Hey, my name is Matt Whitman, and this is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And also, you should know, full disclosure, this is me from the future coming back to add a bonus intro and welcome to you at the front end of the very first episode in the history of this gigantic project. If you're here, it's because you decided to start from the beginning, which I think is amazing. Thank you for doing that. Here's what I know now that I could not possibly have known when I started this thing and recorded this episode that you're listening to right now, however many years ago it was. I couldn't have known that we would move at the pace that we're moving and that people would enjoy moving at a slow pace through the text and diving so deep into the history and the background and the culture, and we've got to know each other. And I've discovered that the group of people who are making this part of their daily routine, you're totally different from each other. It's a very diverse group of people gathered in one place, which hardly ever happens in this day and age of the internet. So this has grown into a really awesome thing because of the people who listen. And now you're one of the people who listen. So thank you so, so, so much for doing that. The goal of this podcast is not for me to persuade you of a whole bunch of things or get you to think just like me, that's not very interesting or compelling. The goal of this podcast is for us to try and cut through the noise and look at one book of the Bible at a time, no matter how long it takes, in light of its historical context and its literary context. This is fancy ways of saying that we're going to try to look really closely at it, with the goal of you getting it on complete lockdown. One book of the Bible for starters, totally in your hip pocket, so that you can mentally spread out all the parts on the table in front of you and understand the story and the order and the characters and how everything fits together and the themes and all of that in ways that maybe you and I imagine is only something that experts are allowed to do. Now, I think we can really get this thing for ourselves. And even though it's complex, I think it is meant to be understood. And further, my friend who's coming back to check this podcast out and you're starting all the way back at the beginning of the first episode, you are really good at interpreting things. You've been interpreting commercials and art and music and storytelling since you were old enough to have your eyes open and pay attention to things. So you bring a huge skill set to this project and this endeavor, and you are going to succeed. You're gonna get Matthew in your hip pocket, and I'm along with you on that journey and learning stuff as we go along. So thank you for being a part of this. Any meaningful connection on the internet in this day and age is something we should not take for granted. And the fact that you're here is something I don't take for granted. Seriously, thank you. And that's it for the prologue. Here's the first episode of the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Hey, I'm Matt, and this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. All right, here's the deal. Two things that I think are very true. One, the Bible is a ridiculously important book. I know not everybody believes that there's a God behind it. I know there's a lot of people who are even here who would say they're not religious in any way, and you're awesome, by the way. Thank you for being here. But I would still say we'd all have to agree that there's a reason the Bible is the best-selling book ever. It makes huge claims that have huge claims on our lives and even on society. That's exciting for some, it's freaky for others, for some, it looks like an opportunity to grab power. For others, it's very humbling and soul shaping. But no matter how you slice it, this book has influenced a ton of people, a ton of society, and in a lot of ways, you could even make the case that everything we're doing even right now, morally, ethically, for better, for worse, is effectively a dialogue with this book that maybe about half of us think is from God, and maybe about half of us think isn't. So it's a big deal. Second thing that I think is a true statement is that it is a very complicated book. Let's just be honest, because of the way the thing is composed, it takes a lot of time to understand, to unwrap this thing. I mean, you're talking about a book that was written over maybe 1500, 1600 years worth of time. I mean, think about what was going on 1600 years before now. It's like 400 AD. How many of us can name more than two people off the top of our heads who were even alive in 400 AD? Well, the Bible spans that much time, and part of the reason it's complex is because you do have this gigantic time span that you're trying to wrap your brain around because it's not a uniform document. Culture is changing, history is changing, empires are coming and going, expectations are changing, and on top of that, what happened in the early parts of the Bible is informing how life is unfolding in the later parts of the Bible. This is not one tight little children's book that happens over the course of a lovely afternoon in the meadow. This is an elaborate epic, the epic of epics, but it's also complex because it was written by a whole bunch of different people. Most of the books that you read that are epics were just written by the one lady or the one dude, but this was written by tons of authors, and they didn't even write it all in the same language. In fact, the same languages didn't even all exist at the same time. And on top of that, it wasn't written in one place. It was written all over the known ancient world and classical world. So that adds a wrinkle. And so what you have is this enormously important book, I think everybody would agree on that. Let's call that established, that is very challenging to interpret. And part of the reason we know it's challenging to interpret are those reasons that I just threw out. I mean, it's the nuts and bolts of it make it challenging to interpret, right? But part of the reason that we know intuitively that it's challenging to interpret is because we've all heard people do insane things with it. We've heard people within and from outside the boundaries of historical Christianity look at verses that seem to be saying one thing and do something totally different with it, or grab one little bit out of the clear blue sky and be like, this means we need to do this thing. And we can all tell that's just completely insane. We also all know that it is complex to interpret because we know what good interpretation looks like, even if we don't know what good Bible interpretation looks like. We know what it is to sit with our really smart friend and have her sit there and be like, oh, well, you know, this movie we've just both went and watched, if you think about this thing or that thing, you can see these themes and be like, holy cow, this lady is a genius, and she's right, there is something there, and then we grow from that. So we can picture good interpretation, we can picture bad interpretation, we can picture maybe how the deck is stacked just a little bit against us in terms of this being a challenging thing to interpret, and then add to that that it just has huge implications. And so, you know, we're gonna be maybe uh bringing presuppositions and biases to the text with us when we go to interpret it, and we got a challenge. So here's the thing I do think there's a way to get past this. Implicit in how the Bible is built is the expectation that we're gonna take some time to think about it. And by some time I mean a lot of time to think about it. Well, that's kind of where this podcast comes in. What I want to do with this little ten-minute Bible hour podcast thing is process our way through, to start with, just one book of the Bible, the book of Matthew. I want to take as long as it takes in little seven to twelve minute daily chunks every weekday to think about this deeply. And that means that the installments each day are gonna be pretty different one to the next. One might be a whole lot of history, the other might be looking at words and ideas and literature, the other's, you know, another day might be thinking about what's going on in our world today. Uh, another might be looking at some of the language behind this and uh some of the original cultural expectations that the original audience would have had. I mean, who knows where we're gonna have to go to wade into this thing and really understand it. And I know that we don't have a ton of time to do it, so we're just gonna sneak it into these tiny little chunks and see what we can learn. And my hope is that together, and I really do mean together, we can process this thing through and when we get done, feel like, all right, the Bible's a big book and it's challenging, but we have one of those books kind of in our hip pocket. Maybe not just solved for all time, but I want us to get to the end of this and feel like I really get Matthew. I feel like I understand what Matthew was going for, how this thing is built, how to interpret some of the trickier parts of this thing, and how to read the big picture of the document and come away with frankly less confusion than what we had walking in. The Bible's important, the Bible can be challenging to interpret, so we can just lament that fact and have this really important influential document be something that's just beyond our grasp, or we can try. So you're here, so I guess that means you're up for trying. Thank you. I'm really excited about that. I'm up for trying too. I'm gonna try really, really super hard to do an awesome job of preparing good stuff and trying to do very honest preparation. The goal of this exercise is not for me to descend from the mountain of all knowing knowingness, because I don't live on that mountain. And the goal is not for me to descend from there and to come to you and be like, there, now I proved it. You have to believe all my things and do my religion like me and hold all the same convictions as me. That's nonsense. This is a process. Uh the goal of this is to do it together. And so it'd be silly for me to try and make you all just like me or think my stuff, because I won't even be like me right now when we're done with this process. Because we change and we grow as we learn things, and I'm excited to share that with you. So, once again, the game plan is through the book of Matthew, every single weekday, in seven to twelve minute daily chunks, I'll have that ready for you in the morning so you can take it with you on your commute, workout, whatever you do. Um I'm honored in advance that you would even get through these ten minutes and consider letting me be a part of this conversation with you. But I really hope you decide to. I really hope you decide to just make this part of what you do and dedicate a little tiny chunk of every single day to thinking deeply about this very important book, regardless of what you believe about it. So every weekday we're gonna do that. Fridays, I might do some different stuff, I might do some long form stuff. I don't know. I just reserve the right to go a little bit crazy there, or I reserve the right to just do more stuff on Matthew on Fridays. We'll see. It's gonna be fun and a little bit of a wild card, but mostly our goal is just process through this book. So we're gonna do that. I've got a YouTube channel called the 10-minute Bible hour. It's just the 10-minute Bible hour with nothing else on it. And we do a bunch of different stuff over there. Here we're gonna do a whole lot of very specific Bible stuff over on the YouTube channel. We'll keep doing the kind of things that we have been doing, looking at theology and church history and some some direct Bible and also going around other churches and visiting them and talking about what they think and why they think it. And we'll just keep charging ahead with both of these. One other thing I want to tell you. This whole podcast thing that we're just about to start is only possible because a whole bunch of people over on the YouTube channel decided that they wanted to support the program at patreon.com slash TMBH. And because they did that, I was able to free up enough of my time to finally be able to commit to this thing I've been wanting to do since forever. So thank you, all of you, who made that possible. And if you want to support this program, I just set up a page where you can do that if you're into that kind of thing. It's patreon.com slash the tmbh podcast.com. No wait. I screwed it up. All I had to do was get it right. It's patreon.com slash the tmbh podcast. You can totally trust me. I mean, I can't get a simple URL that's right in front of my face right, but we're totally gonna be able to interpret the whole Bible together. Whatever, we're gonna have fun. Thank you for being here, and we'll get after the book of Matthew tomorrow. All right, we'll catch you then.