Explaining Differences in the Gospels

Why There are Differences in the Bible? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography by  Michael R. Licona and Craig A. Evans.

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Michael R. Licona and Gary R. Habermas

Truth in a Culture of Doubt: Engaging Skeptical Challenges to the Bible by Darrell L. Bock, Dr. Josh Chatraw, and Andreas J. Köstenberger

Plutarch’s Lives by Plutarch and John Dryden (Translator)

Mikel Del Rosario:

Welcome to The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, Cultural Engagement Manager at The Hendricks Center here at Dallas Theological Seminary. And our topic on The Table Podcast today is Gospel differences in the passion narratives. We're going to be taking a look at the different ways that the Gospel writers portray the events that happened during the passion week. And I have two guests joining me today via Zoom. First guest is Dr. Darrell Bock, Executive Director of Cultural Engagement and Senior Research Professor of New Testament here at DTS. Welcome back to the show, Darrell.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

Glad to be with you and glad to be in this chair and not the one you're sitting in.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Well, thank you for being one of our expert guests on the show today. And my second guest is Dr. Mike Licona. Mike is an Associate professor of Theology at Houston Baptist University. Welcome to the show, Mike.

Dr. Mike Licona:

Thanks, Mikel. Wonderful to be with you.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. So in this podcast we want to talk about the differences that we see in the Gospel narratives in relation to the Passion Week specifically. One of the challenges that sometimes people will throw out when we're trying to share what the Bible says about Jesus with them is that there are supposedly contradictions in the Bible and specifically in the Gospels. And so, just to set The Table for our discussion, Darrell, let me ask you what is really actually at stake when we're talking about these differences that we see and understanding them in the Gospels?

Dr. Darrell Bock:

Well, to the extent that people either accept or reject the credibility of the Gospels obviously impacts the extent to which they will take the presentation of Jesus in the Gospels seriously. So it becomes an important discussion because oftentimes what happens is in the claim about differences, which often quickly get changed into contradictions, there becomes an attempt, as a result, to distance the reader from accepting the way in which the Gospels are presenting Jesus and thus putting them out of touch with the way, at least, in which the Christian faith has presented Jesus to them. So there's potentially a lot at stake depending on the level of cynicism that comes with that conversation.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Now, Mike, you actually wrote a book called “Why Are There Differences in the Gospels” And in that book, you talk about an ancient author by the name of Plutarch and how studying his writings actually helped you understand what we're seeing here with some of the differences just on a high level. Could you give us just a summary of why studying Plutarch helped you?

Dr. Mike Licona:

Most New Testament scholars today regard the Gospels as either ancient biographies or that they share a lot of common with the genre of ancient biography. Well, ancient biography didn't operate by the same literary conventions as modern biographers do. They had a license to be a little more flexible with how they reported some details, but to what extent and how would that impact a reading of the Gospels if they belong to that genre? So what I wanted to do was, well, study ancient biographies to see what kind of level of flexibility they would take in the reporting of details.

Dr. Mike Licona:

So I put a list together of all the biographies that had been written about anyone within 150 years on each side of Jesus, and there are about 90 of them, 90 or somewhere around there, 90 or a few more, and Plutarch wrote 48 of those. So he wrote at least half, more than half of all the extant biographies at that time. Only four are written by Jewish historians. You've got three by Philo and one biography by Josephus.

Dr. Mike Licona:

I read Plutarch's “Lives.” I noticed that nine of them involve figures that knew one another for the most part and participated in the same events. I re-read those nine, and then I read them a third time, and I made a note of all the differences in them because I wanted to see how Plutarch would tell the same story multiple times. Does he copy and paste? What's he do? And so, we have the same author in many cases using the same sources, and at least seven of those biographies he's writing them simultaneously. So we can see what Plutarch does with the same source material and what kind of changes he makes. From those changes, if there's a lot of them, we can infer various compositional devices.

Dr. Mike Licona:

And so I figured if we read the differences in the Gospels in view of those compositional devices, would that shed light on the differences? And man, it's like creating a new lens through which to look and it sheds a whole lot of light on why there are differences in the Gospels.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Well, we're going to come back to some of those differences specifically and we'll take a look at some specific cases to see what kind of light that sheds on these Gospel differences. Darrell, actually, you wrote a book as well called “Truth in a Culture of Doubt,” which answers some of these kinds of alleged contradictions. For example, sometimes people will bring up the length of events. So for example, Jesus' trial in front of Pilate is really a lot longer in John than in Mark. How would we begin to approach that kind of an objection, Darrell?

Dr. Darrell Bock:

Well, you have to ask a couple of questions. One that was basic of which is, what is John doing in relationship to the Synoptics [Gospels]? And it doesn't take much comparative work between John and the Synoptics [Gospels] to realize that somewhere around 85% to 88% of John is not in the Synoptics [Gospels]. So, he's already made a decision before we start.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

Now, I'm going to tell you stuff that is not in the other Gospels or at least in the tradition streams that fed the other Gospels. One of the debates New Testament scholars have is whether John knew the Gospels. How many of them did he know or is he working independently of that? What we can be pretty confident of is he's not working independently of the tradition streams about Jesus that were circulating in the major churches of that period. And so when you do that work, you realize he's consciously going after telling you stuff that the synoptic Gospels, generally speaking, didn't dwell on. In some cases, he skipped stuff that they mentioned. So there's no detail, for example, of the Last Supper in terms of the meal itself which, interestingly enough, we know he would have been aware of because the church observed the Lord's table on the basis of the Last Supper. That kind of thing.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

So it feeds into what each author is attempting to achieve in writing the way that they've written and also how they're interacting with the sources that either they are aware of or they know people that they're writing to are aware of. That's one dimension of it. And so in this particular case, I think what we've got is a situation where John has more awareness of what took place beyond the short meetings that you see in the Synoptics with Pilate. The Synoptics are almost more concerned with Barabbas and the pressure that Pilate was under to make a decision from the Jewish leadership, although you see that in John as well, and pursue some of the interactions that took place in a little more detail.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. There's something that Darrell says a lot that has just been ingrained in my memory, which is the idea that difference doesn't always equal contradiction. And so in this particular case, let me ask Mike, is this very different with how we see other events treated in classical literature? We think about life of Alexander the Great, for example. How different is what we're seeing in the Gospels?

Dr. Mike Licona:

Well, there's a lot of similarities and there are a lot of differences. You've got the fact that the same kind of differences that we typically find in the ancient literature, the Greco-Roman and even Jewish literature, are the same kind of differences we find commonly throughout the Gospels, the same kind of differences. But what's really striking about the Gospels especially Matthew, Mark, and Luke is not necessarily the differences, but the similarities.

Dr. Mike Licona:

See, when I was doing my work with Plutarch, I was thinking, "Okay, well, if he's using the same kind of sources, he's got…" I found 36 stories, pericope in those nine “Lives” that he wrote that are found in two or more of those “Lives.” And so I figured, well, he's got to be copying and pasting some of this. He never does that. He's always paraphrasing. He'll expand and give additional thoughts or he'll subtract for brevity, or he'll change a statement to a question, or transfer what one person said to another person and things like this, displace an event out of its original context and transplanted in another. He does all these kinds of things. But when you come to Plutarch and the way he reports the same, you never see the degree of verbal similarity that you find in the synoptic Gospels which, in many cases, is verbatim or nearly so. You don't see that in the other ancient literature.

Dr. Mike Licona:

And from what we know from the compositional textbooks, et cetera, it shouldn't be that way that you find in the Gospels. I mean, they kind of break the rules by having so many similarities. So the question would be why, we can only guess. It could be that they just had such a respect for the tradition that they stayed as close to it as they did.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Well, let's take a look at some of these specific ones around the passion of Jesus, especially in terms of the crucifixion. One of the most well-attested historical facts about Jesus, of course, is his death by crucifixion. And virtually all scholars will accept that as historical bedrock, but sometimes in popular conversation, people will say, "Well, I'm not so sure if we can trust those accounts because how many women were at the foot of the Cross," for example.

Mikel Del Rosario:

And you have this wonderful appendix at the end of your book, Appendix 3, that lays this out. So let's take a look at this. Quickly, we can see in Mark 15, who is at the foot of the Cross, we have Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James and John, and a lady named Salome. Then in Matthew 27, it's Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James and Joseph, and then the mother of the sons of Zebedee. In Luke, there's women but no names. In John 19, it's Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary's sister, Mary Magdalene again, and Mary, the wife of Clopas. There are a lot of Marys back in the first century. How do we make sense of all of these names? What's going on here?

Dr. Mike Licona:

Well, it's hard to tell exactly. You do have four Marys that are in those narratives combined, four Marys and a few others. Like you mentioned, the wife of Clopas, that's one of the Marys. You've got the sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus. You got Salome, as you mentioned, Joanna. As Tal Ilan and Richard Bauckham have shown, Mary was a very common name in Judea at that point. In fact, I think it's one out of every five women, something like that, one out of every four or five women in that time, Jewish women, were named Mary. And Salome was a very, very popular name. It's like, I don't know, 30% of all women there were named either Salome or Mary. So we're going to expect to find these names in the New Testament. We're going to expect to find several of them. So it shouldn't surprise us when there's four Marys there.

Dr. Mike Licona:

But to compare them between the different accounts is difficult because I don't think that they're trying to mention all of the people there. It could be they're mentioning the ones from whom they got the testimony, maybe they're naming the eye witnesses or maybe the witnesses from that tradition. It's just really difficult to tell, but I don't think that any of them are trying to be exhaustive in who they're reporting.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

I stole something from Mike that if I may apply here, and it's what's called “guy and gal telling.” And the way I explain it in my marriage is if I ask my wife if I have to be at dinner, she'll start with my day at 6:00 in the morning, walk through my day, and then explain the rationale for why my presence is or is not required. If she ask me if she has to be at dinner, she's going to get a one-word answer, yes or no, okay? It's just the way we're built. We're built to tell what we see differently. Some people are built to tell the details, other people are built to say it as briefly and concisely as possible. That's a factor, in one sense, you can't test entirely. I mean, you can look at what someone presents and maybe figure out that's what it is, but you don't know that just from the way they interact.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

And then I expand the joke by talking about Hall Harris and his wife, because Ursula, of course, was German. You ask her, you would get a “ya” or a “nein” answer from her. But if you ask Hall, I call him Dr. Google, he would start with the history of hospitality in the Greco-Roman world, and then work his way to the answer of the question. So you just get people who process stuff differently, see things differently, are attracted to certain details, and not attracted to certain details.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

It's very, very difficult for us 2,000 years away from those writers and not having known them personally what that is. The best that we can do is deal with the remnants of what they give us. So that's one factor that's just hard to trace, but it is a reality of the way people process information.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

And then the other is the concerns that they have to whoever it is they're writing that drives what they're writing as well, which also produces another factor. So there's just a lot that goes into…they aren't trying to give a stenographer's account of everything that you might want to know about the event. They're doing something else. And we have to respect the fact that they've approached the question in this somewhat detached way for the kinds of questions we want to ask from what they're trying to do.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. All historical reporting is, by definition, selective, right? You can't write every single detail down and then that's not their point either. Something that happened on the Cross is sometimes brought up in terms of how Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels, and Darrell, you wrote about this in “Truth in a Culture of Doubt.” This reminds me of sometimes if you go to an art gallery and you take a look at these classic paintings of the crucifixion. In some paintings of the crucifixion, Jesus just looks really haggard and tortured, and He looks like He's crying out in despair.

Mikel Del Rosario:

You see that kind of portrait in Mark 15, He's crying out, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" Some people like to pit that against the other depiction where sometimes you see Jesus on the Cross in a very commanding pose, like He's in full control of what's going on. And you get that feel in Luke 23, for example, where He says, "Into Your hands do I commit My spirit." As people try to pit that against each other sometime, how do we understand those two portrayals, Darrell, of Jesus on the Cross?

Dr. Darrell Bock:

Well, the interesting thing is to take those two accounts and look at them in a synopsis and to look at what point in the crucifixion sequence, which we know lasted for hours, are we, at any given point depending on which version we're in. And what you find out very quickly is that Mark's, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" remark is very much on the earlier end of the time of the crucifixion. And then Mark actually has a remark in which he says, "And the second time, Jesus cried out," and that's all he says, okay? He doesn't tell us what He said. He just said He cried out a second time.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

But when you look at it in the synopsis, the very slot where Mark has Jesus crying out a second time is exactly where Luke has his remark, "Into Your hands, I commit My spirit," which of course is coming right before the end of the sequence as He's dying and He's really giving himself over to the Father for the vindication that resurrection is going to represent. He's represented himself as saying to the leadership, "You're going to put me to death, but God's going to vindicate me and you're going to see that vindication." And so that last remark is that movement into that vindication space because He's going to die. And if He's going to come back to life, God's going to have to raise Him from the dead.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

And so you get the shift in which the first saying from Mark is dealing with the sin question, if I can say it that way. And the second remark from Luke, but it's a little more confident, is really the language of trust coming out of a Psalm, in which the Psalm is distrusting God for His care. I think it's entirely plausible that in the midst of this long sequence of crucifixion, you move from this despair about what Jesus is facing, which was already signaled in Gethsemane with His prayer, all the way over to, "All right, this is it. I'm handing the baton off to you. You're going to either vindicate me or not here, and I'm trusting you to do what the plan says." So that's how I would put it together. I'm interested to see what Mike thinks, but that's about how I would put it together.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah, Mike, how would you respond to that?

Dr. Mike Licona:

Well, John is going to look at things, quote them a little different. Now, I'd have to go back and look at Matthew and Mark, but it seemed to me that when He said, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me," that was a penultima statement of Jesus on the Cross right before He did the loud cry and died. But maybe Darrell's right here. I seem to remember it a little bit differently.

Dr. Mike Licona:

John, when you come to John, instead of saying, "My God, why have You forsaken me," he says, "I'm thirsty." That's the penultima statement. But the very last statement is, "It is finished." So instead of saying, "Father, into Your hands I entrust My spirit," he says, "It is finished." Now, it means pretty much the same thing, you could say, but it would show the extent perhaps to which one of them, probably John, is paraphrasing.

Dr. Mike Licona:

And Johannine specialists all seem to agree that John is reporting different tradition in terms of the stories, but he's also doing some things with Jesus' words. So, for example, no one really questions the orthodoxy or conservatism of F. F. Bruce. F. F. Bruce in his commentary on the Gospel of John and introductory material, says that what John does with the Jesus tradition is it's a translation of the freest kind. It's an expanded paraphrase and a transposition into another key. You've got Paul Anderson, a Johannine specialist, saying he calls John a theological paraphrase. So John here, I think he's taking some of Jesus' words and the reason we do find some of the things like the crucifixion scene a little bit different.

Dr. Mike Licona:

You were talking about portraits. Jesus is kind of in agony, "Why have You forsaken me," there at the end. But in John, He's just calm up on the Cross. Even in Gethsemane, you've got Jesus' real… He's sweating, and, "Father, if it's Your will, let this cup pass from me," but that's not so in John's Gospel, He's pretty, pretty passive in the garden. So it's almost like John airbrushes some of this stuff out, Jesus, wherein not completely from John at the end in the passion narrative, but most of it, he just airbrushes it out and he gives us a little different view of Jesus there, perhaps to emphasize His deity.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

Yeah, I think it's interesting to see, and Mike's right to bring in John alongside of this, because your original question was what are we getting from Mark where we're getting Psalm 22:1 versus what we get in Luke from Psalm 31:5 or 6? And so that's one dimension is what's happening within the Synoptics. But you put John next to it, and John is doing something different.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

I like to tell people when they think about this and they think about paraphrasing and that kind of thing and that can make them sometimes nervous, is to say what John is oftentimes doing is making explicit things that were implicit in what Jesus was saying as we get them in the Synoptics, okay? So it's there, it's just that he's bringing it to attention, and he's bringing it to attention because he started the story in a different place.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

I like to say that John tells the story of Jesus from heaven down, the Synoptics tell the story of Jesus from Earth up. And the point that I'm making is in the Synoptics, you watch it dawn on people who Jesus is and they grow in their understanding of Him. And the writers almost present Jesus in such a way that you can watch that process happen, okay? But John, from the very first verse tells you exactly what he's doing, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This is CNN." Right from the very first verse, you know where he's coming from in terms of his presentation of Jesus. He's the only one that has this extensive prologue that goes before even Jesus was born that talks about His pre-existence explicitly, those kinds of things.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

That's not something someone historically experienced, if I can say it that way. That is a theological deduction based upon the confession that Jesus is divine. And so, those are the kinds of moves that John is making that helped to fill out his portrait and that allow him, give him the room to present this, if I could say, more explicit presentation of Jesus in light of, and now I'm going to appeal to Paul Harvey, “the rest of the story” in terms of what the early church has come to see about who Jesus is.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. Again, we can see that difference doesn’t necessarily mean contradiction, and we can take a look at these things alongside each other and put some of the details together. I think you're remark about Mark 15:37 and the second cry makes a lot of sense as well.

Mikel Del Rosario:

You guys have both debated Bart Ehrman in one way or another live or via podcast. And one of the things he likes to say often is that, “You can harmonize these things if you want, but you have to recognize that you're now making a different Gospel.” How do we respond to people who say it's just not right to harmonize these things because you're doing violence to the text by making your own story? Mike, how would you respond to that?

Dr. Mike Licona:

Well, I'd have to agree with Bart there to an extent. I do think that there are times when you can and perhaps should harmonize the account. But once you begin to see what these ancient authors were doing with the compositional devices that we can infer through Plutarch and the other ancient authors to see the paraphrasing and other techniques that are actually prescribed for historians to use, prescribed by the compositional textbooks that we find in Theon, Athonius, and Quintilian, and others, then I think that that should be our default position by understanding why there are differences in the Gospels. And to try to harmonize the differences in many occasions, not all but in many occasions, would be to go down the wrong road and we'll end up with a wrong answer. So I would agree with Bart to an extent that you shouldn't try to harmonize everything and it can go too far.

Dr. Mike Licona:

I think today there are three basic kinds of approaches that conservatives, the pious, take toward the differences. You've got the ostrich who sticks his head down into the sand and says, "Oh, I know they're there, but I just can't deal with them. They trauma me too much. Don't talk about it." And then you've got the peacemaker, "Can't we all just get along? We can just harmonize these accounts and all of the details are correct. We can create a harmony that includes all the details." And then there's the cruel interrogator that does violence to the text and subjects them to hermeneutical waterboarding until they tell him what he wants to hear. And that's what I… I think all three of those have problems. So I think it's best to try to look at these through the lens of how the ancients would write, and that's going to give us a clearer view of what the Evangelists were intending to communicate to the readers.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

Yeah, I think that's fair. There's one qualification I think I would put on it, and that is what at least the attempt to harmonizing does and what the recognition that ultimately there's one author which, of course, is what Christians believe behind this does, is it says there's ultimately some kind of a unity that's going on here, whether it's a unity that stays focused on, I'm coming at this from a different angle so I'm telling you something different, all the way over to a way in which there are ways to think about this going together. And what the harmonizing can do, as long as it's not too outlandish, is it can show that the declaration that “this is definitely a contradiction” and “that there's something very definitely wrong here,” is not an automatic or a default place to land with some of these details and discussions that we get into.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

And in the midst of doing that, there may be places where you go, "I'm not sure this is the solution. I'm not sure this is the answer," but it is one way to think about the fact. And this is often the case with any event in any scenario is you get two people talking about the same event who haven't colluded with one another about what they're going to say. They're going to bring up different details, different differences, and they're going to put the package together very, very differently. If you talk to my wife and me about our courtship, you're going to get two very related but very distinct stories about how that worked and what was the big moment and all those kinds of things.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Well, as we come to the end of our time together here, let's think about how if you're a pastor who's listening to this or you're a Christian who wants to engage in spiritual conversations during Easter time, especially to talk about the death and resurrection of Jesus, how they might approach conversations where these kinds of detailed things come up and they feel like these are just blocks getting in their way of them trying to share the Gospel and they're not sure how to even begin understanding or responding to these things. Mike, how would you counsel somebody who wants to share the Gospel but is afraid of these kinds of issues that come up? How can they prepare themselves?

Dr. Mike Licona:

Well, that's an easy one for me. I would just say don't get caught in the weeds. Don't crawl around in the weeds of these Gospel differences. I mean, I think it's fascinating. I've studied them for over eight years, and I find it a fascinating thing. But if I were a person and you're just not interested in getting familiar with this, the most important point that you can make is that if Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity's true. Period. It's game, set, match. And if Jesus rose from the dead, He did so at least two decades before the first Gospel was written. And so, Christianity would have been true during all that time so any problems in the Gospels wouldn't negate the truth of Christianity if Jesus rose from the dead. And I think we've got sufficient historical evidence to show, at least from a historian's viewpoint, that Jesus “probably,” and that's all we can say as a historian, Jesus “probably” rose from the dead. And if He did, Christianity is true. Game, set, match.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

Yeah. And the other half of it with Jesus' ministry, I like to say, if a student spends three-and-a-half years with me while they're in seminary, I'm assuming the ThM here, but anyway, if they spend three-and-half years with me or four years with me and they listen to me on a regular basis, they're going to know what my emphases are. If you talk to different students, they might have different details that they tell about me, but they're going to know what I taught and what I thought and core areas.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

And so if the Apostles hung out with Jesus for three and a half years, they're going to sort out whether Jesus presented himself as the Messiah and the answer to God and the promise of God and all that. They're going to probably get that right. And that's what we see in the core of the tradition is this consistent voice about who Jesus is that sets up why the resurrection happened and what's going on with that.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

So I'm saying that between what Mike is saying and what I'm saying, you get a package deal. You get a twofer in the Gospels. And in the midst of that, you get something to reflect on. They probably got those things right. And if those things are right, then your conversation about Christianity can take place. And that's really the point.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

Sometimes I tell people we get lost in people's, what I call, “inerrancy list,” okay? They bring up this question and you answer that one, and they go, "What about this? What about this? What about this?" And they stay there and you never get to Jesus, okay? I prefer to flip that, okay? Not that the details aren't important, they are, but to simply say, “Let's not lose sight in getting down in the weeds about what the real picture is and what the real issue is that we need to be dealing with. And that real issue is who is Jesus and what was He about?” And I think that Gospels are very clear in their similarities in their presentation to make crystal clear what that issue is. He's in the middle of what God is doing.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Yeah. Just to bring our discussion together and to a close, I like what Mike said as well. We have to remember that history can only yield so high of statistics, but our conviction as believers in the resurrection of Jesus goes beyond statistics. We're not just stuck with as high as history can give us. Maybe as historians we are, but there's a lot more that makes me confident in Jesus' resurrection.

Mikel Del Rosario:

And I would commend to our listeners two things. One, the book, “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus,” that Dr. Mike Licona wrote with Gary Habermas which was one of the first books that I read on the resurrection got me really interested in historical Jesus studies through this by way of the resurrection. That will really help you in thinking through how to use this information in conversation talking about the resurrection of Jesus. And then finally, we also have a podcast episode that we did with Gary Habermas on the resurrection of Jesus called “Truth and the Vindication of Jesus and His Resurrection,” so please check that out. Darrell, thanks so much for being with us today on the show.

Dr. Darrell Bock:

My pleasure.

Mikel Del Rosario:

Mike, thank you again for being with us.

Dr. Mike Licona:

My pleasure, Mikel.

Mikel Del Rosario:

And we thank you so much for joining us on The Table today. Please do subscribe to The Table Podcast on YouTube or Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening or watching this. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, and I hope that you'll join us again next time here on The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture.