How important is it to know when a story was set in order to understand and appreciate that story fully? I would say it's really stinking important. If you had no context or understanding for Nazi Germany and the 1930s and 1940s in that part of the world, a show like Schindler's List is going to lose some of its emotional punch. Let's go with something lighter. I started this conversation with Schindler's List. Good heavens, Whitman. Let's go with Stranger Things. Have you seen Stranger Things on Netflix? Even if you haven't, don't worry, this is going to make sense to you. Stranger Things feels like E.T. or the Goonies. It's this early 1980s setting where you've still got childlike wonder and kids are on bikes going around solving a mystery, but it's before the age of cynicism and the internet and everybody knows everything. And so there is still this sense of wonder and mystery. And so the show really works. But if you said it now, I don't think it would work nearly as well. And if you set it in 1740 in Puritan, Massachusetts, I don't think it would work very well either there. It's just completely appropriate set in whatever it was, 1983 or 1984. And part of the reason I think that show has caught on is that a lot of the people who are viewing it are just old enough to remember the setting. All of those little wrinkles and nuance, and just remembering, oh, well, Ronald Reagan was in charge, and oh, we were fighting against the Soviets, and oh no, Gorbachev, and also Burger King and Coca-Cola and advertising and the 1984 Olympics and Mary Lou Rettin, like all of that stuff, is still rattling around in people's heads. And even though no one might need to know anything about Mary Lou Rettin to properly appreciate stranger things, there's this robust context that makes the story pop. And you don't have to make the story 10 times longer to explain all of that historical context. It's just sitting there because we're in close enough proximity in terms of time to remember a lot of those things. And I know there are younger viewers who appreciate it as well, and that works fine. But if you want to understand a story like that, say a hundred years from now or 200 years from now, you'd have to put in a little bit more work because you wouldn't be viewing it within living memory of the events that it portrays. You would be viewing it with a whole lot of water under the bridge, and you'd have to think really hard to reposition yourself to receive that story as it would have been received by the original audience. You see what I'm getting at? The Bible is very, very, very much the same way. The authors of the Bible, I believe, wrote within living memory of the events described. As we discussed in the last conversation, I think the gospel authors are the people whose names are attached to them, meaning these are all first century authors. Two of them were disciples. Peter is heavily associated with the Gospel of Mark, meaning three disciples participated in a meaningful way in the writing of the Gospels, and they were writing about stuff that people would have remembered from an era that people would have remembered. So the same way that if I bring up 1995, your brain goes right to, oh, Bill Clinton and grunge music or whatever was going on in your part of the world at that point. So it is. When people are talking about 2930 AD in the Gospels, everybody who was alive at that point is like, oh yeah, that was when uh Tiberius was in charge. And who was our governor back then? Oh, it was Pontius Pilate. Man, that guy was a nightmare, wasn't he? And oh, remember this little rebellion happened in there and that other thing happened in there. And oh, remember the incident where uh everybody went up to Caesarea and we had the big protests? Man, those were the days, people with flowers in their hair pushing back on the government. All of that stuff is just sitting there in the background of the brains of the people who picked up Matthew and read it when it first came out. They have an advantage because Matthew was picturing that audience when he wrote, and he didn't waste time filling in gaps that they would already have crystal clarity on. That doesn't mean, however, that everybody since then can't understand it well. Man, I phrased that with like eight negatives. Let me do it the other way. However, we should be optimistic that people after the fact can still understand the document wonderfully. But if we want to understand the document, we need to have a clear sense of what the historical context was at the moment, and it sure helps to have a clear sense of when it was written. So, why does it matter when people come along and say, oh, I think Matthew was probably written hundreds of years after the fact by somebody who claimed to be Matthew and it was a trick? Well, it matters, one, because I think that just doesn't hold up under scrutiny and who wants to think things that are wrong, but it also matters because if we want to understand the document, we need to understand not just the moment that it is describing, but we also need to understand the moment in which the author was editing and developing this to communicate it. So here's the deal. I think Matthew was very likely written before 70 AD. So we're talking about a few decades after the events it describes. If we place this very, very early in the 50s, as some might do, you're talking about events that would, to you or me, be like events that happened around the year 2000. So you remember the Matrix and Y2K, it would be about that far back. If we date this in the 60s, we're talking about stuff that once again goes back to like Bill Clinton, George Bush, the first Iraq war, things like that. I'm using all American examples, that's lame, but you all can fill in the gaps. At the very, very most, we're talking about something that stretches almost 40 years out, and then we're back to Ronald Reagan and Stranger Things kind of era. Whatever the case, that gives you a little bit of a context of what it would look like. And further, and maybe we're getting a little technical here, but I think it's important, further, you can picture what it looks like for someone in our day and age to deal with the pressures that we feel now, which are completely different than the pressures we felt in, say, 1990, but to write stories about 1990, the way you go back and highlight certain things and maybe disregard other things is going to change because of the influences and the questions that you're dealing with now. What we have to remember is that even though there's a whole bunch of eyewitness accounts in all of the gospels, we are dealing with something that happened that was written slightly after the fact, which means that Christianity had evolved already. Paul had gone on his missionary journeys recorded in Acts. Christian theology had taken hold in different places, it had started to mingle with different versions of culture. Martyrdoms had happened in the interim. And so there are key questions that everybody's asking. We see that in Acts chapter 15. That's the Jerusalem Council, where you gotta get the big dogs of the rock stars of the early church together to sort out a few things like, well, what do we do with this uh bloody idol meet? And oh, what about some of the sex stuff? What do we do with that? And so all of these authors writing the gospels would have been aware of those questions and would have had those things in view as well. Now, look, I don't need to connect the dots right now because we're gonna get into a ton of this as to how all of this manifests, but keeping these things in the back of our head as we go through the text is going to be hyper helpful. So I would put the writing of Matthew before 70 AD, and I would put it there because we don't get a description of the destruction of the temple, which we know for sure happened in 70 AD. And Jesus looks really, really good if his remarks toward the end of the Gospel of Matthew are then followed by an account of the destruction of the temple. It would be a gigantic mic drop moment. And it seems weird to me that the author would have left out that huge opportunity to punctuate his main points if he were writing after that destruction of the temple had happened. So some people will point to Matthew 27 as well. Verse 8 is in the middle of the account of Judas's death and hanging himself, and it says, that is why it, that's the field that he bought, has been called the field of blood to this day. That phrase to this day, I don't think that occurs anywhere else in Matthew. Maybe it does. This is the only one I can think of. But that gives the impression that there is some continuity, that the that there hasn't been a great disruption to what's going on there, redistribution of land, conquest, or whatever. And that again indicates to me that we are in this pre-70 AD moment. For those who would try to say that the Gospel of Matthew was written much, much later, I think this also pushes back on that theory because Rome got so sick of rebellions in Judea and Galilee that they actually eventually came in and renamed everything and really busted up the old guard. When that dramatic rewriting of things in the early second century happened, it's likely that a lot of these old place names and traditions might have been washed clean as well, especially one whose roots were so shallow as this one with Judas, and it would have only been, you know, a few decade-long tradition, and then that kind of disruption may have disrupted it. Did that last one seem like a stretch? The more I talked about it, the more I felt like maybe that is a stretch. I think I said it was kind of a stretch at the beginning. At any rate, there is a quick overview of the internal evidence for a pre-70 AD date for Matthew. There is also a quick overview, if you will, of my rationale for why I think the date of the authorship of the book is important for us understanding this document. And you know, like we were talking about, you interpret something very differently that was written in the 20 teens than you do something that was written in the 1990s or 1960s. And the same applies here. So if you're gonna do a place where you're like, oh, just get to the Bible already. I hear you. I'm a huge fan. I can't wait to get there, but I want to do it right. And so laying this foundation together is going to be something that really pays off as we get into the text here a few episodes from now. The next episode, we're gonna talk a little bit more about the dating stuff and where Matthew fits in the history of early Christianity. There's some very interesting external evidence about the date of Matthew and what people made of this. In fact, there are some people who would even put the dating of Matthew earlier than what I talked about earlier in this episode. So we'll get to all of that conversation tomorrow. And I think it'll be really fascinating and fun, and again, pave the way for great stuff coming down the pike as we move forward into Matthew and through the whole book. Last thing on the way out the door, we are having conversations about these episodes at reddit.com. R slash TMBH podcast is where that's happening. If you've never been to Reddit, you don't need to feel overwhelmed by that. It's a really easy thing to navigate. It can be a bit much on the front side, but that's why I've linked directly to the conversation in the show notes. All you gotta do is go down and click on that, and you're right there. You can decide if you want to sign up for a free account and shoot back and forth with people, or you can just kind of hang around and spy on what everybody else has to say. That's cool too. All right, I'm excited to get into the next stuff tomorrow. Thanks for doing this with me. I'm Matt, it's a 10 minute Bible hour. I guess we'll catch him on Yana.