The Rooted Podcast

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want to know what is the actual truth about the Bible? Whether that's a Tom Holland about his historical value or a Jordan Peterson about its psychological value, but maybe this is the first high profile attempt to say it's not just valuable, it's credible, know, like historically credible. Why is the evidence that we have of these manuscripts so important when it comes to people's confidence in the reliability of the Bible? For life to be meaningful.

suggests there is a purpose and a story. And I think that's one of the things that the Bible brings back to the table. Secular humanism has not got anything to put on the table in response to the question of why am I here and what is the meaning of life? Well, the Bible does. From beginning to end, it's a story and it's a story that we are invited to be part of. Hey everyone, welcome back to The Rooted Podcast. I'm Noel and I'm here with Mart and we're here with a special guest, Andrew Allerton, who's the head of Bible Engagement at Bible Society.

We're really excited to have him here with us. And we're here today for this sort of bonus episode on the podcast. And this has really come about because of another podcast episode that we all became aware of on the Joe Rogan podcast. If you haven't heard of Joe Rogan, he's a really popular podcaster. He has all sorts of famous people on his podcast. And last week, he interviewed a Canadian theologian named Wesley Hough.

And as Bible Society, we were really interested to see that that episode has done really well. It's been quite popular. If you're not sort of a famous person on his podcast, you usually get about one to two million views. This one's got 4.5 million in just a week. So.

We basically wanted to come on here and have sort of a conversation riffing off of their conversation. And they said a lot of interesting stuff about the Bible that we sort of want to talk about ourselves. So we're here with Andrew to talk about those things. Before we get started, Andrew, two things. I wonder if first you could just introduce yourself to listeners who maybe haven't heard of you or your work yet. And secondly, you actually interviewed Wesley Huff last year for Canadian Bible Society. So I wonder if you could just start by telling us a bit about.

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what that experience was like for you. What was your impression of Wesley Hough? And yeah, just let our listeners know bit about who you are. And thank you so much for joining us. Are you welcome. No, I was good to be on the podcast and you're very understated saying that his podcast with Joe Rogan has performed quite well. It's performed a lot better than any podcast I've been on, that's for sure. It's really kicked off, hasn't it?

As you say, I work with Bible Society, author of the Bible course and some other books that I've written as well. So I love communicating the Bible and that made me really excited to see scale of the interest in what Wes has done with Joe Rogan. But yeah, you're right. Just over a year ago, I recorded a podcast with Wes before he'd leapt to the fame he's got now, but he was such a sincere person. You can see that podcast through the scripture untangled podcast series that Canadian Bible Society published.

I think one of the things that impressed me about Wes was his story actually. In fact, when I then listened to the Joe Rogan podcast, it was only when he told his little bit of his story there that I twigged. thought I've heard this before. And what was noteworthy was that he had a rare sort of sudden rare condition illness that made him paralyzed. And he believes God healed him from that. And in fact, the doctors, think were the ones who claimed, who first used the word miracle to refer to this remarkable recovery.

And he then went on to become quite a successful athlete. In fact, he told me in the podcast I recorded with him that I asked what his PB was for a hundred meters and it was like 10.58, which is quick, a second slower than Usain Bolt's world record. So it's a really intriguing story. then obviously, I mean, that backstory is really amazing, but also then just hearing his passion for the Bible and especially

the credibility of the Bible, you the reliability of the text, which is what he's now doing a PhD in. So it was a pleasure to interview Wes and I'm delighted to see the scale of his influence now. Yeah. And so this podcast, Joe Rogan had him on for a certain reason. There was a sort of debate that had basically gone wrong. But Mark, could you tell us a bit about that, like the background of the episode? Yeah, sure. Well, it certainly went wrong for one of the participants in this debate because it stems from a debate back in October on the Mark Minard

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podcast between Wes Huff and Billy Carson. And Billy Carson, I'd never heard of him before, to be honest, but he is a serial entrepreneur and all sorts of things, but he's also a podcaster. He is pretty much an atheist. Certainly he's quite anti-religion, I think. He's described on Wiki as an expert on ancient civilizations, and he has a TV channel called Forbidden Knowledge for number four, and then Bidden Knowledge.

And it's got programs on it like, is the Bible a copy of someone else's book? This will change everything you knew about Jesus and Yahweh and ancient history that will blow your mind. So it's quite sort of sensationalistic in tone, I suppose. Anyway, that's Billy Carsten and he had this debate with Wes Huff and it was quite

painful, you know, it makes quite painful watching to be honest because he was basically demolished by Wes and it was clear that, you know, he didn't really know what he was talking about. He would say something and Wes Huff would come back with some actual biblical facts. He didn't really know what to say to be honest. Since then he's complained to Mark Minard about the whole set up of the thing and his lawyers have threatened Wes Huff with cease and desist letters when he's shared clips from it. So it all got very painful really for him.

That is when Joe Rogan picked him up basically. So that was about three months ago. What was it? October, I think. And it's just last week as we're recording today, the Joe Rogan interview went out. So that's the backstory. Yeah. And so I guess it makes me wonder, do you think that part of the reason this video has done so well is because it's come out of a controversy or sort of what is the interest? What makes millions of people listen to someone talking about the Bible on a Joe Rogan podcast?

What do you guys think? Well, I mean, I think, you know, in a way what makes people listen to the Joe Rogan podcast is Joe Rogan's podcast, isn't it? It's the largest, think the largest podcast in the world. So in a sense, whoever's on there is going to get millions of listeners tuning in. And in that sense is, know, Joe Rogan is not consuming culture. He's creating culture, isn't he? He's creating intrigue by the people he hosts. So the fact that he's had Wes on there, you know, even if people weren't interested in these things before,

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Millions more people are now just by virtue of seeing, know, Joe Rogan kept saying, wow, which I think has been picked up a lot on TikTok and other channels where it just his amazement at the evidence for the reliability of the Bible. And I was particularly smiling because in the British library in London, if ever I'm going past it to catch a train from Euston or King's Cross, I always wonder in if I've got time to this. There's this little room on the left as you go in called Treasures of the Library. And in there is Codex Cinematicus, which is a big part of the conversation.

Not quite all of it. think some of it's still in Russia and maybe a small amount in St. Catherine's monastery in Egypt, which I've also visited. you know, normally when you go in there, you have that there's this sort of casing that displays various texts, including this, this arguably one of at least, if not the most, the oldest complete Bible. Normally there's no one there. You know, other people are looking at there's a little envelope in another casing that the Beatles wrote out one of the early lyrics of their songs, low, more people over there. And I just thought,

I wonder what it's like today. You know, I imagine there's a lot more people at the footfall in the, the British library has gone up because this kind of conversation puts these things on the map. So on the one hand, think Joe Rogan's boosting the interest. And on the other hand, I also would say personally, I think he's also reflecting back to culture, the fact that there is a new intrigue with the Bible. It's hardly, this is hardly the first time the Bible has come up on his podcast or on other very high profile influences. So something's going on.

not just with this one off. This, think, is part of something broader and it's intriguing to see how it will play out. thought that was interesting too, actually. One of the things that struck me listening to Billy Carson was that, you know, I don't want to be mean to him or anything like that, but it was almost as though he seemed, seems on his, you know, the stuff on his TV channel and what he was saying on the podcast. It's almost as though he's prepared to believe anything other than that.

The Bible is basically what it says it is and that the Bible is reliable and true. And this is what West was pushing back against. And the opportunity that that created was for him to go onto Joe Rogan's podcast. And he was able to say this to this massive audience, which I think is pretty remarkable actually. And it's as though there is this appetite for something which isn't sensationalist and, you know, which isn't just sort of made up stuff like the Da Vinci Code and stuff like that.

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You know, people want to know, well, what is the actual truth about the Bible? And then you've got somebody like Wes, who is such a brilliant communicator and obviously knows his stuff. And he's able just to portray that in a really, a really coherent and clear way. I think that's true, Mark. Just sorry, sorry to jump in. I think what I was thinking as well is I think that's absolutely true. And at the same time, I think maybe if there's something new happening here, for me, what I was thinking is other people have certainly high profile people have certainly

drawn attention to the truth claims of the Bible, if you like, its intellectual value or historical value, whether that's a Tom Holland about his historical value or a Jordan Peterson about its psychological value. But maybe this is the, and not the first, but the first high profile attempt to say it's not just valuable, it's credible, know, like historically credible. So that is a really new and important turn as well. Yeah, that's good.

And talking about credibility, one of the things that Wes brings up is ancient manuscripts. They have sort of a whole conversation about this. Wes has brought Jeoruian a gift, which is like a sort of a copy that he's made, a sort of an ancient manuscript. How well do you think that people understand this? How do you think people sort of perceive this, I guess? And why is it so important? Why is the evidence that we have of these manuscripts so important when it comes to sort of people's confidence in the reliability of the Bible?

Well, I think I can only imagine again, that not many people have perceived the truth or importance of this until now. But again, you know, P52, which is the fragment that he created a copy of for Joe Rogan sits within the John Rylans library in Manchester. And you can go in there, there's public access. So again, I just wonder what the footfall is in John Rylans library in Manchester. I've been there many times myself and we actually filmed around that site for the new version of the Bible course that's coming.

because it is such an important fragment if you are a biblical scholar. But until now, I don't think many people outside of probably without bothered about it. But I think this is a great sort of opportunity to say, look, there really is a footprint of evidence that can be discussed and examined carefully that gives confidence that what we're reading in the Bible is a credible account of what actually happened. mean, it's not that you can put this evidence in a test tube in a scientific sense.

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But the discipline of textual criticism, which is what Wears is very involved in and does his PhD in, currently continuing his PhD studies in, know, textual criticism is not just sort of a few people, you know, trying their best. It's a really accurate process. And I think in the podcast, Wears helpfully drew attention to, I mean, even with P52 in mind, this small extract from John's gospel. The point he made was that if that was discovered in Egypt fairly early in the second century, for it to have got there,

and be a copy of a copy of a copy, presumably, with that printing press in that era. The original John's Gospel must be pushing back well into the first century to have a copy surviving from Egypt in the second century. And all of that just says to people, this really wasn't, that the Gospel's really are not the Da Vinci Code story of something made up, fabricated centuries later to suppress secrets.

You can't do that if you're writing and publishing within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. think Wes made that case really strongly. And that really matters because ultimately the Christian faith is historically rooted. If Jesus did not exist or more importantly, if he did not rise from the dead, there really is not a faith to be had. And so we really do rely on the historical accuracy and credibility. And I think Wes did a brilliant job of saying, and there is evidence and you can really investigate it.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. One of the things that struck me was this thing about accuracy again and the sheer quantity of manuscript evidence as well. mean, think, I mean, obviously there are the big old complete manuscripts, you either of particular books or of the whole Bible like Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus and, you know, they go back all the way to the fourth century. I didn't realize actually, he was saying this, that they might have been commissioned.

by the Emperor Constantine. I didn't know that and that was really interesting to find out. But a lot of these manuscripts that he was talking about, they're just fragments, some of which are not much bigger than a postage stamp, which have survived for all these centuries. And one of the jobs of people like him is to try and stitch these things together into sort of coherent sheet. But the interesting thing is how accurate the text is that's been preserved on these scraps and fragments of manuscripts. It's recognisably

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the same biblical texts that we have in our Bibles. And I just find that incredible really. It's, I mean, it was fascinating to hear him talk about it. Andrew, you mentioned him giving a copy. It was P52, was it, that he gave a copy of to Joe Rogan. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he actually cuts these things out of parchment with a scalpel so that they're the exact shape and contours of the original fragment and then writes on them. I mean, he'd make a great forger, I think.

He writes on them the exact text that was there. mean, it's just fascinating. Yeah. And it must be influential too for people to see someone like Joe Rogan, who's obviously to me seems like quite a spiritual sort of seeker, I guess. open to spirituality and interested in the ancient world to be so believing almost of seeing these things and going, wow, and actually taking them as credible as well. The influence that must have on his listeners must be huge. He's got such a fertile mind, doesn't he, Joe Rogan? I was listening to the podcast thinking he, cause he would

Because he interviews, I guess, a diverse range of people, he's got this ability to cross reference with other conversations. And before you know it, dots are being joined between things that, you know, no scholar would really do that. So I think there's something really rich there actually. liked it. And Wethstuff really, you know, really engages with him, doesn't he? And it's a great interview from that point of view. He doesn't go off on his own track. He engages with Joe Rogan, but he still manages to say what he wants to say. He's really good at it.

I love the amount of times Joe would get asked him a question that was just totally not in his area at all. And he would just go, well, I have no idea. And then tell him something about the Bible that he So one thing Wes also talks about is he mentions John Wycliffe and William Tyndale, who at Bible Society were very familiar with those names. But we thought that maybe some other people wouldn't have been. So we thought we'd talk a bit about those two. Who are they? Maybe why is Wes bringing them up? Why are they important when we talk about them?

scripture.

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Well, I think we're to draw them up because from memory from the conversation, because there was this discussion around reading the Bible in the vernacular of your language, which effectively means reading it in a language that is common to you. And John Wycliffe goes right back to the 14th century. He was an English priest, Oxford scholar, and very controversial character, particularly later, because he effectively undermines the authority of the Pope and the Catholic Church at the time by

in part by translating the Bible into English, along with other activities. From my understanding, when Cliff didn't translate it into English from the Hebrew and the Greek texts, he didn't have availability to those. He went from what's known as the Vulgate, which was the Latin translation. So I think Wes picked up on this irony that the irony is that Jerome only translated the Bible into Latin because people couldn't read the original languages. then there was, so that was in a way controversial way back in the fourth century.

Then there's another controversy by translating the translation into English. So Wycliffe was all involved in that. The Lollards, who are these sort of preachers that were inspired by Wycliffe's work, then went around England and caused even more of a stir. But it's worth noting, think Wes perhaps missed this a little bit, Wycliffe's are like 150 years before Tyndale. And Tyndale comes then much more in the moment of the actual official Protestant Reformation. Wycliffe's often referred to as the morning star of the Reformation, meaning he sort of heralded it, but he wasn't part of it.

But William Tyndale very much was and again, just a slight sort of slight adjustment in that Luther actually translated the German, the New Testament into German and published it in 1522. It wasn't until 1526, I think that Tyndale brought out the first published edition at least of the English New Testament that he translated. So this is much later than Wycliffe, but all part of the same project, I suppose. How can we help ordinary people?

make sense of the Bible in a language that's discernible to them, which of course is not for the majority Hebrew and Greek or Latin, but by the 15th century, 16th century, it's English. And I think it was Tyndale who is alleged to have said that he wanted his mission statement was kind of, want the boy that drives the plough to know the scriptures and at great personal cost. I think it's fair to say he contributed massively to that.

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Yeah, that's right. He was martyred for his faith and his translation activities were a big part of that, certainly. I mean, to me, it just talks about how for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, there's been this drive to translate the scriptures, to make them available in people's own language, people's heart language. And originally, yes, that was Latin.

but it's been translated now to, I wouldn't like to say how many languages it's been translated into, but it's several thousand, I know that. And that was a big part of Bible society's original motivation when we were first founded actually, that translation thing. And I think the other thing to say is that people sometimes, I think people sometimes get the wrong idea of what Bibles are actually like today. I mean, we've done quite a bit of research into the barriers that people have.

to Bible reading and we've done focus groups and things like that. One of the things that people have said is, well, it's this big thick book full of these and those and it's in really small type and it's in columns, which is odd and that kind of thing. But actually that's no longer really true. That's the impression people have got from years ago. But nowadays you get Bibles in really modern translations, which you can read as easily as you would read a novel, a thriller, say, and the text is large and

You can read it on your phone, you can read it anywhere basically. So that process of Bible translation has continued and nowadays the Bible is more accessible probably than it's ever been before. I it's also, isn't it, it's important to remind people that, you know, there isn't, in that sense, there's something significant about the fact that there isn't one sacred language that is the sort of original home of God's inspiration. And then all others are a sort of ever, ever increasing distance from

that language because even the fact that Jesus was almost certainly the first language Aramaic, if you like, was the language that the Jewish people adopted in part because of a defeat by the Babylonian conquest. But then the New Testament is written in another language again, which Jesus himself may not even have been able to read. We don't know, but Greek. So there's a sense in which, you know, the flexibility of the Bible

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That is not that within the Bible itself, there are several languages and some of them were not even the languages that Jesus spoke himself. It just shows that whatever tongue or language or heart language you're familiar with, that's the language that God can reveal himself to you through. And I think that's a really precious truth. Yeah. And just, just building on that, actually, I was reading not long ago about how in the Lord's prayer, Jesus said, when you pray, pray like this, our father and that our father

which is in Greek, obviously, but the original was almost certainly Aramaic. Whereas the official prayers, the synagogue prayers were not in Aramaic, but in Hebrew. Even back then, Jesus was saying, you pray to God, you approach God in the language which you speak, which is quite significant, I think. That's lovely. Yeah. Something else that Wesley touches on in terms of the Bible is talking about

how the canon of scripture was formed, so how different books of the Bible were brought together to form what we now understand to be at least a Protestant Bible. And so I guess maybe in sort of mainstream society, there are some assumptions about books that were deliberately kept in or kept out and why they were kept in and kept out and by whom. And I wondered if we could talk a bit about that, so sort of the formation of the canon of scripture. And again, how is that significant to how we relate to the Bible, trust it, understand it?

I think the word trust is important there because this is a trust exercise. I I always come to a fallback position, is the Bible we have is the Bible that God wanted us to have. Because if you believe in a God who is creator and sovereign, then it's not a big deal for him at least to inspire human beings to ensure that the process by which they select books ends up in the right place. But that said, it's more of an art than a science, I think, when you look at the human footprint for this process.

There are definite strong reasons why some books were included and others left out, but you still find there's controversy around others. And that isn't always resolved until for a little while longer. think what Wes drew attention to from memory was more the issue of other gospels. And I think that's clearer actually, because I think when you both consider the dating, the proximity of you like of the gospels to the life of Jesus and in particular to the eyewitness community that were firsthand testimonies of what actually happened.

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whether that's the apostles themselves or others who were interviewed as eyewitnesses by the gospel writers. think the four gospels are without doubt, both closest and most credible when it comes to recording the history of Jesus from those other options that we would have. Whereas I think highlighted the gospel of Judas and you see there, if you just examine the names, which is part of what he drew attention to and Richard Bauckham and other great scholars have done brilliant work to show how the four gospels really do have an accuracy.

about just the names, what were the most popular Jewish names for boys in the first century context of Jesus. They weren't the same either at the same time in Egypt or later in Egypt and the Gospel of Judas, which seems to come from another context, gets all the names wrong if you like, in terms of what it should be like. So, Wes did a good job of just effectively channeling bit of deeper scholarship there to show the four Gospels really give a credible historical account.

That's not to say there aren't still debates about other writings in the New Testament. But when it comes to the Gospels, I don't know what you think, Mark, but I felt like Wes did good job of just saying, you know, if you really think there's some conspiracy going on, read the other Gospels, read the other options, and then decide if you want to include the Gospel of Thomas or whatever in, you know. I think if you actually read it, you'd probably think, I'm glad that wasn't in the New Testament. Absolutely. Was it the Gospel of... I can't remember which one it was, the Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Thomas, but one of them had...

Jesus going by boat to Nazareth, which is on the top of a hill and miles away from any water. that's one of the examples again. Yeah, I mean, there is this, again, there's a kind of willingness to believe, in some quarters there is a kind of willingness to believe anything other than the plain, simple fact about the Gospels really. And there's almost a desire to look for conspiracies and

to look for dark and sinister reasons why some books were left out of the canon of scripture. Well, often it's because either they don't make sense or they don't match up with what we know of the history and the culture of the time, as you were saying, Andrew, or maybe they're just obvious forgeries or maybe they contain stories which are just wacky and everybody can see, look, this doesn't belong there. And really, the core 66 books of the Bible are the ones which

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which really deserved to be there. And that's process that the church went through in discerning that was a long and very thorough process. And that was the decision that they came to. And revisiting that is probably not very convincing, I think. Yeah. One of the things I found the most interesting, one of the most interesting conversations I think they had was about the creation story. Basically, Wes was saying to look at the creation story that we have in Genesis in context with other creation stories at the time, which I think

for Christians a lot of the time is something that we would not want to do because there are lots of similarities between different creation stories at that time. But what I loved that Wes said was he was saying how what's really important to look at are the contrast. So for example, we have the creation story of the Babylonians who believe that humans were created as slaves of the gods. And then we have the story in Genesis where God says that he's making humans in his own image. And if you just look at that contrast there,

It changes the way we look at God and the way we look at the world. I just wondered what does that mean for Christians, the way that we see creation and what we believe about it in difference to sort of some of the other creation stories or other beliefs? think at one point Wes alluded to a quote by a scholar called John Walton, which is that the Bible was written for us, but it wasn't written to us. And it's a really helpful little phrase that I found that so helpful. It's so useful as a little tool in your pocket because it's true of all of scripture.

But perhaps especially true of Genesis that whilst it is for us, it makes sense and it speaks for our moment. It wasn't originally to us. And I think the point there just immediately cuts through any sort of assumption that we still have that Genesis is primarily pitted against Darwinian evolution or it's particularly, you know, that it's helping that the Genesis is essentially about whether the earth was created in six days or through intelligent design or through evolution. Those debates are not irrelevant. don't mean to.

say that Genesis is irrelevant to those debates. I don't believe it is for a moment. But I think what we can say is it's the original hearers, the audience for whom Genesis was originally constructed, that God inspired it to people who were not concerned with those debates. They were concerned or familiar with these other origin stories that circulated in the ancient world. And this is what Wes highlighted and many scholars have highlighted this that actually when Genesis is understood framed by that

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as a counter narrative to wrong ideas about God and wrong ideas about humans. And the wrong ideas about God, I think in the ancient world would have included the idea that there are many gods that they are sort of fighting it out. mean, one of the shocking things about Genesis is that it doesn't include an origin story for God. It just says in the beginning, God, all other origin stories had some way of tracing out where their gods had come from, as if they were almost

little more, I think CS Lewis describes it as little more than heroes, heroic versions of ourselves. You know, they're part of the natural world and very much described in anthropomorphic, in human terms. I think what was his highlighting is actually Genesis is saying, no, there's a completely different understanding of gods that Genesis brings to the table. He has not got a creation story. He has always existed and there are not many gods fighting it out. The earth has not evolved from violence.

and struggle in the sense of the gods bringing violent conquest and rivalry and all these capricious tendencies. No, there's a peacefulness to just God saying, let there be and there was, you know, it's just calling forth and then this beautiful declaration that it is good, you know, it's not come from an evil place, but from a good place. for me, I think both on the point of how we understand God and how we understand ourselves as human beings.

Genesis is best understood as a counterclaim, a counter narrative to wrong ideas. When you see it in those terms, when you go back to think about what it meant then, I think it actually isn't that hard to bring it forward to say, well, it still speaks to wrong ideas today. We still have this either accidental or violent assumption to the nature of reality. And actually Genesis is challenging that, that we're not accidents. We haven't come fundamentally from a violence or struggle. We've come from the heart of God.

And from that. And just picking up on that theme of violence, I just think, I think that's so interesting really, because if you look at pretty much any origin story from the ancient world, violence is involved. And if you think about a society whose basic understanding of the world is that it is a violent place, that it was conceived in violence, brought forth in violence, and that violence is the sort of core,

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feature at the heart of everything that exists. Everything is built on violence. So if you take that idea and then you take the idea that the world was created good and that God saw everything that he'd made and it was very good. You just have two completely different ways of looking at the world and out of that arise different ways of thinking about human beings and about how human beings are with each other and about the

not just the origin but the destiny of human beings as well. And so for me that's what Genesis says really, really powerfully.

Good. So our last question, one of the things that, so it's an over three hour interview, so it's very long and interesting. brings out all sorts of things about the Bible and there's lots of good conversations. One of the things that he doesn't really talk about is how the Bible is one coherent story that points to Jesus really. I wondered if we could talk about that just sort of to wrap up and why is that important that we see the Bible as one story and that it is connected really and not separate?

what does that mean for us as Christians and for people who believe the Bible to be a credible document?

Yeah, I haven't really thought about that, but maybe Wes didn't draw attention to that, but I'm sure he believes that. think it's just the nature of their conversation was both sort of bit scatty and also focused on the textual details. But I think the overarching story that integrates the whole, I mean, just as our life is structured as a story, isn't it? You have a beginning, birthday, a middle, life, and then an end, death day. And I think there's a sense in which.

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You know, just as the Bible opens with in the beginning, it opens with in the language of some narration of a story. And I think it was GK Chesterton who said that if life, if I suppose that life is a story, I suppose there must be an author. And I think that's one of the things for me is just that actually for life to have meaning and purpose and not either be endless cycles that which some worldviews would articulate or else just a pointless and meaningless

brief existence in a universe that's ultimately heading to annihilation and will remember us no more. For life to be meaningful suggests there is a purpose and a story. And I think that's one of the things that the Bible brings back to the table. I think this is one of the reasons why people are recognizing this is really valuable because there's a meaning crisis. Secular humanism has not got anything to put on the table in response to the question of why am I here and what is the meaning of life? Well, the Bible does.

beginning to end, it's a story and it's a story that we are invited to be part of. A story that makes sense of our little story, if there's a meta story, a bigger story, something we're invited to be part of. So whilst there's lots of deep theological reasons that we could discuss, I think one of them is we just need to, I don't know, I want my kids to grow up feeling like, you know, there's a reason why they exist. They are not meaningless or accidental. And that's not to say that

The world revolves around them or me. know, there's, the opposite danger, but I actually believe that the big story pulls us out of that danger as well. says actually don't let your horizons collapse in on yourself and make yourself the only project in the world worth investing in. If there's a bigger story, there's something bigger to live for and invest in things that will last and will make a real difference for, for eternity. So for all those reasons, I think that big story, that overarching story, the more we can help everyone.

think of the Bible that way and then explore it that way, it's not just some Bible study academic exercise. It transforms the way we live our lives, doesn't it? Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I think for me, the key word is probably confidence. And one of the things I really got from listening to Westau to Joe Rogan was just this affirmation really that the Bible as a document is a trustworthy and reliable document. So, know, in a sense that's...

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head part of confidence, isn't it? Really. But I think there's more to it than that. I think for me, it's an overarching story which points to Jesus. And I think when you read it in that light, it gives you confidence, not just in its trustworthiness as a document, but as something to live by. And it's something which points you beyond the text. It points you to Jesus. It points you to God. It gives you a whole framework within which you can live your life in the best possible way. So that's what that says to me.

I like that Mark. And there was a moment, wasn't there, when think Wes sort of turned the question on Joe Rogan actually about, you know, who is Jesus? Cause I think that's, and that's absolutely right. Isn't it? You know, in the end, he sort of swerved the question. he doesn't answer. Yeah. He really swerved the question and brought AI into it, various things. But I think, I think that's revealing in itself. That is a very personal question to us because the implications of you answering that question are enormous, aren't they? They will unravel your whole life and then

it back together again in a whole new way. If you come to the conclusion that Jesus is who he claimed to be. so I do think there is, I think where I said this, there is almost like some, some thinkers today are bringing people up to the line, but they won't cross it themselves. And I think that's a really astute observation because there's a lot to lose when you cross that line, but there's way more to gain. And I think that's probably the wrestle that a lot of people who've watched the podcast will never be going through. And you know, this is, this is what

CS Lewis went through, it? It's like the most reluctant convert in England as he described himself, precisely because the evidence overwhelms him. It must be true, but the implications of believing it frightened him. And he perceived that to be the ruining of his life to become a Christian. And then he wrote, you know, his actual experience, surprised by joy. The last thing he tried to define was that the most joyful life is to follow Jesus. And I hope that Joe Rogan finds that and lots of people who listen to it. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it'll definitely speak to people who are spiritually seeking, spiritually open. I was also interested in the part where Joe Rogan actually was going quite fiercely against atheism. Do you guys remember that part? Just sort of confused by the conclusions that atheists have come to. And I found that surprising that he said that so sort of passionately. And I just think, yeah, this whole conversation about the Bible, but also just about what it means to us and how it affects our lives and what we believe about.

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the afterlife, but also our life here will be really compelling for people. yeah, that's great. No, I've got the quote there if you want me to read it to you. Yeah, sure. So Joe Rogan says, so he has a go at atheists and he says, we want to think that things are very clean and easy to measure and they often are not. And, I think most of what it means to be a human being in a meaningful way is not measurable. Most of it, love and friendship and community, these things are not very measurable. They're very strange.

You know, the bond that people have with their family and their loved ones, it's very strange. Whatever love is, whatever good is, it's a very real thing. And it seems to not exist in other animals in the way that it exists in us. So that leads me to why. And the why is, I think, a question which is going to be raised for a lot of people by that podcast, Yeah. Just crazy to think that that was on Joe Rogan's podcast, really. Yeah, great. I think that'll be...

for our conversation on that today. But thank you, Andrew. Thanks for coming on and talking with us about this. And thank you, Mark. If you're interested in listening to Andrew Ollerton's interview with Wes Huff, do go check that out on the Scripture Untangled podcast from Canadian Bible Society. And we will see you very soon for another episode.