Yeah, I understand the concern that unless you've got a PhD in second temple Judaism and an undergraduate degree in classics, that understanding the Bible is reduced to the, the sort of a magisterium of scholars up in their tower. Now reading the Bible on your own, just, you know, following the dynamics of the argument, being attentive to the story, you can get a basic and adequate grasp of what the new Testament is about. The Protestants had a word for that. They called that the clarity of scripture, but not everything in the Bible is equally clear. That's why you need a Philip to run beside your chariot and to explain to you what you are reading. And that's why we need teachers. We need people who have, you know, gone back and studied the meaning of Greek words, who, you know, people who have immersed themselves in the ancient world, because there's a difference between having a adequate understanding of the New Testament compared to having a historically informed, nuanced and contextually sensitive. And the difference between having a basic grasp of the New Testament, knowing some background is like the difference between watching something in black and white and watching something in 3D in color. There's just levels of depth and there's dimensions that you don't necessarily see when you, when you're operating with, without that kind of knowledge.

Yes. Could I say as well? I mean, it's really, as you said, just a pastoral point, that God is not bound by our knowledge limitations, which is just as well, because none of us, the greatest God that ever lived, is still not completely on top of everything that is there. And the Holy Spirit can leap across the gaps in our understanding. And like an electric charge or like a bolt of lightning can take a text that we actually haven't got all the footnotes for, and nevertheless make it very real and personal and apply it directly to our hearts and minds and lives. That happens often, it happened again and again to me as a boy starting to read the Bible and as a teenager. And it was in the light of those experiences that I realized I wanted to spend my life studying this more. So it isn't the case that God can't speak until you've got the PhD far from it. And sometimes tragically, the PhD can actually obscure things and people can use their knowledge to blind themselves with their own science. Now, so what I hear in the question is just the slight niggle of a kind of anti-alitism thing, which I very much share. I mean, I've inhabited the world of scholarship, but I know only too well that some of the silliest people I know are very seasoned scholars. And some of the most mature and developed Christians are people who've never got an A level or a degree. So I'm not trying to say, you need the PhD. However, however, again and again and again in church history, as Mike says, there's the Ministry of Teaching in the New Testament. Very interesting. Paul talks about Apostles' Prophets' teachers. And we need to think, what are these teachers teaching? And the first thing they're teaching in the early church, I think to a lot of people, is how to read, because a lot of people were functionally illiterate. And then for many of them in worlds where they would speak a demotic language, not Koeine Greek, they would have to learn enough Greek to start to read. And then they would be taught to read the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, because the Gentile convert coming in didn't know who Isaiah was, didn't know who Abraham was, knew nothing or not much about Moses. And so Christianity has always been about education. And that's why in the church, we're not a bunch of isolated individuals left lonely with our Bibles. We are part of the body of Christ, and one of the great ministries in the body of Christ is the mutual teaching, because actually the newest convert has still got something to teach the most seasoned teacher. But there is this teaching ministry, which is absolutely vital.

Well, the podcast is brought to you by Premier in partnership with SBCK and NT Right Online. And if you want Tom's teaching courses in video format, then NT Right Online is basically the place to go. And we've got a fresh brand new offer for podcast listeners. Tom's latest video course, Reading Scripture in Public, available absolutely free. Now the New Testament began as letters and other documents that Jesus followers read out loud together. Those listening experiences were so transformative that those listening audiences became churches and those documents became scripture. Well, now you can learn how reading the Bible out loud together can revolutionise your faith. Again, Reading Scripture in Public taught by Tom Wright on video is available free to podcast listeners. Just go to NTRight Online.org forward slash ask NT Right. I mean, in my opinion, Mike, I think often the difficulty sometimes for Christians who embrace and start to engage with looking into the history and contextual side of the scriptures is that what they've grown up with very often is the Bible as a devotional thing. So that is the way they will have read it and been taught it, especially in church often. And do you ever find with your students, particularly, I suppose, Mike, that there is a difficulty then starting to, as it were, analyse the Bible and do something that's more methodical and critical with it. And does that in a way cause any problems faithwise sometimes when people start to have to look at the Bible in a very different way to perhaps how they've always looked at it.