I have this whole master plan that I put together. Sometimes it's even weeks ahead of what we're doing. And it's all this stuff about, okay, I want to cover this, and then I meticulously want to work us over this direction. But also, y'all are really smart. Sometimes you've made me change my plans a little bit in terms of the order of things. So here's the deal. My goal was to kind of work us through this whole story about the calling of the first disciples in Matthew, get through the end of the chapter, and then go back and look at now how we're just starting to diverge from the story over in Luke and kind of break down some of the comparisons and consider why Matthew handles the account of the calling of the first disciples a little bit differently than Luke does. But you filled up the subreddit with all kinds of great comments and questions. So forget my stupid plan. We're just going to break it down right now. And as I am increasingly in the habit of doing, I like to go and grab a friend when we interact with questions from the subreddit because I can and it's fun. So this is my friend Jeff Foote. Jeff, you there? Yep. Jeff, would you like to explain to everyone why you are ridiculously famous but nobody knows it on this podcast?
SPEAKER_00Um, the bumper music that you're using uh came from an album that uh I recorded and should be out in a couple of weeks.
SPEAKER_02Yes, it did. All the music on this podcast is completely original. Also, if any of you watch the YouTube channel, the 10-minute Bible hour, I did a video where I went to an evangelical free church, and that was also my friend Jeff's church. And so he's been over there as well. So, Jeff. Well, let's take a swing at this. Why do you think Matthew just blitzes through the calling of the first disciples and really is content to let the reader feel like Jesus walked up, some dudes were doing some stuff, like mending nets or organizing nets or casting nets, and then he was like, hey, follow me, and immediately they did. Why was Matthew going with the condensed or compressed, to use my language version? Whereas Luke goes with the here's a whole bunch of miraculous stuff, and there's this really dramatic conversion encounter for these guys. Why the disparity?
SPEAKER_00I think there's a lot going into it with just their intent as authors and their own stories between Matthew and Luke. You know, Matthew knew those guys, um, Peter James, Andrew, John, those guys, and lived with them. And um, whereas Luke, you know, he he is writing an account based on interviews he's having with these people later on. Um and uh information a little differently. How will we get some of these details and some of his interviews and um if you got it firsthand from those guys? Um storytelling. So I think that's funny. Um the nature of Christ, his humanity, his divinity. Uh there's a lot more illuminated about the son of him. He uh is a human wow, he can have a manage. And I think a lot of his interactions with people who lose is kind of that funny moment of who is this man with the women the laser day. Um it's so much kingdom, kingdom, kingdom. Um I that's just off the top of my head, but I I would say that that author intent, author history um come to mind right away as for why they would tell their stories in a different way.
SPEAKER_02Let me let me just frame this up a little bit. And okay, once again, when I call people on this, at least thus far, I'm not giving them any warning. So I just called Jeff, and you know, I was gonna shoot the breeze with him about some weird stuff that's happening with our baseball team there in Colorado, but we never quite got to it. We started talking shop about Bible. So uh Jeff is shooting from the hip, but he's good for it. So thank you, buddy. Um, Luke is is a different structure than Matthew in terms of how the storytelling works because Matthew opens with a pretty quick birth narrative. Luke's birth narrative is the giant one. It's the one that you read at Christmas, of course. And the baptism gives us a more detailed account of how John interacts with the people that show up to be baptized and is pushing back on them. The temptation is almost identical in structure. It gives us basically it's the same gist. But then from there we see a divergence. Jesus goes up to Galilee. There's an event that happens in Nazareth in Luke chapter four. This is the unrolling of the scroll, and he says, he reads from Isaiah, and he says, you know, now this is fulfilled in your hearing. And I just want to go through all of the book of Luke because I've put a lot of work into this book too, but we're doing Matthew, so I'm going to try and keep it fast. Um, and so eventually then Jesus winds up back in Galilee. Now, in in Matthew chapter four, that is handled in one sentence. When Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been arrested, he returned to Galilee and set up shop in Capernaum. Paraphrase is mine, I don't have it open in front of me, but that's the gist. In Luke, that takes, I don't know, uh it's from Luke 4, 14 through 30, something like that. No, it's a little bit further than that because there's the miracle of casting out the evil spirit that still happens in chapter four, and uh, he has the interaction with the demons that he's casting out, and the order of things is a little bit strange because there's a healing of Peter's mother-in-law before we see Peter respond to the calling in Luke chapter five. And I'm just gonna read the passage from fives. One day, as Jesus was standing by the lake of Genesaret, there are like four names for the Sea of Galilee, right? Like the Sea of Tiberius, Sea of Galilee. Am I saying that right? Genesaret?
SPEAKER_00That's how I always thought, Genesaret.
SPEAKER_02If if nothing else were wrong the same way. Uh, with the people crowding around him and listening to the word of God, he saw at the water's edge two boats left there by the fishermen who were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little bit from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat. When he'd finished speaking, he told Simon, Put out into deep water and let down the nets for a catch. Simon answered, Master, we worked hard all night and haven't caught anything, but because you say so, I will let down the nets. When they'd done so, they caught such a large number of fish that the nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat and they came and helped them out, and then they came and filled both boats so full that they they both be or they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus' knees and said, Go away from me, Lord, I am a sinful man. For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee. Then Jesus said to Simon, Don't be afraid, from now on you will catch men. So they pulled their boats up on the shore, left everything, and followed him. That is a lot more dramatic than the other story. Jeff, why would Matthew leave all of that out? Because it's good.
SPEAKER_00It is good. And again, I think it has to do with the point they're trying to make at this point in the gospel. Like you see, you brought up the birth narrative and then the citation account, the baptism. You know, um Matthew puts the genealogy first thing, right? Because he's trying to say Jesus checked all the bosses to be the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00Um and Abraham, right? The genealogy goes back to Abraham here. Whereas Luke puts the uh the genealogy between the baptism and the temptation, because he's trying to connect Jesus not to the Messiah, connecting Abraham so much, it's connecting Jesus to the son of man, all the way back between Adam and the Son of God, and he's he's got the nature of Jesus going. And pretty much from the the voice from heaven that comes to the nature of the uh from Luke. Um genealogy, so the voice is this genealogy has the son of Adam, the son of God. And then he goes to the temptation where he um temptation podcast, you know, Jesus is doing his one of the first Adam fails. And then Luke has a whole stream of miracles that are just the next thing he gets. So, like you said, the the demon, um Peter's mother-in-law, uh, a leper, a paralytic, um the miraculous catcher fish.
SPEAKER_02You know, Matthew's got a section that demonstrates Jesus' authority over like everything. He can beat that, he can beat that, he can beat that. And so we get seem to get that a little bit earlier in Luke with this chunk of, I think very specifically, collected miracles.
SPEAKER_00Well, and I think it's because Luke is really digging deep on a point early in these chapters of the divinity of Christ. Whereas Matthew in the early chapters is hitting the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_02Well, and I think it's interesting, too, how Matthew makes the conversion of the other four guys, the calling of the other four guys, sound just like his. Like some stuff happened, I guess. In Matthew, we don't get to know what, and that's kind of what we gamed out yesterday. Is it's just Matthew clearly wants the the reader to come away feeling like there was just a 180 for these guys. They were doing one thing, they were invested in one thing, they had this encounter with Jesus, they dropped their nets and they went. Matthew, sitting at his booth doing his thing, is corrupt, he's a part of this dirty government sham that's going on. Jesus is like, follow me. Matthew's like, okie dokie. And so I think what Matthew is trying to advance is this idea that the kingdom is not just a thing that nebulously happens, but you play an active role, and not just through piety or through religious ritual, you play an active role in the building, the unfolding, the flowering of this kingdom. That seems to be what Matthew wants to drill. What Luke seems to want to drill, I agree with you, and that it's the dual nature of Christ, but I also see the theme in Luke of people assuming a right posture before before the God man when they realize he's not just a man, he's God. Jesus is constantly vindicated in Luke. As people figure out they thought he was one thing, turns out, whoa, he's so much more than that. We thought he was guilty and we killed him. Whoa, we came back to life. He's actually the Messiah and God in the flesh are bad. And so again, everybody who gets it right in the Gospel of Luke falls at the feet of Jesus. They wash his feet with their hair and their tears, they they throw themselves at the feet of Jesus, they sneak up in a crowd and just look to be in humble contact with Jesus' power. And so here I think it's really important that we see the best Christian, the guy with the reputation as being the leader of the Christians. We need this anecdote in Luke that he assumed the right posture before the king as well, and did so very dramatically. And the king said, Rise, Sir Peter, and engage henceforth in this quest for my kingdom. Long story short, I think we can agree that what we're not seeing here is a conflict between the two. What we're seeing here is editorial priorities and something that really illustrates that each of these gospels really does bring something different to the table. They're not just four fragments of a biography, they're all advancing a theological theme, and that's why all four are Bible.
SPEAKER_00It's not a matter of contradiction, it's a matter of different perspectives of the storytelling, because we have different authors and we have different situations within writing, but you know, they like I said, they both talk about the kingdom, they both talk about the divinity of Christ, they both include the miracles, they both include the children of the mouth, they both you know talk about these same events, it's just really kind of native organization. Um I just think that especially the molecular supernaturalism that Jesus followed. But eventually they don't have both. So I think the fact that there's consistency when you have somebody who is there personally, and then you have another guy doing interviews later, that for me is remarkable. That there aren't more things different.
SPEAKER_02Right. So one thing that's gonna need to happen is I'm gonna need to have you come back on here when your album is out so that we can tell people where to get it, because I think a lot of people would really want to latch on to that, and it's getting close, right?
SPEAKER_00It is it's getting very close. Probably uh it's gonna be manufactured next week or so.
SPEAKER_02Nice. Jeff, you're awesome, man. Thanks for doing this. You up for it again sometime?
SPEAKER_00Any time, party thank you.
SPEAKER_02Sweet, we'll hit you up. Thanks, man.