This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 551: Read the Bible for Yourself 18: Helpful Tools to Understand the Bible by Sean Finnegan

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

00:08
Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan. And you are listening to Restitutio podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today.

00:24
What tools can help you understand the Bible better? Today we'll cover some recommended resources for you to deepen your study of the Scriptures, including Bible dictionaries, commentaries, Bible software, AI.

00:38
And more. Of course, it's impossible to cover everything in a reasonable time frame, so I'll just recommend two or three of each resource type, focusing primarily on tools that I personally have and use regularly.

00:52
Here now is Episode 551 part 18, the last episode of our class. Read the Bible for yourself, helpful tools to understand the Bible.

01:11
Question why do we need helpful tools to understand the Bible? Why do we need helpful tools?

01:19
Good question. Good question. I think there's so many of us out there who think to ourselves.

01:25
Just me and my Bible and I'm good. There's definitely a truth to that statement. There is definitely a truth to the fact that the Bible is written in such a way that.

01:37
The really important salvational stuff, pretty much anybody in any time period could understand, so long as it's in their language.

01:45
But there are other things that we can misunderstand. If we don't know about their world, and we've talked about this before, so I'm not going to belabor it, but they have a different geography, a different history, a different culture, different science, different philosophical understandings. And there are different cultures in the Bible, in the Old Testament.

02:05
In the ancient Near eastern culture and the New Testament in the Gospels, where in 1st century Jewish culture, which is typically called Second Temple Judaism.

02:15
And then once we're into the epistles, we're in the Greco-roman world. All of a sudden. So these are different cultures that have different assumptions and different economics, different literacy.

02:26
And so it's helpful to have study tools to guide us and to give us.

02:33
Some help along the way. Our outline for what we are going to talk about now in our last session of this class is I'm going to cover Bible dictionaries, commentaries.

02:44
Bible Project videos, software and search tools. So first up our Bible dictionaries, Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias are resources that you can use to look up a place, a name, or a topic.

03:03
And so some of the more commonly known ones are the international Standard Bible Encyclopedia.

03:11
This is a 5 volume set from the year 1915. It's out of copyright. If you're on a free website, chances are it's going to be loaded in there and it'll be accessible for free. It's still good on some things, but it's way out of date. Literally a century plus out of date.

03:31
From later archaeological, linguistic and other kinds of scholarly discoveries and adjustments.

03:40
Which can sometimes be helpful that it's out of date to show you like this is what people used to believe a century ago, but it's not all that helpful for you. You have the Urbans Dictionary of the Bible from the year 2000, which is pretty helpful, more updated version of that, as the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary from 2015.

04:00
So any any of these can be helpful for looking up most different things. I think the newer stuff is better so I don't think about that. In regards to everything in life, just for the record. But when it comes to scholarly tools, it does generally apply, not always but.

04:16
Early.

04:17
The mother lode is the IVP Bible Dictionary series. If you really want to invest in a fancy Bible dictionary, whether Prince or digital, you can get the inner varsity Press Bible dictionary series they have. Let's see how many volumes here 12345678 volumes.

04:37
On different sections of the Bible and notice like these are similar to the sections we covered in this class, right? They have one on the Torah, which they call the Pentateuch. They have one on historical books, one on wisdom, poetry and writings, one on the prophets, one on New Testament background. Right. So, you know, these are not all that foreign to you and they span the years.

04:58
From 1997 to 2023, scholarly resources take a long time to produce.

05:05
And that's a good dictionary to look at if you're interested, let's move on to commentaries.

05:11
Now there are free commentaries.

05:15
I'm going to say the same thing over and over again, but there are free commentaries. They're the commentaries that are out of copyright. They're old and they're commentaries like Matthew Henry, the People's New Testament, Jamieson, Fawcett and Brown, John Calvin's commentary. John Wesley's commentary. These are all commentaries that are freely available in.

05:35
Free.

05:36
Bible apps you get on your phone on websites. Problem is with those older commentaries. One I don't want to say this too strongly, but oftentimes they do not tell you the.

05:46
Options.

05:47
For interpreting a verse, they just tell you what their opinion is and let me tell you, new commentaries don't do that a quality.

05:56
Viewer commentary is going to say to you this verse is understood in these different ways.

06:04
For these different reasons, and I think this option is the best For these reasons, which is a way more helpful thing for you to understand, because even if you disagree with the with the author of the commentary, you at least now know what the options are.

06:20
And so I think that's a big reason to prefer the the newer commentaries over the old ones, the old ones also missed out on discoveries of manuscripts, archaeological discoveries and language changes and discoveries.

06:34
Did you know that it wasn't that long ago, maybe 100 years or 200 years ago, they thought that the New Testament Greek was was a was a Holy Ghost language, that it was a special language that only the New Testament existed in?

06:46
And then they found a whole cache. Really a dump, literally an ancient dump of fragments of ancient Greek in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. And they're like, oh, this is the same kind of Greek as the New Testament.

07:00
I guess there wasn't a Holy Ghost language and then, you know, they concluded the opposite. They're like it was St. Greek.

07:06
It was the common language of the people that the New Testament was written in and and look this this has a bearing on how you define words.

07:16
If you have all this other comparable literature to help you understand a difficult word in the New Testament, and so older resources don't have the the benefit of those discoveries.

07:27
Biblical studies has made major discoveries in the last century or two, three and Stewart say in their book how to read the Bible. For all its worth, Jesus says it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom of God. You will sometimes hear it said that there was a gate in Jerusalem.

07:47
Known as the Needles Eye, which camels could go through only by kneeling and with great difficulty, the point of this interpretation is that a camel could in fact go through the needle's eye.

08:00
The trouble with this exegesis, however, is that it is.

08:03
Simply not true.

08:05
There never was such a gate in Jerusalem at anytime in its history.

08:09
The earliest known evidence for this idea is found in the 11th century. It's 1000 years after Christ.

08:17
In a commentary by a Greek churchman named Theophylact, who had the same difficulty with the text that many later readers do, after all, it is impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. And that was precisely Jesus's point.

08:32
It is impossible for someone who is rich to enter the Kingdom. It takes a miracle for a rich person to get saved. It's a minor thing, right? But you will look at some of these older or free resources and you will say, wow, this is really something. This gate in Jerusalem, it's called the the eye of the needle, but it's wrong.

08:53
Right. So that's an example of something that crept in and then was later overturned and is not going to be found in any of the modern ones. So what commentaries should you get if you're interested? So I was only going to get one commentary for the Bible. It would be the Zondervan Illustrated Bible background commentary. The CBC is 10 volumes.

09:14
It's a couple 100 bucks in print for the Old Testament couple 100 bucks for the New Testament, but combined they they give you a deal. I.

09:22
Don't know how it works.

09:24
I don't have the physical version. I have a digital version of it and it works pretty well. The physical version might be even better because they have a lot of, like pretty pictures to look at. That probably look better there than on my screen.

09:38
I love this commentary. It's so helpful, but it's not the sort of commentary that's going to tell you verse by verse. What is the verse mean?

09:46
It's a background commentary.

09:49
So what it's going to do is give you information that is helpful for understanding the Bible. It's not so much gonna tell you what the Bible means.

09:58
So it'll tell you about other literature that is similar to what's in the Bible. Other archaeological like a statue or something like that that is somehow related to the Bible. So it's a background commentary, it's not expository. It's not going verse by verse, so it is limited in that sense. That's why it's so.

10:19
You might think 10 volumes and 500 bucks is a lot. That's nothing when it in the commentary world, that's just like nothing, OK.

10:28
As I will demonstrate with this next one, which is 50 volumes, if you get both the Old Testament and the New Testament, it's not even, I don't think fully finished yet. They've been working on it for who knows.

10:38
And that's the new international commentary, the Nicot and the Nye Kent. That's the new international commentary, the Old Testament, new International commentary of the New Testament. It's a fantastic commentary. It is expensive, whether in print or digital, but it is very good.

10:57
They're generally very good at giving you the options for understanding something and then providing their reasons. Like I was saying just a minute ago. It's a good mix between scholarly and readable.

11:09
The new international commentary, it's not really a technical commentary, but is is written by the same the the people that have those credentials and know that technical stuff to the deepest levels. But it's not getting too technical.

11:22
Unlike this one, the new international Greek Testament commentary, the NI GTC's just New Testament 12 volumes. Super technical, you got to know the original Greek, but if you do, this is such a great commentary, very helpful, serve like the Nic on steroids.

11:40
And then let me go in the opposite direction, totally non-technical, no Greek at all and that's the New Testament for.

11:47
Three one by NT Wright, it's 18 volumes. It's actually affordable. It's paperback as opposed to hard cover. What NT right does I have this commentary? I've had it for years and I, you know, I use it from time to time, not not all the time, but he takes a paragraph from Scripture, he translates it himself as his own translation into. He rides the world.

12:07
Best scholar, probably the most famous New Testament scholar of the Century so far, and.

12:14
He gives his own translation of the paragraph of the Bible, and then he tells like a story that's interesting and relates. And then he explains the the overall so so he's not getting in the nitty gritty, he's not going verse by verse, but he's giving you, like an overview of stuff and it's it's pretty helpful.

12:33
I have a friend that read the.

12:34
Whole thing, bless his heart.

12:37
Commentaries are not the sort of books unless your name is Vince Finnegan who will sit there and literally just read a commentary front to back in his recliner chair. Like it's normal like other than my dad. Like, I really have never seen anybody read a commentary front to back the way you typically use them is you're reading the Bible and you're like, oh, this verse is.

12:56
Confusing. Let's see what the commentary says and you look up the commentary for just that verse and get an explanation. That's how it's used. You don't just like sit and read it other than my dad. Apparently that's something he likes to do.

13:11
All right. On to the next thing. Bible Project videos, probably many, many people know about this, but I'm going to explain it anyhow. The Bible project is the brainchild of Tim Mackey, who's a world class biblical scholar. He has a PhD, he reads Hebrew and Greek, and he is gifted at seeing.

13:30
The structure of biblical books more than really anybody I've ever encountered, where like he just sees the structure of how the book is put together. How is the book of Isaiah put together? How is the book of Philemon put together? Or, you know, revelation so he has all these videos?

13:47
Was.

13:48
With a really gifted visual artist named John Collins, and so the two of them, Tim Mackie and John Collins, they they narrate these videos. He's got ones that are book overviews and he's already done the whole Bible. So for the Old Testament, they have 39 videos for the New Testament. They have 26 videos.

14:09
Every book of the Bible is covered, but not necessarily in its own video. So like first through third John is one video instead of one for first John, one for second John 1. So that explains the numbers a little.

14:19
So for each of these Bible book overview videos, there's a full visual representation and animation. These are YouTube videos they're about, I don't know, 5-10 minutes. They're very short. Tim Mackey Stuff is is really good. I wouldn't agree with all of his beliefs exactly, but he has an incredible gift.

14:39
Keep his beliefs out from what the Bible says and just tell you what it says in its own context. So he's got these book overviews, which I think are the best.

14:50
But then he also has how to read the Bible 19 videos on that. What's the name of this class? How to read the Bible? Yeah, OK. He has theme videos. 41 of those, he's got word study videos. There's 21 of those and he's got many more. They're all free. They're all on YouTube. It's all crowdfunded and so forth. All right, on to Bible software.

15:11
There are two main Bible apps out there these days. They are called accordance Bible software and logos Bible software. Both will help you get a ton of English translations.

15:26
You know, if you want to get all the English translations I mentioned last time this software will you you can pay for it and they will load all of that in the.

15:34
Here they'll give you access to the original Hebrew and the Greek. You can get access to the BHS. You can get access to the BHQ. I have that in accordance. You can access to the Nestle Aland 28th edition. All those things that I was telling you about last session are in these software packages, but the way these both of these Bible software programs.

15:54
Work and most of them work these days.

15:56
Is that you can buy a base package, but then you buy resources individually for stuff that you want to add on because there there are just so many Bible resources in the world today that if you wanted to, like, fully add on everything, it would be over $40,000. Seriously, like they have that as an option.

16:17
So you don't want to add on everything that's ever been written about English, Hebrew and Greek. OK, so or about the Bible. So you pick the resources that you.

16:27
Want.

16:28
And then you just pay for those and both of these play the game of having sales and their sales are really good usually. So you wait till something goes on sale, you buy it.

16:41
And then you know the rest of the.

16:43
Year.

16:43
Is expensive, but everything goes on sale at least like one month a year, maybe everything, but most things.

16:50
These software programs will also give you cross references. Cross references are actually super helpful because they show you where Old Testament quotes come from in the New Testament. They show you where parallel scriptures occur between the Gospels and similar verses.

17:05
They'll give you outlines of Bible books and you'll be able to search. These are these have very powerful search engines in them. We could search English, you could search fuzzy English where like not the exact phrase but like similar.

17:18
Which is kind of cool. You can search alright. Show me all the times that this Greek word occurs, regardless of whether it's in the future tense, present tense or past tense. Any tense and just in the book of Second Peter, you can do searches like that in these Bible software. The differences between them is that accordance.

17:38
Doesn't work well on PC's. It runs like butter on a Mac.

17:42
But it's a little at least currently. Maybe they'll improve this. It's it's a little choppy on the PC, but the commentaries and resources are less expensive in accordance than in logos. So I find myself using accordance a lot because it's less expensive. I use accordance virtually every day.

18:02
I even read the Bible in the mornings. I'll read it in the Bible. Software logos is better for PC users. It's got a lot of sermon preparation stuff in it. It's got a steeper learning curve.

18:14
But when it comes to the phone app, the Logos Phone app, in my opinion is way better than the accordance one. And I use the Logos phone app every day as well. In fact, for a year, just in case I want to look up a verse in the middle of this. So I think they're both great. If you're looking to get deeper in things and really.

18:34
Bring your study of the Bible to the next level. You can get either one of these, whichever one you think works better for you, and then they have tutorial videos where you can learn how to use them like because they're they're both so ridiculously complicated as far as like all the things.

18:48
They can do that. You have to just, like, watch the videos that are of interest to you because it can do more than what you want to do. Like I probably use 10% of what it can do and I'm a pretty nerdy guy. So alright, let's talk about search tools. Let's say you want to find.

19:06
Something in the Bible.

19:08
Let's say you want to ask a question who are all the women mentioned in Luke's gospel?

19:15
You can't type that into your Bible software, but you can type it into artificial intelligence.

19:21
An AI chatbot will give you that answer like that. So here's a little screenshot of ChatGPT and I asked that question list all the women in Luke's gospel, it replied in the Gospel of Luke, several women are mentioned who play significant roles in the narrative or are referenced in various contexts. Here is a list of.

19:42
Some of the women mentioned in Luke's gospel and then #1 Mary Luke one through 2 #2, Elizabeth #3, Anna #4, Mary, and it just goes. It's just instantaneous, totally free. I use.

19:55
AI every day when I'm trying to find something in the Bible and I know like AI was not.

20:03
Made for this.

20:04
It was made for other things probably, but like, it's really good at finding out like a list of something. I asked it during this class I asked it how many blocks of teachings.

20:15
Are in the book of Matthew and has said there are five blocks of teaching in the book of Matthew. Here are the references. Here are the.

20:21
Names of each of the teachings.

20:24
And like I already knew that, but I like. I wanted to see what it said.

20:27
It's just like boom. There it is.

20:29
So.

20:30
The problem with AI is you gotta check everything yourself because it does make mistakes and you don't want to depend on it and then just copy paste and then find out that ohh that reference was off or that there's a repeated item in a list or something and the other thing it does really well is summarizing.

20:47
You can say summarize for me what Romans Chapter 5 is about, and it and it's never going to give you like a really intelligent.

20:54
Nuanced.

20:55
Summary or at least not currently. It gives you the generic blase summary, but you know what? That's helpful. A lot of times. One other use I had for AI for this class was.

21:05
Because.

21:06
I asked it about revelation. I said what are the various interpretive lenses for the Book of Revelation and Boom 12345 right down the list. So it's very helpful for stuff that you might traditionally use an Internet search for, whether Google or Bing or whatever you use for Internet searches. Now the AI chat bots are.

21:27
Very helpful for that and they're.

21:28
Free.

21:29
I did not pay a subscription for the.

21:32
And I'm not getting paid for this, so here's another one. A website calledopenbible.info. If you have ever searched the Internet for a phrase like what does the Bible say about pride, this is probably a website that came up. It's usually number one or two, and it just gives you a list of verses.

21:52
From the ESV and right next to the list of verses will be a number of votes. So this is crowdsourced.

22:02
Where people are voting this verse most relates to this word or phrase. So proverbs 11/2 has 14,884 helpful votes for the topic. Pride.

22:16
And so you could type in to openbible.info, you know, whatever.

22:22
Word or phrase and it will just list all the verses ranked by actual humans who have human intelligence, which I think is still very useful. So that's that's about it for helpful Bible too.

22:34
Rules you can go as deep as you want. You know what I mean? You can. You can get the commentaries. You can get the Bible dictionaries. You can learn the languages or not, you know. But like, what is? What does any of it matter?

22:45
If.

22:46
You don't read it, you got to.

22:47
Actually.

22:48
Read the book. I'm going to come back to that in a second, but let's just take a moment to take stock.

22:54
And think about what we've been through. We began asking the question why?

23:00
Should you read the Bible for yourself?

23:03
And I talked about the reasons why so you can detect the genuine from the counterfeit by familiarizing yourself with the genuine and understanding the genuine.

23:13
Because let me tell you, there are so many. Like, I showed you the eye of the needle myth. There's so many of these things out there and nobody knows we're in the information age where information is just sloshing around and you know this guy made a TikTok video that went viral. So now everybody thinks this way.

23:33
But yet nobody's actually looking into the Bible to see what it says.

23:38
So that's a good reason for us to be able to read the Bible for.

23:41
Ourselves.

23:43
We talked about what you need to know about your Bible, how to read the Bible in context, how to determine content and application, and then we started going through the Bible section by section. We did Old Testament history, law, wisdom, literature.

23:58
The Psalms, the prophets we did New Testament background, the Gospels, acts, Church epistles, pastoral epistles, general epistles, the Book of Revelation. Last time we talked about translations and now.

24:14
You even know some helpful tools for the Bible?

24:17
You are now.

24:18
Well equipped to read the Bible for yourself.

24:23
Good.

24:23
But it takes work.

24:26
Being well equipped is not the same as actually doing the thing. Think of a ship completely equipped with all it needs, and yet it's sitting in the dock.

24:35
It needs to go right in order to make the journey and be of benefit. It takes discipline. My I recommend that you set aside a time every day.

24:46
To read your Bible.

24:47
Personally I do it first thing in the morning. Other people do it during lunch. Other people do it in the evening or at night, whatever it's not. That's not what really matters. What really matters is that you not to get too theological. What you sanctify a time of your day, where you say this is my Bible time and if you.

25:05
Don't do that.

25:07
I mean, you can listen to the Bible while you're driving. You can listen to it while you're going for a run or exercising or whatever you do. Unless you're a swimmer, in which case it's more difficult. But that's not quite the same thing as sitting down and reading it with your eyes or sitting down.

25:28
And listening to it, but not doing something else.

25:31
So that would be my encouragement is to have a time.

25:35
I highly recommend that you pray. I know I mentioned this before, I'll just mention it again. You pray beforehand say God help me understand this.

25:43
Help me understand what what I read.

25:46
And then when you're done reading, ask the application question.

25:52
God, is there anything you want me to do?

25:56
In light of what I read today.

25:59
So there's the application of like what does this mean for us today? And we've talked about how to properly handle that, but then there's also a Holy Spirit component of of our relationship with God.

26:10
Where he can apply scripture to your life in a way that's personal to you, somebody else maybe wouldn't even understand what you're talking about. But to you, it makes sense and he can speak to you in that way. And so I think opening up the door for that to happen is valuable. Don't just read and understand the Bible.

26:29
And those classes read the Bible for yourself. But like, don't just read and understand the Bible. Think the Bible live the Bible as well. Let the Bible change you.

26:41
Let's review.

26:42
Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias provide short articles on places, individuals, and topics in the Bible.

26:50
Older and free research tools sometimes contain inaccuracies that more recent scholarship has overturned or updated.

26:59
A good commentary tells you the options for interpreting a verse. Reasons for each of those options, and a suggestion for which one makes the most sense.

27:10
The Bible projects book overview videos are really helpful to get a general understanding of a book of.

27:15
The Bible.

27:17
Bible software on PC's, tablets and phones provides world class research tools to help you study scripture.

27:25
When searching for a phrase, a topic or something specific, you can use a Bible app, openbible.info or AI.

27:35
Well, that draws an end to our 18 bar class on how to read the Bible for yourself. If you enjoyed this class, check out our other classes on lhim.org.

27:49
And as we're just winding things down here, I want to leave you with a challenge. I want to leave you with the challenge to read the entire Bible.

28:00
I know many of you have already read the Bible. I don't care. I'm still challenging. You read it again, read the whole thing. It's so good for you to read through the Bible. And if you've never read through the Bible before.

28:12
Where you would be so amazed at how many things like you've just heard of or showed up in a movie or some line from somebody from years ago and you're like, oh, that's where they got that from. All these things are in there. And if you read through the whole Bible, you will get so much benefit from it. So why not do it? And May God bless you as you read his book.

28:38
Well.

28:39
That brings this session, and in fact this entire class to an end 18 episodes, my goodness.

28:47
Now you may have other research tools that I didn't mention in this episode that you find useful. If so, why not come on to restitutio.org and find Episode 551 helpful tools to understand the Bible and leave your comments there? Would love to know what it is that you are using.

29:07
Well, we got a new review.

29:12
Someone named 2 tennis girl gave a 5 star rating and wrote podcast for deep thinkers. Well, that's a short and sweet review. Love it. Thanks so much. Two tennis girl for the support. Also on Spotify we have gotten.

29:30
Several comments in.

29:32
Some from a little while back, but I hadn't seen them until today. I found a new button where.

29:38
Where it reveals.

29:40
All the comments that I have not yet seen, I'm going to read a number of those out on Podcast 43, which was called identity theft by Vince Finnegan. My father, one of his most powerful sermons.

29:52
On who God is, who Jesus is, you know, hence the title identity theft.

29:57
Somebody named Danielle wrote in saying John 1030 I and the father are one. Jesus says that he is God.

30:07
Just to be honest, this one is bothersome that it comes up so frequently.

30:14
John, 1030 I and my father are one to put upon Jesus that he's talking ontologically about some sort of mystical metaphysical.

30:27
Lucia, Substance, essence, nature be.

30:31
Being.

30:32
Is just to me, absolutely laughable. Jesus had just spoken about how his father is caring for the sheep, how he is caring for the sheep, and then he says I and my father are one. Obviously and caring for the sheep. He's not talking about his essence.

30:52
He's talking about his function, his purpose. We have to read the Bible in context. This is a good example of what happens when we take a single verse, as if we're treating the Bible as what a scientific textbook or a law code or something like that.

31:09
Not that they're.

31:10
Aren't legal codes in the Bible, but this is certainly not one of them, and we pull this one sentence out and we say, OK, this is the way it is. And then we interpret it from a modern perspective. This is a good example of what not to do, and it comes up over and over and over again. I mean, even really top level theologians.

31:30
Evangelical theologians will will point to John 1030 as evidence of the deity of Christ, and I'm just over here palm to my forehead, thinking to myself ohh my.

31:43
This is really bad this this is your go to this is.

31:47
You listen to an entire sermon called identity theft, which passionately makes the case that Jesus identity has been stolen and your response is John 1030. OK, well, I don't want to be harsh, but I'm not convinced.

32:05
Another comment came in on Will Barlows interview Episode 313, Questioning Way International doctrines. Actually a couple of comments came in on that one on the website and one on Spotify comments.

32:20
The Spotify commentary said awesome. So glad I found this episode. I followed this podcast today. Hey, welcome to restitutio. We're so glad to have you and alante joining us online. Another person had commented in called Daniel, who says that he grew up in the way most of his family still involved. He has separated recently due to doctrinal problems.

32:43
Like tithing and the military structure. I wonder what that refers to if he's talking about just leadership structure in general, or if he's actually talking about.

32:52
But people in the military, I'm not really sure. He goes on to say other than a few doctrinal issues I personally studied, I still greatly value the works and publications that the ministry produced from the early years, and he goes on from there. Well, Dale, welcome to the journey, my friends. A lot of times when we first leave a high control group.

33:12
Or an authoritarian group, if that's what you mean by the military structure comment. We do feel kind of lost, and it takes a little while to figure out a lay of the land. But as it turns out, there are so many different groups and individuals and ministry.

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These online and offline in person many places around the world that are in agreement with the idea that the father is the only true God and Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, the one who was miraculously begotten but not.

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God himself.

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And so I I welcome you to the journey my friend, and you may discover that that you may want to change more of your doctrine as as you go. But there's no rush. Take your time, think it through if you want to know how we're approaching things here at restitutio. I have a 24 part class called.

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Theology, and it's basically just a Theology 101 combined with the theology 201 type class. And so the way it's set up is.

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And.

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I will layout a doctrine in one episode and then in the next episode I will interact with the so-called difficult text for that doctrine and explain how they could be interpreted and harmonized, and so that is available on the podcast feed. You can find that in the main Restitutio podcast.

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Feed or the rest of studio classes, podcast Feed or on the website. There's a tab on the top called classes and this is just called theology. It's available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and other podcast apps, and to listen to on the website as well.

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And you may disagree with a couple of the conclusions that I have come to, and my group has come to over time. But hey, at least tell you what one way of looking at it is. And that might be helpful in itself, even if you don't agree. I also got a couple of comments in about Maccabees.

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One from Bobby Wolfe a while back on my podcast episode 3, which was between the Testaments.

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And another comment and by somebody named Mark both asking about Maccabees and that Intertestamental period. It's interesting. I just I got a book on this called bridging the Testaments I think is what it's called and I've been working through it and I I don't think I have reached out to the author.

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Yeah, but I'm maybe, maybe I have. I'm reaching out to a lot of authors right now to line up interviews, but I'm hoping to get.

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Him on and talk about this intertestamental period, which he doesn't like that term inter testamental, but it is an important period to understand the the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament because so many things happened there and Mark's point was, hey, why not do an extension of this Bible class where you.

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Get into some of the apocryphal literature or the pseudepigraphical literature, or some of the more exotic.

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Static literature that made it into the Ethiopian Canon and my answer to you for that is not today, but thank you for the suggestion. I will certainly consider it in the future, because these are corpuses of literature that I think are interesting and that I have done some work on, especially the Apocrypha.

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But also, you know, I've dipped my toes into the Book of Enoch and certainly read some of the pseudepigraphical literature that has survived. So maybe in the future, thanks for the suggestion. I do appreciate it. Hearing your suggestions does have an effect on what I plan out as far as what I'm going to do. So please keep them.

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Coming, it's hard for me to know what people are interested in, what they're not interested in. I have my own interests, obviously, but there's it's also very helpful to know what you're all interested in. So I will definitely keep that in mind for the future. I will certainly recommend to read 1st and 2nd Maccabees. I think it's super helpful to get that historical backdrop even if we don't consider it to be inspired by God.

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Most Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, do consider it to be really helpful history to understand what happened in between the Testaments.

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So those are some comments from the Restitutio website itself, from Apple Podcast reviews from Spotify questions. Sorry I didn't get to everybody, but keep them rolling in. I certainly do read them all and I do appreciate you taking the time to write and you can go on to restitutio.org find.

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The episode for today and there are quite a few other comments on there that you may also be interested in reading and interacting.

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Now that this class is done, I'm booking lots of interviews. In particular, I've got ones with Suzanne Lakin and another with Kermit Zarley coming up next couple weeks here. I'm also scheduling interviews with a couple of authors as you may or may not know, I am on the list.

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For a few different publishers who will send review copies and set up interviews for me with the different authors of theology textbooks and monographs, and.

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So forth. So I've got a couple of those lined up and a couple of more I need to get back to emails on. And I also have an interview set up with Zach Mayo of New Zealand and that's I think very interesting. Zach is organizing a UCA conference unitary Christian Alliance Conference in.

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New Zealand, so that would be a fun one if you're looking for a vacation.

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Combined with some interesting theology and meeting great people, that might be a perfect fit that's scheduled for November. So stay tuned. It's going to be an awesome series of interviews this summer. I hope you will enjoy them. That's going to be it for me today. If you'd like to support this ministry, you can do that.

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At restitutio.org, thanks to all of you who are supporting us, we'll catch you next week and remember, the truth has nothing to fear.