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Anchored Bible Conference: The Quest for Wisdom and Co-Reigning with Christ
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In this enlightening episode, Dr. Mark Giszczak, Associate Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Augustine Institute, shares his profound insights on the quest for wisdom as depicted in the Bible. Dr. Giszczak explores the intricate connections between wisdom and kingship, highlighting how the desire for wisdom leads to a kingdom, drawing from his expertise in Old Testament wisdom literature. Using the Wisdom of Solomon as a focal point, he explains the significance of wisdom in both ancient and contemporary contexts, illustrating how wisdom is the ultimate intellectual virtue that guides us toward true power and glory. Join us to understand how seeking wisdom aligns us with Christ, enabling us to share in His reign and divine authority.
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My name is Dr. Mark Giescheck. I'm Associate professor of Sacred Scripture here at the Augustine Institute. And I'm really excited to be with you today and share with you about some of the topics in Sacred Scripture that I'm passionate about. But first I wanted to show you my beautiful brand new Bible. I chose the black leather one and I just think it looks absolutely gorgeous with the gold pages and the beautiful ribbons, but some people like the hardcover even better. So anyway, I'm really proud of these Bibles. I was on the committee that helped design them and I'm just so excited to be able to share the ESV Catholic edition with you. So I hope that you enjoy one of them paperback hardback leather and hopefully we'll have many more editions coming out in the future. So anyway, today I want to talk about a topic that is really near and dear to my heart as a scholar of the Old Testament and, and particularly as a scholar of wisdom literature. I wrote my dissertation on the Song of Songs, and right now I'm deep in a study of the Book of Wisdom, working on a commentary on this relatively rarely read Old Testament book, the Wisdom of Solomon. So the title of my talk is the Quest for Wisdom and co Reigning with Christ. So sometimes I don't think we necessarily put together the pieces that the Bible has before us, right. That the quest for wisdom and the quest for kingship in Scripture are seen together. But we live in a very strange time, right? Our era is very much opposed to wisdom. Right. It's an era when people call good things bad and bad things good, and where people embrace falsehood and the truth is often sidelined. The spirit of ignorance has really taken over many minds and hearts in our society. The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritin puts it well when he says, the disease afflicting the modern world is above all a disease of the intellect, a disease of the intellectual. And it reminds me of St. Thomas Aquinas talking about how each one of us has been born in a double darkness, an obscurity of both sin and ignorance, a wound deep in our soul and a wound in our mind as well. In fact, he defines the wound of ignorance as the redirection of the human mind away from the truth toward other things, other pursuits. So if our age is dominated by that spirit of ignorance, I think that St. Paul's words describe it very well when he says, they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened, claiming to be wise, they became fools. How appropriate is that for our culture today in that kind of World, a world of ignorance, a world dominated by intellectual depravity of various kinds. Instead of having reasonable civil arguments with each other, we have the rise instead of the shouting match when truth is sidelined. All people want is power. That's what drives so many people today, right? The desire for power. Control over other people, control over money, control over the culture. The Greeks, the ancient Greeks, who we'll talk about a lot today, even had a word for love of power. Philarchea. Philarchea is this love for power, this love for control. Why do people love power? People love power because it gives us a false sense of security, right? A sense of predictability and control, when in fact having power. Earthly power does not deliver us from the power of God. It does not deliver us from the power of death. It's an illusion. In Scripture, however, we find an alternate desire which leads to a different kind of quest. It's not just the quest for power, but it's the quest for wisdom. And this is really the key verse of our talk today. The desire for wisdom leads to a kingdom. The desire for wisdom leading leads to a kingdom. These are words taken from the Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 6, verse 20. And I want to unpack what these words mean in our talk today. In the Old Testament, the wise man is one who seeks instruction. He seeks knowledge. He seeks moral correction for his faults. He seeks understanding and true intelligence and a keen sense about all things. Wisdom is very hard to define in this way. Right? What is wisdom exactly? Right. What is it? It's a kind of knowledge. It's a kind of know how or it's a kind of sense. In the the non biblical book of fourth Maccabees, it says wisdom is knowledge of things divine and human and of their causes. I think that's a nice succinct definition of it. Wisdom is knowledge of things divine and human and of their causes. St. Thomas will identify wisdom as the greatest of all intellectual virtues. It's the greatest of intellectual virtues. Why? Because intellectual virtues are classified according to their causes. Right. There's biology. Right. And botany and all these different topics. Right. That we could study. But the greatest of all things to study the greatest of all causes is God himself. He says wisdom is the most excellent of intellectual virtues because wisdom considers the supreme cause, which is God. So it might seem that wisdom leads us away from power toward anonymity and personal piety and maybe even bookishness. Right. You can imagine wiseman sort of in a library reading room somewhere paging through Aristotle. But the wisdom of Solomon insists that the desire for wisdom leads to a kingdom, it leads to power. So the purpose of this talk is to unpack that statement and show how it simultaneously draws on Old Testament themes and themes that we can find in the wider world of the wider Hellenistic political culture of the day, in order to lay a foundation for us to understand what the New Testament has to teach about this. So I'll give you two key words here at the beginning. One is exousia and the other is doxa. These two key words will drive through and they'll be a kind of thread that we can take all the way through from the Old Testament and Hellenistic Judaism, the, through the wisdom of Solomon, the ministry of Jesus, the teachings of St. Paul, all the way to the Book of Revelation. And we'll see how those two ideas, exousia, which means authority, right, Power, governance on the one hand, leads to doxa, glory on the other. Those two ideas will be a driving theme of what we're doing here. And we're going to see that Jesus wins the victory. And by his victory over sin and death, by his suffering, death and resurrection, he comes to reign, right? Jesus ascends into heaven just to have a good time up there. No, he ascends into heaven to reign as king on his throne. So we are invited then on the quest for wisdom with Jesus. And we'll learn that Jesus himself is wisdom incarnate. So to seek wisdom is to seek Christ. And finally, if we follow the quest for wisdom, if we follow the quest for Christ, if we are willing to undergo suffering with him, we come to participate in his glorious reign, to reign with him forever. Now, first we have to take a little step back and think about the book called Wisdom of Solomon. Again, like I said, it's one of the least read books of the Old Testament. And yet the Wisdom of Solomon was the last book of the Old Testament that was written. It was written in the first century BC by a pious Jew living in Alexandria in Egypt. Alexandria in Egypt was one of the largest cities in the Greco Roman world, and it had a large Jewish population. This book was written in Greek, not in Hebrew, like much of the Old Testament. So the book of Wisdom of Solomon was written in Greek and has a very rich vocabulary. So reading the Wisdom of Solomon in Greek can be kind of frustrating because you have to keep looking up the words. Many of the words are brand new, right? The author made up words like Shakespeare, right. And he takes great care in constructing his thoughts in a way that's elegant and beautiful in the Greek language. He's clearly familiar with the Greek philosophical terms of the Hellenistic period and the ways that people thought about life and death and the search for wisdom. Now, why this book was written, we have lots of theories, but one sort of main theory has become popular among scholars, and that is that the Wisdom of Solomon was written for young Jewish men, men who were living in the city of Alexandria, a city full of ideas, right? A city full of people, a city that was at a crossroads of cultures. It was a pluralistic, cosmopolitan environment. And in that kind of environment, there were a lot of Jewish people, a lot of Jewish parents complaining. My son grew up and abandoned the faith and went after the goddess Isis or went after Greco Roman rhetoric, or went into politics or went into the military, and he left the faith of his fathers behind. And this book, the Wisdom of Solomon, is written to those young men, those ones who are tempted to abandon the faith of their fathers because of this interesting cosmopolitan, pluralistic environment which they find themselves. There are so many choices, right? So many things to believe, so many popular philosophies, so, so many popular religions, so many things to do. Why would I want to stick with the faith of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob? Why would I want to bother to keep kosher and follow the law of Moses in this interesting environment that I live? And this book is an appeal to them that following the law of God is the most reasonable thing to do. Following the Law of God is about pursuing the God who created the universe. He invites them on the quest. He invites them on the quest for wisdom. And so, in this way, our author does something that we find relatively unusual. You leaf through the Wisdom of Solomon. There are no names in the whole book. He talks about ancient biblical characters like Enoch and Moses and other wonderful characters, but does not mention their names because he's trying to show that the lessons that we learn from those biblical characters are universal and universally applicable. He doesn't even mention the name of Solomon. He doesn't even mention the name of Solomon. Solomon's name does not appear in the book. However, he does write some of the book, at least in the voice of Solomon. So we hear Solomon's voice, particularly in chapter six through. Through nine. Why Solomon? Right? Because Solomon is the ultimate wise man, the one who is given more wisdom by God than anyone else. To think about the content in the book, I've given you a little slide right at the beginning of the book. The book comes in essentially three parts. Chapters one through six are often called the Book of Eschatology. They deal with the righteous and the ungodly, and what happens in their lives, and then what happens when they're judged by God. The middle part of the book, chapter six through 10, really focuses in on Solomon's quest for wisdom, his love for wisdom, and it even re narrates his famous prayer for wisdom in chapter nine. And then the latter half of the book, chapters 11 through 19, are often referred to as the book of History, where our author will essentially retell the Exodus story in a way in order to reveal the difference between the unrighteous and the righteous, between the wise and the foolish. So that's just a brief window into the wisdom of Solomon. But I want to talk about the milieu in which it was written, which is the milieu of the Hellenistic world. And sometimes people think Hellenistic. What does that mean? What's going on? Right, so it refers to Greece. Right. So we do have an earlier period of, of Greek history, but the Hellenistic period really begins when Alexander the Great conquers the entire world. Alexander the Great conquers the world from Greece to India to Egypt, and then he dies young, so he has a very successful young career, and then he dies. And we're left with a little bit of chaos. Right. He has generals who follow after him, called the Diadochoi, his successors. So the major players in that scene are the generals Ptolemy and Seleucus and Cassander and Lysimachus. And what they do is they divvy up Alexander's empire. But don't think it was just sort of like a nice easy party where they sat down and rolled dice for the universe. No, there were many, many wars that unfolded after Alexander's death where these different players are fighting for control. And when they win part of his empire, what do they do but declare themselves to be kings? And this is crucial for understanding what's going on in the Book of Wisdom, what's going on in the ministry of Jesus, and the way that salvation is depicted in St. Paul and Revelation. This is an essential backdrop. The historian Eve MacDonald talks about this era and says one of the most important symbolic notions of the Hellenistic period was conquest. The spear won land, and the rulers of these kingdoms established their legitimacy through military victory. This is the period of upstart kings, right? You have all these generals running around in the post Alexander the Great world, fighting battles, claiming territory, fighting against one another and struggling for power. And once they win a territory and they win power, they. They declare themselves to be kings. So kingship in the Hellenistic period is not a hereditary matter. They're not Inheriting the kingship. Rather, they're achieving it right through their military achievements. So their military victories lead to exousia, authority. Right. Political authority, and they lead to doxa, the glory of reigning over other people as a king. It's also important for us to remind ourselves that ancient peoples, while we do have some democratic ideals in Greece and Rome, ancient peoples did not think of power coming from the people. Ancient peoples thought of power coming from above, power coming from God. So there's a simultaneous idea in here that these generals are winning kingship not just by military achievement, but by moral achievement. They earn kingship by their moral qualities, and the gods are willing to bestow power upon them because of their moral achievements. Now, of course, if you're an upstart king and you declare yourself to be king just because you want a battle, you have to have a way of promoting your reign. Okay? So they would hire writers who would write propaganda for them, and they would also issue coins with their heads and their names depicted. So there were lots of coins from the Hellenistic period. And coining your own coins was proof that you had power. Right. It showed other people your face, and it showed other people your name and cemented this idea that you were in control. But these propagandists that they would hire to write, they would ask them to write not just about ideas in general. Right. But about kingship in particular. So in this time period, we have quite a few what are referred to as kingship tracts. Right? So they're books or booklets written by philosophers about kingship that don't focus on kingship as a hereditary ideal. It's not about getting it from your grandfather and your father. It's about earning it or achieving it through your moral qualities and through your military victories. These kingship tracts are not written by amateurs. Right. They're written by real philosophers. And we could view them as true works of political philosophy as they describe the qualities necessary to claim kingship for oneself. We could think of the king as representing, yes, the ideal wise man like Solomon, or representing the philosopher king of Plato. So Plato's depiction of the ideal government is when you have a very virtuous king who has total power in that government because he's always going to do the right thing. He's a philosopher and a king. You get a sense for the direction of this in the legends about Hercules, right. Where Hercules is rewarded for choosing against vice and for virtue. While not one of the kingship tracts itself, there's a related text called the Letter of Aristeas, which is famous for describing the original translation of the Septuagint. But in there, there's a kind of scene at a banquet where one of the kings, Ptolemy, goes around talking to the different Jewish translators of the Septuagint and asking them philosophical questions about kingship. And during this discussion, it becomes clear, and here I'm quoting from the historian Oswin Murray. He says, what becomes clear in this scene is that the highest form of government is to be master of yourself and not to be carried away by impulses, especially by such as a king is prone to the desire for conquest. Now, isn't that interesting? In their vision, in their political vision, the highest achievement that you could make, right, the highest form of government is to govern oneself. Self control is the greatest form of control or power, okay? And then he goes on to say, thus, the king must be a man who can rule himself. The king's virtues are all important. It is arete virtue which preserves his popularity and honor. Now, quoting from Aristeas itself, the king asks one of the guests, how could one be free from envy? And one of the banqueters replies, first of all, by realizing that God assigns glory. There's one of our key words, doxa and greatness of wealth to kings, each and every one, and that no king is independent. All of them wish to share this glory, but they cannot. It is a gift of God. So again, go back to our two Q terms, exousia, authority and doxa, glory. These are the two things that you get when you become a king, and they're both gifts of God. God gives you jurisdiction on the one hand, but then he gives you fame and glory on the other. And this is where Solomon is such an essential figure for this era. Solomon, in the Jewish tradition, is the ideal wise man, the greatest king, the wisest of all men, at the very beginning of his reign, as it's narrated in 1 Kings 3 and 2 Chronicles 1, what does he do? He prays for wisdom. And God honors his request and says, you know, Moses, most men in your position would pray for riches and glory and honor. And you prayed for wisdom and understanding. And I am going to give you that. And I'm going to give you all of the riches and glory and honor you could dream of as well. So God honors Solomon's request for wisdom, and then he gives him power and wealth as well. So Solomon then sort of sets the stage for us as the one who desired wisdom, who loved wisdom, and who sought it in the right way, and so received a kingdom as well. Indeed, if you go Back to the very first verse of the Wisdom of Solomon. It's a book by a king addressed to kings. Now, of course, it's a pseudonymous fictive king here, right? This is written in Alexandria in the first century B.C. but it begins, love righteousness, you rulers of the earth. Think of the Lord with uprightness and seek him with sincerity of heart. That's the most important thing. If you do that, you will get power later on. In chapter six, he addresses himself to O Kings and O Judges of the ends of the earth. Give ear you that rule over multitudes and boast of many nations. And then again in 6, 9, O monarchs, I think right after our key verse. So I'm just going to go back here for a second. Right here, right after our key verse of wisdom 6, 20, we hear him talk through the logic of this whole process. He says, therefore, if you delight in thrones and scepters, if you love power, O monarchs, over the peoples honor wisdom, that you may reign forever. He's saying, I know you want power, I know you want authority, I know you want control. But the greatest power and the greatest control is that which comes from God. And the way to gain that kind of power is to seek wisdom first. The desire for wisdom leads to a kingdom. So Solomon himself embodies the quest for wisdom. He says, I loved her wisdom, I sought her from my youth and I desired to take her for my bride, and I became enamored of her beauty. This is Solomon, fictive Solomon in the Book of Wisdom, describing his desire for wisdom. He has the greatest desire for wisdom, and then he receives the greatest portion of wisdom as a gift from God. Solomon's search for and embrace of wisdom takes the place of the militaristic emphases of the Hellenistic kings. It's not about winning battles, it's about falling in love. So if you look, for example, in chapter seven, verse seven, he says, therefore I prayed and understanding was given me. I called upon God and the spirit of wisdom came to me. Solomon's quest for wisdom is not about personal achievement. Solomon's quest for wisdom is about having the right desire. See the difference? If you're a Hellenistic king, you're one of those generals, you're Lysimachus, you're fighting battles, you're trying to win by your own ingenuity to gain more power over more people. But if you're wisdom, or if you're Solomon, you seek wisdom first. And by doing that, you will receive the greatest portion of not only of wisdom, but of power. I preferred her to scepters and thrones, and I encountered wealth as nothing in comparison with her. He goes on, right, describing his desire for wisdom, his love for wisdom. But what happens with Solomon then? Now we have a tendency to remember his faults, but that's not what's going on here. We're remembering the good parts of Solomon's life, right? The things that went right in Solomon's life. Solomon then becomes a kind of pattern for us. He becomes an ideal model of seeking after God, his kingship and his desire for wisdom. His quest for wisdom, his love for wisdom establishes a universal pattern for us. We can follow in Solomon's footsteps on this moral quest for wisdom. It's what one scholar has referred to as the democratization of kingship, right? So in the Hellenistic era, again, the whole idea of hereditary thrones is thrown out the window. And instead people are going around earning thrones and winning battles and fighting to gain political control and then declare themselves king. And the author of Wisdom of Solomon is going to take that idea of kingship that can be earned by achievement, and he's going to use it to read the character of Solomon and say, look, each one of us can do this. You don't have to be born as the firstborn son in the house of David to become a king. All you have to do is follow in Solomon's footsteps and seek after wisdom, and so you will become a king. The desire for wisdom leads to a kingdom. So this book embraces the best trends of the Hellenistic kingship ideals, right? This concept of kingship as a moral achievement and then sort of transforms it into this ideal of the search for wisdom. As I mentioned in chapter nine, Solomon's prayer for wisdom is going to be expanded in this beautiful form. So we hear him talking about. We hear him talking directly to God. O God of my fathers, Lord of mercy, who has made all things by your word and by your wisdom as foreign man. It's a beautiful prayer, but I want to draw your attention to chapter 9, verse 10, where he says, send her forth from the holy heavens and from the throne of your glory. Send her that she may be with me and toil, and that I may learn what is pleasing to you. Why does he say this? Because wisdom is a gift from God. Wisdom is a gift from God. It's not something that Solomon can earn, right? It's something that he can only receive as a gift. So Solomon wins, if you will, the battle of desire. He has the right desire, and so he receives this great gift from God. The gift of wisdom so in this way, Solomon embodies both the ideal wise man of the Hebrew tradition and that eager student of wisdom and moral correction and understanding and knowledge. But he also embodies that Platonic ideal of the philosopher king. He's the wisdom seeking son of David who fulfills the wildest dreams of the philosophers of the Hellenistic era. By seeking wisdom, Solomon obtains both exousia and doxa. Now in chapter 8, verse 10, he literally says, because of her, I shall have doxa, I shall have glory. He doesn't use our key word exousia in reference to himself. But later we find in Wisdom, chapter 10, verses 13 and 14, when he's describing Joseph, a righteous man, he was imprisoned, right? Joseph in Genesis and wisdom brought him the scepter of a kingdom and exousia, authority over his masters. So Solomon's desire for wisdom leads to a kingdom. But this is not just about Solomon, right? It's a universal pattern for everyone, for all kings, right, for all people. We can all be kings. If only we seek wisdom, we too can obtain exousia and doxa. And the book mentions this in chapter three and in chapter five when it describes the righteous, it says they will govern nations, rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever. The righteous will govern and rule. Not only that, they will receive a glorious crown and a beautiful diadem from the hand of the Lord. So this theme of sharing in God's governance over the universe, right, it's a key component not just of wisdom of Solomon, but of biblical eschatology as a whole, right of the way that the Bible depicts what happens after death. So for example, In Daniel chapter 7, verse 22, it talks about how God gives judgment, right, power, authority to the saints. It says the time came when the saints possessed the kingdom. So when we find a certain someone, right, walking on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and saying, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, the time is fulfilled. Repent and believe in the Gospel. What is he talking about? He's talking about Daniel 7:22. He's talking about what's going on in the wisdom of Solomon. The kingdom of God has come. And Jesus will even portray himself in Solomonic terms. In Matthew, chapter 12, verse 42, he says, the queen of the south will rise up in judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon. And behold, something greater than Solomon is here, namely me, right? He's talking about himself. Jesus is the new Solomon. And Jesus obtains By his suffering, death, and resurrection, guess what he obtains? Exousia and doxa. All authority, exousia in heaven and on earth has been given to me. He says, all exousia in heaven, on earth, has been given to Jesus. By what he won for us on the cross, he has ultimate jurisdiction. And then he describes himself in terms of doxa. In Matthew 25:31, he says, when the Son of man comes in his doxa, in his glory, and all the angels are with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne, his throne of glory. Jesus is taking the language of Hellenistic kingship and using it to describe what he has achieved. By his moral achievement of undergoing suffering and by his military achievement of combat against the forces of death and darkness. Jesus has won for himself a kingship. So now he can invite his followers to reign with him. Jesus gives exousia authority to his disciples that they might share in his doxa. So, for example, we hear him giving them authority, exousia over unclean spirits in Matthew 10. And he says, truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of Man will sit on his throne of glory, doxa, you who have followed me will also sit on 12 thrones, judging the 12 tribes of Israel, they will participate in his governance of the universe. He even says to me, you know what? My Father assigned a kingdom to me, and I also assign a kingdom to you. I confer on you a kingdom. I covenant to you a kingdom. Most literally, St. Paul will recognize this as part of the definition of Christian salvation, right? We don't just get sort of saved and then shipped off to, like, a heavenly hot tub to just sort of while away our hours and pleasure for all eternity. No, we actually participate in the governance of the universe. St. Paul insists on this. In 1 Corinthians 6, he says, or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? And in Ephesians, we see Jesus seated at the right hand of the Father. So this is in Ephesians 1:20. We see Jesus ascending, sitting down at the right hand of the Father. And I want to read the quote because it's really helpful. Far above, okay? So it says, he seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come, Jesus is given ultimate jurisdiction, universal jurisdiction. And then it says in chapter two, verse six, right? And he raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places. In Christ Jesus. We reign with Jesus, right? We share in his authority and his governance. James will also say, right, that we are heirs of his kingdom, right? We inherit the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him. A lot of times people think about the language the New Testament uses to describe heaven, and they think about all those passages about crowns, right? You're going to receive the crown of righteousness in second Timothy 4, 8, the crown of life, the imperishable wreath. But you know what? In 1st Peter 5:4, we see what this means. It's the crown of glory. This is not just a trophy, right? It's not just a prize. This isn't just a kind of token to hang on your wall. This is a symbol of the governance that you will have in Christ. This all comes to a head in the end in the Book of Revelation when we see the saints depicted as a kingdom of priests who reign with God on thrones that are set around his throne. So reflecting back on our themes, then, I think it's important to recognize that the quest for wisdom is the quest for Christ. The quest for wisdom is the quest for Christ. When we join Solomon in his love for wisdom, his desire for wisdom, we're seeking not just after some sort of intellectual ideal, but after wisdom incarnate, after Jesus himself. This quest calls us to reject Philarchia, right? The love of power, and to embrace something else. Philosophia, right? The love of wisdom. We're called to reject what this earth craves, right? The desire for earthly power, right? It's insatiable and it doesn't lead you anywhere, because true power can only be obtained in the humble search for wisdom. So I think the answer to our dark age of ignorance is to seek the light of divine wisdom, that we might come to reign with Christ. And we begin to realize that desire for power, desire for a kingdom, does not lead to wisdom, but to folly. But on the other hand, the desire for wisdom does lead to a kingdom, to the kingdom of God, and that in Christ we obtain both exousia and doxa, both authority and glory, that our salvation in him includes reigning with him now and forever. Okay, before I conclude, I just wanted to show you a couple things, just in case you want to hear me talk a little bit more. The Augustine Institute just released CD of the month for October called the Dark Passages of Scripture by me. So it's a talk about all those easy passages in scripture, you know, like where God kills people or asks people to kill people or really weird bad things happen. I talk about all those, and it's based on my book, Light on the Dark Passages of Scripture, where I deal with some of those difficult to understand passages in the Old Testament and the complicated things like, well, what about hell? What about the Canaanites? What about the cross? What about God's mercy and justice? How do we think about all those things together? So if you want any more from me, you can take a look at those or at my blog, Catholic Bible Student. But most of all, I just really thank you for joining us today, and I hope you're really enjoying this conference. And I am just so delighted to be with you. Thanks so much. Sam.