This is not a normal How I Write episode. First, there are two guests, not one: Tim Mackie and Jon Collins. They’re the founders of The Bible Project, a YouTube channel with more than half a billion views that is entirely devoted to teaching people how to read just one book — one that I believe happens to be the most influential book in the history of Western civilization.
I think you’re going to like this regardless of whether or not you’re religious. Let me know what you think.
Transcript
[10:45] Illusion of Knowing and Turning It Off
[21:24] Comparing Biblical Stories Through Visual Media
[32:48] Finding Joy in Communal Bible Study
[43:53] The Power of Words to Create Reality
[52:55] No Simple Instruction Manual for Life
[65:51] Dialogue-Driven Scripture Teaching Approach
[76:04] Jesus' Teaching Style: Riddles and Revelation
[86:25] Early Bible Reading and Interpretation
David Perell:
Okay, so my first question for both of you is, like, right now I'm in the book of Second Samuel, and when I want to figure out a Bible book, what I do is I go to your YouTube channel and I look up what have John and Tim said about a book?
You guys obviously don't have the luxury of doing that. So when you're thinking about making a new video, where do you start?
Tim and Jon:
Starts with you.
Tim and Jon:
Yes, it does. Usually the ideas for what we're doing come from me saying to you, "Oh, we should really think about this." A concise answer is, there is a whole world of biblical scholarship that I spent a lot of years paying to go to school to learn how to learn from this body of scholarship.
I'm just like in any field of knowledge, there are your nerds who learn about that thing to a level of detail that no one thought was possible. Then they give their whole lives and careers to research and write about that. So that kind of work has been going on around Scripture for a couple thousand years.
I became just enamored with it, fascinated, excited by it, and it so enriched my own journey of following Jesus that I just couldn't stop going to school for college and then seminary graduate school. That's it really.
A lot of that education is just learning the languages and then learning Greek and Hebrew. Those are the languages of biblical texts themselves, a little Aramaic in there.
The conversation about the Bible has been happening in a cross cultural way in German and in French and in Latin and in English and in a lot of different languages. That's what I went to school for for so long: to learn languages so that I could read in this conversation. It's all books.
I made a lot of friends in those years that are all in biblical studies, researching writing. It's just a whole world of Amazon lists of way too many books and not enough money.
David Perell:
And then where does the handoff happen? So how is the baton passed to you, John?
Tim and Jon:
Just through dialogue because I don't have the patience or aptitude to sit down and study and read. But I'm just very curious, and so I love this relationship and other relationships I've had in the past where I get to just work with an expert and then just drill them and discuss.
Through dialogue and through just a lot of asking questions, I try to understand it myself.
It's in that dialogue that we work through the ideas. It is a discovery process, though. You come with 75% of what you think we're going to walk away with, but there's some genuine discovery along the way.
Tim and Jon:
For me, it's literally like a professor prepping to teach a class: a huge stack of books, lots of weeks or months, putting usually a set of notes together. That would be like what a professor teaches then students take students through. But I just have one hyper curious, insistent student who won't do any homework.
David Perell:
Never, never does the homework.
Tim and Jon:
But I'll show up engaged.
Tim and Jon:
You'll show up engaged.
Tim and Jon:
It's perfect.
Tim and Jon:
So you come in cold, which is great because I can't take anything for granted. Things that I'm just assuming or gaps in my own learning, where I've made four leaps in steps of conclusions I'm making, and he'll be like, "Wait, how'd you get from there from that?"
David Perell:
So you don't really accept logical bridges and stuff like that. You're like, "I just need to understand simpler, simpler, simpler." Is that how you're thinking about it?
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, it needs to make sense to me, and I'll sniff out logical inconsistencies. They'll bug me.
I want clarity on the words we're using. I won't take words for granted. It bugs most people, but it doesn't bug Tim. I think it works enough. At least you don't show me that it bugs you.
Tim and Jon:
It doesn't bug me. So, as you said, it becomes a discovery process. I've done a lot of work, but I also consistently find that when we sit down and talk for five to 10, 15 hours, not all at once, but spread out, I learn because he challenges me to write gaps in my thinking.
Or he asks a question that I'm like, "I never even thought about that," prepping for this. Then we just start working on it together, so it's co-learning. We're learning as we go.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, so it goes from notes to discussion to script for a video to then a lot more written content that our scholar team generally does, then to more notes. It's kind of the pipeline.
David Perell:
And then where does the art direction come in?
Tim and Jon:
The art direction will be—we'll write the script. We'll get the script to a place that we feel like we could pass it off to our animation studio. And then we let them come in and start doing story development and art development.
David Perell:
Okay, so there's something here. You are sort of an in-house theologian, and then you are the bad student who's trying to make everything super clear, and you're helping to distill. And then there's another animation team after that.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, there's our animation team. My expertise before this partnership was just making animated explainer videos. I loved the process of sitting down with a client and learning, quizzing them, and being curious, and then coming up with a script.
The whole process after that of having an artist storyboard it and then come up with the right visuals that help you land the idea in the right way—that whole pipeline is something I love. I've done a lot of it, and so we just built our own team here that does that with us.
We learn a lot when we sit down with them because we'll read a script to them, and we'll feel pretty good about it. Then they'll ask us questions, and we'll realize, "Oh, okay, we need to work on this more." So it's like more community in the script.
Then they'll go away and they'll come back with storyboard ideas, and we'll be like, "That's a really good idea. In fact, we could play up that idea by adapting our script this way." Or, "This is just not working. Why? Oh, because we weren't that clear. Need to rewrite this." So it's a collaborative process there with our artists.
David Perell:
So what's an example of what you were just saying? Break that down for me.
Tim and Jon:
What would be a good example?
Tim and Jon:
A project that's in the pipeline right now is a theme study on wilderness throughout the Bible. I read lots of Bible and lots of scholars on the Bible to create the notes. We talk for 10 hours. We co-wrote a script that we felt great about, like we were pretty stoked on it.
Then, we gave it to our team, and they were beginning to point out that the way we plotted the sequence of ideas was actually really hard to display visually in terms of story coherence. They'd point out a couple spots like that: "You're trying to set up this pattern, but it didn't fully repeat in this and this."
Then we were like, "Oh, my gosh, we didn't even notice." So then we go back and rewrite. They go back and storyboard. Sometimes they'll try and tell the story visually, like you're saying, and then come back and say, "Do you see how we don't have a scene for this, but we do in these two other places?" And we're like, "Oh, we could write a little paragraph, and then it would."
It's kind of like that. Sometimes we're into draft seven of the script in that back and forth with the artists.
Tim and Jon:
I'm trying to think of a really clear example. I know in the test video, our artists came with the idea of two doors, so we didn't come with that idea. Then that became such a central image.
There's always some sort of visual that will unlock an idea for us. Then the inverse is true as well. There will be a set of visuals where you're like, "Why is this so murky? Why is this not working?" And it's usually because we have something in the script that's just not working, and they're like, "What do we do with this?"
David Perell:
Tell me about the illusion of knowing.
Tim and Jon:
A lot of people ask me if I'm being sincere in our podcast because our podcast is just us having conversations, working through the content. Most people kind of assume that the podcast is pre-rehearsed, or I know where we're going. So then the question is like, "Are you being genuine? Are these really your questions?"
I've had to think about that a lot. We've been talking about the Bible for…
Tim and Jon:
11 years now.
Tim and Jon:
11 years now. And so we'll go back to the same ideas over and over. Sometimes I'll be like, I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask again.
The way that I've explained it to people is that we all have this illusion of knowing. I kind of think I know, and usually I don't fully really know. It's a psychological term about how our brains work, which is if we realized how little we actually understand about the world, we would go crazy. There's so much about life that I don't get, but I have to feel in control just to move on throughout the day.
So my brain plays this trick on me that goes, "You get it. You know. You know how this works," but I don't. That's the illusion of knowing, and I have to turn that off. So when we're having a conversation, you have to be in a safe and curious place to go, "You know, I probably don't know. I think I know, but I probably don't know." It's muting that illusion of, "Oh yeah, I get it," and allowing yourself to come to it again, pretending like you don't know, and then suddenly realizing, "Oh, actually, it's much deeper than I thought."
[10:45] Illusion of Knowing and Turning It Off
David Perell:
How do you think about that? One of the challenges with Scripture is that in some way, it's like this marvelous mystery. It's this glorious mystery. It's like God has given us a little bit that we can just learn.
Tim and Jon:
And learn and learn.
David Perell:
We learn so much about God's kingdom, but there's so much that is just beyond our grasp and comprehension. I would assume that in your position, part of what people expect from you is to have answers.
As you learn more, you realize, "Man, I don't know when the day of the Lord's going to be." How do you balance a pursuit of certainty that comes with teaching with a kind of surrender to the grand mysteries of it all?
Tim and Jon:
That's a really great question. I think a lot about it, too. In my own journey of following Jesus and really attending to Scripture in detail for a long time, definitely the hope of certainty has gone out the window. Not because of skepticism about the Bible, but because of the impact of Jesus and of the story of Scripture on me. Certainty is stemming from a desire to have control over what I think the outcomes of my life are. If I know the right things, certain outcomes will follow, and if I don't, disaster. I really don't see that that's a virtue Scripture is trying to instill in us. The virtue of trust, learning how to trust and have confidence in the one that I'm trusting. That's a big deal, but that's really different than certainty.
The story of the Bible is about a botched quest for wisdom and people trying to know or take knowledge that really isn't available to them, or at least not in the way they think it is.
David Perell:
Where does that show up beyond Genesis 3?
Tim and Jon:
Oh, man, it's what the whole thing's about.
David Perell:
It's like, David, that's what the whole book is about.
Tim and Jon:
It's not about anything else except humans learning how to trust God and his surprising ways of teaching us what wisdom and life really are. That's why I love biblical literature so much and why I love being a follower of Jesus. It has been the gateway for me inhabiting a view of the world where I do have trust and confidence, but I have zero certainty.
Tim and Jon:
Zero.
Tim and Jon:
I'll dial that back. For me, what matters less than certainty is trust.
All that to say is, I have no problem knowing that I don't know the answers to most things. You and I share that of wanting to expose the illusion of knowing. We both value that, and we feel okay being vulnerable, of reaching the point, "I don't know. I don't know how it goes together. I need five more years to think about that." That's just admission of the truth.
Tim and Jon:
A traditional explainer video, which is the world I came from, is all about helping you actually know.
This morning I was talking with our animation studio director working towards this new video we're making on the spirit of God. There's so much mystery in this idea that God is spirit. To make an explainer video to smooth out the mystery feels like the wrong move. You want someone to sit in the mystery, but there's a way to do that.
It's interesting that we have this. I have an explainer video background, and it is to try to feel like you can master something. Like, oh, I can control it because now I understand it. But there's also just a beauty in being able to understand something in a new way and then enter into the mystery through a new perspective.
Tim and Jon:
To honor a mystery doesn't mean that you don't think about it or ponder it. You can actually make a lot of progress in understanding the thing you can't understand.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Truly. What you come to is to better understand exactly what it is you don't understand. Typically, in our experience, we're like, oh, there was a lot that was blurry, that's clearer now. That helps me honor the mystery of who God is in even a deeper way.
David Perell:
The Spirit of God is such a good example because we learned the Spirit of God is an advocate. So we actually know that the Holy Spirit is an advocate. Also, the Holy Spirit is a person like the third figure in the Trinity.
So this isn't like, just because it's a spirit, doesn't mean it's shapeless and formless. There's actually a grain to the Spirit, which will be aligned with the desires of Christ and also has perfect knowledge of past, present, and future.
Tim and Jon:
Whoa.
David Perell:
We've learned all that. To your point, you can sit in the mystery, and by learning, getting some knowledge, there's a way that the mystery can actually expand because as you contemplate it, it actually has form now.
Tim and Jon:
It's a great analogy. The biblical story is trying to answer the biggest questions. It's trying to address the biggest questions of who are we, where are we, what's wrong with everything, and if there is a solution, what is that, and who's behind it all?
They're huge questions. While knowing the full extent of every one of those, I think, is kind of like a dog trying to learn algebra; it's just not going to happen. But we can make a lot of progress in our own journey of expanding our awareness of all those questions. Scripture actually is ideally designed to do that because it's so hard to understand. That's not a glitch; it's a feature.
Tim and Jon:
That's what I've learned through this project: I grew up in a tradition where the Bible was approached as a reference book. You can just dissect it, turn it into a rule book, or turn it into a theology book and master it. I've come to this appreciation of the fact that this is literary art that actually puts a lot of riddles and mysteries in front of you on purpose and is asking us to engage with the mystery and the riddles not so that we can never understand anything, but so that we can wrestle with it in the right way.
This goes back to the theme of wisdom. How do you actually learn something? Do you just memorize a list of things? Do you memorize a taxonomy? Or is wisdom and knowing how to have a good life and how to connect to God, is there this experiential wrestling through and turning something really personal through that wrestling? We just marvel all the time about how many puzzles are in the Bible. We just relish the puzzles and keep coming back to them and thinking about them in new ways.
Tim and Jon:
Right.
Tim and Jon:
I think that's also why we've just enjoyed our learning process, the writing process, and then visual media as a way to communicate because you're communicating more than just through words. The script is an important part.
But when the marriage of the script plus a visual world and language does something in the communication of an idea that I think we also really value because it's not primarily cognitive or cerebral. The visuals are working on another level of human understanding. And I think that is our way of trying to honor both the clarity and the mystery of God that's being communicated in Scripture.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
David Perell:
I wanted to talk about this because I think that this clip is a really good blend of where visuals and sound and everything that you're trying to do come together.
Speaker D:
The Bible is such a sophisticated piece of literature, and so all these smaller plot lines keep overlapping, building up the tension.
Tim and Jon:
And when you back up, you can.
Speaker D:
See how they've all been woven together into the unified story that leads to Jesus.
David Perell:
There's so much there of the tension, and then the sound goes up. You can actually feel the tension, and then it goes.
The unified story pause that leads to Jesus. Ding. You know what I mean?
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, there's a cadence to it.
David Perell:
That's so much more than just words. There's all these layers of communication.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, it's great. Congratulations to our past selves.
It makes the point that biblical literature is trying to influence us on all of those levels.
Tim and Jon:
What you've taught me about biblical literature is that it will—like just the poetry—give you one line of poetry and then a second and just ask you to compare and contrast these two lines. And it's through comparing and contrasting that you begin to find more meaning.
It could do that with a story. Here's a story about Adam and Eve taking from the tree of knowing, good and bad, because they saw it and they desired it. And here's another story of King David on his roof seeing and desiring a woman and taking her. You're just supposed to start to think about these stories together.
By doing that, you're seeing a depth that's kind of under the surface.
What we get to do with the visual medium is help explore contrasts and comparing things in that clip, building tension, or showing you an illustration that tells you the point. There's so much you can do with the visual medium that the Bible doesn't have, but the Bible is doing the same techniques.
[21:24] Comparing Biblical Stories Through Visual Media
Tim and Jon:
We've made videos about all the books of the Bible, kind of overviews, and the "How to Read the Bible Series." That clip was from there.
But I feel like the biggest demand for us, in terms of learning and challenging us, is when we do a theme study of an idea that's introduced at the beginning of the biblical story and then runs all the way through. There, what we're trying to do is trace a pattern throughout Scripture and then replicate it in a short form.
But the visuals are so ideal, just like what you're saying, because you can put the story of Adam and Eve there, and then right after that, have a scene about Moses or about Gideon or Jesus. You can make the visual composition of each story parallel to each other. That visual parallelism is actually an expression of the literary parallelism.
It's so fun and forces us to think literally about the Bible as words around us on a page, but then also as parallel images in a storyboard. I love that process; it's been one of my favorite parts of it over the years.
David Perell:
That's the thing. When most people read the Bible, they're at a certain altitude, and I think a lot of the gift that you bring is zooming out in different altitudes. So, one example is with the Sermon on the Mount series. You're like, "Hey, there's a chiasmus going on here. Here's the significance of a chiasmus."
And you're like, "Whoa, okay, I didn't know I could read something like that." And then if you take something like the number 40, testing, okay, you get Noah's Ark, Moses in the wilderness, Jesus.
And so I think a lot of what you're doing is you're allowing us to go to different altitudes because my Bible studies aren't like that at all. We're really in, like, let's focus on this parable.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, and that's a great way to engage the Bible. It's not the only way, and my experience is flying high altitude, but having done the detailed work is actually how the biblical authors themselves want the ideal reader to engage.
David Perell:
What do you mean by that?
Tim and Jon:
You know, biblical stories, what's funny is they're often packed with detail. We're like, "Why do I need all this detail about the shape of these curtains in the tabernacles?" But then it leaves out details that seem really critical, you know, as the character's motives or why they do the things they do.
Tim and Jon:
And all the detail matters, is what you're saying.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, but it matters both in its context in that parable or in that story about Moses or Gideon. But also the Bible is designed in a way that those details also stick, should stick in your memory so that they stick out when you're comparing character stories to each other at a high altitude.
So that little visual of those stories stacking on top of each other, that actually is us drawing what I think our minds are supposed to be doing. And the biblical authors also just assume that the ideal reader of the Bible is going to read it day and night for a whole life and have it all in your head.
Tim and Jon:
Exactly.
David Perell:
So I'm going to show one more video because I thought that the way that you explained this was so beautiful, and it's exactly what you're saying here.
Speaker D:
In Psalm 1, we read about the ideal Bible reader. It's someone who meditates on the Scriptures day and night. In Hebrew, the word "meditate" means literally to mutter or speak quietly.
Tim and Jon:
The idea is that every day for.
Speaker D:
The rest of your life, you slowly, quietly read the Bible out loud to yourself and then go talk about it with your friends, pondering the puzzles, making connections, and discovering what it all means. And as you let the Bible interpret itself, something remarkable happens: the Bible starts to read you, because ultimately the writers of the Bible want you to adopt this story as your story.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, we talk about someone a lot, and that word hagah is really meaningful to the work that we do.
David Perell:
What's hagah?
Tim and Jon:
To meditate.
David Perell:
Ah, right, of course.
Tim and Jon:
And it's that murmuring sound. It's like having the words on your lips, you know, in your mind, just sifting through them. I'm just always reminded that in the ancient world, you didn't have a lot of media. This was like what you had. And so I'm confronted with all sorts of things to keep on my mouth and in my mind. I'm scrolling, and that shapes you.
What you meditate on becomes the thing that you desire, and what you desire, then you meditate on. And this is what Psalm 1 is training you to think.
So we have this ancient media that we're meant to shape our imagination on. You talked about how we can read a parable. When you do that, there's going to be a conversation that parable is having with the rest of the Bible, with the images it's using, the words that it's using. It's just telling.
It's not going to tell you to do this. It's just expecting that you have spent time in these other stories too, and they're just there in front of you, and you can then begin to go, "Oh, that's why he's using this image of the kingdom of God being like a tree." There's more here because I understand how trees have been coming up throughout the Bible, and that's to meditate on Scripture.
Tim and Jon:
There is a certain tension. Maybe we feel it in different ways, but we begin life as putting explainer videos out there on YouTube as a kind of way to share them.
Our goal actually isn't to get people to watch more of our videos. We want to share the videos to the degree that they help people.
But our goal is that people actually become more wise readers of scripture and spend more time meditating on scripture so they can follow Jesus with more devotion. That actually is what our hope is. And understanding the Bible better is a really big part of that. We hope the videos are helpful to that degree.
When we're talking about meditation literature, we're trying to craft the videos so that they're a little like micro visual interpretations of what the Bible's doing so people can meditate on them and find little clues and see how we do it.
Ultimately, it really is about the Bible. The way you experience this little video is actually what the Bible can be like. At least that's always been a hope for me.
David Perell:
You mean in terms of the feeling or in terms of how alive it can be?
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, the feeling and making connections. There's something about when the human mind finds coherence and connection between what I thought were totally opposite or different things. Then you're like, whoa.
But it's true in our lives. It's like that conversation I had at the coffee shop, then that thing that happened on the drive home, and then what happened at breakfast this morning. It's all connected. Those are electric moments in our lives.
Tim and Jon:
What good art does is it gives you a moment to see something that conjures emotion, but then also meaning. The more that you spend with it, the more meaning unfolds. That's such a craving for us, is to find more and more meaning.
Another craving is to have relationships with people where this meaning comes alive. This wonderful thing has happened to me with the Bible, which is the Bible was this very boring, isolated, individualistic, kind of just learn to master this book.
David Perell:
It was like grandma's dusty old tome that you weren't allowed to question or ask, lest you have any doubt whatsoever. How dare you.
Tim and Jon:
You know.
David Perell:
It doesn't need to be like that.
Tim and Jon:
No. It's turned into an opportunity to have this wonderful friendship where we get to dialogue. Not just us, but then our artists come along, and we get to think about these ideas, and then we get to let those ideas emerge in our imagination. We get to then let those ideas shape the way we think. We could do that in community with each other. That's just so fun.
I've been running this experiment with people where we'll just read Psalm 1 together as a community. We'll just enjoy the process of enjoying it as literary art and then asking what God's wisdom is for us. It just begins to be like, oh, this was fun. This was, like, a really enjoyable thing to do. Why don't we do this more often?
David Perell:
There's so much in Psalm 1 I just saw, and I've been reading Psalm 119. You just see it all the time. Delighting in the law of the Lord is a huge part of this. This is supposed to be fun. This is supposed to be an utter joy.
Tim and Jon:
Can I tell you something funny about that?
David Perell:
Please, bring it on.
Tim and Jon:
I gave up reading the Bible right after college.
David Perell:
Oh, you were just like, I'm done with this.
Tim and Jon:
After Bible.
Tim and Jon:
After Bible college.
Tim and Jon:
You got a degree in understanding the Bible.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah. It's actually not that hard to get that degree.
There's this wonderful old man in my church who took me and some friends out to breakfast every Friday morning and read Psalm 119 to us slowly. It was the most tedious and boring thing I've ever done in my life.
Tim and Jon:
Wait, 19 or 119?
Tim and Jon:
119.
Tim and Jon:
119.
Tim and Jon:
It constantly was like, I delight in your instruction. I delight in your, you know, over and over and over, just how excited this poet is about reading the Bible. And I'm sitting here going, I am so bored. I began to despise Psalm 119.
Tim and Jon:
Wow.
Tim and Jon:
I remember even telling you that at one point we were having a conversation. I don't think you knew what to do with it because you're just kind of like, oh, okay.
Tim and Jon:
There's backstory there, some trauma there.
Tim and Jon:
And then there was this moment where it just clicked in for me, and all of a sudden I could read a line from Psalm 119 and just feel this delight in me of, oh yeah, I do enjoy this. It completely shifted for me.
It's because we're doing it in community. We're just letting these ideas really shape us, and we're able to enter it with curiosity. There's a joy to it.
[32:48] Finding Joy in Communal Bible Study
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, you can read the Bible with a few different aims, a few different goals. One of those goals, I think, and people are introduced to it sometimes first or sometimes only, which is reading the Bible to synthesize from it a system of coherent theological ideas or doctrines.
That is a great and worthy task. It's actually even really important, I think. But that's a different way to read a text than to read it and ask, what is this designed to do to me apart from what I want to do with it? How do I enter into it on its own terms and just let it do what it wants to do to me?
That's what I became so interested in for all those years of schooling: discovering a tool set and a set of questions to ask these texts that begin to unlock that.
Then seeing every book of scripture like a super well-designed roller coaster where it's like, I could step aside and look at the roller coaster at these four moments of the ride and see what they're doing and analyze it. Or I could just get on it and then just press pause every 10 seconds and be like, notice how it jolted you to the right there, and then do you notice how you went over that little bump? What's that about?
You begin to see these authors are doing something to you. Sometimes it's by concealing information or not giving you the answer that you want in the moment and by burying the answer that you have to a question from page one but not giving it to you till page 50. The Bible is that kind of book. Reading it with just going on the ride is a different aim, a different goal.
That's what I've tried to learn how to do, and I've forced you to go on that ride with me. But it's been amazing.
Tim and Jon:
You forced me.
Tim and Jon:
Well, this whole thing was your idea.
David Perell:
You forced him, actually.
Tim and Jon:
You invited me. I signed up. I'm a willing participant.
An example that is really lovely about what you were just talking about is the Tree of Knowing Good and Bad. It's such a riddle at the beginning of the story of the Bible. God plants a tree in the middle of the garden: don't eat it; it will kill you. And it's called the Tree of Knowing Good and Bad.
What do we know about the humans? We know that they are made in the image of God, and they're meant to rule and subdue the earth on God's behalf as his representative. Well, you're gonna need some knowledge of good and bad, right? That's essential. So why put a tree of something I need in the middle of the garden and then tell me not to eat it, and it'll kill me? Why does that become the unraveling that kicks off the whole story of humanity and the human drama? It doesn't tell you why; it just presents this riddle. We've wrestled with that many times over.
There was this one moment where we got to the story in 2.
Tim and Jon:
Kings 3, in 1st Kings.
Tim and Jon:
1st Kings 3, story of Solomon. We get to the story in 1st Kings 3, where Solomon is famously asked by God to request anything.
Tim and Jon:
He just became king.
Tim and Jon:
He becomes the king, and God says, ask me of anything, and you can have it.
I always remember that story as he asks for wisdom. What he actually technically asks for is for the knowledge of good and bad. That's the phrase. It's actually hidden in a lot of translations, which is so annoying.
Tim and Jon:
Really? Yeah, yeah.
Tim and Jon:
He asks for the Tree of Knowing Good and Bad essentially, and it's this hyperlink back.
God doesn't go, "What? No, that's the one thing that's off limits." God says, "I am so stoked that that's what you asked for. I'm going to give it to you, and you're going to be the wisest person on Earth, and you're going to have so much discernment."
When I started to compare those two stories together and think about what would it have been like for Adam and Eve to go, "Okay, we want that tree, God, but you told us not to take it. Can you give us that? Can I have the knowledge of good and bad from you? Can you give me access to the fruit?"
Suddenly it started to pop with, "Oh, that was the point. He wasn't withholding the knowledge of good and bad. He was trying to train them about how to get it, which was to..."
Tim and Jon:
Ask for it, where to really find it. Yeah, that's right.
Tim and Jon:
The Bible doesn't tell you that; it's just something you begin to discover. Suddenly that becomes so meaningful to me in my life and the way that I search for how to control things and how I know what's the good life.
David Perell:
Well, that's a marvelous example of what you were saying earlier: if you can really be tied into the specific words, that then shows you, brings you back up to the altitude of, "Here is how the entire biblical narrative fits together."
When you said that earlier, I didn't really know what...
Tim and Jon:
You mean by that.
David Perell:
That's what you mean by that.
Tim and Jon:
That's what I mean by that. And what's so amazing is after he says, "I'm like a little child who doesn't know good from bad," that's what he says. And then you give me wisdom.
So he does get the wisdom, and he becomes the most prosperous king in the biblical story up to that point.
David Perell:
Until he builds the dang temple.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, until he blows it. And that itself, that story itself replicates the Adam and Eve story. He just had a longer success period than they did. And then you're just like, oh man.
Tim and Jon:
Well, the wisest person in the world.
Tim and Jon:
If they can't do it, and if he can't do it, where do I sit in this whole situation? I'm probably not going to do any better. And that's kind of the point is to keep putting these characters in front of us who replay in unique and different ways the calling and failure of Adam and Eve.
This is part of what we mean when we talk about a unified story that leads to Jesus. The four gospel accounts telling the story of Jesus: the gospel authors were such Bible nerds, like, they knew all this. So they've designed the stories about Jesus to precisely link in through their wording in the same way, but as the inversion or the reversal of all these failures.
David Perell:
Let's pop into the gospel. So this show is called How I Write, and John 1:1 says, "In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
The Word, the Word, the Word is God, the Word is with God, the Word was God. What's going on with them?
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, what a wonderful example. You're like, how are those two statements true at the same time?
David Perell:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Is it God or is it distinct from God?
David Perell:
Right.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Well, and also, what is going on there?
Tim and Jon:
That's the question. You better read the rest of the story to see how that's going to unfold.
Tim and Jon:
Well, what's with the image of the Word? It's really abstract and poetic, and again, it's this hyperlink to the rest of the story of the Bible.
How? You know we've read Genesis 1 with each other a hundred times. You've got the story of God creating with the Spirit hovering over the dark waters, and then he begins to speak words, 10 words.
God as Spirit over the waters and then God as Word that then orders all of creation is just this deeply Hebrew idea that when you get to John and you're like, "In the beginning," the beginning, Genesis 1, "In the beginning was the Word," it's getting you to go, "Okay, let me think of Genesis 1 while I think of John 1. Let me put those two stories together," because they're talking to each other, and that's just what biblical authors want you to do all the time.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, what a great riddle that we've tried to unpack different times before. Because that image of the Word in the beginning is God's word. It's with God, so it's along with God. But if something's with me, like you are, it's distinct.
Like John's with me, I'm not John, John's not me, but we're with each other, so we're distinct. But then John is Tim, like the word is with God and the word—it makes no sense from one point of view. But think of what is a word? Even a word is something that's an expression of my mind that gets translated into air, pushed out through my vocal cords to make sounds that I'm saying right now that you understand.
So what's so wild is the invisible thing in my mind can become a thing that goes out from me, and then it enters into you. And then now you know the thing that was in my mind through the thing. So a word actually is such a wonderful image for something that's me, but also goes out from me and takes on an identity distinct from me, and somehow it's me to connect with something else.
David Perell:
Well, on that point, I think of Hebrews 4:12, like the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two edged sword. And then when Jesus comes back, he's got the word in his mouth, it's like a sword, and then it all comes together there.
So what is going on with that? This is just why the Word.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, the Bible is a text made up of words. It opens with a story saying the divine word is the most potent creative source in all the universe. It's the thing that makes the universe be what it is. It's the word of God.
It is remarkable then, throughout the biblical story, how much what characters say really matters and ends up having a significant effect on the world.
So much so that Jesus says, right, that famous saying, no idol word will be ignored on the day of the great reckoning. We'll be held accountable for every idol, every word we—they matter because they create. They create reality.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, and so writers can understand that you can create realities with your words that change the way people think and understand, and that's powerful.
But what are you doing? You're using letters and strokes of a pen or shape of your mouth—what is actually going on? But there's this power to it. And the biblical authors are literary geniuses. They come from a literary culture of so much care for the word. And so when they think of that power, it's very intimate to them. That's their world.
[43:53] The Power of Words to Create Reality
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, the best analogies, as I've sat longer with biblical literature, the best analogies I can think of are all about musical musicians. Think of a really tight knit jazz quartet. They've been playing together for decades, and they just know how to hum and how to work together.
They've memorized it, and they know their scales. That's all down. But in the moment, they create the new thing. No two songs are the same.
Biblical authors are working on that level of sophistication in the shaping of these texts, which is why you can read the Adam and Eve story in light of the Solomon story, and two dozen other stories in between that have all been designed to link to each other.
Unless you know to expect that from the Bible, you won't hear sophisticated jazz. You'll hear something else, which is most people hear in the Bible. They're just like, this doesn't make any sense. It's confusing.
Tim and Jon:
Well, you'll get to Revelation and you'll read about the sword coming out of his mouth and you'll be like, that's weird. But you'll get fixated on the sword and you'll think of him as a warrior, and maybe he's going to use that sword to kill people. But then you're kind of missing what's going on with that. It's coming out of his mouth.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah. Yes.
David Perell:
Why would God speak to us in poetry?
Tim and Jon:
Yeah. I love that, dude.
David Perell:
Can you just give me a plain answer?
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
David Perell:
Like, what is going on?
Tim and Jon:
Why does it—why did Jesus teach in riddles?
Tim and Jon:
I think we have thoughts. I don't know about answers.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Poetry is a form of human communication where you alter your normal habits of talking.
Usually you spend a lot of care on using fewer words, and you are looking to combine words and images and figures of speech in surprising combinations. Those surprising combinations force you and the reader to make new connections.
Poetry is famous for using metaphor or figures of speech. Metaphors are a way of getting your mind to put two things together I wouldn't normally put together. It's a form of human communication that says more and means more than you can even get on one reading.
You need to keep going back to it, and you find it keeps having more layers of meaning to it. What better form of communication as the vehicle of divine speech?
It's a great line in Psalm 62, "Once God has spoken, but two things I have heard." It's sort of like God's speech is so dense that it actually means many things, even though it's just one set of words.
Tim and Jon:
We've talked about in our "How to Read the Bible" series how important metaphor is. In reality, I think this is how it works. This is beyond my pay grade, but the way we understand anything is through metaphor.
There's metaphoric schemas behind all of our language and everything that we think. How do we learn new things, and how do we change how we think? It's by adopting new metaphors.
You can also try to learn another argument or kind of a logical train of thought, and that's also really useful. There's something more powerful and enduring by changing the metaphor behind what you believe.
Tim and Jon:
I think that's part of why I've enjoyed working in the visual medium for all these years on these projects, because no one explainer video we make can say everything about whatever it is. You can pack every millisecond with so much intentionality that you actually could watch it 30 times.
Our artists are this skilled. They're obsessing over details in the visual language to a degree that I'm just like, "Wow, okay." You're like one of the biblical authors, and that itself is communicating the multiple layers of meaning that are inherent within scripture itself.
The biblical authors come from a world that actually value indirect communication more than direct communication. I think they assume that the most important ways that our words can influence each other is not by making everything crystal clear the first time, but by sparking a learning journey that will last a lot longer than the conversation.
David Perell:
On the visual point, there's a lot of metaphor in visual. So in the apocalyptic literature video, whenever you see a character have a revelation, the camera pulls back.
Tim and Jon:
Oh, yeah, okay.
David Perell:
So then you have the profit. It's a tight shot. It's inwardly focused perception of the world. Then you get this broader vision of the cosmos, and it's just like us. The scene is widening.
You get this kind of subconscious change that happens through the imagery, through the sound, which is a kind of metaphor.
Tim and Jon:
It could also be your literal experience. If you're on a hike and you're in a ravine and then you go up to the ridge, you see more.
Tim and Jon:
That experience, and then that becomes our language, like, "Give me an overview of what we're going to talk about." You're using a metaphoric schema with the way you're using that language by saying, "To understand something is to be able to pull back and see it as a whole."
That's a beautiful way to understand understanding. There's other ways too, as well. Sometimes our metaphors are really bad and dangerous, and so we just need new ones. It's delightful to be able to be confronted with new ones.
Tim and Jon:
In a way, you could say that is a big part of what the biblical story is trying to do is stock a human mind with an encyclopedia of images and stories and ways.
Here's a whole bunch of stories of somebody who was given everything they could have ever wanted by God, and then how they blew it, and then about the cascading effect of how they blew it affected everybody around them for generations to come. You're like, whose story am I telling? I'm telling about ten different people's stories in the Bible right now.
David Perell:
It's like, what is Tim trying to say right now?
Tim and Jon:
If you have those stories in your mind, then the moment I come to a decision, like at work, in parenting, or at the grocery store, that's what's filling my imagination. I'm like, I do not want to be like David right now. I don't want to be like Cain. I want to be like Solomon was on his good day or something. I want to be like Jesus all the time.
That's what it's trying to do. I think in that little clip, that's what we meant by saying the Bible begins to read you. It's trying to help you learn how to read your life. The way we become skilled readers of our lives is actually parallel to becoming skilled readers of the Bible.
David Perell:
I like the idea that the Bible is a window to see God and a mirror to see yourself. It's both of those at the same time.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, that's a great metaphor.
Tim and Jon:
That's a metaphor. There we go.
Tim and Jon:
I like that.
Tim and Jon:
I will say, it does bug me that we can't have a book that just tells me exactly what to believe and what to do. I sometimes just feel like that would be so much easier and nicer—really simple. Just give me the list of things to believe and the list of behaviors.
How big would that book need to be in reality to deal with the complexities of life? It's impossible to create that kind of book. Why does God write to us in poetry and in narratives? Why does Jesus teach in riddles? In order for us to really be able to get God's wisdom in the corners of every nuance of life, there's no instruction manual that will be able to do that.
[52:55] No Simple Instruction Manual for Life
David Perell:
Is there a writer or a kind of writer that you have a particular appreciation for? Maybe the way that Paul pens a sentence, the way that the Book of Job is written? Is there something that comes to mind where you just get in its presence and you're awestruck?
Tim and Jon:
The King James translation has done some really wonderful things with certain psalms or teachings. There is just this cadence and poetry to it that has this beauty and nostalgia to it. You've taught me to just sit and patiently come and begin to appreciate it on its own terms instead of feeling its beauty on the first pass.
Tim and Jon:
Sometimes a biblical story or poem will feel like chaos.
Tim and Jon:
Paul bugs me the way he writes. I get really irritated.
Tim and Jon:
He doesn't even finish his sentences. Sometimes our translations hide it, but Paul actually breaks off a sentence because something just occurred to him. It happens quite a lot in Greek.
It's so hard that our English translations kind of massage it out. I think he was writing on the go. He was often dictating. What Paul never did was write the Discipleship 101 Handbook.
Tim and Jon:
That also bugs me.
Tim and Jon:
He references that he did have something like that in his head. To the Ephesians, he says, remember the whole pattern of teaching that we taught you about how to follow Jesus? Remember that? Now let's talk about this thing.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
So that bugs you?
Tim and Jon:
That bugs me a lot.
David Perell:
Then he cuts off the sentences.
Tim and Jon:
His sentences are dense, they're run-on sentences, and sometimes he cuts them off. It's hard to follow.
He's writing in Greek and he's thinking in Hebrew. All that bugs me.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
But then there's also.
Tim and Jon:
He didn't write his own systematic theology. That bothers you?
Tim and Jon:
When he would go to a new church community, they would have a Bible study where he would teach them the basics of faith, and he refers back to it all the time. I would love that curriculum. Wouldn't that be great to have that curriculum? I kind of expect that that's what the Bible would be.
David Perell:
That was the original Bible project, actually.
Tim and Jon:
So no one wrote that down or kept it. There were no cameras to capture it. We just have the letters that he wrote to churches afterwards to go, "Hey, about the things you're screwing up now, let me give you some instruction."
Tim and Jon:
He'll pull from that. He's pulling phrases from that stuff, but we don't get the complete thing.
Tim and Jon:
That's Paul. The Old Testament, Hebrew Bible stories, they're so dense. And Tim alluded to this. Every detail matters.
But then there are details you're just like, "Why are you telling me that?" Or, "You told me that already." In fact, this is the third time you're telling me this one detail. What's the deal? And that bugs a modern reader like myself, who wants to know the inner conflict of the character and wants to hear more of the nuance of a dialogue and doesn't want to be reminded about some seemingly inconsequential details.
David Perell:
I hear about blood in Leviticus one more time.
Tim and Jon:
Biblical authors are just writing in a different way. And they're just like, "The reason I'm telling you this again is for a purpose, and you're supposed to care about that purpose."
I'm not trained as a Western modern reader to be able to do that. So your question was what literature do I just relish? And I think, honestly, it's all very hard.
David Perell:
It's funny because when we were talking about making good explainer videos, something you said to me is, "Say it once and say it simply." And then the biblical writers say things over and over and over again.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Communication philosophy. And that itself is a part, I think, of the learning journey. We've talked about describing the Bible as a cross-cultural reading, the Bible as a cross-cultural experience.
In a way, that is what it's like any time you go visit another culture, go visit another family in their home. It's just a different family than the one you grew up in. It's like, "Whoa, this is a different world and there's different language and habits and practices."
David Perell:
Who's the author for you? The author? The writing style for you that you—
Tim and Jon:
Oh, whatever one I'm working on at the time.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Biblical author.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, if that's what you're asking.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Then, yeah. I mean, the tricky thing is for many of the books of the Hebrew Bible, they begin life with individual figures, like in Isaiah.
Tim and Jon:
You've entered the matrix, though.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Like you're fully in, like you're reading in Hebrew.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Your mind is switched over, like.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
David Perell:
Is there one writer that you feel is the lossiest as I read an NIV or an ESV, where you just feel like, "Oh, so much is lost from the translation."
Tim and Jon:
I want to honor our translations in the English tradition as remarkable achievements. They truly are. But no translation can ever capture everything going on in the original, and that's true in the Bible.
Isaiah has had a hold on my interest and imagination from my earliest days of following Jesus. I'm as puzzled about a zillion things in Isaiah as I was when I first started reading it. They just have changed and developed the things I'm puzzled about. I love the Isaiah scroll. It's also one of the few complete scrolls that was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. So you can go read a 2,200-year-old version of it.
Tim and Jon:
Jesus was really into Isaiah.
Tim and Jon:
Totally. Jesus' top 10 books of his Bible, at least by how often he quotes from, are the Psalms, Isaiah, and Deuteronomy, with Genesis coming in a hot fourth on Deuteronomy.
Isaiah really mattered to Jesus. I had a friend in Bible college who said that random thing to me, and I was like, "Okay, well, I guess if I want to get Jesus, I should really get to know those books of the Bible."
Speaker A 59:49 - 60:23
One realization I had, if there was ever preaching to the choir, this is the sentence: that the Bible is really important. What I mean by that is we have one story, one example of this. We have one story from Jesus's childhood, and his parents can't find him. He's with the rabbis learning Torah.
There's so much there, even like Joshua 1:8. What makes Joshua a great leader is he knows the word. Keep it close to your lips.
I don't know, that surprised me. Something like that.
Tim and Jon 60:25 - 60:38
I marvel at the idea that part of being a Christian and following Jesus is becoming like a literary nerd of an ancient type of literature.
Speaker A 60:38 - 60:39
Yes.
Speaker B 60:39 - 60:40
Ancient Israelite text.
Tim and Jon 60:40 - 60:48
Ancient Israelite text is kind of like, "Hey, now that you're following Jesus, you're gonna get really interested in text."
Speaker A 60:48 - 60:48
Isn't that weird?
Speaker B 60:48 - 60:50
As you write texts.
Tim and Jon 60:51 - 61:09
I grew up in a tradition where it's like, you know, the Bible is for everyone, so go and have your personal time with the Bible. I think that's wonderful. But to the level that you can geek out with these texts, I don't know if everyone needs to be what you are.
Speaker B 61:10 - 61:13
No, I think actually that would not be good for the world.
Tim and Jon 61:13 - 61:24
We need people to focus on some other things. How wonderful it is to have a community of people so that when you sit down with your crew and you read some text, there is maybe someone like you around.
Speaker B 61:24 - 61:37
The world needs a certain ratio of Bible nerds, but definitely not too many because some people need to actually do the stuff that makes the world make something around and do stuff, not just make documents longer.
Tim and Jon 61:37 - 61:59
It's an invitation, though, that all of us can enter in and level up and appreciate this at a level that you probably didn't think you could. The way I think our minds work and the intellect of an average person is way more intelligent than we give ourselves credit. This is something I believe as an explainer.
Speaker B 61:59 - 62:25
I remember the first time you said it to me. We were working on the first or second script, and we would pass back edits to and forth from each other, sometimes simultaneously on the Google Doc working. You're up above and I'm down below and I'm making everything longer and more explicit. You would come through and just was like a lawnmower, and every paragraph shrunk.
Speaker A 62:25 - 62:27
John the lawnmower. Here he is.
Speaker B 62:27 - 62:54
No, it was incredible. There are many principles that I've learned from you about communication over the years, and one of them is that if you're clear, people are actually way smarter than most of us give each other credit for. If you speak to them in a simple, clear way, which is what all of us want anyway. I heard this explained once, and I think it's true.
Speaker A 62:54 - 63:05
Cleo Abrams, she's a YouTuber, and I love how she says it. She says most people overestimate how much context people have and underestimate their intelligence.
Tim and Jon 63:06 - 63:07
Do the opposite.
Speaker A 63:07 - 63:07
Exactly.
Speaker B 63:07 - 63:08
That's great.
Speaker A 63:08 - 63:09
Do the opposite, right?
Speaker B 63:09 - 63:09
Yeah.
Speaker A 63:09 - 63:14
Lay out the context for people, but then assume they're smart. And that's what I hear you say.
Speaker B 63:14 - 63:15
It's exactly the same thing.
Tim and Jon 63:15 - 63:49
There's so much complexity to the ideas that we are discovering and wanting to communicate. It's easy to think, "Okay, I'm going to have to really dumb this down. We don't have the time to get all the context to read all the books to do all that work."
But that's because we don't have the time. We actually do have the intelligence. That's what I love in my role. I can just sit down with someone who's done the work as context and then just drill, drill, drill until we get to that clarity. If I can get to that clarity, everyone else can get to that clarity.
Speaker A 63:50 - 64:16
I was watching a lot of videos the past few days, and the biggest thing, the biggest X ray vision that I picked up, is how conversational the two of you are. Because it feels conversational, it doesn't feel like a lecture. You give us permission to be the beginner and not to have to be the expert. So listen to this and really pay attention to the back and forth because I want to hear how that comes together.
Tim and Jon 64:17 - 64:22
Each part of the story there is loaded with ambiguities, but altogether it makes sense.
Speaker D 64:22 - 64:29
This is the literary gentleman genius of the Bible. It forces you to keep reading and then interpret each part in light of the others.
Tim and Jon 64:30 - 64:33
This is feeling complicated. I don't know if I can do all that.
Speaker D 64:33 - 64:38
Well, you're actually not expected to notice all of this by yourself or all at once.
David Perell:
So I just want to hammer that home because that's actually a really non-obvious way of teaching scripture. Because it's not a podcast, it's not a lecture or a sermon. It's something else that's really unique about your style, which elevates it and makes it really approachable.
Tim and Jon:
I don't know why I decided, "Let's write in dialogue," because I'd never written any other scripts in dialogue up until we started working on this, but it felt right. What we try to do is just capture our voice.
I am asking those questions. I do know it gives permission to the viewer to go, "Yeah, that's my question too," or "That's what I'm feeling too." It's usually kind of hidden back there, and I think it's the illusion of knowing. We kind of feel uncomfortable that we don't know, so we kind of tuck it away a little bit. But as soon as someone else goes, "I don't know what that means," you're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know what that means, either. Thank you for saying that out loud." I think that's a powerful way to invite people into the process.
[65:51] Dialogue-Driven Scripture Teaching Approach
David Perell:
Do you write that into the script?
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, we write our voices into the script, which is weird because then we are rehearsing and performing a script.
Tim and Jon:
It is a condensing of an actual conversation that we had. It's not like we're making it up out of thin air, but we are creating a concise form of the learning journey from hours into minutes.
There have been first drafts where you are writing both voices as the first draft. I've done a couple first drafts where I've tried it, but you're better at it than I am.
What I love is the back and forth. We are editing each other's voices as we write together. There'll be times where I'll be like, "Nah, you're smarter than that," or, "I'm not talking about you, you, but also your Persona." I'll be like, "No, I think the viewer probably knows that, but they have a question about it. Is that right?" You're like, "Yeah, that's right," or vice versa. We've made hundreds of these.
Tim and Jon:
It all comes out of the fact that we know each other's voice, and we went through the experience together. The question that comes on the page is a question that I was feeling. I'm trying to reverse engineer.
How did I come to understand and get any clarity at all? What was the question that was creating tension that ended up getting resolved? What's the one thing that Tim said and how he said it that kind of shook something loose? I'm just taking that from the conversation and then writing the script.
Tim and Jon:
What we're also trying to model is that what is true about human development is that we discover our most important insights for our growth as human beings in community, in relationships, to something other than myself. It might be a book, but that's me encountering another person through their word, back to that thing again.
We are a kind of species that develops through communal knowing and learning. We need each other to actually grow in our insight.
That's another thing that we've come to really value is a communal reading of scripture and that it's good to read scripture by yourself and with your friends, and that both are really important. I think that was something we were unconsciously communicating by writing the videos as a dialogue because we valued that learning process together.
David Perell:
I had a guy on the show, his name is Dana Joya. Wonderful poet. He said that there's a line he likes that goes, "God creates, man assembles." True, not true? What do you think?
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, there's some beauty in that. I mean, I think you've taught me there's two words for create that are often translated "create." Bara, and what's the other one?
Tim and Jon:
There's two words used in Genesis one, which is bara, which means to bring about an unprecedented thing, a thing that's not been before, the brand new thing. Only God baras in the Bible. Then God also asahs, which is to make or produce. That is a very general word.
Tim and Jon:
God can do it, but also humans do it.
Tim and Jon:
But humans do it.
Yeah, so it is kind of like recycling.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, it's that idea.
God bara. We can only then remix what God has done, which is a wonderful creative opportunity that is participating in the divine, but not in the same way that God can create something out of nothing.
But we are creating order out of chaos.
When we mend a relationship, or when we start a business, these are creative acts.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, you're right.
Actually, I needed some time to think about the quote, but I affirm that.
Who cares what I affirm? I think biblical authors would affirm that.
Meaning that everything that humans produce is built upon a whole bunch of things that were given to that human that they didn't plan for or ask for. They were just given to them from their very first breath.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
And that's just the nature of what it is to be human, but that doesn't make us any less co-creators in the world.
It just means our creations have a relative status in comparison to God's.
God is creator.
David Perell:
If you look at the English language and you trace back influences, so often you see that it goes back to the Bible.
Tim and Jon:
Right.
David Perell:
So you take somebody like Abraham Lincoln and you read what he's saying, and you see these biblical waves, this biblical rhythm, this biblical language.
It seems like as I excavate, everything just goes back to the Bible and Shakespeare.
So let's talk about the Bible.
How has the Bible influenced our language?
Tim and Jon:
There are people who are experts in such things.
I'm not one of them.
I thought about them.
I know some things about it.
But the English translation tradition is only about 700 years old. The Bible's a lot older.
David Perell:
Like going back to Tyndale or before that?
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, Tyndale, William Tyndale, Wycliffe, John Wycliffe.
Those are the earliest, and then they had a huge influence.
It's kind of accumulating.
Then each new English translation that was made looked to its predecessors for cues.
The King James in 1611 was a culmination of a couple hundred years post-printing press of real flourishing of English.
Probably the most that we don't talk about anymore today was the English translation called the Geneva Bible.
Tim and Jon:
Right.
Tim and Jon:
Hugely.
That was Shakespeare's Bible.
Shakespeare read the Geneva Bible, and the Geneva Bible was taken by the pilgrims to the colonies in America.
It was the first.
It was the Bible that influenced American English, the Geneva Bible.
There are so many figures of speech that are in like even odd ones.
I remember when I learned them, Job.
There's a ton from the book of Job, but one is the skin of our teeth.
That's the Hebrew idiom that Job uses, and the King James chose not to paraphrase it into another idiom.
They just kept it.
The dust of death.
There's so many, hundreds of them.
There are also categories of thought that have influenced West Europe and American culture that we find it difficult to imagine another way of seeing the world.
But then you go to another hemisphere and you're like, wow, it's really different.
David Perell:
What do you mean?
Tim and Jon:
The sacred value of a human life.
David Perell:
Look at how the Romans treated babies.
Tim and Jon:
That's not taken for granted certainly in human history.
It's not taken for granted in the same way on the planet today.
David Perell:
We hold these truths from the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
What do you mean that's self-evident?
We are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights.
That's the next line.
Tim and Jon:
These are wonderful examples, and the person without power in a certain situation has the moral high ground just by being without power. There's nothing more Hebrew Bible and Jesus-style than that way of seeing the world, and that is definitely not how most humans have viewed it.
I guess it's more in terms of ethical worldview or moral worldview. The Bible and the spread of Christianity have left a stamp that is still there even in cultural institutions or in a person's mind that they're not a Christian and they wouldn't identify as a Christian, but they think actually more like a Christian than like anything else. A lot of that has to do with the widespread impact of the Bible in Western culture.
David Perell:
What do you think that Jesus understood about communication that we can learn from?
Tim and Jon:
I ask myself that question all the time.
Tim and Jon:
I grew up in the church, and I've listened to thousands of sermons.
Thousands of sermons. And the number of sermons that have left any sort of real indelible mark on me is something I could count on one or two hands. And they're actually probably ones I heard on tape from someone who's just like a world-class gifted preacher.
Jesus gave sermons, I suppose, but he taught in riddles, and he was very provocative. He just gave so much space to be like, "Yeah, you don't get it yet, but that's okay."
[76:04] Jesus' Teaching Style: Riddles and Revelation
Tim and Jon:
Right, on purpose.
Tim and Jon:
If you come to me and you press me enough, okay, then I'll tell you what it means. That's just such a different way to approach learning with someone.
Tim and Jon:
Speaking of context, it's good to acknowledge the context of what Jesus was saying and why and when he was saying it. He lived in a military occupied land from a foreign empire, and he was making claims about himself that, if misinterpreted, were highly dangerous. In fact, he got executed for it.
He also chose a form of communication that was clear enough to people who wanted to know and wanted to follow him and ask more, but that seemed harmless or silly enough to be dismissed by people who were critics or haters.
That seems to have influenced a big part of his communication style. It also is clear that he valued indirect communication that forced the listener to wrestle with big questions, but in a way that he didn't want to nail it all down for you. He wanted to force you to do that work yourself, and that's what his parables and riddles are.
David Perell:
How would you compare and contrast the different writing styles of the four Gospel writers? Let's do this as a fire round.
Tim and Jon:
You love to bring me to Luke a lot, I feel like.
Tim and Jon:
Oh, yes.
Tim and Jon:
At least more recently, he talks about at the beginning of his gospel about the journalistic, kind of orderly account.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah, the orderly account.
Tim and Jon:
He's also very Jewish. He and Matthew are both very much about all the hyperlinking and structure of the book and the way the words they're choosing and when they're choosing them, and the number of times they use words. Those feel very similar to me in certain ways.
Tim and Jon:
However, you can watch moments where he's interacting with one of his sources. At least what I think is one of his sources that we're talking about Luke.
We're talking about the Gospel of Mark. When Luke is interacting with one of his source material documents that we call the Gospel of Mark, you can just set him up in parallel and you can watch him leave out certain puzzling details in Mark, abbreviate a story. It's a lot similar to what you do to things that I write.
Tim and Jon:
Edit it down.
Tim and Jon:
And then often he'll shift the wordings of things to use more common or more easy to understand words for his Greek and Roman readers in the first century. So you're actually watching him do a kind of cultural translation of a shorter, more dense and cryptic version of a story that's in Mark. You can watch him do it.
So that's a cool thing to think about, but what most people notice is the way that John is different than Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
David Perell:
My goodness, you said it so beautifully that it's like a Rembrandt painting.
Tim and Jon:
Oh, okay.
David Perell:
You did like an 80 million hour lecture series on the Book of John, and I listened to the whole thing.
Tim and Jon:
And you're like, it's like a Rembrandt painting.
Tim and Jon:
Right?
David Perell:
Like, you look at a Rembrandt page, and it's all the stuff that's dark, and then there's this little bead of light. And every single thing that the light is on is important.
So if you see a detail in the Book of John, it's going to be important, but he's also not going to give you much. It's kind of this darkly lit room.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah. Great.
David Perell:
That's a nice way to put it.
Tim and Jon:
That's great.
Tim and Jon:
And he's very poetic, and there's a very high relational dynamic, so it feels very human and intimate.
Tim and Jon:
I remember when I first started learning the little that we know about John in the late first century. The Gospel of John registers this. It also is alive in early tradition after the New Testament that John was the last living of the 12, those earliest. He had the longest time to sit with his memories and all the memorized sayings.
He also, uniquely, in John's account, recalls Jesus's teaching about the Holy Spirit coming to be your teacher and to remind you of everything that I told you. I think what John is telling us there is the account of Jesus that you're reading is the account that comes from the decades that he had to prayerfully recite and meditate on all the content of the word.
Tim and Jon:
Make sense of it.
David Perell:
Right.
Tim and Jon:
With the guidance of the Holy Spirit and with his community, the "we" that speaks up at the end of the Gospel of John. The Gospel of John actually is the product of the kind of personal and communal prayerful meditation over a lifetime that brings us the rest of the biblical text.
So John is amazing, but every biblical text is actually like that, just in a slightly different way.
David Perell:
And then what's going on in the writing style of the Psalms and Song of Solomon? How do you feel like that has inspired maybe our music, like gospel music today?
Tim and Jon:
There's so many songs written with the lyrics from that tradition and the imagery.
Tim and Jon:
We don't have any surviving melodies or music in biblical manuscripts or anything like that. There is a reading, kind of chanting tradition in a certain kind of stream of biblical manuscripts from the medieval period, where Jewish scribes developed a fixed way of how to chant and the rhythm that they built into a series of markings along the words. Super, super cool.
If you ever go to Jewish synagogue and hear them reading scripture, they're following that.
David Perell:
When I was bar mitzvah, I grew up Jewish, and then I became Christian. My Torah portion was parashat roshe, and when I sang it, it was "Amen kiyakoum bakir becha yamnim oh choleim kalom ben hata ne leha." So you would chant it. You weren't just read it.
Tim and Jon:
The origins of that chanting tradition go back to the 4th, 5th century AD and likely is much older. It's probably really old. It's so cool to think about.
How that relates to what the Levites were singing in the temple and how they sung the psalms is a big question mark. It's a whole field of Bible nerds and historians doing their thing.
Tim and Jon:
In terms of the impact of the language of the psalms, sometimes it's hard to not read a verse and then hear a song.
Tim and Jon:
I hear the song version of it.
I think I've been really interested to learn more recently about the way that the Psalms were memorized, chanted, and sung, both in Jewish tradition and then also in the Christian monastic tradition of monasteries.
Because singing, praying the Psalms by singing them was a habit three times a day for tens of thousands of Christians, probably more. It's never stopped. It's still happening here today.
And when I began to read early theologians or Bible nerds from the three or four hundreds, you can just see that this is somebody who has the Psalms not just in their mind, like in their body, because they sing them every day.
Tim and Jon:
Right.
Tim and Jon:
I was recently reading Augustine. St. Augustine's Confessions is a really wonderful example. It's my bedtime reading right now, and he can't help but the Psalms leak out of everything. He says it's so beautiful. I wish I sounded like that.
David Perell:
I always think it's telling that we say that to memorize something is to know it by heart. I think that's what you're saying.
Tim and Jon:
That is what I'm saying.
Maybe it's back to stocking your mental encyclopedia with the stories and poems it reads you. It becomes the way that you read your life.
David Perell:
I'm such a new believer, so I've had this funny experience where none of my family's Christian.
As I would spend time with believers who I really admired, I noticed that they would speak Bible. They basically had the Lego blocks of all the words and verses and concepts. Everything that came out of their mouth was they would just rearrange those Lego blocks and it would come out in Bible that they would just rearrange.
I was like, I want to go learn how to do that.
Tim and Jon:
That's so great, David.
I remember being in my early 20s noticing that I didn't grow up reading the Bible. My parents were and are believers. They're amazing, but they didn't force Bible reading in our family culture. I really didn't start reading the Bible till my early 20s.
I noticed that at Bible college. Exactly, and I thought it was awesome. You can know these texts in a way that they can just be a part of how you talk. There is also a way in which that can be more or less helpful ways to do that.
[86:25] Early Bible Reading and Interpretation
David Perell:
Sure, sure, sure.
I know, exactly.
Tim and Jon:
We can so rearrange the Lego blocks that it's actually our creation, but we think it's the Bible. We kind of remade the Bible, and it sounds like the Bible, but actually we've so dismantled what the biblical authors are trying to say and remade a new thing.
But to the degree that our language can be a faithful representation of the language of scripture, I think it's cool.
David Perell:
Well, thank you, guys.
Tim and Jon:
Yeah.
Tim and Jon:
Thank you, David. This has been really fun.
David Perell:
You guys have taught me so much.
I just got to talk to you guys about all the questions that I had.
The Word and writing was wonderful. That was pretty cool, wasn't it?
Tim and Jon:
Totally.
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