Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-Minute Bible Hour podcast. And for those of you who've been with us for a long time, every now and then we step away from the book of Matthew to talk about something that's you know related to what we're working on that seems like a good question that came up. And this is one of those good question episodes where David Hicks from the Patreon page asked a really smart question. So here is said really smart question. Thanks, Matt, for the great lessons. I guess I'm going to keep all the stuff where he says nice things. I can't imagine how much this study has helped me. Okay, I'm actually starting to blush a little bit. And then he says some other nice stuff. Okay, let's just skip to the question. Uh in most podcasts, you make a remark like, quote, the original audience would have, or quote, the original audience would have immediately thought of dot dot dot. Are those statements based on an educated guess, or do we have documents from the era that give us insight into how folks perceived things? Thanks, David from Alabama. First of all, about the Alabama thing. I'd never been to Alabama for an extended period of time until about five or six years ago, and now I get there a lot and I really like Alabama. So high five for being from somewhere that I'm a big fan of, too. That's a really smart question, David. And my buddy, who a lot of you know, if you've hung around the podcast or the YouTube channel, Aaron Utect, is in town. And so, Aaron, hi, thanks for hanging out. It's great to be here. Thanks a lot, man. Aaron has an exceptionally useful brain. He's good at thinking thoughts about things that you can't see and that are abstract. And I know that even hitting him cold with this question, he's gonna have good ideas. So, Aaron, how do we know what the original audience would have known and what the original audience would not have known when we're talking about the Bible?
SPEAKER_00That's a really, really sharp question. It depends on any particular passage. Are we saying, well, the original audience would have understood this word this way? You know, and that's a linguistic question. We can go back and we, you know, we have multiple uh places where a certain word is used inside or outside of the Bible uh in ancient literature, or is there cultural assumptions? And that gets into be a little bit more conjecture and based on reading things back into ancient documents and sources.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, let's think about something that we just worked on. We're looking at the Matthew 8 passage here a little bit ago about the boat trip over to the region of the Gatarenes on the far side of the Sea of Galilee, and then there are all of these people over there, and Jesus shows up and he runs into some pig herders and some crazy demon-possessed guys. And if I recall correctly, and I don't actually know for sure at this point, because I don't go back and listen to all of these again and again, but I think I that's one of those moments where I would have been like, oh, well, the original audience would have been like this, would have been like that. So what can we say for sure that the original audience would have assumed, like a Jewish audience, what would they have assumed about the people of the region of the Gadarenes as they're reading this in the first century? And how would we know that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so answering that question is important in the context. So when the Jewish audience hears pig herders, Jesus is all of his activity happened in the context of Judaism, and so pigs were against Old Testament law. And so there's there's that question. Now, refresh my mind, the gatherings, was that Gentile territory or Jewish territory? It was Jewish territory, wasn't it? Well, it's got to be Gentile territory because they got pigs. Yeah, I think it my my recollection is it was a little bit mixed. In either case, the pigs were bad. Offensive and gross. Offensive and gross. So how do we know that the original audience would have been grossed out by pigs? Because they were against Jewish law. And that's all over the Old Testament and it's all over the New Testament, where you can see the early Christian church trying to figure out what they are going to ask Gentiles to do as they come to following this Jewish Messiah named Jesus. What about extra biblically?
SPEAKER_01How would we know that from outside the Bible that the original audience would have been appalled by pigs?
SPEAKER_00I'm thinking of one example. What do you got? Well, I think we're probably thinking of the same massive example. There are other smaller ones, but where Antiochus Epiphanes slaughtered the uh sacrificed a pig on the altar in the temple in Jerusalem. And it was enough to spark the Maccabean revolt.
SPEAKER_01It sparked a whole revolt. Yeah, the destruction of the Seleucid Empire in the Levant and the advent of the Hasmonean Jewish dynasty that lasted for whatever, 100 years until Pompeii came and wrecked it a little bit later on. So, in answer to your question, David, one of the ways that we can cobble together how we think the original audience would have responded is just like that. Okay, what historical examples do we have? What do we have from the text? What do we know about the audience? All right, well, these are people who like the Bible, these are people who would have been devoutly religious, these are people who've had a recent, very bad political experience with somebody trying to stick a thumb in their eye with pig stuff, which means that it wasn't just the original Jewish audience who would have been triggered by the whole pig thing, but people who were Gentiles would have known how the Jews felt about the whole pig thing. And question for you, Aaron. On one level, that could seem like it's just, you know, a fun Bible trivia, like we're just wasting time there. But I think I know you well enough to know that you think that those kind of little details really help to interpret a passage. How does that come into play in an example like this?
SPEAKER_00It gives you a window into the humanity of what's happening. Everything that we do and say is is embedded into context. Are we, you know, if you read C.S. Lewis, well, he's referring to the war. Well, he's he's talking about World War II in, you know, living in London and the kids get out of the city and stuff. Everything that we do and talk about is embedded in culture. And so if we want to get deeper into that, then we can get those things. And the the further we get away from the text. Now, sometimes you'll you'll come across a passage and in the Bible and there'll be an end, and the narrator will give you kind of a clue. Um, I think this is in John 4, where he gives John gives the clue. For Jews didn't interact with Samaritans. He kind of just tells you that straight up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and Luke will give you little clues like that.
SPEAKER_00Yep, those will happen from time to time.
SPEAKER_01But Matthew doesn't. He assumes that his audience knows that stuff. He's writing to Jews, so he doesn't give you any of those clues. Of course, you guys know what you do. It's like writing a book to Americans who live in the Midwest and being like, and Americans at that time liked baseball, a game where you hit a ball with a stick. We don't be like, Why are you wasting our time, you idiot? Like, do you even know who you're writing to? We all know what baseball is.
SPEAKER_00The further you get away from the text, you have to have just a touch of humility and you move out a circle. History gives us pretty solid clues. Sometimes we get a layer outside of that and we're extrapolating a little bit more. And the degree that we're moving away from anything that's explicitly in the text, then you have to say, Well, I think this shapes what's happening here, but I can't hinge my entire interpretation on something that's three or four steps removed.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00That makes sense. So sometimes.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so you're saying that part of the way we know what the original audience thought is because we know what words meant at that time, for the most part. We've figured out through extra biblical sources that word means that. If that word was said, it would have made people feel this way. If some historians looking back from in the future and they're looking back on us and they're looking at a document written in 1840 and the word gay appears, they if they're paying attention, they know that the original audience would have thought of gay times as being joyous and happy and magical, and that that means something different in terms of lifestyle and approach to relationships if they're looking back on 2020. Likewise, there's a difference between words 300 years before Jesus, 200 years after Jesus, and during the time of Jesus. So you're saying words is one of the ways that we get a window into what the original audience thought. You're saying that biblical historical context if we figure out that something is so pronounced and so well known that we can just assume everybody would have known this passage in Isaiah. Any Jew would have known this. Any American would have known they would have at least heard of the Bill of Rights. They would have at least heard of like we the people or you know, freedom of expression, or something like that. But when does it become an educated guess? When we get beyond those two things, uh when are we guessing as to what the original audience thought and can that become dangerous?
SPEAKER_00Uh it can become dangerous. I think we just need to always be careful with that. It can inform it, but like I said, stuff from a couple of layers outside of the text shouldn't inform it. And that's where when you talk about interpretation, the parts interpret the whole, and the whole interpret the parts. And so if I think, oh, you know what, I think this this nuance from history, I think there's actually something going on here in John's gospel or Matthew's gospel, and nobody else has picked up on it. You say, okay, maybe zoom out, and does that seem to flow in the scope of the bigger story that Matthew is telling or John is telling, not just in that particular passage, but in the broader scope, like, you know what, I think that does fit, or that would be an outlier. I'm gonna put that one uh as a maybe, but I'm not gonna, you know, teach that in a college or, you know, in a church or something like that.
SPEAKER_01And that's part of why it just takes longer to go through the Bible the way we do it here. And when I was doing the church thing and talking in front of people, it just took a long time to do it because you have to nuance that stuff out. You have to communicate degree of certainty at times. And if you're really sure, if I'm really sure, like come on, everybody would have known this. I'm not gonna waste time talking about why or laying it out. If people have a question, we can go through that together and I can point out why. Uh, like with the Antiochus Epiphanes things and the, you know, and the pig. Like, I know everybody's gonna know about the pig thing. But at other times, I think you have to kind of acknowledge look, this historical incident had happened 40 years earlier. It happened a few hundred miles away, but I've got sources from this area that indicate that people were still thinking about it. So it is possible that Jesus' remarks here or that Matthew's remarks here are a vague reference back to this trigger phrase or this keyword. And you put it in front of people so they can at least think about it and consider it. But usually if the interpretation of a passage hinges on something that fringe, you probably got a problem already.
SPEAKER_00Correct. Yep. And none of the main stuff hinges on that. What what you're talking about there is adding color. Let me give an example that I think of. Um I thought of just John's John 4 earlier, um, the woman at the well. And there's people have made a lot of this in the Old Testament, there happened um on a few a number of occasions where the patriarchs met their wives at wells. And you come to John's gospel and John mentions the well a couple of times very specifically to highlight it. And Jesus is single, and this unmarried woman meets him at this well, and it kind of, you know, if you're into Hebrew literature, you know, like, oh, this is inviting this question. Well, of course, there's nothing that ever happens between the two, but I think John is implying a parable that the woman who's disreputable is the bride of Christ. Can I prove that and say this Greek verb makes me confident of that? No, I can't. Does that change the meaning of the passage at all? Not one level, but it adds color to it and it makes it much more rich.
SPEAKER_01And I really do think in those kind of examples, it's safe to say that if we're writing to a biblically literate audience, where I mean, this is their stories, these are their movies, this is their Avengers, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, like this is the stuff they know. They're gonna catch that. The same way, like, if you're out to dinner with somebody and the people you're out with are like, oh, well, how did you guys meet and fall in love? And you tell the whole story, and then you're like, you know, and finally she was like, I love you. And I was like, I know. Everybody knows you're referencing The Empire Strikes Back. And 200 years from now, the astute student should be able to look back and be like, oh, that was so ingrained in the lore that here's what that really meant. Or 200 years from now, somebody should be able to look back and see that uh clever employment of the phrase as you wish doesn't mean as you wish. It means I love you because of 1987's The Princess Bride. So, David, I think that's an awesome question. Thank you for giving me permission to do a special episode where we talk about the system and thought and strategy behind how to tackle the Bible a little bit, and to give me an excuse to sit down and talk with my friend Aaron, who really does think very deeply about this stuff and brings a ton to the table. So, Aaron, thank you. David, thank you. Everybody who hangs out and listens to this kind of stuff. We'll get back to more Matthew Manana. I'm Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and this is Aaron Utah. And it's still the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.