 14. Why would we bother? Like, you know, it's given, it's a given, it's discounted information. I'm like, yeah, but it's the source of all of that, is it not? And like, yeah. So by the end of the conversation, sometimes they say, Yeah, you've caused me, you a Gentile, have caused me to think that I should maybe read and ingest my own scripture more. Just because I hadn't memorized the entire Hebrew Bible, I had memorized by age 14. Does that really help me if I'm just obsessed with the rabbis and I'm not even reading the Bible? So, like it's like fun, it's a fun challenge. And I think the apostle Paul is the same way. I mean, at one level, a lot of the scripture was probably discounted information. He's a rabbinic Jew and so steeped in his ways. And I think the Damascus Road just is an intervention and it comes right to him. And he can't, it's unavoidable. Jesus has been knocking on the door and finally breaks down the door and says, Hey, this is who I am. Your horse, you're gonna go blind. Boom. Now get my program, go be my instrument to save the Gentiles. But can you imagine the Apostle Paul with the struggle? Being the most erudite rabbi, the next gamelliel, yeah, the pedigree, the food chain, being somebody. And I'm sorry to be harsh to all of us, but God tasks him with you take all of this and your Greek training and you give the gospel to Gentile dummies. Like what a burden.
SPEAKER_01I don't feel insulted. I'm okay with that.
SPEAKER_02Wouldn't you wouldn't it have been much more effective for Paul to be the next Gamellio and subversively reach his own people?
SPEAKER_01Well, no, because I know the results, but I think I I think I'm tracking with your flesh it out.
SPEAKER_02Well, it's just sad. It's just to me, it's sad in a way because he he could have been a subversive, like he could have risen to the top of the rabbinic authorities and pulled a fast one on them. And before they killed him, given the ultimate testimony of connecting all the dots and saying he really was the Messiah and here's why, and let the spirit fall on you all.
SPEAKER_01I mean, he kind of did. He he had a homecoming there after he said goodbye at Ephesus. But you go and read that speech and you can tell that it's like, I am pacing for 45 chapters. That's right.
SPEAKER_00And then halfway through the chapter, you're like, uh, anyways, Jesus is real, he's real. I see you picking up those rocks. So Jesus is real, it's real, it's all real. I tell you, it's real, and you should all believe. Ow, okay. If you can just tell it's so true.
SPEAKER_01He just goes into like when a pastor has too much bloat in the service and they're not keeping track of time, and they're like, oh dang. Okay, uh, well, we're just gonna do the first verse and the fourth verse of this hymn. And uh, you know, there were like four more points here, and they just wrap it up. We're gonna skip the closing song and off. But it does, it has that feel to it.
SPEAKER_02It's really something, it's really powerful.
SPEAKER_01So you almost got it all in. Yeah. I may bring everybody up to speed here. We've just been talking. This is my buddy Dr. John Monson. Everybody, thanks for hanging out with me for a bonus episode. We do these from time to time on Saturdays when I have the opportunity to have a conversation or I got something that I want to process through. That's a part of the season that we're doing, which right now is on Galatians. Every now and then, for those of you who are new, we will do a Saturday episode, and then you get to hear Jeff Foote's bonus episode music, which is a national treasure. And we can all be thankful to Jeff and to Dr. John Monson, who joins me here. Because of the two of them, we got to hear the bonus episode music today. So, Dr. John Monson, for those of you who don't know, we've been friends now for five years, something like that. I've known you for a long time. Every time I introduce you, you get squirmy and weird, but there's just not a way to introduce you that doesn't make you sound cool because you're cool. Uh, John has got a PhD from Harvard. Like, just there, that's kind of you know, rocket straight to the moon right there. He grew up in Jerusalem with a dad who is a legendary archaeology, geography of the Holy Land, uh Christian education in Jerusalem guy. And so yeah, I had the pleasure of talking with Jim earlier tonight, which is awesome. And so John is uh, I mean, you're a multicultural guy. You're Middle Eastern, but you're Swedish. And Hebrew is your natural language, but also it's English. And you live in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, and you're a professor, but you're all over the world doing this stuff. I've never met anybody in all of my Bible travels or anything who so has their finger on the pulse and is so connected with everything that's going on with archaeology and the people who are not just, you know, like me in their shed reading the Bible and trying hard. You know, I'm throwing a lot of energy at this, but you know, so many people who are boots on the ground and in the trenches. And so it's just really fun to talk to you every time we get to chat. And you're likable and we're friends, and I enjoy you hanging out. So John was passing through Rapid City, South Dakota and was able to hang out with me. We've done nothing but talk for two straight days. I think I still have kids and a wife. I've seen them there at the house from time to time when I get food or go to the bathroom, but we've just relentlessly talked for two days, and I feel like we haven't even scratched the surface. That's what it's like. So before I let John off the hook, I was like, hey, I'm gonna turn on these microphones. And from your perspective, as somebody who grew up in both a Hebrew context and a Christian context, I think you might have some interesting stuff to bring to bear in a bonus episode on the book of Galatians, which has so much to do with the Hebrew context and the Christian context and what it looks like when you mush those things together well, and what it looks like when you mush those things together not well. So there's your big introduction. Let me just cut to the chase with my question. Hey, John, being who you are and where you're from and how you grew up goofing around on the back streets of Jerusalem on your BMX bike with your buddies, speaking Hebrew growing up, but also being raised in a Christian household, and you're still a Christian to this day. What do you make of Galatians? What pops for you in this book?
SPEAKER_02It seems to me that Galatians is in a way, the way I described it is it's Paul's first iteration, really a big iteration of how he's processing this experience of encountering the risen Jesus Christ. And the way I described it, maybe a goofy way, but we like to talk about goofy things. But I I view it as he's a chef making an Italian meal. And what he's doing is the core of that meal is a, let's say, a marinara sauce or a you know, a tomato sauce. So he's reducing the tomatoes into a really, really tasty, zesty stew, and he's throwing into it some spices, some outside things, some influences. But what he's essentially doing is creating the foundation of his thinking, laying out in a forward-looking way within the circumstances of what's going on in that particular community and the problems they're having, but it's really triggering him to make an articulation of wow, how does this all fit together? And I really do think that Romans is the full flowering of that. So this is the reduced tomato sauce, but the meal is coming, and that's Romans.
SPEAKER_01And that's the definitely think Galatians is written before Romans.
SPEAKER_02In my view, yeah. And again, there are many New Testament scholars who have lots of opinions, but it seems like a very logical iteration both by way and sequence by way of both how he's relating to people and how he's eventually getting to Rome and developing his thought in a more you might say a more sophisticated way, but actually, as we talked earlier, Dane, these were some comments you made, a more a more nuanced, a more rich vocabulary, a more developed thinking. And essentially, Romans, if you think about it, he talks about these issues and he gets to this great statement in eight, and then he's like, Oh, but what about my own people? So he's got to reopen that whole discussion until he gets to 11. Then he gives us some, you know, some how-tos at the end. So I think Galatians is like, I know it's a reverse order, but you might say it's a Cliff Notes. It's a prequel Cliff Notes layout of his thinking of what's coming in Romans. That's my take, and I may be totally wrong, you know, as I as I look at it, but we got some anchors with his with his discussions with Peter, and you know, we have some topical challenges that are that are faced there. The big thing though for me is in Galatians. Well, we can get to it.
SPEAKER_01I'm I'm rambling on, but oh now you got me on a cliffhanger there with what the big thing is. Okay, we're gonna put a pin in you about to say what the big thing for you in your view in Galatians is, but you know, just bouncing off of that, um to me it reads a little bit like I don't want to say he's surprised, but it feels a little bit like Paul is caught flat-footed by the situation. He's not there, you know. As we get further into the writings of Paul, he's not surprised at all by the actions of the Judaizers. But at this point, it almost comes off even in the opening lines and the greeting, you know, hey, I'm Paul, an apostle, and you know, Jesus, and you know, not from men, Paul and all the brothers. What are you people doing? Grace and peace, you, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what are you doing? It it's like there's a it's like he's shocked that they fell for it. He he takes the first half of the book to basically try to whack-a-mole down all of the flurry of accusations and confusion that have sprung up, and we see a more concise response to that later on. But Galatians, to me, one of the reasons I think I I think the early date and thus the you know, the the part of Galatia that corresponds to the early date is because it does look like he's having to pen this letter quickly, under pressure. He's having to anticipate, he's at a strategic disadvantage, he's not there. So the Judaizers are, they're gonna get to counter everything he says. So he's it's like he's trying to run the equation. All right, I know these guys, I went to school with these guys, I trained with these guys. If I say this, oh, I'm kind of running this equation for the first time here, but we gotta get this letter out. If I say A, they're going to say G. And then if I say H to counter G, all right, then they're gonna say J. But I if I say K to counter J, that's gotta close the matter. Okay, let's do this. And it's like it's like he's shrewdly mapping out this whole strategy with two hands tied behind his back, he can't be there, he's clearly lost his relational tether to the Galatians where it's frayed a little bit. And that really comes through in the first half of the book, and I think he's remarkably composed for how great a strategic disadvantage he is at here. But then as he kind of catches up to the damage they've done, then you see his mastery and his training take over. And like you, he's a guy who's got his his feet, you know, one foot in each of these worlds, and he he finds his footing and just wrecks the Judaizers' uh uh theological argumentation, and in doing so, just lays them bare by I mean, what did these guys are purported experts on the Old Testament, and in a chapter and a half, he's like, so anyways, about that old testament and about the first Jew, Abraham. You don't even understand him. Like you guys honestly think that Abraham, who predates the law, had right standing with God because he adhered to a law that didn't exist yet? Come on, you're clowns. He believed God. It was credited, everybody knows what it is credited to Abraham as righteousness. And so then Paul is just ascendant, he's in total control from there on out. Kind of gives him the uh I mean, I don't know, I'm trying not to think of an offensive term here. Gives them the there you go, buddies, comment in the middle of Galatians 5. Just go emasculate yourselves. And then he turns his attention to talking with his brothers and he softens his tone. He's trying to get it right with them. So, yeah, there's my there's my kind of overview of the pressure I imagine him feeling a little bit. Crazy talk? I mean, culturally, you're more dialed on this, you know it better than I do. Am I reading too much into that, or do you sense him under some of that same duress as well?
SPEAKER_02I I think you're right. And again, you know, you're gonna have uh two testaments. If you have two New Testament scholars, you'll have three or four opinions. And that's true. And you know, we have our We have one. We don't want to let you talk now. No, no, it's great. But I think in the end of the day, part of it for me is to frame it within the impact that Galatians has had in church history that I'll get to in a minute, and why has it had that impact? But let me suggest, in my view, in a way, I agree with everything you said, but I also think that Paul is being triggered with his uh he's fighting himself on this as well because he's been through this. My point is he's not only preempting them, but he's arguing with himself because he's a good Jew and he is deconstructing the very thinking that they've had and that he's had.
SPEAKER_01What do you which part in particular do you think is about scrappling with?
SPEAKER_02It's about the as you know, as I have the outline in front of me of there's only there's one gospel, but then the the core element I was getting to there is he says, you know, in two there, he says, Okay, so this is what we had a pin in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. This is that core element.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's both two and three. And again, if we if we look at it through here, we have him first saying that he is, you know, he is justified by faith. He's living by faith in 215 and following. But then this is the one that's the big one for me, is of course, three, you know, um, six to nine, because he's channeling Abraham, he's cutting through all the rabbinic tradition, he's cutting through all of Old Testament history, he's cutting through everything, getting back to this source and saying, even before the law, you've got Abraham really doing what we're all supposed to do, and that is to live by faith. And when God says go, you go, even though all the empirical evidence around you is pointing to the inverse and the reverse, and he's almost in a way to be sort of hyper biblical canonical collect connections, he's almost channeling Job, who says, Though he slay me, I will, I will, I will trust him still. All empirical evidence points against God's existence or plan being a good and righteous plan, but I'm gonna cling to him because I know it's the only game in town, and I know that my Redeemer lives. So Abraham is is doing that, and I think Paul, in part, not saying he's battling his own demons, so to speak, or his own doubts, but he's really he's really the trigger of what you've been describing is uh is bringing him to a an efficient and and conclusive statement about this is the gospel, uh this is how it builds on our faith tradition as Jews, this is why going back to Judaism only doesn't work. This is the completion of it, and then the righteous shall live by faith. In the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, there is a text called, and the Dead Sea Scrolls are from let's say 250 before Christ to 70 after Christ, and they have a copy, multiple copies of many biblical books from the Old Testament, a lot of other literature.
SPEAKER_01You made a video with me about that one. That's right. It's fun, and they don't have Esther in it. That's where a lot of these people met you, I bet.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, oh it's great to be in touch with you all again, but they don't have Esther in there. But what's interesting to me is there is a but everything but Esther. Yeah, everything but but there's a there's a fairly obscure text called QMMT, and I had a student write a master's thesis on it for me. And it's it's basically saying, you know, in one part, you know, and the righteous will live by faith. It's channeling what you have here by works. It's called um mikzetorah. It's um mikzet Torah in Hebrew, which is which is the name of this text, the the Acts of Torah kind of so what's really interesting is that it that's directly in this rare statement at Qumran of living by faith, even though they are keeping the calendar, all the legal, all the hyper-legalism of the Jewish tradition. And yet, in one of those statements, they say, Yeah, you'll live by faith. You'll be justified by faith. That's righteousness, is faith in God, like Abraham had. So Paul is steeped in all that literature. And I guess the point I'm trying to make is that Paul is cutting through all of this, you know, all of this misunderstanding and saying, Man, Jesus Christ appeared to me, and this is what it's all about. And he goes to, you know, three, six to nine. It's just very, very powerful.
SPEAKER_01Consider Abraham. He believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. Understand then that those who believe are children of Abraham. Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announce the gospel in advance to Abraham. What a powerful sentence that is. He announced the gospel in advance to Abraham. This is not a novel religion, this is not even a departure, this is the always-known conclusion and fulfillment and completion. I mean, he's echoing Matthew 5.17. This is where it was always going. It's not an abolition, it is the fulfillment. And so the scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announce the gospel in advance to Abraham, colon, in the English translation I'm reading here. Quote, All nations will be blessed through you. I mean, even that payoff of the Old Testament motif all the way up through Zechariah, even Malachi, that idea that yeah, that first promise to Abraham. I mean, that's that's original covenant language from the original deal God made with Abraham. Even if you act like an idiot, I'm gonna bless you, and all the nations will be blessed through you. Paul is saying that is the gospel, that is the first fruit of the message of the whole thing. So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. Good stuff.
SPEAKER_02Channel, you've worked on Leviticus. Let me let me channel that and say that we misunderstand one of the things going on here is you can imagine this uh a small group of believing Jews, the Holy Spirit falls on them and some people who joined him from around and about. And this is a Jewish story. And in Acts, you know, when the spirit falls and Peter gets, as it were, the phone call from Caesarea and goes up, and like, what the wait, the the spirit falls on the Gentiles?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, just reminding everybody, this is roughly the one-third mark of the book of Acts. Exactly. When Peter's praying on the rooftop and Joppa, he has that vision nine being lowered, and a bunch of animals and stuff in there, and just right then, knock at the door, hey, there's an outsider, uh, an ethnic outsider who got told in a message from God that you're supposed to come and talk to him about it.
SPEAKER_02And let me give a little bit of anchoring of that while just while we're on it for a moment, because Paul is having to process this just like Peter's processing, and sometimes they don't agree. But think about it.
SPEAKER_01And Paul doesn't have the luxury of taking a month to process it to reply. Exactly. This church he or this group of churches is about to implode. He's got to have to write it now.
SPEAKER_02It's triage. It's a I mean, Galatians is a triage. I guess what I would say, and again, what do I know? But Galatians is a triage book in the circumstances that you've outlined, but it triggers in every good way him to revisit where he's been since the road to Damascus and saying, I'm gonna cut to the chase and show you this is the arc of salvation history, and this is where we fit in. And wow, therefore, get your act together, listen to the gospel and follow this paradigm and go back to the constraints and limitations of what you had before. Let's let's go to the original juice, the original octane of Abraham, but let's just double back for a moment to the the the spirit falling on the Gentiles. Where does Peter witness this this this wow? The Gentiles will be drawn in as well. This vision. It's on the roof where in the in Jaffa.
SPEAKER_01Who flees? Why do I say Jaffa? Am I supposed to say Jaffa?
SPEAKER_02Well, it's Yapho. It's a p technically a P in the Hebrew, but it's it's not uh it's not pronounced with a a ph uh, you know, it's it's a ph so it's Jaffa. Even in English? Well, okay, in English we do it that way, but I'm speaking I'm speaking.
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, I'd I'd try to sound less than you know, Jaffa.
SPEAKER_02Everybody in modern modern world speaks says Jaffa, but who went to Jaffa to get away from preaching to the Gentiles? Jonah. Jonah. And where did he what port did he leave from? I don't remember. Jaffa.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02Then we already answered that one. I thought it was a true question. The very place where Peter is getting the message from the Lord that don't call dirty what I call clean. These are also my people. Oh, wow. Is the very place where Jonah tried to get away from him. So there is geographical glue there that Bible scholars don't even think about. Now, but think more than that.
SPEAKER_01By Bible scholars, you mean me, Matt Whitman. No, no, no. But never thought about that.
SPEAKER_02There's an example where geographical anchoring cascades and echoes right through the biblical text. But what happens after that? He gets, as it were, you got to go up to Caesarea. What is Caesarea? That's where the Jews and Romans, the Gentiles, it blew up and started what was called the first revolt against Rome, 70 AD, which was catastrophic for the Jewish people.
SPEAKER_01He almost started it according to Josephus during the time of Pilate when everybody came up over the shield incident with the images of an emperor and threatened to commit mass ritual suicide. Exactly. That place had been a nuclear meltdown waiting to happen since they built it.
SPEAKER_02And let's take that a step further then. How does Paul get to Galatia by a boat? And, you know, partly goes up to Antioch a couple times. He goes up back to his home area, but how does he get how does he get up there? The port of Caesarea, which is where the Jew-Gentile relations blow up and create essentially another exile for Israel and almost obliterate them. That very port is where the spirit falls on the Gentiles, and Paul has to absorb uh Peter has to absorb it and go back and explain Acts 15, like, uh oh, we got a problem here. Like, how do I explain this? Because this is a Jewish story, but suddenly our oppressors and the majority of the world, and what we call vile pagans, uncircumcised Philistines, to quote David. Yeah, they're part of God's kingdom. And we got to worship with these people. You got to be kidding. So Paul is having to address this and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold your phone. You don't need to go back through all of Jewish law because guess what? We go all the way back to the root of Abraham, and he got it right as God's spirit spoke with him. And let's just go down to Leviticus path as I was going to go for a moment in Jewish ritual and in Jewish prayer. When you give a sacrifice, you don't give a sacrifice, even a substitutionary atonement of sorts, unless your heart has been changed. So you're not really doing the sacrifice if you just dial it in and you know, okay, the animal paid the price. Bye, have a nice day. Without repentance, you're not really following Levitical law. Remember, if your brother caused you to, you know, sin in your heart and all that. So I do think that Paul is actually showing the following God, repentant heart, reckon to him as righteousness because of his, because of your faith in God. And the whole sacrificial system and all of that is an accommodation for a time, but it's not the main event.
SPEAKER_01And don't go back to So a second ago, you weren't talking about Matthew 18. If your brother, you're talking about the Luke thing about chasing the guy down before you get to go and give your sacrifice and get reconciled.
SPEAKER_02But I also think that's in that's all through the old testament as well. And when you really take the heart of it.
SPEAKER_01So sorry, yeah, I my brain went to a different place. So I didn't track with you for a minute. Can you flesh that out one more time?
SPEAKER_02It's just that you don't you don't make a sacrifice, you know, because some animal is going to pay the price. You also accompany it with true repentance. Yeah. In a sense, by following God, cutting to the chase, following and channeling Abraham, you're doing that as he did it even before the sacrificial system. He obeyed and he lived according to God's plan for him in that era. So I think Paul is going back and saying, Don't, don't go back through all this law and require it and don't regress, as it were, but actually you got to deal with the fact that you know you are justified by your faith, and Abraham is the father of all of us, and the Gentiles are grafted in, and they're part of our system now.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And our system doesn't require them to go through all of this. And he's having an extended aha moment triggered by the crisis in Galatia.
SPEAKER_01And maybe an evidence to support kind of your feel here would be that you can almost hear Paul working through the question of, okay, then why was there a law? And those feel like rhetorical questions, but to hear you describe it, if your read's correct, they're rhetorical questions, but they're also questions that he's grappling with himself. So then why did any of that happen? Okay, now's my chance to put pen to paper on that exactly right now. And at at some point it seems like Paul probably would have written all of these things. And I mean, well, when I say all of these things, I mean like from all of the letters, he probably would have written them. But we don't have any of his treatises at all. Everything we have from him is either a recorded speech that we got from Luke's investigation, or Luke's, you know, Luke was there for a lot of it. Luke was an eyewitness recording this himself as well. Or something happened, pressure was applied, and Paul wrote a letter to deal with it, and his letters and his rationale for what to do were always, always, always theology first. The gospel first, theology first, Jesus first, and that's going to inform what to do. Here's you know, Titus, here's how to deal with those Cretans. This is how they are, this is what you need to be having them focus on.
SPEAKER_02Now, maybe, maybe this articulation and condensation of the gospel and the Jew-Gentile relationship and go rooting back to Abraham, maybe the occasion is the meltdown in Galatia, and you put it so very well. But I think what it did is triggered and provided an occasion for him, maybe even as a byproduct, but an occasion for him to give a really solid articulation of his understanding of the gospel in light of his Jewish heritage and the Gentiles coming in. So I view it as an occasion to bring it all together in his own mind, and actually, I think a little bit argue with himself. But then when he's later in his life and you get to Romans, it just the full flowering. Like I said, it's the full meal. Yes. And I think what's fascinating about this is that you go to, you know, Wesley, you go to Wycliffe, you go to Karl Bart, you go to all kinds of people, you go to Martin Luther. And it was Galatians and in some cases Romans that brought about inflection points in the history of the church. Agreed. Because you read it, and even though this is directed towards some backsliding Galatians, the byproduct of giving a summation of the gospel with an economy of words and a clarity of the entire Old Testament reduced down to a couple key points, this is the trigger that the Holy Spirit uses to bring major inflection points in the history of the church, including Martin Luther himself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and there you go. There's there's a thing that I promise you, some people who are sitting on this conversation have been wondering, they don't know you, they don't know what you do or where you work, you know, as a professor who teaches the Old Testament and Old Testament languages and archaeology. They don't know. They don't know where you go to church or what you think about these things. And I bet there are some people have been sitting here going, is this Monson guy who seems nice enough and smart enough? But is is he saying that the Bible is just basically like half the New Testament is just Paul self-actualizing and just kind of journaling it at other people, and that it this is all happening like apart from the Holy Spirit? But I know that's not what you think. How can this simultaneously be what I think we're both kind of saying it is, which is a very human thing, real human pressures, internal to Paul, external to Paul, and also from God and guided by the Holy Spirit? What how do you reconcile those two things?
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, first of all, we take any number of places in Scripture that attest to its self-authenticating nature, and we have the claims of scripture that are truth claims that are powerful, and we do in part, of course, we take those on faith. But I also think let's just take any biblical character and see the development of their life. Let's see the shepherd David, and then the poet David, and then the King David, and then the fallen David, and then the repentant David. I mean, the Holy Spirit is using even his sinful behavior to bring a blessing on all of us by going through the valley of sin with him, whether we've sinned in those same ways or not, and coming to an understanding that God wants a teachable broken spirit that Paul has as well, and that Saul, King Saul, did not have. So I don't think there's any problem with seeing a development of thinking, not that one is true and one is not, but Paul is providing circumstance-generated triage, again, I'll say, in real terms to practical questions that are happening that are arising in the early church, including this regression into sort of a legalism and a Judaism kind of thing here. And I don't think that there's any conflict between the Holy Spirit guiding his thought process even over time as he's maturing. Did I come to faith as a young boy? Yes. Did my faith really reach new awareness of sin and a recommitment of my life in middle school? Yes. Am I a project of God over a long period of time? Yes. Is the Holy Spirit at work in all of that, superintending in ways I could never dream of what God has in my life? That's just my own circumstance, but how much more so a rabbi trained in all of this, we get a little window into his development of thinking, but I think it's of course Galatians and Romans are not in conflict. They're just, like I say, the full flowering that comes a little bit later. So I don't see any conflict. I mean, I'm a church attender. I believe in God working, of course, through his word, the word of God. And this is our guide to faith and practice. And I believe that the Bible fits both Old and New Testament, fits beautifully into its context, original, which doesn't threaten the veracity of Scripture, but actually showcases and enhances our understanding of the clarity and uh truth of Scripture.
SPEAKER_01So Yeah, and if you could you were only allowed to write Holy Spirit-inspired scripture on your best day when you're coming off of a really good week or a really good month, we would be deprived of a bunch of David's psalms. Absolutely. So was Paul having his very best, most spiritually mature moment, that perfect intersection where his brain was young and he had no forgetfulness, and his diet was good because of the part of the world he was traveling in, and he ate the right stuff to make his brain work the best, and it was the right level of exhaustion, and like the cycles in between getting the flu and rebounding from it. Like, was every book he wrote equal? In like he was equally at absolute pinnacle for all of those? I mean, that's flesh thinking to use Paul's own language, right? Like he himself is saying like that in his weakness, all of this comes together the right way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he talks, he's he talks about the thorn in the side. I mean, David talked thorn in the flesh. David talks about all kinds of his trials and tribulations. And I don't think that's any diminishing of scripture, but I I actually think that Galatians and Romans are are the highest form of articulating the essence of the gospel.
SPEAKER_01I happen to think they're great too. Abraham is I hope so. I just spent whatever 13 or 14 months on it when all said and done.
SPEAKER_02I mean, that's incredible, and I commend you for that. And but let's go back and think about for a minute just Abraham comes from a dysfunctional family. Moses lets God down by not always obeying him the right way and being a very flustered guy.
SPEAKER_01That's a really nice way to say murdered some dude and threw his body in a ditch and covered it with sand.
SPEAKER_02Well, think of the argues with God and says, I'm going to do it my way, and God's like, hey, wait a minute, you're not going to the holy land at the end. And let's think of other care biblical characters who really, who really blow it, but God is recording the ebb and flow of their life. And we have in Galatians and the framing of Acts, you know, that frames these epistles, we have we have the real world of Paul in full color. And I don't think there's any diminishing work of the Holy Spirit here. I think Galatians and Romans have triggered some of the greatest movements and ideas and theological realities of the history of the church.
SPEAKER_01And for the sake of brevity, niceness, and I'm not in the mood to fight, contrast this with other world religions or even other Christian adjacent religions and the stories behind where their sacred texts came from. This is so much more incarnational, and everything about the Bible seems to revolve around that idea. It's it's God who's above all of this, making himself known all the way to the point of taking on flesh, and then not just taking on flesh, but like, but obviously I'm not gonna do the dying part. That's for you suckers, you chumps. Nope. Philippians 2 even onto death took on that nature of a servant all the way unto death. Yeah. On the one hand, the conversation we're having, I could see how it could be kind of jarring for somebody to feel like that. That sort of feels like it knocks the Bible off of the pedestal, you know, because it's like, you know, it's it sounds like this is born out of a guy who was in process and wasn't there yet. But but yeah, I mean, if of course he was. And remember, we meet him when he's holding coats for people murdering the follower and Stephen.
SPEAKER_02You know, I mean, that's process, isn't it? It's all process. But let me but let me let me clarify. I mean, I'm not saying there's a contradiction between Galatians and Romans, I'm just saying the the Damascus Road experience, and well, first of all, watching Stephen be stoned, that's also that's an inflection point in his life. And God is using, of course, the Damascus Road experience and cutting through everything and saying, Hey, I got to appear to you to get your attention. I wish he would do that to all of us on a regular basis, although that's a kind of frightful thought, too. But then again, all I'm saying is, in my view, and I may be wrong, but Galatians is a consistent picture, a triggered articulation of what he's come to and why it matters. And then there's no contradiction with Romans. It's just when I say full development, I don't mean that there's anything missing from Galatians. I'm just saying he expands in every good way to clarify it. So if I tell you the play by play of a basketball game, that could take a long time. But if I give you the score and I give you one or two key highlights, that's not a different game. It's just giving you highlights that show you the flow of the game, and then I'm you can watch the whole game later and get the play by play. And I guess I see it more in along those lines.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the point is we're perfectly at ease with the Christian position that this document is from God and it's reliable and it's what he meant to do, and that uh, you know, like Peter talks about, you know, everybody who's writing this stuff is carried along by the Holy Spirit. Uh, you know, like Paul talks about himself, all scripture is God breathed. That's what I think. That's the assumption that I come to this with. I still try to use the kind of questions that would be born out of any normal skepticism that I would submit anything I would ever look at in life to, because I think you get the best stuff that way. Yes. It's just that the Bible seems to hold up to it incredibly well. And I I I like the visualization here of a dude who has a foot in two worlds like you, who is steeped in all of the culture and the inside jokes and the eye rolls and just everything with his old college buddies from his Pharisee days. Yes, yes. And but the Damascus Road thing happened, and he was blind, and then the scales fell off his eyes, and then he went a different direction, and it's it's just this this complete second act to his life, and now all of a sudden, it's like if if you or anybody who's listening has a thing from your past that is tough, and you you kind of prefer when it doesn't come up, but some days, and this is always a great plot for a movie or something, too. I move to a small town to leave that life behind, but now that life has come knocking on my door again, and I'm gonna have to go back to you know, I imagine that for Paul, there was a little bit of that queasy feeling in his stomach, like just crap. This is like here's the thing this is nipping at my heels. Why would I have thought that I would ever outrun this? I'm gonna have to face it down, and I didn't get to choose the battlefield on which I get to face this. They're there in person. I'm writing a letter and it has to go out tonight.
SPEAKER_02And you know what it is? You need you all in Galatia need an intervention. I was just there. You know the truth. Yeah, I got to an intervention. You know what? I'm gonna lay it out to you and give it to you straight. And this is what it looks like, this is the core of it. Get get with the program. I I think that's uh what's what's going on here. I mean, I've told people before, you know, just just read Galatians in one sitting or listen to it. Yeah. And and just ask at the beginning that God would use that in your heart. It'll blow you away. That's what scripture inspired holy scripture does. And uh what I would suggest to you as you as you consider this is Paul is not Jesus. Paul is a human character who talks about his struggles and his trials. And I would also put before you that we talked about the other religions. I mean, the Bible is unashamedly anchored in time and space and real stories and difficult people. And it's not creating an idealistic nirvana that we're trying to reach. It's not talking about some human endeavor, it's talking about a living God who wants a relationship with us. And this is what it looked like because he wanted to represent his love for the world through a certain medium and a certain vehicle. And that ended up being a certain people group, no better than any other people group, and he chose them. He could have chosen all kinds of people like fiddling a roof, you know, the saying in the movie of all the peoples of the world, did you have to choose us? I mean, that's a burden. And Paul is dealing with that in light of the intervention of the living risen Jesus Christ. No other religion does that. No other religion has its own maker of the universe that take on human form and meet us where we're at, and yet not succumb to all the flaws and sin and damaged goods framework that we ourselves have. And Galatians is a condensed map of what it's all about and the way forward. And again, I would say Romans is like, wow, this is really adding detail. And then at the end of it, Revelation is telling us that's the telos, that's the end. That's where it's going.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Boom. I really appreciate what you're saying about challenging people to sit down and just read the book in one sitting. But I disagree with you. I think Galatians is best encountered over roughly 14 months in 10 to 12 minute chunks, but only on weekdays and with fart jokes on either end. I think you really get the best sense having encountering it.
SPEAKER_02Let me come right back at you. Do let me let me say do both and. And what I mean by that is like it blows my mind that you've spent that much time in Galatians, and I've been tracking some of it, and I'm always blessed by it. And I wasn't paid to say this. You are walking through the text in a way that is natural, that gets it both its essence, but develops the thought in a broad biblical and philosophical framework that's very helpful. And I think it's fantastic to spend a good long time in these books and to do it the right way.
SPEAKER_01I'll tell you this is my final thought. And and the the people are listening on our conversation, they know that this is where I'm at. I thought I had this book in my head pocket before we started. I've I've preached through it, I've written through it, I thought I had it. But you know how sometimes you'll have a conversation and you've done it a hundred times on this topic, but a different brain is in the conversation. Somebody else is sitting there, and when you hear yourself saying it out loud, but now that lady is sitting there, you go, wait a minute. I'm not quite sure I have this on lockdown, or I'm not sure this is the best. Or you know, you you rethink it a little bit and you're like, no, this still needs refining. And I got to the middle of Galatians this time around, and with the collective brain of a whole bunch of people I respect and care about listening in on this, that was a pretty interesting pressure for me. And I really had to work, man. Like this book, this book has has and will continue to push me. I like to say when we get done, like, hey, you got it in your hip pocket. Uh I think I think with this one I'll be like, you know, we got it like uh mostly in our hip pocket. Like it probably won't fall out if you go for a jog or whatever, but it could probably be shoved further into the hip pocket. So you might want to spend a little more time with this one than even what we've done.
SPEAKER_02Can I give a quick follow-up? Please. Uh first of all, to meditate on scripture day and night as we are told in Deuteronomy applies to the New Testament as well.
SPEAKER_04Sure.
SPEAKER_02And that's a powerful thing because we extend that into the parables, into the epistles. We should be we should be living, breathing this stuff. But I want to say that uh for me, and I say this to my students all the time, um, it's the greatest privilege to be reading scripture over and over in primary language because it's a incredible renewable resource. I view uh the scriptures, the aggregate, the totality of scripture and each individual book as being akin to the human genome. We can't figure this out completely. God's spirit guides us and tells us what we need to know and activates it in our lives in beautiful ways. But scripture, how it all fits together and how beautiful it is, and how it fits its context. This is not a human creation. Yeah, human vehicles gave it to us from God, but I liken it to the human genome. We can tinker, we can study, we can fiddle, but it's way beyond us, way beyond us. And thanks be to God that He made it accessible to us in a way that we could understand through someone like the Apostle Paul. And a step further, we're not that far from Yellowstone. I liken it to the Morning Glory pool at Yellowstone. Another one. And it's refracted through any kind of light, any kind of day, depending on the cloud pattern and those bacteria and everything else are gonna give you this hue, that hue. It's gonna look in myriad combinations of color. It doesn't change the composition of the pool. It doesn't change the shape of the pool, at least in our time horizon. But the way it's refracted is an ever inspiring uh thing of beauty that you can't explain through just science or reason. And I would put scripture alongside the morning glory pool of Yellowstone and alongside the human genome, and I would say it is always going to push back against me and make me come face to face with my mortality, face to face with the saving work of Jesus Christ throughout Scripture, Old and New Testament.
unknownUh-huh.
SPEAKER_02And it's going to always tell me that wow, the creator of the human genome and of the morning glory pool created something way beyond both of those that's called holy scripture. And no matter how much I may think I've got it, as it were, in my pocket, it's always going to push back at me and say, man, there is so much more. So come back to it and dig into it with a good mind and a teachable spirit. And that, my friend, is what you are doing on a daily basis in this podcast. That as a guy who's given 40 years of his life to teaching seminary and college students, mostly in a Christian context, you're teaching me every day, and I'm loving it. And uh, you all in the podcast, you have a privilege of going deep in these things. Keep at it, let God work through it, and uh just keep up the good work.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, man. We'll let Jeff play music. I'm gonna leave that as the last word.
SPEAKER_02Hey, I love his music too.