Bible Project: How Two Guys Changed Bible Education on YouTube | How I Write

Summary

Podcast Summary: How I Write with David Perell

Episode: Bible Project: How Two Guys Changed Bible Education on YouTube | How I Write
Guests: Tim Mackey & John Collins (The Bible Project)
Date: June 25, 2025

---

Overview: The Art and Process of Teaching the Bible

In this episode, David Perell interviews Tim Mackey and John Collins, the co-founders of The Bible Project, about their creative process, the collaborative mechanics behind their viral Bible explainer videos, and their philosophy on reading, writing, and teaching scripture. The conversation goes behind-the-scenes on research, scripting, animation, and how their unique dialogue style makes the Bible accessible and engaging, regardless of one’s religious background. Along the way, they explore deeper questions about understanding, mystery, and the enduring influence of biblical literature on personal growth, writing, and Western culture.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Collaborative Creation: From Research to Script to Animation

• Genesis of Ideas
  • John typically initiates the study, immersing himself in a vast world of biblical scholarship and languages.
  • [01:10] John Collins: “Usually the ideas for what we're doing come from me saying to you, oh, we should really like think about this ... It's a whole world of Amazon lists of way too many books and not enough money kind of thing.”
• Hand-off and Dialogue
  • Tim plays the role of the intensely curious "non-expert", drilling John with questions, pushing for clarity and simplicity.
  • [03:12] Tim Mackey: “I don't have the patience ... just to sit down and study and read. But I'm just very curious. And so I love ... to just work with an expert and then just drill them and discuss ... It is a discovery process...”
• Process Pipeline
  • The process: John’s research → long-form notes → dialogue & Q&A → iteratively developed script → passed to animation team for visual conception → collaborative refinements.
  • [06:09] Tim Mackey: “So it goes from notes to discussion to script for a video, to then a lot more content, written content that our scholar team generally does, then to more notes...”

2. The Collaborative Animation Workflow

• Animation as a Tool for Clarification
  • The animation team often spots logical or narrative gaps that prompt script rewrites and deeper clarifications.
  • [07:54] John Collins: “A project that's in the pipeline right now is a theme study on wilderness throughout the Bible...our team ... pointed out the way we plotted the sequence of ideas was actually really hard to display visually ... so they just point out a couple spots like that. We're like, you're trying to set up this pattern, but it didn't fully repeat...Sometimes we're into draft seven of the script in that back and forth with the artists.”

3. The “Illusion of Knowing” and Embracing Mystery

• Illusion of Mastery
  • Tim describes how repeated exposure can fool us into thinking we understand more than we do.
  • [10:09] John Collins: “We'll go back to the same ideas over and over and over. And sometimes I'll be like, I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask again ... That's the illusion of knowing, and I have to turn that off...”
• Certainty vs. Trust
  • For John, certainty in faith or biblical knowledge has yielded to trust—a willingness to sit with not knowing, to foster true wisdom.
  • [12:16] John Collins: “The hope of certainty has gone out the window ... Certainty is stemming from a desire to have control ... But that's really different than trust. So I think 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...”
• Honoring the Mystery Through Learning
  • [14:47] Tim Mackey: “There's a beauty in being able to understand something in a new way and then enter into the mystery through a new perspective.”
  • [15:37] John Collins: “To honor a mystery doesn't mean that you don't think about it ... you come to better understand exactly what it is you don't understand.”

4. Designing for Depth: Clarity, Visuals, and Literary Art

• Why Visuals Matter
  • The integration of visuals enables the communication of both the clarity and the mystery inherent in biblical literature.
  • [19:01] John Collins: "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."
• Layered Communication
  • The videos blend dialogue, sound, and visuals to create multiple layers of meaning—not just cognitive, but emotional and spiritual.
  • [20:34] John Collins: “Congratulations to our past selves. No, but that's right. It makes ... the point. And biblical literature is trying to influence us on all of those levels, you know?”

5. Reading the Bible: Altitudes and Approaches

• Zooming In and Out
  • The Bible invites both close reading of detail and high-altitude pattern recognition—seeing chiasmus, numerology, recurring motifs (e.g., significance of "40", tree imagery, etc.).
  • [24:08] John Collins: “Flying high altitude, but having done the detailed work, is actually how the biblical authors themselves want the ideal reader to engage.”
• The Ideal Reader, Meditation, and Community
  • Psalm 1 and the concept of "hagah" (meditate): The Bible is designed for daily, lifelong meditation—muttering, pondering, dialoguing.
  • [25:39] John Collins: “In Psalm 1, we read about the ideal Bible reader ... you slowly, quietly read the Bible out loud to yourself and then go talk about it with your friends ... The Bible starts to read you because ultimately the writers of the Bible want you to adopt this story as your story.”

6. Why Poetry, Riddle, and Narrative?

• Metaphor and Meaning
  • Poetry, parable, and indirection aren’t glitches, they’re a feature meant to stock our minds with images, drive deeper reflection, and avoid simplistic answers.
  • [47:49] Tim Mackey: “In reality, I think this is how it works ... the way we understand anything is through metaphor. And so there's metaphoric schemas behind all of our language and everything that we think. And so how do we learn new things and how do we change how we think? It's by adopting new metaphors.”
  • [53:40] Tim Mackey: “Why does God write to us in poetry and in narratives, and why does Jesus teach in riddles?”
  • [46:30] John Collins: “… the biblical authors assume that the most important ways 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…”

7. Dialogue as Pedagogy

• Modeling Communal Discovery
  • The dialogue script structure models real learning as a social, communal, and iterative journey.
  • [65:48] Tim Mackey: “I am asking those questions. I do know it gives permission to the viewer to go, yeah, that's my question too...”
• Intentionally Conversational Writing
  • The videos consciously script in learner/teacher voices to make the viewer feel welcome, not intimidated.
  • [66:39] Tim Mackey: “Yeah, we'll write our voices into the script. Which is weird because then we are rehearsing and performing a script ... It is a condensing of an actual conversation that we had.”

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Nature of Understanding:
  • [10:09] Tim Mackey: “If we realized how little we actually understand about the world, we would go crazy ... my brain plays this trick on me that goes, you get it, you know how this works. But I don't.”
• On Certainty and Trust:
  • [12:16] John Collins: “[Certainty] is stemming from a desire to have control ... But that's really different than trust ... I have no problem knowing that I don't know the answers to most things …”
• On the Project’s Aspirations:
  • [28:25] John Collins: "Our goal actually isn't to get people to watch more of our videos ... 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."
• On Meditating on Scripture:
  • [26:30] Tim Mackey: “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 ...”
• On Visuals and Literary Parallels:
  • [22:09] John Collins: “You can make the visual composition of each story parallel to each other. And that visual parallelism is actually an expression of the literary parallelism. And it's so fun ... It forces us to think literally about the Bible as words on a page, but then also as parallel images in a storyboard.”
• On The Bible as Literary Art:
  • [17:42] Tim Mackey: “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 ... so that we Can, I guess, wrestle with it in the right way...”
• On Communal Learning:
  • [68:21] John Collins: “What we're also trying to model is ... we discover our most important insights for our growth as human beings, in community, from. In relationships to something other than myself ... we're a kind of species that develops through communal knowing and learning.”

---

Important Timestamps

• 00:45 – The starting point for making a new video: research, scholarship, languages
• 03:06 – The dialogue handoff, the teacher/student dynamic in their process
• 06:09 – Animation’s role in developing and clarifying content
• 09:39 – The “illusion of knowing” and how their podcast dialogue is genuine
• 12:16 – Certainty vs. trust in approaching Scripture
• 16:51 – Learning expands mystery, not contracts it
• 17:42 – The Bible as literary art and embracing riddles
• 22:09 – Paralleling literary and visual patterns; chiasmus, themes
• 25:39 – The concept of “hagah,” meditation, and Psalm 1
• 28:04 – The Bible Project’s true goal: encouraging independent, wise reading
• 47:49 – Understanding through metaphor; poetry as divine speech
• 65:01 – Modeling the conversation in videos; writing in dialogue
• 66:36 – Scripting permission for the viewer to be a beginner
• 78:28 – Contrasts in the Gospels’ writing styles, literary strategies

---

Writing Styles & Literary Devices in the Bible

• Comparative Gospel Analysis

  • Matthew and Luke: Structured, heavily hyperlinking to Hebrew scriptures
  • John: Poetic, intimate, “Rembrandt painting”—sparse in detail, but every detail is loaded with significance
  • Mark: More cryptic, denser, a source for Luke’s more accessible versions
  • [80:17] David Perell: “It’s like a Rembrandt painting … 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.”

• Psalms, Songs, and Chant Tradition

  • The Psalms deeply embedded in Christian and Jewish chanting, shaping early church and monastic traditions.
  • [85:14] John Collins: “... when I began to read early ... theologians ... 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.”

---

The Bible’s Influence on Language & Culture

• English idioms and Ethical Worldview
  • Many familiar phrases and a "sacred value of human life" trace back to biblical source, with Tyndale, Geneva, and King James translations shaping English for centuries.
  • [74:21] John Collins: “Oh, the sacred value of a human life ... that's not taken for granted in human history. It's not taken for granted in the same way on the planet today.”
• Biblical Imprints in Western Thought
  • Concepts like equality and justice, found in the Declaration of Independence, have deep biblical roots.
  • [75:01] John Collins: “That the person without power in a certain situation has the moral high ground just by being without power. That is ... nothing more Hebrew Bible and Jesus style than that way of seeing the world.”

---

On Teaching, Communication, and Jesus’s Methods

• Jesus as a Communicator
  • Preference for indirect, provocative, riddle-based teaching, designed to provoke rather than simply explain.
  • [76:50] Tim Mackey: “Jesus gave sermons, I suppose, but like he taught in riddles and he was very provocative and he just gave so much space to be like, yeah, you don't get it yet, but that's okay.”
• Why Parables?
  • To enable self-discovery and to protect the message in a politically volatile context; to reward persistence and curiosity among his listeners.

---

Final Reflections

• On Joy and Delight in Reading
  • The Bible isn't meant to be onerous or merely instructional; it is to be experienced with delight and curiosity, ideally in community.
  • [33:33] John Collins: “You can read the Bible with a few different aims ... 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?”
• On Language and Memorization
  • The bodily practice of chanting, memorizing, and meditating on scripture “stocks your mind” with images/patterns, so scripture “reads you.”
  • [85:41] John Collins: “That is what I'm saying. That is. And 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.”

---

For New Listeners: Key Takeaways

• The Bible Project’s process is a model of collaborative, communal exploration—fusing deep research, sustained dialogue, rigorous simplicity, and visual storytelling.
• Their videos and podcasts are crafted to make the viewer an active participant in meaning-making, not a passive recipient.
• Biblical literature is a masterclass in how to create—through ambiguity, structure, repetition, poetry, and narrative—a lifelong learner and seeker, not merely someone with correct answers.

---

Sample Notable Quote for Social Sharing:

“Our goal actually isn't to get people to watch more of our videos ... 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.”
— John Collins, [28:25]

---

Transcript

[David]

This is not a normal episode. There's two guests, not one. Tim Mackey and John Collins. And they're the founders of the Bible project, a YouTube channel with more than half a billion views. And it is entirely devoted to teaching people how to read just one book. I think that book happens to be the most influential book in the history of Western civilization. The beginning of this interview is about how they make these videos, they're so good, how they're researched, how they're written, how they're animated. Then we go into the deeper stuff, and I think you're going to like it whether you're religious or not. Questions like, how should you read the Bible? And what can we learn about all the different writing styles in scripture? Stories, songs, poetry, proverbs, parables, all those things.

[Tim Mackey]

Let's rock.

[David]

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 Mackey]

Starts with you.

[John Collins]

Yes, it. Yep, it does. Yeah. Usually the ideas for what we're doing come from me saying to you, oh, we should really like 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. So I'm just like, in any field of knowledge, you know, there's your nerds who like learn about that thing into a level of detail that no one thought was possible. And 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 couple thousand years. And 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. So that's it really, in the way a lot of that education is just learning the languages and then learning like Greek and Hebrew. Mm. Those are languages like of biblical texts themselves. A little Aramaic in there. But then 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. So that's kind of what I went to school for, for so long, was to learn languages. So that I could read in this conversation, but it's books and it was a community of learning colleagues. So I made a lot of friends in those years that are all in biblical studies, researching writing, but it's just a whole world of Amazon lists of way too many books and not enough money kind of thing.

[David]

And then where does the handoff happen? So how is the baton passed to you, John?

[Tim Mackey]

Just through dialogue. Because I don't have the patience. Yeah. Aptitude. Just 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 and through dialogue and through just a lot of asking questions, try to understand it myself. And so then it's in that dialogue that we work through the ideas. And then it is a discovery process, though. I mean, you come with, you know, 75% of what you think we're going to walk away with, but there's some genuine discovery along the way.

[John Collins]

Yeah, yeah. For me, it's literally like a professor prepping to teach a class. So 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, like, hyper, curious, insistent student who won't do any homework.

[Tim Mackey]

Never, never does the homework. But I'll show up engaged.

[John Collins]

You'll show up engaged. It's perfect. So you come in cold.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

Which is great because I can't take anything for granted and things that I'm just assuming. Or gaps in my own learning where I've made four leaps in steps of what conclusions I'm making. And he'll be like, wait, how'd you get from there, from that?

[David]

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 or what?

[Tim Mackey]

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. And, you know, it bugs most people, but it doesn't bug Tim. And so I think it kind of. It works enough like, at least you don't show me that it bugs you.

[John Collins]

It doesn't bug me. Well, so like you said, it becomes a discovery process. So 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 learned because he challenges me then to write gaps in my thinking, or he asks a question that I just am like, I never even thought about that. Prepping for this. And then we just start working on it together. So it's co learning. We're learning as we go.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah. So it goes from notes to discussion to script for a video to then a lot more content, written content that our scholar team generally does than to more notes is kind of the pipeline.

[David]

And then where does the art direction come in?

[Tim Mackey]

And so 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. And art development.

[David]

Okay, so there's something here. So you are sort of in house theologian, and then you are the bad student who is just, like, trying to make everything super clear, and you're helping to distill. And then there's another animation team after that.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah, there's our animation team. So my expertise before this partnership was just making animated explainer videos.

[John Collins]

So.

[Tim Mackey]

I loved the process of sitting down with a client and then learning and quizzing them and being curious and then coming up with a script. But then the whole process after that of then 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. And so we just built our own team here that does that with us. And so 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, and they'll ask us questions, and we'll realize, oh, okay, we need to work on this more. So it's like a more community in the script. And 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, man, we could play up that idea by adapting our script this way. Or, man, this is just not working. Why? Oh, because we weren't that clear. We need to rewrite this. So it's a collaborative process there with our artists.

[David]

So what's an example of what you were just saying? Break that down for me.

[Tim Mackey]

What would be a good example?

[John Collins]

So, well, a project that's in the pipeline right now is a theme study on wilderness throughout the Bible. So we did a bunch of work. So I do read lots of Bible, read lots of scholars on the Bible, create the notes. We talked for 10 hours. We co wrote a script that we felt great about. Like we were pretty stoked on it. And then, yeah, we gave it to our team and they were beginning to point out the way we plotted the sequence of ideas was actually really hard to display visually in terms of story coherence. So they just point out a couple spots like that. We're like, you're trying to set up this pattern, but it didn't fully repeat and this and this. And then we're like, oh my gosh, we didn't even notice. So then we go back rewrite. They go back 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. So it's kind of like that. I mean, sometimes we're into draft seven of the script in that back and forth with the artists.

[Tim Mackey]

I'm trying to think of a really clear example. I know in the test video our artist came with the idea of two doors, so we didn't come with that idea. And then that became such a central image. But there's always some sort of visual that will unlock an idea for us. And 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 just kind of like, yeah, what do we do with this?

[David]

Tell me about the illusion of knowing.

[Tim Mackey]

Well, 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. And most people kind of assume that the podcast is like pre rehearsed or I know where we're going. And so then the question is like, okay, well, are you being genuine? Are these really your questions? And I've had to think about that a lot. We've been talking about the Bible for.

[John Collins]

11 years now.

[Tim Mackey]

11 years now. And so we'll go back to the same ideas over and over and over. And sometimes I'll be like, I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask again. And 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. And the way that just. 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. Like, I really. 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, right? So my brain plays this trick on me that goes, you get it, you know, you know how this works. But I don't. And so I just have to. 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. And so it's. 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, I. There's. It's much deeper than I thought.

[David]

How do you think about that? Because one of the challenges with Scripture is that in some way, it's like this marvelous mystery, and it's this glorious mystery. It's like God has given us a little bit that we can just learn and learn and learn. We learn so much about God's kingdom, but also there's so much that is just beyond our grasp and comprehension. And I would assume that your position, part of what people expect from you is to have answers. But it's sort of one of those things that as you learn more, you sort of realize, man, I don't know when the day of the Lord's gonna be. You know, stuff like that. And how do you balance sort of like a pursuit of certainty that comes with teaching with a kind of surrender to the grand mysteries of it all.

[John Collins]

That's a really great question. I think a lot about it, too. I think that 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, actually because of, I think, the impact of Jesus and of the story of Scripture on me, which is certainty is stemming from a desire to have control over what I think the outcomes of my life are. And if I know the right things, certain outcomes will follow. And if I don't, you know, disaster. And I just 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. To me, that's a big deal, but that's really different than certainty. So I think 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]

Where does that show up beyond Genesis 3?

[John Collins]

Oh, man. So what the whole. It's what the whole thing's about.

[David]

It's like, David, that's what the whole book is about.

[John Collins]

Yeah. I mean, it's not about anything else except humans learning how to trust God in his surprising ways of teaching us what wisdom and life really are. I think for me, that's just why I love biblical literature so much and why I love being a follower of Jesus, is it actually has been the gateway for me inhabiting a view of the world where I do have trust and confidence, but I have zero certainty. Zero. I should take that. I'll dial that back. I think for me, what matters less is certain than certainty, is trust. All that to say is, I have no problem knowing that I don't know the answers to most things. And I think you and I share that. Of wanting to expose the illusion of knowing. Like, you and I both value that and we feel. Okay. Being vulnerable.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

Of reaching the point, you're like, oh, I don't. I don't know. I don't know how it goes together. I need five more years to think about that. And I. But to me, that's just admission of the truth as opposed to, like, a.

[Tim Mackey]

Traditional explainer video, which is the world I came from, is all about, like, helping you actually know. So this morning I was talking with our animation studio director working towards this new video we're making on the spirit of God. And there's so much mystery and this idea that God is spirit. And to make an explainer video to, like, kind of smooth out the mystery just feels like the wrong move. You want someone to sit in the mystery, but there's a way to do that. But 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 and 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.

[John Collins]

Or even, like, to honor a mystery isn't mean that you don't think about it. Ponder it. You can actually make a lot of progress in understanding the thing you can't understand truly. And actually what you come is to better understand exactly what it is you don't understand. But then I think 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, you know, deeper way.

[David]

Well, the Spirit of God is such a good example because, for example, we learned the Spirit of God is an advocate. Okay. 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. Okay. Okay. Wow. 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.

[John Collins]

Whoa.

[David]

Okay. So we've learned all that. And so I think that to your point, that 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.

[John Collins]

Yeah, it's great. Yep. It's a great, great analogy. I mean, the biblical story is trying to answer the biggest questions. Answer. It's trying to address the biggest questions of, like, who are we? Where are we? What's wrong with everything? If there is a solution, like, what is that? Who's behind it all? I mean, they're huge questions. And while knowing the full extent of every one of those, I think is kind of like a dog trying to learn algebra, like, it's just not gonna. But we can make a lot of progress in our own journey of expanding our awareness of all those questions. And Scripture actually is ideally designed to do that because it's so hard to understand. And that's not a glitch, it's a feature.

[Tim Mackey]

That's what I've learned through this project is that I grew up in a tradition where the Bible was approached as a reference book. Some sort of, like, you can just dissect it, turn it into a rule book, or turn it into, like, a theology book and master it. And I've come to this appreciation of the fact that this is. 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, I guess, wrestle with it in the right way? And 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, you know, a taxonomy? Or is wisdom and knowing how to have a good life and how to connect to God, there's this experiential wrestling through and turning something really personal through that wrestling. And so we just marvel all the time about how many puzzles are in the Bible. And we just kind of relish the puzzles and keep coming back to them and thinking about them in new ways.

[John Collins]

I think. I think that's also why we've just enjoyed our learning process, the writing process, and then visual media, you know, as a way to communicate, because you're communicating more than just through words, though 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. Like, 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.

[David]

Yeah. 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.

[John Collins]

The Bible is such a sophisticated piece of literature, and so all these smaller plot lines keep overlapping, building up the tension. And when you back up, you can see how they've all been woven together into the unified story that leads to Jesus.

[David]

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 thing. You know what I mean?

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah. And like, there's a cadence to it.

[David]

That'S so much more than just words. There's all these layers of communication.

[John Collins]

Yeah, it's great. Congratulations to our past selves. No, but that's right. It makes. Makes the point. And biblical literature is trying to influence us on all of those levels, you know?

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah. What you've taught me about biblical literature is that it will, like, just. Just the poetry. It'll 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. And 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. And you're just supposed to. It doesn't tell you to do it. You're just supposed to start to think about these stories together. And by doing that, you're seeing a depth that's kind of under the surface. And what we get to do with the visual media, what we get to do with the visual medium is we get to help explore contrasts and comparing things in that clip. Building tension or showing you an illustration that kind of tells you the point. There's so much you can do with the visual media medium that the Bible doesn't have. But the Bible is doing the same techniques.

[John Collins]

Yeah, we've made videos about all the books of the Bible, kind of overviews, but the biggest. And then that how to Read the Bible series. You know, that clip was from. But I feel like the biggest demand for us in terms of learning and challenging us, is when we do a theme study of, like, an idea that's introduced at the beginning of the biblical story and then runs all the way through. Because 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 and 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, but you can make the visual composition of each story parallel to each other. And that visual parallelism is actually an expression of the literary parallelism. And it's so fun. Then it forces us to think literally about the Bible as words on a page, but then also as parallel images in a storyboard. And I love that process. It's been one of my favorite parts of it over the years.

[David]

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.

[John Collins]

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]

What do you mean by that?

[John Collins]

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 tabernacle? You know? But then it, like, leaves out details that seem really critical, you know, as the character's motives or why they do things, the things they do.

[Tim Mackey]

And all the detail is matters.

[John Collins]

Yeah, but it matters both in its context in that parable or in that story about Moses or Gideon. But also the. 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, kind of. 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.

[David]

Exactly. 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.

[John Collins]

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. The idea is that every day for 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. Yeah, yeah, There you go.

[Tim Mackey]

We talk about someone a lot, and that word hagah is really meaningful to the work that we do.

[David]

What's hagah?

[Tim Mackey]

To meditate.

[David]

Ah, right, of course.

[Tim Mackey]

And it's that murmuring sound, and it's like having the words on your lips kind of, you know, in your mind, just kind of 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 kind of on my mouth and in my mind and 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 kind of shape our imagination on. And so you talked about, you know, we can read a parable. And 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. And 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, they're 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. Like, okay, there's more here because I understand how trees have been coming up throughout the Bible and that's to meditate on Scripture.

[John Collins]

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. And our goal actually isn't to get people to watch more of our videos.

[Tim Mackey]

No.

[John Collins]

Right.

[Tim Mackey]

I mean.

[John Collins]

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. And we hope the videos are helpful and to that degree. But 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. But ultimately it really is about like the Bible. Actually, the way you experience this little video is actually what the Bible can be like. At least that's always been hope for me. Thinking about.

[David]

You mean in terms of the feeling or in terms of how alive it can be?

[John Collins]

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, Right? Right. And that's what those are electric moments in our lives.

[Tim Mackey]

And what good art does is it gives you a moment to see something that conjures emotion, but then also meaning. And the more that you spend with it, the more meaning unfolds. And that's such a craving for us is to find more and more meaning. And then another craving is to have relationships with people where this meaning comes alive. And so 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]

It was like Grandma's dusty old tome that you weren't allowed to question or ask, like, lest you have any doubt whatsoever. How dare you? You know what I mean?

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[David]

It doesn't need to be like that.

[Tim Mackey]

No. It's turned into an opportunity to have this wonderful friendship where we get to dialogue. And 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. And we could do that in community with each other. And that's just so fun. And so I've been running this experiment with people where we'll just read Psalm 1 together as a community, and we'll just enjoy the process of enjoying it as literary art and then asking what God's wisdom is for us. And it just begins to just be like, oh, this was fun. This was, like, really enjoyable thing to do. Why don't we do this more often? It's like, yeah, I don't know. We should. Yeah.

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[David]

There's so much in Psalm 1 I just saw, and I've been reading Psalm 119, and 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. And that's the thing that.

[Tim Mackey]

Can I tell you something funny about that? Please, bring it on. Well, so in college, right? I gave up reading the Bible right after college, and.

[David]

Oh, you were just like, I'm done with this.

[John Collins]

After Bible college.

[Tim Mackey]

After Bible college, yeah. Wow.

[John Collins]

Like, you got a degree in understanding the Bible.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah. It's actually not that hard to do. It turns out to get that degree. To get that degree.

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

And so there's this wonderful old man in my church who took Me and some friends out to breakfast every Friday morning and read Psalm 19 to us slowly. And it was the most tedious and boring thing I've ever done in my life.

[John Collins]

Wait, 19 or 119?

[Tim Mackey]

119.

[John Collins]

119. Yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

And 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. And I began to despise Psalm 119. And 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, yeah, that's, yeah, there's backstory there. You had some trauma there. 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 like, oh, yeah, I do enjoy this. And it completely shifted for me. And it's because again, we're doing it in community. We are, we're just letting these ideas really shape us and we're, we're able to enter it with curiosity. And yeah, there's a joy to it.

[John Collins]

Yeah, there's maybe you could say there's a couple. 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. And that is a, 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? Like what. How do I enter into it on its own terms and just let it do what it wants to do to me? And that's what I became so interested in for all those years of schooling was discovering a tool set and a set of questions to ask these texts that begin to unlock that. And then seeing every book of Scripture like a pre super well designed like roller coaster where it's like I could step aside and like 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 and what's that about? And you begin to see these authors are doing something to you. And sometimes that'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 till you. Till page 50.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

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, you know, with me. But it's been amazing.

[Tim Mackey]

You forced me?

[John Collins]

Well, this whole thing was your idea.

[David]

You forced him, actually.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

You invited me.

[Tim Mackey]

Signed up.

[John Collins]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

We. No willing participant. I think an example that is really lovely about what you were just talking about is. 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. And 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? Like, that's like, kind of 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? And then why does that become the unraveling that kicks off the whole story of humanity and the human drama? And it doesn't tell you why. It just presents this riddle. We've wrestled with that many times over. And there was this one moment where we got to the story in second.

[John Collins]

Kings three in First Kings.

[Tim Mackey]

First Kings three.

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

Story of Solomon and Solomon. So we get to the story in 1st Kings 3, where Solomon is famously asked by God to request anything.

[John Collins]

He just became king. So he's like.

[Tim Mackey]

He becomes the king, and God says, ask me of anything and you can have it. Famous story. I always kind of remember that story as he asks for wisdom, right? 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.

[John Collins]

Really?

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

He asks for the Tree of Knowing Good and Bad, essentially. And it's this hyperlink back. And 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 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 that, to the fruit? Suddenly, like, it started to pop with, like, 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.

[John Collins]

Ask for it, where to really find it. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

[Tim Mackey]

And so the Bible doesn't tell you that. It's just something you begin to discover. And 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.

[John Collins]

And.

[David]

Well, that's a marvelous example of what you were saying earlier, of how 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. Because when you said that earlier, I was like, I don't really know what you mean by that. That's what you mean by that.

[John Collins]

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. Until.

[David]

Builds the dang temple.

[John Collins]

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 Mackey]

Well, the wisest person in the world.

[John Collins]

Yeah. If they can't do it. And if he can't do it, like, 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, which is part of what we mean when we talk about a unified story that leads to Jesus. Is that the four gospel accounts telling a 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 like the inversion or the reversal of all these failures.

[David]

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.

[John Collins]

Yeah, the Word.

[David]

The Word. The Word is God. The Word is with God. The Word was God. What, like, what is going on with that?

[John Collins]

Yeah, what a wonderful example. You're like, how are those two statements true at the same time? Right, yeah. Is it God or is it distinct from God? Right, yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

Well, and then also, what is going on there?

[John Collins]

That's the question. You better read the. You better read the rest of the story to see how that's going to unfold.

[Tim Mackey]

Sorry, what were you saying? Well, and what's with the image of the word? Really abstract and poetic. And again, it's this hyperlink to.

[John Collins]

The.

[Tim Mackey]

Rest of the story of the Bible. And how does you know? We've read Genesis 1 with each other, I don't know, a hundred times. And so 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. And so that 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 now 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.

[John Collins]

Yeah. And, 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 like a word is something that's an expression of my mind that gets pressed, translated into air, pushed out through my vocal cords to make sounds that I'm saying right now that you understand. So it's so wild because 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]

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, the word in his mouth, it's like a sword. And then it all comes together there. So like, what is going on with that? This is just why the word.

[John Collins]

Yeah. The Bible is a text made up of words. It opens with the 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. And 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. Yeah, the matter. Because they create. Yeah, they create reality.

[Tim Mackey]

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. And. But what are you doing? You're using letters and strokes of a pen or shape of your mouth, like what, what is actually going on? But there's this, this power to it. And the biblical authors are literary geniuses. Like they come from a literary culture of just so much care for the word. And so when they think of that power, it's very intimate to them. I mean, that's their world.

[John Collins]

Yeah, yeah. The best analogies, as I've sat longer with biblical literature, the best analogies I can think of are all about musical musicians. Like think of a really tight knit, you know, jazz quartet. And they've been playing together for decades, right. And they just know how to hum and how to work together. And it's. And they have, they've memorized it and they've, they know their scales, that's all down. But in the moment, they create the new thing, you know, every time those two songs are the same. And 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. I don't know, you'll hear something else, which is most people hear in the Bible. They're just like, well, this doesn't make any sense. It makes confusing.

[Tim Mackey]

Well, you'll get to Revelation and you'll read about the sword coming out of his mouth, and you'll be like, well, 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. It's coming out of his mouth.

[John Collins]

Yeah. Yes.

[David]

Why would God speak to us in poetry?

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah. I love. I love that.

[John Collins]

Dude.

[David]

Can you just give me a plain answer?

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah, like, what is going on?

[David]

Why did.

[Tim Mackey]

Why did Jesus teach in riddles? Yeah.

[John Collins]

Yeah. I think we have thoughts. I don't know about answers.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

Poetry is a form of human communication where you. You alter your normal habits of talking. Right. And 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. And those surprising combinations force you and the reader to make new connections. And so poetry obviously is famous for using metaphor or figures of speech, but what metaphors are is they are a way of getting your mind to put two things together I wouldn't normally put together. It's a form then, 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. And what actually better form of communication as the vehicle of divine speech, which is. 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 Mackey]

Yeah. We've talked about in our how to Read the Bible series how important metaphor is. And in reality, I think this is how it works. This is beyond my pay grade, but the way we understand anything is through metaphor. And so there's metaphoric schemas behind all of our language and everything that we think. And so how do we learn new things and how do we change how we think? It's by adopting new metaphors. And I think poetry just goes at that directly. You can also try to learn another argument or kind of a logical train of thought, and that's also really useful. But there's something more powerful and enduring by changing the metaphor behind what you believe.

[John Collins]

I think that's part of why I've enjoyed working in the visual medium too, for all these years on these projects. Because no one explainer video we make can say everything about whatever it is, but you can pack every millisecond with so much intentionality that you actually could watch it 30 times. I mean, our artists are this skilled. They're like. I mean, they're obsessing over details in the visual language to a degree that I'm just like, whoa, okay. You're like one of the biblical authors. And that itself is communicating the more the multiple layers of meaning that are inherent within Scripture itself. And 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]

Well, 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.

[John Collins]

Oh, yeah, okay.

[David]

Yeah. So then you have the profit. It's a tight shot. It's inwardly focused perception of the world. And then you get this broader vision of the cosmos, and it's just like us. The scene is widening. And so you get this kind of subconscious change that happens through the imagery, through the sound, which is a kind of. A kind of metaphor.

[John Collins]

Yeah, it is. 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 Mackey]

That 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. And that's a beautiful way to understand understanding. There's other ways too as well. And sometimes our metaphors just are really bad and dangerous. And so we just need new ones. And so it's delightful to be able to be confronted with new ones in.

[John Collins]

A way you could say that is a big part of what the biblical story is trying to do is like, stock a human mind with encyclopedia of images and stories and ways. Right. 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. And you're like, whose story am I telling? I'm like, I'm telling, like, about 10 different people's stories in the Bible right now.

[David]

It's like, what is Tim trying to say right now?

[John Collins]

Yeah. And so. But then that shapes you. If you have those stories in your mind, then the moment I come to a decision, like at work or, you know, in parenting or at the grocery store and like, those. That's what's filling my imagination. And I'm like, oh, dude, 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. Like, 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. But the way we become skilled readers of our lives is actually parallel to becoming skilled readers of the Bible.

[David]

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 Mackey]

Yeah, it's a great metaphor. That's a metaphor. There we go.

[John Collins]

I like that.

[Tim Mackey]

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. And I sometimes just feel like that would be so much easier and nicer. Just really simple. Just give me the list of things to believe and the list of behaviors. But then how big would that book need to be in reality to deal with the complexities of life? And so it's actually just impossible. I think it's impossible to create that kind of book. So why does. Why does God write to us in poetry and in narratives, and why does Jesus teach in riddles? Because 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.

[David]

Is there a writer or a kind of writer? I'm curious from both of you 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? You're like, this is. You're awestruck.

[Tim Mackey]

You know, King James translation has done some really wonderful things with certain psalms or teachings that there is just this cadence and poetry to it that has this beauty and nostalgia to it. But. But you've taught me to just kind of sit and patiently kind of come and begin to appreciate it on its own terms instead of feeling its beauty on the first pass.

[John Collins]

Yeah. Sometimes it feels. A biblical story or poem will feel like chaos.

[Tim Mackey]

Paul bugs me the way he writes. I get really irritated, especially when he.

[John Collins]

Doesn'T even finish his sentences. You're just like, come on. 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.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

But it's so hard that our English translations kind of massage it out. But it's a good example. I think he was writing on the go. He was often dictating, which doesn't mean they're haphazard. But what Paul never did was write, like, the Discipleship 101 Handbook.

[Tim Mackey]

That also bugs me.

[John Collins]

But he references that he did have something like that in his head. And who be to the fusions, like, remember the whole pattern of teaching that we taught you about how to follow Jesus? And so it's like all of that. Remember that? But then. Now let's talk about this thing.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

So that bugs you.

[Tim Mackey]

That bugs me a lot.

[David]

Then he cuts off the sentences.

[Tim Mackey]

No. Well, yeah, I mean that his senses are dense and they're run on senses. And then sometimes he cuts them off. Yeah, it's hard to follow. It's hard to follow. And then he's. He's writing in Greek and he's thinking in Hebrew, and I'm just this, like, Northwest kid that just wants. That all bugs me. But then there's also.

[John Collins]

He didn't write his own systematic theology bothers you.

[Tim Mackey]

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 it be great to have that curriculum? I kind of expect that that's what the Bible would be.

[David]

That was the original Bible project.

[Tim Mackey]

So, yeah, like, no one wrote that down or kept it. There was 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. Like, let me give you some instruction.

[John Collins]

And he'll pull from that. You know, he's pulling phrases from that stuff. But we don't get the complete thing. Yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

So that's Paul. The Old Testament, Hebrew Bible stories, they're so dense. And Tim alluded to this. Every detail matters. But then there's details. You're just like, why are you telling me that? Or you told me that already. Like, 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, you know, hear more of the nuance of a dialogue and doesn't want to be reminded about some seemingly inconsequential details.

[David]

I hear about blood in Leviticus one.

[Tim Mackey]

More time, you know, so 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, you're supposed to care about that purpose. And I'm not trained as a Western modern reader to be able to do that. So your question was what literature Just do. I just relish. And I think, honestly, it's all very hard.

[David]

Well, 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 Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

Communication, philosophy. And that itself is a part, I think, of the, the learning journey. We've talked about describing the Bible as a cross cultural reading the Bible as a cross cultural experience. Because in a way, that is what it's like in anytime you go visit another culture, go visit another family in their home, that'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. But. And who's the author for you?

[David]

The author? The writing style for you that you.

[John Collins]

Oh, well, whatever one I'm working on at the time.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah, the biblical author.

[John Collins]

Yeah, if that's what you're asking.

[David]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

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, you've entered the manuals, though.

[Tim Mackey]

Like you're fully in, like you're reading in Hebrew.

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

You're like, yeah, your mind is switched over. Like.

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

In a way that.

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[David]

Is there one writer that you feel is the lossiest As I read a NIV or an esv, where you just feel like, oh, so much is lost from the translation.

[John Collins]

I want to honor our translations in the English tradition as remarkable achievements. They are truly. But no translation can ever capture everything going on if it's, you know, of what's in the original. And that's true in the Bible. So Isaiah has had a hold on my interest and imagination from my earliest days of following Jesus. Yeah. And 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 Mackey]

Jesus was really into Isaiah.

[John Collins]

Totally. Yeah. Jesus top 10 books of his Bible, at least by how often he quotes from are the Psalms and Isaiah and Deuteronomy with Genesis coming in. Pop forth on Deuteronomy. So 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.

[David]

Yeah. One realization I had, if there was ever preaching to the choir, this is the sentence. But that the Bible is really important. And 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. And there's so much there, even like Joshua 1:8. And what makes Joshua a great leader is he's.

[John Collins]

He.

[David]

He knows the word, you know, keep it close to your lips. And I don't know. That surprised me. Something like that.

[Tim Mackey]

I marvel at that. That part of being a Christian and following Jesus is becoming like a literary nerd of an ancient type of literature.

[David]

Yes.

[John Collins]

Ancient Israelite text.

[Tim Mackey]

Ancient Israelite text is kind of like, hey, now that you're following Jesus, you're gonna get really interested in text. Isn't that weird?

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

Now. And here's the thing is I grew up in a tradition where it's like, you know, the Bible is for everyone, and so go and have your personal time with the Bible. And 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.

[John Collins]

No, I think actually that would not be good for the world people to.

[Tim Mackey]

Focus on some other things. But how wonderful it is to have a community of people so that when you sit down with. With your crew and you read some text, there is maybe someone like you.

[John Collins]

Around the world needs a certain ratio of Bible nerds.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[John Collins]

But definitely not too many because some people need to actually, like, do the stuff that makes the world go around and, like, do stuff that just make documents longer.

[Tim Mackey]

But then 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. And 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.

[John Collins]

Yes, yes. 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. And you would come through and just was like a lawnmower and it was like every paragraph shrunk.

[David]

John the lawnmower. Here he is.

[John Collins]

No, it was incredible. And one, there's 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. And if you speak to them in a simple, clear way, which is what all of us want anyway, is to.

[David]

I heard this explained once, and it's true.

[John Collins]

I think it's true.

[David]

Cleo abram, she's a YouTuber. And I love how she says it. She says most people over. Most people overestimate how much context people have and underestimate their intelligence.

[Tim Mackey]

Do the opposite. Exactly. That's exactly.

[John Collins]

That's great.

[David]

Do the opposite, right?

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[David]

Lay out the context for people, but then assume they're smart. And that's what I hear you.

[John Collins]

It's exactly the same thing.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah. There's so much complexity to the ideas that we are discovering and wanting to communicate. And 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. Like, we actually do have the intelligence. And that's what I love in my role, is I can just sit down with someone who's done the work as context and then just kind of like Drill, drill, drill, until we, we get to that clarity. And I'm like, cool, if I can get to that clarity, everyone else can get to that clarity.

[David]

So I was watching a lot of videos the past few days and the biggest thing that I kind of biggest X ray vision that I picked up is how conversational the two of you are. And 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 want to hear how that comes together.

[Tim Mackey]

Each part of the story there is loaded with ambiguities, but altogether it makes sense.

[John Collins]

And this is the literary genius, genius of the Bible. It forces you to keep reading and then interpret each part in light of the others.

[Tim Mackey]

This is feeling complicated. I don't know if I can do all that.

[John Collins]

Well, you're actually not expected to notice all of this by yourself or all at once.

[David]

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 makes it, it elevates it, but also makes it really approachable.

[Tim Mackey]

I don't know why I decided let's write in dialogue, because I'd never had written any other scripts in dialogue up until we started working on this, but it felt right. And what we try to do is just capture our voice. So 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. And it's usually kind of hidden back there. And I think it's the illusion of knowing. Thing is, 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. Thank you for saying that out loud. And so, yeah, I think that's a powerful way to invite people into the process.

[David]

Do you write that into the script or you do?

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah.

[David]

Okay, cool.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah, we'll write our voices into the script. Which is weird because then we are rehearsing and performing a script.

[John Collins]

But I mean, 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. Yeah. Creating a concise form of the learning journey from hours into minutes. And 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. But what I love is the back and forth. And 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 what I mean by you. I'm not talking about you, you, but also your Persona. And be like, no, I think you would know this. Probably the viewer knows that, but they have a question about it. That's this. And then I'll be like, is that Kano? And you're like, yeah, that's right. Or vice versa. So I don't know. We've made hundreds of these, but all.

[Tim Mackey]

Comes out of the. The fact that we know each other's voice and we went through the experience together. And so 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. And so I'm just taking that from the conversation and then writing the script.

[John Collins]

What we're also trying to model is what is true about human development is that we discover our most important insights for our growth as human beings, in community, from. In relationships to something other than myself. It might be a book, you know, but that's me encountering another person through their word. Back to that thing again. But truly, I mean, we're a kind of species that develops through communal knowing and learning. We need each other to actually grow in our insight. And 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. That both are really important. And I think that was something we were unconsciously communicating by writing the videos as a dialogue because we valued that learning process together.

[David]

Yeah, I had a guy on the show, his name is Dana Gioia. Wonderful poet. A wonderful poet. And he said that there's a line he likes that goes, God creates, man assembles.

[John Collins]

True.

[David]

Not true. Eh, I don't know. What do you think?

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah, there's. There's some beauty in that. I mean, think you've taught me there's there's two words for create that are often translated create in Hebrew. Right. Bara. And what's the other one?

[John Collins]

Well, there's two words used in Genesis one. Okay, yeah. Which is bara, which means, like to bring about an unprecedented thing, the thing that's not been before, the brand new thing only God baras in the Bible. But then God also asahs, which is to make or produce. And that is a very general word. But yeah, it can.

[Tim Mackey]

God can do it. But also humans do it.

[John Collins]

But humans do it. Yeah. So it is kind of like. Or you could say recycling.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah, it's that idea God baraz. 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. And when we mend a relationship or when we start a business, these are creative acts.

[John Collins]

Yeah, but you're right, actually, I needed some time to think about the quote, but I do think I affirm that. Actually, 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 that were just given to them from their very first breath. 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, you know, to God's. God is creator.

[David]

If you look at the English language and you trace back influences so often you see that it goes back to the Bible. Right. So you take somebody like Abraham Lincoln and you read what he's saying and you see a kind of these biblical waves, this biblical rhythm, these biblical language that you see. And it seems like as I excavate, everything just goes back to the Bible and Shakespeare. So let's talk about the Bible. Like how has the Bible influenced our language?

[John Collins]

There are people who are experts in such things. I'm not one of them. I thought. I thought about them. I know some things about it, but yeah, the English translation tradition is only about 700 years old. The Bible's a lot older, but like.

[David]

Going back to Tyndale or before that.

[John Collins]

Yeah, Tyndale. Yep. William Tyndale Wycliffe, John Wycliffe. Those are the early, the earliest. And then those. Then they had a huge influence. And it's kind of accumulating then each new English translation that Was made, looked to its predecessors for cues. And then 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.

[David]

Right, of course, of course.

[John Collins]

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. So all that to say is there's so many figures of speech that are in like even like 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. So it's a Hebrew idiom that Job uses. And the King James chose not to paraphrase it into like another idiom. They just kept it and so the dust of death. There's so many, there's hundreds of them. But so that's on the English language. There's also I think 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 oh wow, it's really, really different.

[David]

What do you mean?

[John Collins]

Oh, the sacred value of a human life.

[David]

Right, of course. For example, look at how the Romans treated babies.

[John Collins]

Yeah, I just. 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]

I mean with that 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.

[John Collins]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's. These are wonderful examples. And we're so.

[Tim Mackey]

Ah.

[John Collins]

That the person without power in a certain situation has the moral high ground just by being without power. That is 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. So I guess it's more in terms of ethical worldview or moral worldview. The Bible and the spirit 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. And a lot of that has to do with the widespread impact of the Bible in Western culture.

[David]

And what do you think that Jesus understood about communication that we can learn from?

[John Collins]

And that is kind of a weird question. I ask myself that question all the time.

[Tim Mackey]

Yes. I mean, 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 I could put on one or two hands. And they're actually probably ones I heard on tape from someone who's just like that. You've never met world class gifted preacher. So. And so Jesus gave sermons, I suppose, but like he taught in riddles and he was very provocative and he just gave so much space to be like, yeah, you don't get it yet, but that's okay. You know, and on purpose, right?

[John Collins]

On purpose.

[Tim Mackey]

And if you come to me and you press me enough. Okay, then I'll tell you what it means. Like, that's just such a different way to approach learning with someone speaking of.

[John Collins]

Context like we were earlier. I mean, it's good to acknowledge the context of what Jesus was saying and why and when he was saying it. So he lived in a military occupied land from a foreign empire, and he was making claims about himself that if misinterpreted, were highly dangerous. And in fact, he got executed for it. And so 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. And 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 and how.

[David]

Let's do this kind of as a fire round. But how would you compare and contrast the different writing styles of the four gospel writers?

[Tim Mackey]

You love to bring me to Luke a lot, I feel like.

[John Collins]

Oh yes.

[Tim Mackey]

At least more recently he talks about. At the beginning of his. Of his gospel. About just the journalistic kind of orderly account.

[John Collins]

Yeah, the orderly account.

[Tim Mackey]

But then he also very Jewish. Him and Matthew both very, very. 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 and all the things, those feel very similar to me in certain ways.

[John Collins]

Yeah. 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 of 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. Actually, it's a lot of similar to what you do to things that I write.

[Tim Mackey]

Edit it down.

[John Collins]

Yeah. 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. That's in Mark. You can watch him do it. So you can literally watch that act. So that's a cool thing to think about. But they are. What most people notice, though, is the way that John is different than Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

[David]

My goodness, you said it so beautifully that it's like a Rembrandt painting.

[John Collins]

Oh, okay.

[David]

Well, no, there was a, like a. You did like a 80 million hour lecture series on the Book of John. And I listen to the little thing and you're like, it's like a Rembrandt painting.

[John Collins]

Right.

[David]

Like, you look at a Rembrandt painting and it's all the stuff that's dark and then there's like 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 like darkly lit room. I thought that was nice.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah, great.

[David]

That's a nice way to put it.

[John Collins]

Yep. That's great. That's a great. Yeah, we. Yep.

[Tim Mackey]

And he's very poetic and there's a very high relational dynamic. And so it feels very human and intimate.

[John Collins]

I remember when I first started learning the little that we know about John in the late first century. And 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. And he also, uniquely, in John's account, recalls Jesus teaching about the Holy Spirit coming to be your teacher and to remind you of everything that I told you And I think what John is telling us there is the book, 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.

[Tim Mackey]

World makes sense of it. Right.

[John Collins]

With the guidance of the Holy Spirit and with his community, the we that speaks up at the end of the Gospel of John. And so the Gospel of John actually is the product of the kind of personal and communal prayerful meditation over a lifetime that is, you know, that brings us the rest of the biblical text. So John is a word. It's. It's amazing. But every biblical text is actually like that, just in a slightly different way.

[David]

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?

[John Collins]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tim Mackey]

There's so many songs written with the lyrics from that tradition and the imagery. Yeah.

[John Collins]

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 a Jewish synagogue and hear them reading scripture, they're following.

[David]

Well, when I was Bar Mitzvod, so I grew up Jewish, and then I became Christian. And my Torah portion, it was parashat Roshay. And when I sang it, it was amen kiyakoum bakir bacha yamim o kolem kalom venata leha. And then that's how it was. So you would chant it.

[John Collins]

You weren't.

[David]

Just read it.

[John Collins]

So the origins of that chanting tradition go, I mean, 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. But 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. But in terms of the impact of the language of the psalms, sometimes it's.

[Tim Mackey]

Hard to, like, not read a verse and then hear a song, hear the.

[John Collins]

Song version of it.

[Tim Mackey]

Yeah, totally.

[John Collins]

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. For, like, it's never stopped. It's still happening here today. And when I began to read early, like theologians or Bible nerds, you know, 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 Mackey]

Right.

[John Collins]

And I was recently. Oh, like Augustine. St. Augustine's Confessions is a really wonderful example. It's my bedtime reading right now, and. And he can't help but just the psalms leak out of everything he says. It's so beautiful. It's like, oh, man, I wish I sounded like that.

[David]

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.

[John Collins]

That is what I'm saying. That is. And 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]

Yeah, well, I'm such a new believer. So I've had this funny experience where none of my family's Christian. And as I would spend time with believers who I really admired, I noticed that they would speak Bible and they basically had. You can imagine, they just had the Lego blocks of all the words and verses and concepts. And then at 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. And I was like, I want to go learn how to do that.

[John Collins]

That's so great, David. Totally. 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. And so I really didn't start reading the Bible till my early 20s. And I noticed that at Bible college. I noticed that. Exactly. And I thought it was awesome. I was just like, you can know these texts in a way that they can just be a part of how you talk. There's also a way in which that can be kind of maybe I'll say there are more or less helpful ways to do that.

[David]

Sure, sure, sure. I know, exactly.

[John Collins]

Because I think we can so rearrange the Lego blocks that it's actually our creation, but we think it's the Bible. You know, 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. Yeah. Of the language of scripture, I think that's cool.

[David]

Well, thank you, guys.

[Tim Mackey]

Oh, yeah.

[John Collins]

Yeah.

[David]

Thank you, David.

[John Collins]

This has been really fun.

[David]

You guys have taught me so much. And I just got to talk to you guys about all the questions that I had. And the word and writing was wonderful. That was pretty cool, wasn't it?

[John Collins]

Yeah, totally.