Hey, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And do you remember a while back when there the whole six-seven thing was going on? I wanted to be all above it at first. I wanted to be like, this is dumb kid culture, stupid. But it grew on me when it was all the rage, because it was one thing that everybody had in common. The cool kids, the dopey kids, all the kids, if they ever heard anybody say six, seven, which is a pretty common thing to hear people say because of how six and seven are right next to each other on the number line. If they ever heard anybody say it, all the kids knew to yell and make this hand gesture and all be excited together. And it was silly and it didn't really mean much. I think it was born out of a rap video and then something from TikTok internet culture, but it quickly leaked way beyond that. And it became this thing that is very rare anymore, which was this big shared cultural phenomenon. And if you were a student of culture studying this era of history, you could look at a video made on the internet that was clearly targeted to middle school kids and know that if somebody in there looks knowingly at the camera and says six, seven, oh, okay, well, I know what they mean by that. It's a nod to this short-lived meme thing that happened. Okay, okay. But if you're any good at interpreting stuff, and then you went and looked at a video that was made on the exact same day that was targeted toward people who like the National Basketball Association and like to study the NBA draft and all the up-and-coming prospects, you could figure out pretty quickly. I mean, you would know that anytime they said 6'7 in that video, even though it was made at the exact same time, that it's not a reference to the meme, it's a reference to how tall that given basketball prospect is. This is common sense, basic interpretation of the world. We can all figure this out just simply by saying, okay, well, who is the target audience of each of these two hypothetical videos? And if I know that, I know why they said six, seven. Likewise, when we look at the four gospels, if we think a little bit about who each of these gospels, these are the first four books of the New Testament, each of which tell the story of Jesus. If we bear in mind who each of these gospels was written to, it can help us to figure out some of the trickier parts that maybe were a little more customized to that audience. In particular, I'm thinking of the passage we're working on here at the beginning of John, John 1, 1, and 2. I've read it a few times the last few days. I'm going to read it again. In the beginning was the word. Word is the hinge word here we're trying to figure out. And the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Now, I've told you the last couple of days, word here means Jesus. But why is John using word instead of Jesus? Why not just say Jesus? And to get to the bottom of it, or at least to take steps in that direction, I thought we would consider today who each of these gospel writers were targeting and see if that gives us any clues. So let's start with Matthew. That's the first one. The Gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And if you were here for season one of this podcast, you already know who Matthew was written to because we talked about it a billion times. Matthew was written to Jewish people. It's absolutely packed with explicit citations of the Jewish scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. It opens with a genealogy that dates all the way back to Abraham. It uses the phrase kingdom of heaven. It assumes the original audience is completely familiar with all kinds of Jewish customs and holidays and rhythms of life. And Matthew is using all of this stuff every time it comes up. He's trying to make the point that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament, of the story arcs that were left unfinished coming out of the Old Testament. He's the fulfillment of the prophecy. He's the lock and key solution to the theological puzzles that are left coming out of the Old Testament. I've said it before, but Jesus in Matthew is the bump bump to the Old Testament's bop, bada dot dot. Jesus is that thing, the only thing that will complete the Old Testament. Well, most of the ancient world didn't care that much about the Old Testament. Most of them had never even heard of it. But for the Jews, it was the most important thing ever. So when we read Matthew, we got to keep that in the back of our minds if we want to read it well. Any little riddle or tricky part that we get stuck on, we can start by just running it through that filter. Okay, oh, Matthew's trying to make it make sense to the Jews. And a lot of times that is enough right there to get unstuck and make sense of it. Okay, how about Mark? Well, Mark's less than half the length of Matthew. It is action-packed, it is super fast, and it looks like it was written to Roman people, maybe people in Rome, maybe people who just thought of themselves as being Roman in terms of their identity. Now, historically, we know enough about how Mark happened that this squares. Mark worked with Peter, Mark was in Rome with Peter and with Paul. Mark shows up at the end of the book of Philemon. He's there hanging out with Paul, probably literally at the end of the book of Philemon, which was our season last time around, where Paul is saying, Oh, and you know, John Mark is here with me too and sends his greetings. Probably John Mark was sitting over there in the corner with a pen and a sheet of paper working on the gospel of Mark. At that time, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. That's pretty good. I think there's a great chance that at least part of Mark was written in Rome to Roman people, and that it was derived from the sermons and recollections of Peter that he was framing up in such a way that they were meant to make sense to the humans in the city of Rome, Peter was explaining it all to. As a result, Mark, who was Jewish and knew all this stuff about Jewish customs, still takes the time to explain them. He does not assume the original audience knows any of the stuff that Matthew assumes the original audience knows things about. You know what? Hang on a second. This is an opportunity for me. Just a minute. I'm excited. I wrote about this. I wrote a book. It's called The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible. It has a lot of things in it that we talk about on this podcast. It's not out yet. I mean, as I'm recording this, it comes out here in a couple of months. There's always a link down below if you want to pre-order this thing. There's my little sales pitch. And I've got a couple of little parts here in the chapter on Mark that speak exactly to this. I'm going to read them to you because that is fun. This book, Mark, explodes out of the gate with its thesis in the opening line: the beginning of the good news about Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God. In one brief declaration, Mark tells you Jesus is the promised deliver, that there's only one God and Jesus is his son, an idea that would have piqued the curiosity of a Roman reader. And he's also implied the fact that if you're reading this book, then the good news he's talking about is for you, no matter who you are or where you're from. Now, at this time, most of Mark's readers would have known dang well that Rome executed Jesus, and they would have wanted to know well, are you saying that Rome got it wrong? There's a little bit more here. Mark is always pushing the action forward. He constantly uses the phrase at once or immediately to keep the story hurrying forward. Jesus is presented as a man of action who knows exactly who he is and exactly what he's here to do. Among the Gospels, Mark records the fewest words of Jesus. Instead, he emphasizes Jesus' deeds. A presentation like that would resonate with a first century audience in Rome. All right, I got carried away. But Mark also uses a bunch of little Latinisms, he uses Roman vocabulary, and he puts a lot of emphasis on persecution and suffering, which would have made sense to the Roman church at the time Mark was probably written, which would have corresponded with Nero, who was punishing the Christians and making life a complete nightmare for them. So one helpful little trick for making sense of Mark is to try to think about the tricky parts against the backdrop of how Romans or Roman Christians would have thought about it. Then we've got Luke, my first love as a gospel. I've been through Luke deeply a couple of times. I love this book. I love the sequel book of Acts. And it looks like Luke was written to a very well-educated, Greek-minded, Greek-speaking audience that would have been mostly Gentiles. In both Luke and the sequel, Acts, Luke emphasizes the idea that Jesus is the savior for all people, not just the Jews. So if you start with that assumption and you know who he's talking to, that sort of unlocks Luke when you get into those tricky parts. You see Luke taking his very broad, non-Jewish audience into account with decisions like tracing the genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam, not just Abraham. Jews would have wanted to go to Abraham, he's like the first in the line, but Luke takes it all the way back to Adam, kind of saying, This is all of us, it's always been all of us, we're a big family. So again, when we're trying to make sense of Luke and especially the hard stuff in Luke, remembering what he's trying to accomplish and who he seems to be writing to is very, very helpful. So if we can agree that when we're trying to make sense of something difficult in anything that we want to understand better, that one of the tricks that really helps is to consider who it was written to, whether we're talking about a hypothetical hype video made for middle school boys that references 6-7, or a very technical, nerdy NBA draft preparation video that breaks down each of the prospects and how tall each of them are, or whether we're talking about Matthew being written to Jews, Mark being written to Romans, Luke being written to a global, largely Gentile Greek speaking audience. If we can agree that a common sense interpretive trick to decoding each of those things is to consider who the original target audience was, then I gotta think that learning a little bit more about that with John is gonna help us make sense of what's going on on this rather tricky, rather philosophical, rather theological prologue here on the front end of John that leans so heavily on this concept of the word. And tomorrow we're gonna dig into exactly that. Who is John talking to here and what exactly is he trying to accomplish? Did you see the way I used that as an excuse to go and touch on all of the Gospels? Because I think they're great, and I just want to use John as an excuse to get all over the Bible as well as study John deeply. I did what I did. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.