You're listening to the 10 Minute Bible number 100 dispense on the free daily deep minute Bible. And right now we're talking about collations.
SPEAKER_00When my siblings and I would fight, my parents always wanted to know that we had actual peace, that we'd really worked it out. They didn't do this smooth it over, hug it out nonsense. If it was a fight that was big enough to rise the level of it being on their radar, they would take the time to figure it out with us. We'd sit down and work through what we were actually thinking, why we were angry, why they were angry. Do you get it now? Do you see? They wanted to make sure that we were truly on the same page and that we really had peace after a dust up. They did a great job of monitoring our relationship, the three of us kids, to make sure there wasn't seeds of some deep divide that were going to manifest later and wreck things, destroy our relationships or whatever. And I really respect them for the way that they came at it. Likewise, in the same way that my parents wanted to make sure, wanted to really know for themselves that there wasn't some false peace between the siblings after we fought. So I find myself curious, coming out of Galatians chapter two, as to whether we've got a real peace after two metaphorical siblings, Peter and Paul fought, or whether we have some sort of smooth it over piece. And I don't like the idea of there being a smooth it over piece. It's kind of intimidating. That would have pretty icky ramifications if Peter and Paul never really did get back on the same page in terms of what the core message of belief in Christ and the whole enterprise actually is. I mean, would that mean that we have two rival versions of Christianity growing up right alongside each other through the age of the early church or through all of the history of Christianity? Dang, that would be bad. So I know, as is so often the case, because this is a daily podcast, and we just get to what we get to. So often I have these big ambitions. And I'm like, tomorrow we're gonna do this for sure. We're going to Galatians chapter three. And then the next day I'm like, no, we're not. We are taking a road trip on a little side jaunt here, because I thought of something I'm curious about. Well, this is one of those times I thought of something I'm curious about. I want to know how it worked out between Peter and Paul, and I thought maybe you'd be curious about that too. So that's what we're gonna do real quick. Here's the truth of the matter. We don't get much more Bible narrative about the life of Peter after this stuff in Galatians 2, this little bit of narrative that we get sneaked into a letter here from Paul. There's sort of this dead zone in the Bible for Peter, and really there are a couple of dead zones. Peter is just a fascinating character in terms of who he is on screen, but also in terms of the way he's treated. Because you get these big Bible hotspots in Peter's life. You're like, dang, we're hearing a ton about him right now, and then it goes dark for a while. Matthew is a fascinating book in terms of the treatment of Peter. Peter's a point of view character through the entire book of Matthew. All of his screw-ups or screw-ups that you as a reader are supposed to find relatable, his high points or stuff that you as a reader are supposed to find relatable. The questions he asks are always the obvious question that if you're reading carefully, deep down you might be kind of afraid to admit that you had that question too, but it's the right and obvious question. Peter is likable, relatable, even when he's being an idiot, because he's an idiot exactly how I would be an idiot if I were there. But then at the end of Matthew, he doesn't get any resolution. He runs off into the night having rejected Jesus after he said he'd never do it. I'll even stab people's earballs for you if I have to, but yeah, in the end of things, he goes running off into the night all embarrassed and ashamed. It's interesting. Mark reads a lot differently involving Peter because Mark kind of is Peter. There's a huge amount of historical source that says Mark was a travel companion of Peter, that Mark and Peter hung out in Rome later in Peter's life, and that the Gospel of Mark is kind of the recollections of Peter. And when you have those lenses and you go and read the Gospel of Mark, it really does pop. If you've never heard this before, I mean just go try it. Mark doesn't take you very long to power, read it in a day, you know, a quick afternoon or whatever. You will see it. It sounds like the recollections of a dude who was there and is like, oh, this day was like this. The trees look like this. The grass was green that time of year when we were at the thing. I mean, obviously, I'm mega paraphrasing, but also there's stuff in there that is reflective of the questions Peter asks in Matthew as recorded by Matthew. So Matthew's watching Peter be the point of view character, and all those obvious questions that Peter asks through the book of Matthew, you can kind of see them implicit in the book of Mark. So it's not just that, yeah, you got some pretty credible early Christian sources, like big name early Christian sources that say Peter and Mark were connected and that Mark is relaying a lot of the recollections of Peter. You can also kind of just go and test this by reading it with the antenna out for that thesis. And at least for me, I've come away going, huh? Well, that's pretty compelling. There's a lot of internal evidence to support that as well. So we can talk about Luke and John and how Peter shows up in those another time. But basically, you're getting the picture here. We get Peter in the Gospels from a lot of different angles. We get to see inside his head, and the years of Jesus' public ministry is a huge hotspot on the heat map for how much Peter we get. And then early on in the book of Acts, remember we talked about the A plot, B plot structure of Acts as we were warming up toward the book of Galatians. The A plot, as we've called it, I mean, this is just my term. I don't think anybody else would call it this. If you go out on the internet and you're like, A plot, B plot, Acts, what is that? You're gonna be really disappointed. You're gonna be like, oh, that's just the thing that was made up in that one podcast that I listened to. But I think it works. I think it's there because we really are chasing two stories. The A plot comes right out of the Gospels, and it follows the remaining disciples, primarily Peter, and John is always right there with them, as they stay in Jerusalem and just imitate the stuff that they saw Jesus doing. I mean, in a lot of ways, the early going of Acts has Peter back on the scene after he ran away in shame and he's restored by Jesus. We don't get the restoration of Peter at the end of Matthew, but we see it elsewhere in the Gospels. And he's just picking up right where Jesus left off. We don't always get a tip of the hand from the author of Acts, Luke, to say the Holy Spirit was right there and told Peter what to say. Other times it looks like the Holy Spirit was precisely telling Peter what to say or guiding him in all of that. But either way, we see Peter imitating the way Jesus was connecting the dots between the Old Testament and the New Testament for the Jews. And Peter, indeed, I mean, he goes on to kind of be the guy who's taking the message of Jesus to the Jewish people, whereas Paul ends up being the guy who goes to the Gentiles. Well, the A-plot is popping throughout the first half of the book of Acts. We see a ton of Peter, and Peter is not a static character. He's dynamic, he's going through stuff, he's figuring things out, he's got to wrestle through the promises of Jesus and the predictions of Jesus and how Jesus said it would play out and what Jesus said about the Holy Spirit and how all of that was going to be. We see Peter trying to come to terms with all of it and solve it. And that's really evident when Peter has to figure out what do I do in the face of persecution? What do I do in the face of persecution from a guy who just killed one of my buddies? That being Herod who killed James. What do I do when miraculously God lets me out of prison? Should I leave? I guess I should just go. Whereas Paul had another situation like that himself, and he ran the math and was like, I guess I should just sit in here. I think that would be most strategically shrewd. So Peter's having to think, he's having to think on the fly, he's having to grow, and then he has this vision of the sheet being let down from heaven with all the animals in it, and you know, God saying voice from heaven saying, you know, take and eat. And Peter, just like back in the old gospel days, he does the same thing. He's like, No, never, nothing unclean has ever touched my lips. No, I'll never abandon you or whatever. And by the time you get to the end of the first act of Acts, the attentive reader coming off of the gospel should be like, wow, every time Peter makes a giant declaration about what he always does or what he'll never do, God is gonna humble him and correct him and teach him stuff. Yet again, that's just the formula, apparently, for kind of how Peter grows. So again, tracing the A plot in the early part of Acts, Peter's just a blast. Even when he's dumb, he's being used by God and is incredibly effective for teaching any reader who picks this up a whole bunch of stuff and asking the questions we would want to ask. He is kind of like he reminds me of Andy Dwyer from Parks and Wreck, the way he just goes absolutely big all the time and says exactly what he's thinking. And when he's stupid, he's stupid. And when he's profound, he's profound. But this is just what he is. And if you don't know what the NBC sitcom from the late 2000s called Parks and Recreation is, that had a young Chris Pratt in it playing Andy Dwyer, it's just fine. Just ignore this part of the podcast and we're just gonna move forward and it's gonna be fine. But as we get further into Acts, Peter starts to go more silent. We get him sporadically through Act Two of Acts, but that A-plot tapers off. More or less, we're just giving the impression as readers, as we move through the narrative of the New Testament, that the Jewish thing, like we kind of did that part. The gospel will always be there. There's stuff going on off-screen, behind the scenes, whatever. But Jesus' trajectory that he lays out in Acts 1.8 for the book of Acts and the whole ministry trajectory of the whole New Testament, not just the stuff written in Acts, but all of it, was always going to be that you're gonna be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. There are these concentric radiating circles coming out of Jerusalem that demonstrate the geographic trajectory of the gospel. Well, the further we get out from the middle from Jerusalem, the more the gospel is gonna have to be said differently while still being faithful to what it is in order for it to make sense to the people who it is going out to. Because the concerns of a Jewish law following Jerusalem Jew are gonna be way, did I say Jew twice? I think I did. Well, you know what I mean now. I really emphasize it. That's gonna be way different than somebody who doesn't know anything about any of this stuff, who lives in Thessalonica or Iconium or Derby, they don't know. They're a Gentile. I mean, they've heard about Jewish religion and stuff, but it just isn't their thing. And so there's this thematic radiation that happens as the message of the gospel goes out. There's a character radiation that happens. The closer we are to Jerusalem, the more Peter we get, the further out from Jerusalem we go, the more Paul we get. And generally the closer to Jerusalem we are, the more synthesis questions we get theologically. How is Jesus the completion of the Old Testament story? What do we do with the law? But the further out we go, unless like in the case of the Galatians, Judaizers come and ask the questions, the further out we go, more the theology questions are sort of general interest with less focus on how this is the completion of the Old Testament, even though that's there and running in the background. So Peter, increasingly, as we get through Act Two of the Book of Acts, he's just not on screen as much, even though he was the dominant character, human character at least, in the first act of Acts. And then by the time we get to the third act of Acts, call that roughly the last 10 chapters or so of the book, we don't really see him at all. He goes entirely off screen, and the A plot is entirely supplanted with the B plot. So to land the plane for today, our knowledge of Peter thins out really just about the time that this controversy with Paul that we've been looking at in Galatians chapter 2 happens. So that makes it a little bit more challenging to cobble together a sense of whether the peace that was achieved between Peter and Paul was really a unified one and how it worked out. It makes it a little bit harder to cobble that together than it would be if we're talking about Peter getting the kind of coverage that he got in the Gospels and early on in the book of Acts. But I think we can get a really good sense of whether this was a true peace that was achieved after the incident at Antioch between these two metaphorical brothers, or whether this was a fake piece. Hug it out, act like you like each other, say you're sorry to your brother. Now you look him in the eye and say you're sorry to him back. I think we can figure out that it wasn't that and that it was authentic. But rather than just asking you to trust me, we are gonna zip around the Bible and look at that for ourselves next time around. All right, I think that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is a 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.
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