Scribes and Scriptures (ft. Dr. Peter Gurry)

Today is Monday, November the 28th. I'm Ryan Hill.

I'm John Galantis. You're listening to Clear View Today with Dr. Abbadon Shah, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. You can find us online at ClearViewTodayShow.com. If you have any questions for Dr. Shah, suggestions for future episodes, you can write in and let us know by texting 252-582-5028.

You can also email us at contact at ClearViewTodayShow.com. We've been getting a lot of texts, by the way. We have been getting a lot of texts. A lot of people have been texting the number. Thank you for texting in. We do our best to respond to every single one of them, so if you missed your text, we apologize. I actually put them on mute because Ryan and I share an account with the texting service, and so I get them, too, and I'm like, I'm just going to mute y'all.

I know that's not good for the radio show. I don't mute you guys. I love you. I don't mute you.

Obviously, I'm just joking around. I don't mute you guys, either. But listen, if you can look past my hateful rhetoric towards you guys, you can help us keep the conversation alive and in the airwaves by supporting this podcast. You can share it online.

Leave us a good review on iTunes. That lets Apple and Mr. Jobs himself know that you like the conversation. He gets a text every time. He gets a text that says, we want more Clear View Today.

But you guys sharing it and liking the podcast on iTunes and on Spotify and wherever you listen to your podcast is a good way to let people know that you want more and that you want to keep the discussion of Jesus Christ alive. That's right. That's right. Absolutely. You want to hit them with the first of the day?

I would love to. Verse of the day today comes from Philippians chapter four, verse eight. This is a good one.

Yeah, I like this. Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things. I think that's super important around the holidays because on the holidays or in the holidays, during the holiday season is what I'm trying to say. All we want to focus on is the negative. I want to focus on my anxiety. I want to focus on my stress. And not only do I want to focus on it, I want everybody around me to know that I'm more stressed than you.

If I can, yeah, go ahead. I think a lot of times people say like, oh, I don't really feel like it's the holiday season. Do you mean that or do you just feel like not adequately stressed enough?

I've been hearing that more and more and more amongst my friend group, like the older I get, like it just doesn't even feel like Christmas. Yeah. You know why? Cause you're negative all the time.

Yep. You're negative and you're focused on how stressed you are. You're fighting. It's like, I get that like life is more stressful now than maybe it was 20 years ago, but guess what? That's cause we're adults now. We've got more stressors.

Hashtag sorry, not sorry. I'm not sorry to say it. I'll say it again. Well, and here's where I've revisited this advice.

Here's where my advice comes in. Put up a Christmas tree. Put up the Christmas tree. Hang a wreath.

Put the lights on your front porch all year long. No, maybe not. That's a little much even for me. Drink a hot chocolate. Yeah. Eat a cookie. Get yourself in the spirit. That's right. Ain't nobody going to do it for you.

It's up to you. Text from my, from our engineer jobs is dead. Well, let's hard shift into today's topic. We're revisiting the realm of new Testament textual criticism today, and we've actually got a special guest on today's show. We're going to grab them in just a second, but if you have any questions or suggestions for new topics, send us a text at two five two five eight two five zero two eight. Or you can visit us online at clearview today show.com. We're going to go get Dr. Shaw and we'll be right back. Hey, the listeners.

My name is Kelsey and I'm John. And we want to pause the show for just a second to talk to you guys about Clearview churches, original EP together forward. Yeah.

These are five songs, five original songs that we wrote right here at Clearview church, myself, Dr. Shaw, David Williamson, our engineer on the Clearview today show, some of the other guys on the worship team. But sometime during all the shutdowns for 2020, we noticed this really horrible isolationism setting in all over the world. It was like nothing we've ever seen before. That's right. And one of the things that we've always been about here at Clearview is forward motion and community.

Those are both very important. So the whole heart behind the EP was, Hey, let's just take these two things and let's put them together because we truly feel like that's the antidote to what's happening in the world today. We're right in the middle of writing a whole bunch of new material as a church, but while all of those projects are still in the works, we want to help point you guys towards these songs that God has given us. You can listen to all of them right now on Spotify. Just look up Clearview worship, or if you want to support what we're doing here at Clearview church, you can buy it on iTunes right now. And always remember you can support us directly at the Clearview today show by visiting us online at clearviewtodayshow.com.

That's right. Thanks for listening. We hope these songs are as much a blessing to you as they were for us. Amen. Let's get back to the show. Hey there listeners.

My name is John and I'm David. And we just want to take a second and talk to you about Dr. Sean Nicole's new book, 30 days to a new beginning daily devotionals to help you move forward. No matter who you are or where you are in life, you're going to get stuck.

You're going to have goals that you just can't seem to reach. And you're going to be looking for some new way to start over. Unfortunately, life does not have a restart button, but here's the good news. God's mercy is new every day.

Right? And so that means every day is a new chance for you to start over. Now, Dr. Shah and his wife, Nicole have written a new 30 day devotional in their 30 day series designed to give you practical tools for starting over.

No matter where you are in life's journey or what pitfalls you've encountered, this devotional is going to help you move forward, refocus your mind on God's truth and meditate on his word. And you guys can pick up a copy right this second on Amazon.com. Unless you're driving.

Yeah. Don't shop and drive unless you're driving. In which case, wait till you get home. But we're going to leave a link for you right here in the description of this podcast.

So it'll be waiting for you when you get home. That's 30 days to a new beginning daily devotionals to help you move forward. For the remainder of November and all through December, we'll be sending a free copy to anyone who supports the podcast by visiting us online and donating to the show at cleerviewtodayshow.com.

That is a very, very good incentive, gang. That's 30 days to a new beginning daily devotions to help you move forward by Abaddon and Nicole Shah. Thank you guys so much for listening. David, you want to jump back into the show? Let's go.

All right. Welcome back to Clear View Today with Dr. Abaddon Shah, the daily show that engages mind and heart for the gospel of Jesus Christ. You can visit us online at cleerviewtodayshow.com. Or if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes, send us a text at 252-582-5028. And if you're joining us for the first time, Dr. Abaddon Shah is a PhD in New Testament textual criticism, professor at Carolina University, author, full-time pastor, and the host of today's show.

You guys can follow that website at AbaddonShah.com. We're here in the studio with Dr. Shah. Dr. Shah, we've got a very special guest in the studio today. I'm going to kick things over to you if that's okay. If you just introduce our special guest for us.

Absolutely. We have today with us, Peter Gury, Dr. Peter Gury from Phoenix Seminary and Texan Canon Institute. And welcome. It's good to be here. This is not the first time you are here at Clear View.

It's not. No, it's my second time. It's great to be back. I was wondering if we could talk about the incident we had yesterday when you came in with the poodle shirt. Wait, the poodle shirt? He had a shirt on it that said sod poodles. And I saw it and I was like, who is this guy walking?

I was like, oh, this is Dr. Gury. So I was like, I wonder if we're cool enough. So I opened the door. I was like, what up poodles? It took me until yesterday to realize why he called me that though. Then he, then he texted me about today and was like, said something about poodles again. And he said, you can wear that shirt again if you want.

And that's when it connected. I'm kind of a nickname person, actually. Like I have nicknames for all my kids. I was called nicknames growing up. So I just, I just rolled with it.

I thought it was obvious, but you walked away like, why did this dude disrespect me? So the reason I wear that shirt though is because I think it's the greatest mascot. Sod poodle is a, is a what do you call it? A Prairie dog.

Okay. And it's the mascot of the, of the what do you call it? Double a baseball team in Amarillo, Texas. I don't even like baseball. I drive through Amarillo when we leave Phoenix and I stopped at a gas station.

They had those shirts and I thought it was the greatest shirt. I got it. That's pretty awesome. But I'm sure you had, you were wondering what is wrong with this place. I don't understand. I've been here before, so I know John's here to talk about the original text. I don't want to be called a poodle. I don't understand.

Well, speaking of that on today's episode. So we want to talk to you about the, the new book that you've written with Dr. John Mead scribes and scriptures. That book is, is available now. It's going to be available very soon. Yep. It's available.

Okay, cool. It's about the history of the Bible and stuff like that. Cause I thought what happened was guy just dropped the Bible out of the sky. A lot of us do, you know, I mean, we, we have our Bible and a nice leather Brown copy maybe. And it's double column and has chapters and verses. And we just think it's always been like this.

What do they want to look like? It was not right. Wow. But still is an amazing story, right? It is an amazing story. Yep.

That's right. So I guess, how did that start? Like where do you begin with such a huge task? Like, okay, what's the history of the Bible?

Where do you even begin there? Well, it's a great question. And in some ways we wrote the book trying to think, okay, what if we didn't take anything about the Bible for granted?

Okay. So, so look at your Bible and just think, I don't want to take anything about this for granted. So the first chapter of the book is actually is talking about writing itself, the alphabet, where did the alphabet come from? And you know, at some point you kind of lose the history of the alphabet in the midst of time. You might say we don't, there's no like one single point, but even then you think about writing itself. And why did people ever bother to first write things down rather than they're in a culture where mostly things are oral, they tell stories, okay. Why at some point did they just start to write things down? And so we kind of, that's kind of the entry point into the history of the Bible. We start all the way back with the alphabet. Now we don't tell everything along the way, because if we told the full story, you know, you'd have a book, I don't know how long. So we do. And this book is aimed at lay people.

This book is aimed at lay people and intended, you know, to help people who don't know anything. But still, in that sense, we wanted to kind of people to approach the Bible and say, what, yeah, what if I didn't take it for granted how I got this? So all the way from that, then all the way to our English Bible translations.

And why do we have so many today? Where do we get our first English Bible translation from? And then everything from, you know, formatting, like why are there headings in your Bible? Why are there verse numbers?

Where do those come from? To the names of the books, you know, why is it Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, those are actually not Hebrew names, even though those books are written in Hebrew. So just kind of peeling those questions back and helping people realize there's, there's a story to this book. And then as we say, I think, in the introduction, we want to tell the story of the Bible as much as we can to help you appreciate the stories in the Bible.

So along the way, we're also trying to sort of say, now let us show you how that helps you interpret the Bible, how to help you understand the Bible. So just if I can draw one kind of quick illustration of that, you think about the alphabet, right? And then think about how Jesus is called the alpha and the omega in the book of Revelation, right? Well, okay, that's a metaphor drawn from the alphabet, right? Saying he's the first and the last, and he encompasses everything because alpha is the first letter and omega is the last.

Right, right. You know, it's interesting that you talk about that and you say you start with the writing, because that makes me think of the conversation we had, I think two weeks ago, where we're talking about the original text. You know, this idea that someone, somewhere did pin the first instance of the Bible or the Gospel or the Scriptures. And people are saying that, you know, it's not even worth going back and trying to find it because it's just been lost to time.

Yeah, and that's just not true. I mean, we believe there is an original text, Old Testament and New Testament. In your book, every heading, whether it's text, canon, translation, you deal with the old and new, old and new, because the history is not exactly the same. Yeah, I mean, the Old Testament is written over a much longer period of time. It's written in Hebrew for the most part, and then a few bits in Aramaic. And the New Testament is written within 100 years of itself and then written in Greek.

So just very, very different histories at some points, you know, there's over that. But both for, to answer your question, both for the old and the new, there was a time when the author sat down, as Peter talks about, not Peter Gurry, but Peter in the Bible, the apostle talks about, you know, holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, Pharaoh carried, directed, guided by the Holy Spirit. So there was that moment in time when that pen hit the document and words came out that were inspired, all Scriptures given by inspiration of God, Theopneustos, God breathed. And so we believe that, of course, we don't have those original documents.

That would be great. We won't need a book like this, but the original documents are gone. But the copies are there, plenty of copies in the Old and the New Testament. And through the discipline of textual criticism, Old Testament textual criticism is different. Although both of us are New Testament textual criticism, but Old and New Testament are different. But through proper praxis, you can get back to the original text.

Yeah. But if we have to rely on copies, I mean, we, because I know you say in your book and pretty much any New Testament critic would admit that, yes, the scribes did make mistakes when they were copying these books over, there were mistakes. So I guess does that undercut the doctrine of inerrancy? I mean, I know, of course it doesn't, but as far as the conversation is going, why doesn't it, why, why can we say, okay, if we, if we're adding human elements and now we're even admitting that those humans made mistakes, why, how can we turn around and say, but there are no mistakes in the Bible. There are no, there are no errors in the Bible. Because if you believe the scripture is God-breathed, then the corollary doctrine, concomitant doctrine is that it is the Word of God, hence it is without error.

There are no mistakes in it. So inerrancy, I don't need to go through scripture, Old and New, line by line, line by line, you know, incidents by incident, trying to determine whether or not this is true or false. Because I believe it's God's Word and God doesn't lie, then His Word is true, hence inerrancy. So textual variants or scribes making mistakes do not shake the doctrine of inerrancy from me because it's tied, it comes out of inspiration. Now, if you have a problem with inspiration, then we're talking about something completely different. I remember you sharing about that in your message. If you, I mean, it's been an ongoing topic for us.

If you have an issue with inspiration, then everything just kind of falls apart from there. That's, we've got to start there and then things logically follow, but that's what we've got to handle first. Right. That's what the scripture says about itself. Right.

And it says it's the breath of God. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's always helpful to remind people that, well, two things. One is Christians have never believed that scribes were inspired the way the biblical authors were. So we ascribe that inerrancy to what the author said, not to what scribes accidentally made them say. And then the second thing is we use the term error a lot as textual critics. And we don't always mean, we rarely mean, in fact, something that is theologically in error. And error just means the scribe made a mistake in his copying. And that could be as simple as he misspelled a word or he, you know, the pen just slipped, that kind of a thing, you know. And so even those are, we call them errors. That's just the kind of the technical term. I don't want listeners to hear error and think, oh, all the errors in our manuscripts are theological. He's actually, most of them are not at all.

They wouldn't even rise to that level. I got you. I got you. So as we're talking about errors and textual variants and things like that, one thing that was on my heart recently, a lot of my friends have Bibles that have different books in it than mine does. You know, one of my friends has a Catholic Bible and there are books included in there that aren't included in mine.

For the sake of our listeners and our viewers, can you both, Dr. Shaw and Dr. Gray, can you kind of explain what's going on there? Why are some books included? Who makes those decisions on what books are included, which books are not?

How does that process work? So the basic reason is because the major branches of Christianity have all accepted a different set of books in the Old Testament. Now, for the most part, they all look the same in the New Testament.

There's a few outliers in some small regional churches, but say Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Bibles all look the same in the New Testament. So the issue really is in the Old Testament. And the short answer is, part of the reason why they don't all agree is because there never was a single council that met and decided this. And the reason I bring that up is because a lot of people think, oh, the Council of Nicaea, maybe, is where things were decided.

And this, you know, this found its way into the Da Vinci Code, so it's entered the popular imagination through that, through the movie and the book. But there never was a single council that sort of laid things down. I thought Dan Brown was a text critic himself, man. You mean to tell me he's full of belongs?

I saw it in the movie, so it must be true. He's not as good a historian as some people think. Now, there were councils that met, but they tended to be regional, or they tended to be a council of one particular branch. So the Roman, you know, the Council of Trent, for example. But the short answer to why there's a difference between, let's just go with Protestant and Catholic for a moment.

The reason there's a difference there is because the Protestants accepted the canon of the Jewish synagogue, which does not include those extra books that the Protestants called the Apocrypha, and that Roman Catholics called the Deuterocanon. People did use them. Christians did use them early on. So in the fourth-century origin, Jerome and Augustine go back and forth on this question, and Jerome says that we should only accept the books accepted by the Jews. And Augustine says, no, we should accept any books that have been used widely among the church. And so Augustine wants to have the wider Old Testament canon.

Jerome wants to have the smaller one. The earliest canon lists that we have for the Old Testament match that smaller canon, the Protestant one. And then, as far as we can tell, the Jewish canon from, say, around the time of Jesus and before that is probably closer, if not the same, as the Protestant canon, just in a different order of books in some cases. Does that make sense?

That's kind of the lot, but... Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the Septuagint canon is what we're really referring to. So people ask me, you know, should we read those apocryphal works? I'm like, yeah, you can. There's nothing wrong with that.

Will they benefit me? I'm like, yeah. I mean, if you want to know the intertestamental history or know how people were thinking in that period between the Second Temple and the coming of Christ and a little beyond, and you want to know how Jewish people in Alexandria and Alexandria were thinking and feeling, by all means read away. They're not bad books. They just, I don't think they are on the same level as the ones in our canon. Was there ever any intentional, like, shaming or any intentional distancing from those books? Like, where did that feeling come from of like, oh, this is kind of wrong. I shouldn't be reading this. Yeah, that's a great question.

That's part of the question I need to, I want to look more into. Okay. My hunch is, okay, that what happens is because of the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic side says these books are now canonical.

Okay. And so they're on par with all the rest of scripture. Useful not just for illustrating doctrine, but for establishing doctrine. And they do, they point to the Apocrypha for things like their belief in purgatory, for example.

Okay. So there are places in the Apocrypha where it matters for their theology. I think when the Catholic church takes such a high view of them, Protestants over time feel the need to react to that.

And so they in some ways react too far in the other direction. So what happens is like the original King James Bible, for example, in 1611, is published with the Apocrypha in it. Okay. Now marked off as the Apocrypha, but still clearly there. And already some people are upset about that at that time. And some King James Bibles, even in the 17th century are published without the Apocrypha. The Puritans, for example, are pretty opposed to the Apocrypha in their Bibles. If you fast forward to the 19th century, the British informed Bible society, sorry, no, I'm getting this as details. We're in the weeds now.

Hang on. That's the third section of the book. But the British informed Bible society was the biggest Bible society in the world at the time. And they published and and sent Bibles around the whole world, tons of them. And they changed their policy in the 19th century and said, no more will we support Bible societies around the world that published the Apocrypha.

And so that had a huge shift. Now, interestingly, in the United States, the Apocrypha was rarely printed in Protestant Bibles, as far as I'm aware. So that's partly because of our Puritan heritage, I think, different than the English things on the English side. Now, in the New Testament section, there's a little difference there. Yeah, there were books, again, useful for devotional purposes, like Shepherd of Hermes, or Epistle of Barnabas, or Clement.

And so there were benefits there. But again, there was a distinction, just the way they talked about those books, just the way sometimes they were included in the canonical lists, that they were not on the same level as the other 27. And so that's a different issue. Now, when Da Vinci Code and others are talking about all these Gospels that supposedly the church, you know, shoved to the side, or they tried to hide away because they had secret information, they're talking about Gnostic Gospels. They're talking about Gospel, like Gospel of Barry Magdalene, or Gospel of Judas, or Gospel of Peter, and all this. Many of them came centuries later. So those wouldn't be apocryphal works, or they would be, but not the same as? No, I mean, I wouldn't even consider them on the same level at all.

Got it. These are, universally, they were rejected. Like, we know this is a monk. Yeah, nobody's, you know, the Gospel of Thomas does not show up in any Christian canon list. Are they heretical? Some of them.

I would say so. Okay, okay. I mean, the Gospel of Thomas, for sure.

Okay, okay. It seems, to give you an example, I can give you the most salacious one, which is the very last saying. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, supposed sayings of Jesus. There's no narrative to it at all. There's no birth of Jesus. There's no death of Jesus.

There's no resurrection of Jesus. So by New Testament centers, it's not really even a Gospel. It's just a book of quotes. Yeah, essentially.

Yeah. And they're esoteric. And to be fair, some of them match very closely ones in, say, Luke or Matthew. And, you know, let's be fair. Sometimes you read things Jesus says in the canonical Gospels and you go, I don't know what that means.

Yeah, right. So let's be fair to the Gospel of Thomas here. But there's one saying, for example, where the Gospel of Thomas seems to very clearly set itself in opposition to the Old Testament. And I think that's actually one of the places where, maybe it's not obvious at first, but where the Gospel of Thomas is most opposed to the Gospels in our Bible, which over and over and over again try to show how Jesus is the culmination of Israel's story recorded in the Old Testament.

Does that make sense? Yeah. So where our canonical Gospels are, it pains to show how Jesus is in continuity with the Old Testament, okay? Yes, he says some new things, for sure, and brings a new covenant and all that, but it's strong continuity.

The Gospel of Thomas seems to present itself in strong discontinuity with the Old Testament, even to the point of almost rejecting it. Does that make sense? Yeah.

So that's pretty significant. And even salvation, things like that. I mean, unless you convert, become a man, right? Yeah, that's right.

That's the last saying is, I think it's Mary who comes to Jesus, and the disciples essentially ask about how she can be saved, and Jesus answers something to the effect of she can be saved if she becomes a man. Wow. Wow. It's a bit... You can look it up online. I encourage listeners to Google it.

No hope at all for the ladies, huh? I mean, it's gnostic. It is... Gnosticism was there, and definitely you can see the impact. So I guess my question with that is, where do these books come from and how are they perpetuated? If they were just rejected outright, why are they still lingering, or are they even still lingering? Well, some of them...

So, okay, a couple of things to say. I think one is some people did accept them, that's clear. Otherwise, they wouldn't have copied them and read them, and nobody would have written them, okay? We can ask why people were interested in them, and frankly, that's a bit hard for me to understand, because they don't have a lot of appeal to me. But I think some people... Goodness.

I mean, they are still appealing to some people today. I think some people today find them appealing because they don't have the kind of authority that you find in the gospels, and it is this esoteric kind of spiritualism, more, which fits... Mystical. Yeah, mystical, almost. It almost feels like the hidden sock drawer gospels, almost.

You've got the Bible, but then the Easter egg is over here. Like you unlock the secret level. You unlock the secret, yeah.

Yeah. And it's kind of, to some degree, I don't necessarily want to call it cult, but it's sort of the appeal of a cult in that you're an insider, and you have the truth where everybody else is being duped, right? So, Gnosticism in general, I think, has that sort of appeal to people where it's... Gnosticism means knowledge, gnosis from the Greek word.

And so, yeah, it has this appeal. The other thing is some... You need to understand, there's a pretty big range with these apocryphal gospels. Some are like the Gospel of Thomas, where they have a theological bent to some... Others are sort of like, haven't you ever been interested in what Jesus was like as a kid?

Who of us has not, when we've really thought about it, been like, what would it have been like to be his friend? Some of these gospels fill that stuff out for us, and they're very imaginative, and I don't think anybody took them as sort of historical truth, but people have always been interested in things that gospels don't tell us, and so some of them just fill in the gaps imaginatively. Is there an infancy Gospel of Thomas? It's not just one, so there are... That's right, there's several. There's several of them.

We said hidden. It made me think of Philip Jenkins' book, Hidden Gospels. He's a university, I think, Pennsylvania, I think, professor, or somewhere there in Pennsylvania, but he wrote that book, and in that book, he talks about how the contemporary culture is fascinated by this secret knowledge, or this group that preserves something that the others, in their sociopolitical desire to dominate the world, were trying to undermine them, or trying to persecute them, and this group continued to preserve them, so we are now going back and finding that, and all of a sudden, it's going to revolutionize the way we see the world, or Christianity, or whatever, and I would throw the word postmodernism in it, because it helps that postmodern way of thinking. We've had a lot of discussions about postmodernism on the show.

We had Dr. Robinson in here some time back. Well, I think, if you think about just conspiracies in general, I think there's a sense in which, there's a level at which any kind of conspiracy appeals to a person's pride, because it means, like I said, it means you're on the inside. You're figuring it out. You figure it out, and like I said, you've not been duped the way everybody else has been, and so if it turns out that Christianity is really built on some sort of massive power play, and nefarious motives, and it's this big conspiracy that's been held over us, and it's like, what? This thing that everybody's taken so seriously, it's been so important in our culture for hundreds and hundreds of years, turns out to be based on this lie, and I know it.

It makes you feel kind of, there's a way in which it can make you feel good about yourself if you're not a Christian. And it makes for good TV shows, and movies, and books, and courses. It sells well, absolutely. That's true, man. It sells. That's the thing.

Conspiracies sell, and I think people figured that out, I mean, even all the way back then. Dr. Gray, thank you so much for being on the show today, for engaging in conversation with us. Like we said, your book, yours and Dr. Mead's book, Scribes and Scriptures, is available now, so feel free to pick one up. Where are they available? Available online?

On Amazon, and the publisher is Crossway, and I think it's crossway.org. Okay, absolutely. And we can link to those in the show as well. Again, thank you for being here today. My pleasure. And before we go, for last minute advice, Dr. Gray, we want to give you the opportunity to give us some last minute advice as we close today.

What advice do you have for us? It's really simple. It might not be surprising to your listeners. Okay. I don't like this. I don't like the way you're looking at me.

No, it's good. Okay. Read your Bible. Oh, there you go.

All right. I mean, the story of the Bible is fascinating. Stories in the Bible are even better. So read your Bible.

I know it can sometimes be hard for us because it seems old. Sometimes the language can be difficult, and you're not sure what's going on, but read it. The more you read it, the more it makes sense. Go online, find some books that'll help you understand it. Go to a good Bible preaching church.

You can ask your pastor about it, but read your Bible. Amen. Absolutely. That's awesome. Thank you. We love you guys, and we'll see you tomorrow on Clearview Today.