If you don't know anything about or care anything for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you're gonna be fine here. Just bear with me for the first couple of seconds. One of my favorite parts of the whole Lord of the Rings story is when the characters get together at Rivendell for the first time and they don't really know each other yet, maybe just a little bit by reputation. And they're like, we got this great big situation here. We got this thing that we need to accomplish that we have to go out and do, but it's hard and it's dangerous. And then one member at a time, the fellowship of the ring takes shape as each additional member is like, all right, I'm in, I'll help you accomplish the dangerous, important thing. And when you read that for the first time or watch it for the first time, you don't get the significance of who the fellowship is. But any hypothetical person who was well acquainted with the world of Middle Earth or lived in that neck of the woods would have been like, What? That's your team? Wow. I mean, this is a bold move. I don't know how this is gonna work. You've got age-old enemies here, cultural enemies, the dwarves and the elves. Like, these are blood enemies. They had it out. One feels betrayed by the other, one feels superior to the other. And then you got the short thing with the dwarves, and then I understand how that could maybe factor into some feelings of insecurity if I were a person who could relate to things like that. And then you've got this long-lost, maybe king mystery man, rogue, who people are not sure of. They don't know if he's sketchy or not, or if he can be reformed into leading in the way he would need to lead to make this thing go. You got these four little tiny people who are barefoot. They didn't even bring shoes to the thing. What could they possibly contribute? You've got a super duper old guy who talks to butterflies. I don't know if you really want to bring the geriatric along for your sword fighting adventure, but okie dokie. And then you've got a guy who is the son of a crazy man who has political aspirations to permanently occupy a throne that isn't really his to occupy at all. And it looks like he wants nothing but power. I mean, this thing should be doomed to failure from the beginning. And then the joy of it is that as the story unfolds, you figure out as you get to know the characters and their backstories that you know, dang, this is an even bigger achievement than I thought. That these people are coming together, unified under this much bigger thing than their previous disputes or issues. And the fact that they coexist as a fellowship speaks to how important their quest is, speaks to how high the stakes are. And the attentive reader can't help but catch that theme that Tolkien develops beautifully. Okay, I said that was going to be like 30 seconds, and it was like three minutes, but it's it's great writing. And if you think for a minute that that writing isn't informed by what we're looking at right here, then you're just not giving Tolkien enough credit. Because likewise, when we get to Matthew chapter 10 and we get the list of the disciples, to you and me, reading this 2,000 years after the fact, it just looks like a collection of names that sounds vaguely Jewish. I mean, we don't know what any of this stuff means. But yesterday we were looking through some of these initial names, and you start to realize, no, no, some of these people are coming from really different backgrounds. Let me just review the text with you one more time. Matthew 10, starting in verse 1, Jesus is getting ready to shift from, hey, I'll do all the work here with miracles and stuff, to surprise kids, you have to go get a job, and now you're going to be responsible for this. So he called his 12 disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out evil spirits and to heal every disease and sickness. And these are the names of the 12 apostles. First, you got Simon, who's called Peter. I added the yagat, that's not in the original language, and his brother Andrew, James, son of Zebedee, and his brother John, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew, the tax collector, James, son of Alpheus, and Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him. So, I mean, you got a hint there at the end that one of these guys is kind of a scoundrel. But for the most part, it does just look like a wall of names. Well, then we look a little closer, and we realize that Peter has some personality. He's a brash dude, he's married, he's given something up, he's a fisherman, he's a northerner, kind of a self-made working man. But then you got James and John. We know that they have a little bit more wealth, but maybe they were told to go get some calluses on their hands. So they go up and they're working maybe in a fishing operation that's owned by their dad. And as a result, they're a little bit, man, my dad's got money and we're in charge of the thing. So these are fancy boys a little bit more. They act a little bit more entitled as we go along. Then we've got a character you and I have spent a bunch of time hanging out with, and that's Matthew. Most of what we know about Matthew is from reading between the lines of what he wrote in the book that we spend all this time with. I feel like we're learning a lot about him. He was somebody who was surprisingly well-versed in Jewish stuff, but despite how well-versed in it he was, he still chose to side with the occupiers instead of his own people. So he had made a conscious choice to reject this stuff initially. But then he has this encounter with Jesus, and he doesn't really tell us much about what went down there. But he goes from being the most reviled, repugnant cultural other sellout to yeah, I'm all in. Okay, cool. I quit my job. All the energy I was putting into being this stool pigeon dirtbag, I'm not going to put into doing something that's redeeming and good and to follow this king and then eventually write about it in maybe the most important historical account of who Jesus is. That's a pretty amazing the way he pivoted using his skill with the pen and organization and observation from a nefarious task to something very redemptive. And honestly, he and maybe John are probably two of the three people directly responsible for the most Christian conversions of all time. So, my friend, we're only through a few of these names and we're already seeing, whoa, this is a very disparate group. This is more like the fellowship of the ring. I don't know how this is going to work out than it is like a unified team of homogeneous crime fighters who all wear the same suit and have exactly the same values. You got Thomas, also called Didymus, probably because he was a twin. I guess that's the idea. That's what the word means. He gets a bad rap for doubting, but I kind of like the dude. He asked fair questions. I relate to Thomas a lot more than I relate to the really heroic disciples, but that tells you a little bit about his character. He's not brash and impulsive, and let's just go do it. He's kind of the opposite of Peter. He believed in Jesus after needing more evidence than others needed and was willing to follow Jesus into great peril after that. Tradition says that Thomas got run through by a spear in India after everything was all said and done. Then you got Bartholomew, and the interesting thing about this guy is I've read a couple of credible theories suggesting that he was descended or associated with royalty somehow, uh vaguely connected to David way back down the line in a way that might even still have been recognized. Who knows if that's true or not? We've got some stuff about the disciples in the Bible, but a lot of what you know or you hear about them is extra-biblical tradition of varying degrees of reliability. I mean, it's a pretty diverse team when you've got a gruff, sleeveless fisherman and someone who's vaguely connected to royalty from back down the line. But he wasn't a dirtbag. I mean, Jesus liked him right off the bat. So he was genuine, truthful. There's no guile in him right when he met him. I think that's in John 1. I don't know, we don't have time to go look. And I don't know, there are more of these guys as well, including Simon the Zealot, who is associated with the sect of Jewish thought at this time that was about rebellion. I mean, he was from the team that wanted to respond to what was going on politically by overthrowing everything. Then tag on to that, you got Judas Iscariot, who really disliked money and ultimately ends up betraying Jesus. What a bizarre team that Jesus assembled. And they all die in a horrible, crazy way. James, son of Alpheus, might be the guy who got clubbed to death. He may have died a different way. James the Greater was murdered by Herod. He got killed, as we talked about last time around. And then you got Simon the Zealot, whose buddies and classmates all died in the rebellion in 70 A.D., put down by Rome. But Simon the Zealot, according to tradition, died in Persia going out and trying to bring in that harvest that Jesus told him to pray that somebody would be raised up to bring in. Tradition says that he got crucified there. Thomas, as we mentioned, got impaled by a spear in India. That's the story. Peter, pretty reliable. Tradition says that he got crucified at the site of St. Peter's Basilica, which is Nero's circus. Philip impaled by hooks and hung upside down in Anatolia. Matthew impaled in Ethiopia. People really liked the impaling. I think Bartholomew was flayed or whipped to death going out and doing the stuff that Jesus told him to pray to be able to do. Andrew, oh Andrew, I remember, because he was crucified because of St. Andrew's Cross of Scotland. You know, it's crucified on like an X-shaped Ramsey Bolton style cross. And then John dies of old age. I don't remember if I covered everybody, but you get the gist. Everybody goes out and dies in a really ugly way, following through on this little blip that we get at the end of chapter nine. These crowds, they're harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Oh, the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. And so they do pray that, and they are the answer to their own prayer, and they go out and suffer the same fate that Jesus suffered for it. And the Christian believes that in every way they suffered the same fate, died, and death was defeated in them by the work of God. So, bottom line, I think the original audience would have seen this list and been like, you just can't put those guys together in a room, let alone send them on a quest. They're gonna kill each other. They don't have the same interests, they're not into the same stuff, they're from different teams. Like building your team out of people from an Antifa rally and some bikers for Trump gang members. And then you just build it out from there. Like, we know what division looks like in society. I'm not trying to jab anybody there, but come on. You know what it is to be in a deeply divided moment with different factions who all have their enemies and people they can get one over on, and people who they vote against, and people they gripe about on Twitter. Imagine taking all of those people from all of the factions, jamming them into one team, giving them only the training you've seen so far in the book of Matthew, and then being like, all right, you represent me now, out you go. That would have sent an amazing message to the audience about this transcending all of your dumb, stupid little fights of the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all those things are very important. But you know what? If Jesus had picked a team that was all from one group and was like, we're gonna go win with this faction, you never would have heard of any of this, because all that would have been was one more screaming special interest group that wants their precious little thing and everyone else is literally Hitler and we're the only ones who are right and good. We don't take those people seriously. Come on, even when they're from your own team, you look at that and that's just partisan hackery. There's nothing transcendent or true there. When you see that kind of group of neatly organized, we all have our facts exactly straight and we all believe the exact same thing, and you're wrong, and all of our information points to how wrong you are, and the only way for you to be right is to sign up for our thing. When you see that kind of homogeneous thought from a group of homogeneous people, you assume it's a power grab. When you see a bunch of people who have no business even being able to exchange two decent words together, rallying behind something, let alone rallying behind something to the point where, let's just go through it again: crucified, whipped to death, flayed, impaled, clubbed, impaled, crucified, impaled, murdered with sword, crucified, maybe shot with arrows, crucified, died of old age. When you go through that list, that's an incredible level of commitment that these people threw into something that they were not unified in beforehand. That would have spoken to the original audience. They would have taken notice when they saw this, the same way a crazy, disparate group of people coming together to do something today, which does not happen anymore, would blow your mind as well. And what we're seeing here in this simple list of names is a principle of the kingdom. So there's your weird, screwy motley crew roster. Next time around, we'll talk about what Jesus actually told them to go out and do. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.