Pints With Aquinas - Unlocking the Mysteries of Scripture (Dr. Scott Hahn)

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Dr. Scott Hahn is a renowned biblical scholar, author, and speaker who has had a profound impact on both Protestant and Catholic communities. He is married to Kimberly, with whom he has six children and eighteen grandchildren. Dr. Hahn is the Chair of Biblical Theology and the New Evangelization at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he has taught since 1990. He is also the founder of the Saint Paul Center for Biblical Theology. A bestselling author, his works include Rome Sweet Home (co-authored with Kimberly), The Lamb's Supper, and Angels and Saints. Dr. Hahn holds degrees from Grove City College, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Marquette University. After serving in Protestant ministry for ten years, he converted to Catholicism in 1986. Get a copy of the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: https://ignatius.com/ignatius-catholic-study-bible-2h/

The Emmaus effect is what this Bible is going to have, not just with the generation of Catholics living now, but with generations to come. Oh, you can die now. I don't want you to. I don't want you either, but I do. I feel like Simeon and Luke, you know, now let thy servant depart in peace. I feel as though this exceeds anything I ever expected to finish. It represents a legacy of faith But I I never presume I wouldn't have been able to do this myself Yeah There is no way and I wouldn't have been able to do it without the other people doing almost all of the heavy lifting The sense of spiritual grandfathering, you know where you have students who become your teachers

You have your own firstborn son who's become your teacher. It's so much more fun to be a launching pad than it was to be a rocket. Dr. Hahn, thank you for being here, and thank you for this beautiful, brand new book, the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, Old and New Testaments. I'm excited to talk to you about it. Yeah, I can't believe it's here. Really? Yeah, I mean, it's still... When did, what year did it, did you begin the project? Well, I was asked by Father Fessio in December of 97, and I had just grown frustrated with a couple of Catholic study Bibles that I had looked through and had considered using. And I was so frustrated that when he asked me if I might serve as the general editor for Ignatius Catholic Study Bible,

everything in my, everything, every instinct was like, no, you don't have the time. And I didn't. But the desire just got the better of me. And so I said, sure, if you'll hire this grad student who just finished up, whose interpretive judgments in scripture, I trust more than my own. And he's like, oh, he sounds good. And I said, he's disciplined, a good work ethic, kind of a more introverted. But I think we could do it if we hired him full-time, sight unseen.

He'd never met Curtis Mitch. And Curtis lived right behind us, and I'd gotten to stand up at his wedding, our lector, and he said, okay, I'm really open to that. And so the next month, January of 98, we officially got started. It began with a visit to Thomas Nelson Bible publishers in Nashville who had published I think probably close to 50 study Bibles, but they were all Protestant. And anybody who's used a study Bible knows there's nothing to get you into Scripture staying there and somewhat addicted like a study Bible. And there really wasn't anything out there for Catholics.

And so he hired Curtis and we began working together. But I mean, Curtis did almost all of the heavy lifting, but he could complete my own sentences. He could also amend my thoughts. And so I had this trust in him that was, well, it was really right-headed, and it paid off. And so we worked from January of 98 if my memory serves until about 2018-2019 and we had been at it for 20 years and you know the budget and all of the other factors the considerations and the concerns and so we had to make some adjustments and Curtis was so well suited to identify

people to delegate so we ended up having a dozen other contributors, Matthew Thomas on Maccabees, John Bergsmuh on Ezekiel. What a grand slam. But I mean, the most shocking thing about the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible in my own mind is that it's here, that it's in my hands. Twenty-seven years. Yeah, and that I've been using it every day. Really? And I just gave it to one of my grad students as a wedding gift.

He's getting married in less than a month. And I just, I am convinced that we've got to get into as many hands as possible, especially young people, especially like high school kids who are living the faith, enjoying it, but they want to go deeper, but they don't know how, they don't know where to begin. And so, I look back on my own experience. I was converted at about 13 and a half. Won't go into the details of my delinquency, but, you know, and I knew that I should read the Bible. I knew it was the Word of God. I knew that I should believe it, but I found myself not wanting to, or at least wanting to want to read it, but I got a Bible from my Presbyterian church. I began reading it, and I just felt lost. And so I put it up back on the shelf.

And then somebody suggested, you know, pray about it. Have people pray over you, and I did. And then somebody else suggested, go and get a study Bible, one that answers the questions, one that makes the connections. And so I went up to South Hills Village, I went to the Christian bookstore, and I found the Harper Study Bible. And I remember carrying it home, and I remember opening it up, and that very night, I read like three or four chapters. It was the most I think I'd ever read as a very new young believer. And I really enjoyed the footnotes. Did you start in Genesis or the New Testament? That first night I didn't. I was just beginning in the Gospels. But then within a week or two, I started in Genesis. And I did a round trip all the way through the old into the end,

until the end of the new. And I enjoyed it so much, even the parts that I didn't really understand, because so often the footnotes and the cross-references would point connections out, you know, and so I'd be like, okay, this is making sense. This is the Word of God, but it makes sense for humans who are not necessarily rocket scientists. And so that Harper's Study Bible, I carried with me for many, many years. It carried me into the Catholic Church.

I got Catholic Bibles, I've used them, but I've always had my Study Bible because it's sort of like your neighborhood. Is that the same one that you got? No. Not the same one, but the same. It's the exact same one. The page layout, the footnotes, and everything else.

I ended up meeting the man who had written most of all the annotations, the page layout, the footnotes, and everything else. I ended up meeting the man who had written most of all the annotations, Harold Linsell, when I went to seminary, and I thanked him for it. And so I always wanted, after becoming Catholic, I always wanted to create something that would have a similar effect on ordinary Catholics, but especially effect on ordinary Catholics, but especially young Catholics. They pick up a study Bible and say, okay, this might take a lifetime, but you know, it'll be worth it. And so that's what this is. It's so much more than that. Ladies, find yourself a man who loves you the way Scott loves Bibles because I mean, this is, I love hearing you. I love your passion for it. It's beautiful.

I also love that you were 14 years old. That's wild. Not a lot of 14 year olds are walking home with a study Bible. No, but I met a group of other high school kids who were studying the Bible and we would have prayer meetings and Bible studies like once a week. And it was cool. It was cool. And so I'm just grateful to God that he got me into the Word before I could have accumulated more and more fears or anxieties about not really understanding it. Tell people, people might be watching this thinking, aren't there other Catholic study Bibles? There's probably tons.

No, they're not. I mean, it's a funny thing. The Wall Street Journal just came up recently with an article identifying 2024 as the year of the Bible sales, a 22% spike in the sales of Bibles, but they noticed almost all of them are Protestant, you know. And study Bibles, I have over 100 study Bibles. I think I have less than seven, I think six Catholic Study Bibles, and they're all written by academics. And this is too, I mean, what was really special about this is that we have scholars who contribute to this, who really know contemporary biblical scholarship, but they believe in the Word of God. They're effective teachers. They're very clear writers, and they make connections between the Old Testament and

the New, between Scripture and the sacraments, the saints, the Blessed Virgin Mary, purgatory, and all of these things, not with an attitude like, here, we're gonna prove this, but just showing that if you're reading this and if you're making the connections, it's the Catholic mysteries of faith that will emerge. And that's just really not what you find in any other Catholic study Bible. No other Catholic study Bible even claims to have attempted to do that.

Okay. So we have, you know, we have the maps, the charts, the diagrams that you'll find in all of the study Bibles. But in addition, we have introductions, we have, you know, we have the maps, the charts, the diagrams that you'll find in all of the study Bibles. But in addition, we have introductions, we have topical essays, we also have, you know, over 23,000 footnotes. Wow. And they're full of good scholarship from the contemporary world of biblical studies, but also the saints and the doctors.

Yes, I noticed that. biblical studies, but also the saints and the doctors, and a lot of the magisterium as well, not in a heavy-handed way that is sort of extrinsic to the text, but showing how in the living tradition the Word of God has always been about making these connections. And that's what I find most people getting excited about when you see, okay, the Passover lamb, and you see Jesus fulfilling the Passover when he institutes the Eucharist to be the new Passover, and then as the lamb he lays down his life and he dies and he sheds his blood, but provides for communion in the Holy Eucharist. And when you make those connections, you realize, okay, the Old Testament and the New, they really do line up.

But so does the document with the sacraments that we celebrate, and with the life that I'm trying to lead, you know. We should read the Word of God and try to live the Word of God and really believe in it and share it with other people. But so often it's like, you know, one of the most popular study Bibles that I will go, I won't name it, but it's a Catholic study Bible written by academics, I think to impress academics, and to make clergy feel as though unless they know the languages and have a doctorate in Scripture, they really aren't

qualified to tell people what the Bible means. And it's like, yes, they are. You know, and so I will often tell priests at our conferences, don't ever let me hear you say from the pulpit, I'm not a scripture scholar. And so, you know, no, you have holy orders, you've got the grace of the sacrament, you have been empowered by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the word. That doesn't mean you just get up without praying or preparing, but it does mean you don't need a PhD after your name. As Mother Angelica told me a few weeks after I got my PhD, you know, and I put it there on the bottom of the screen on the WTN, she rolled her eyes and I saw her, and she said, hey Sonny, it doesn't matter how many letters you have after your name, the only thing that counts is whether you have two letters in front of it,

ST, you're here to become a saint." And I'm like, give that girl an honorary doctorate. I mean, that's wisdom, you know. And I think that's what we really ended up pulling together was a team of scholars, of teachers, of writers who can connect the wisdom of God's Word with ordinary Catholics. Yes. Well, you know, what I love, my favorite book in the Bible is the Song of Songs. And what I loved about going through this, so I've got this at home on my bookshelf. Reading a chapter. Yeah, because you were kind enough to give me a copy. And yeah, I just, I said, what's, you know, there's this great wisdom from Jordan Peterson

At least the way he phrases that I like it He says what's something you could do that you would do that would make your life better You know not just something you could do because there's all sorts of things you could do but you won't Because have you met you you're lazy you make resolutions only not to keep them. You're distracted So I thought well, I could probably read one chapter a day. I could probably do that. So it was nice. I'd wake up and I'd just read my one chapter and then I'd go through the commentary. It was lovely. But what I was going to say is in the Song of Songs, for example, I love that you're compiling different commentaries from the Church Fathers. And it's all here, so it's almost like the highlights of these different saints who have commented on it are right here in

the footnotes. So it's not like here's the wisdom of Scott Hahn or whoever, even though that's something to be had for sure, but you're also, it's imbued with the wisdom from the Church. Right. You know, it is, it has draws quotations from Bernard of Clairvaux, who had a four volume commentary on the Song of Songs, and many others too. At the same time, we don't ignore contemporary scholarship, especially good scholarship that strives to be faithful as well as grounded in historical research. So, you know, 40 years ago, Marvin Pope had a commentary on the song of songs that was practically worthless, because all he did was draw parallels with ancient Near Eastern

erotic poetry. And most of it was semi-pornographic. And so it's not just boring, it's a turn-off. It's like, oh my. And then along comes Professor Dr. Nina Harriman, who wrote recently a 700-page doctoral dissertation demonstrating on historical grounds that the best way to read the Song of Songs just so happens to line up with the way it's been read in tradition, that it's Solomonic wisdom literature, that it has a Messianic purpose, a message, that it also draws from the bridal and the nuptial

intimacy that God has as the bridegroom for his people when the Messiah comes and she's become a good friend. We published a book of hers at the St. Paul Center, A Thirst for the Spirit. It's just beautiful. And she teaches out in Menlo Park, California at St. Patrick's, but drawing from her work, we really have had that confidence in bringing about a marriage of that which is ever ancient, ever new, as well as good, solid, contemporary biblical research. You know, I was asked to do this right after I had turned 40, And I remember thinking, like, you know, this is ambitious, but it's also somewhat foolish. But it's worth, you know, at Chestererton's line,

if something is really worth doing, it's worth doing badly. And so I thought, well, at least I'll do this. And with Curtis's help, it'll be better. You know, and if it ends up being something that we're not all that proud of, somebody will read it and say, I could do a better job. And I would say, go for it.

Yeah, please do. And so just doing it that way, little by little, year after year. And it was hard to explain to the experts in Nashville at Thomas Nelson Bibles how we would pay for it. Because they explained the whole process of building a budget, of building a team, and when I said we're gonna do it with one guy working full-time, he rolled his eyes, franked it, and just said, forget it, it'll never happen. And I'm thinking, you

don't know Curtis Mitch. I do, and I think it might happen. It's worth trying, you know. Did you know, I mean, you obviously knew when they asked you 27 years ago that it was gonna be a massive undertaking Were there points in the process that you thought? All right, we may have hit a brick wall. We may there was nice Maybe we'll release some of the books separately, but we're not gonna be able to finish this thing or never Yeah, I mean I felt that I think Curtis Mitch might have felt it more because we had more kids. I got busier. I began traveling. I was teaching full-time. I was working on other book projects. And Curtis was too. I mean, he wrote a wonderful commentary on Matthew with Edward Sri, Dr. Ted Sri, and he also co-authored the commentary on Romans with me for

the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture. So, and he was also teaching as an adjunct professor at the university. He's working full-time for the Augustan Institute now. But he seemed to me to be the kind of guy who could go the distance, you know, like a marathon runner, or more like a mole who could just keep burrowing. And so, I am convinced from conversations that we had that he would hit a wall, you know, and I would try to encourage him, affirm what he's done. But we were always concerned about, well, how long will the budget hold out, you know? And it held out for the most part.

You know, we had to supplement things at times. But the bottom line was that I had a thought, and I ran it by the committee there in Nashville back in January of 97, and I said, 98, I said, what if we publish separate fascicles, like on Matthew, Mark, Luke, John? I knew that the Jerusalem Bible, the French had done it that way, the Ecole Bibliq and other things. And they just said, no, forget it. If you could in any way recoup expenses as you're working on the project, we would have done it, we would have thought of it. And thanks be to God for Father

Fesio, because he heard them say it, but he looked at me and he said, well, try that. And so we came out with individual volumes, fascicles on the four gospels, and then me and he said, we'll try that. And so we came out with individual volumes, fascicles on the four gospels and then Romans and Acts, and we began using them. I ran into colleagues who were using them for undergraduates as well as for graduate seminars. I feel like there's a market here. You know, just the way y'all did Thomas Aquinas's commentary on Romans in that beautiful book, not intimidating. It was just the English. I mean, if you had a book that looked like that, and it was just your commentary on Exodus, I would love that. I would buy that. So is there any plans to continue doing individual books or no? We're

done. We're going to continue, I think, because it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I think it paid for the entire project and then some. And so what we did was to kind of, you know, supply creates demand. So a supply-side approach to producing a Catholic study Bible ended up, you know, so that Ignatius Press was probably asked as much as I was, when will the study Bible be complete? Well, the New Testament was complete back in 2010. And people saw that and said, well, okay, when the Old Testament comes out, it'll be like three volumes. Well, Word on Fire is coming out with a multi-volume

Bible that is a beautiful project, and I have all four, the ones that are out yet so far. But no, this was thick pages, and so this is thinner pages. We're going to end up doing a paperback version of this in the next two or three years. We're going to also strive to do a compact version. So the gold standard back in the 90s when we started for the Protestants was the NIV Study Bible. And Curtis and I both looked at that and said, do you think we could ever even approximate that with the Catholic Study Bible?

And then the ESV Study Bible came out. We're like, oh man, it's even bigger and longer and it's really good, especially for an evangelical Protestant. But it had all these glitches when it came to the passages that Catholics know you have to kind of sidestep if you're non-Catholic. And so that was our standard and we went for it. But honestly, I believe, especially in the last five or six years as the team grew as we delegated as we ended up with Andy Swafford and John Bergman Michael Barber and Mark Ishak and I shouldn't have started the list because No, I have to say Jeff Morrow Yeah, and then John Kincaid and Andre Villeneuve and David Twelman and Jim Prothrow and oh boy

I hope I'm not forgetting anybody. Yeah, but mean, it is like an all-star team. And Curtis had enough good sense to figure out exactly how to delegate. And all these guys had great training and a good will to help us cross the finish line. I told you before we started that I was a COVID skeptic for a while, back in 2020. But even more, I was a study Bible skeptic. I had practically given up. I had really begun to think, I won't live long enough to see the study Bible. And so instead of the four last things, I refer to the five. And this is one. And I might just say this too, that the NAB has a study Bible edition, and I sometimes consult it, but at times you will be like,

what are they doing? They're questioning miracles, they're questioning prophecy, they're questioning the Fathers, they're questioning what appears to be the teaching of the Magisterium. They deny outright that St. Matthew had anything to do with writing Matthew's gospel, and then you're off to the races because it's sort of like a lot of things are up for grabs. But that's what you've got to accept if you live in the 20th and 21st centuries, because historical criticism is the only real approach to reading the Bible.

But it's not. It's limited. I mean, it's valuable in a certain limited way, but people who know historical criticism and the critical methods, especially source, form, and redaction criticism, they will tell you that first of all, it cannot verify a single miracle, it cannot verify prophecy being fulfilled, it can't verify supernatural activity of any sort, divine or angelic. It's sort of like a colorblind art critic, because it can only see the natural, the human, and the historical past.

It cannot see the divine, it cannot see the prophetic, the miraculous, the supernatural. It doesn't read the Bible in order to actualize the Word of God in our lives today the way the saints and the doctors of the church all took for granted. And so it has limited value, but it has unlimited excess. I mean, people are using it in a way more, you know, more in the 20th century than I would say in the 21st century. But on the other hand, the kinds or the different critical methods now are not modern but postmodern. So you have LGBT criticism, you have post-colonial, you have third world. Instead of three or four or five or six critical methods, the experts now identify over 60

closing in on 100. And it's just overwhelming. You feel as though, even if I were a biblical expert, I couldn't master all of these methods, so I'll specialize in one. But if you don't specialize as a biblical scholar, you are easily disqualified, or you can find it easy to feel disqualified. And this is what I want to tell priests, deacons, but also ordinary Catholic laypeople, disqualified, or you can find it easy to feel disqualified. And this is what I want to tell priests, deacons, but also ordinary Catholic laypeople, that you can trust the Word of God. It comes in Scripture and in living tradition, and when it's read and proclaimed in the church

in preparation to celebrate the Eucharist, that's where it comes to life. That really is its supernatural habitat. You know, we had a conversation a few months back where, you know, if you look with historical honesty at what was the context in which the New Testament books were written, it was the early Church's liturgy. Why were they written? You know, to be read in the liturgy. Why were they read in the liturgy? Because they prepare you to celebrate the Eucharist. And Jesus only applied the term the New Testament to one thing. He didn't say write this in remembrance, he said do this. He never wrote anything down. It would have been nice if he did. He never commanded the apostles to write anything down. It's

nice that some of them did, but most of them didn't. But all of them did the New Testament as the sacrament. I mean, you read Luke 22, 20, the New Testament was a sacrament years before it started to become a document, and that should influence the way you read the document, because it's an ecclesial document written for a liturgical context in order to shed light on this Eucharistic mystery we're about to celebrate. So we call them the books of the New Testament, but in the early church, the New Testament was exactly what Jesus referred to it. That's the kind of thinking that is really imbued in the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible.

R. You know, when you write a book, you usually have an idea of how long you want it to be, and therefore you have an idea of the word count. How did you do this? How did you know you weren't adding too many footnotes or too many words in a particular footnote? We didn't. I mean, we did our best, Curtis especially. I mean, he would often do a kind of comparative analysis

of other study Bibles. But he would also recognize the deficiencies in other study Bibles and the need to kind of supplement what was missing, especially when they were Protestant volumes. And so, we kind of played it by ear a lot of times. How's it doing as far as sales? Extraordinary. I mean, beyond our highest hopes.

And so, the initial print run is already sold out. Doesn't it just go to show that if you, you know, people, we can fall into the trap of trying to pander to people, give them soft, easy things, but people want meat and potatoes, don't they? This is meat and potatoes. I mean, there's salad, there's dessert, there's everything for everybody, you know. Somebody who's never read the Bible before can pick this up Yeah, open it read it and get it. Yeah and enjoy it

But as I mentioned, you know, what we want to do is we want to get it into the hands of young people Because what the Harper study Bible did to me at 14 15 16 17. It not only got me just sort of Addicted to reading scripture daily, it also just set my heart on fire. I was just telling my class this afternoon that I was playing guitar in a band throughout high school, and I got to play guitar the summer after my graduation. And so I was in the continentals, we toured the states for two months, we did Europe for one month, Scotland, England, Belgium, Holland, and all of my bandmates were sleeping on the bus, the brass section, the bass, you know.

Whereas I had a 600-page commentary on Romans by John Murray, and I had my Bible open, so I got a whole seat to myself, because I just, it had come alive and I wanted to do this. And by the time the summer was over, I got the guitar out of my system. The aspiring rock star retired at 17. And I knew, I had an offer to play guitar in a studio in Pittsburgh. There weren't many, I think there were two, but I just knew that I wanted to go off and study the Word of God. Well, we're grateful that you did. So someone buys this book and they go, how do I start this thing? And one way to start would be from the beginning, but what would you suggest?

How should people begin to attack this thing? If you're really a beginner, I would say start with the Gospels. Okay. Yeah. And just start off with Matthew. And within the first two chapters, you're gonna see that there are a lot of people out there that you'll run across who are gonna tell you, you know, Matthew's infancy narrative is legend at most. It's embellished. It's even slightly mythological.

And what we do is to show it ain't so, it is historical. And it's grounded in eyewitness testimony, and it's been received as such unanimously through the church's history in the living tradition. But it isn't like just close your eyes and say there's no place like Rome. No, open your eyes and read this naturally, critically, literarily, historically, but also read it spiritually, prayerfully. And I think that is even more important, that if you can place yourself in the gospel scene and just imagine what would it have been like to hear Jesus teach the sermon of the mount? What would it have been like after the sermon was done in Matthew 9 and 10, in Matthew 8 and 9, for him to perform ten consecutive miracles to illustrate the power of the kingdom of heaven?

And I think that combination of daily reading, checking out the biblical text first and foremost, then looking at the footnotes, making these connections in literary, historical, but also in spiritual and theological terms, and one chapter will be enough. Sometimes you might want to go on, but stop. You develop the habit first. So, okay, let's look at a little passage here. One thing I've been thinking about lately as I pray the Holy Rosary is when they find Christ in the temple, he's 12 years old, and if memory serves, he's not teaching so much as he is asking questions, but almost like Socrates maybe,

they seem to be being taught nonetheless, and they're surprised at how wise he is. By the way, I got, there's nothing I have prepared to say here, I just flipped it open to here, because I wanted to see what y'all had to say, and I want to learn from you while I got you, see, I'm greedy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let me just read one say here, I just flipped it open to here, because I wanted to see what y'all had to say, and I want to learn from you while I got you. See, I'm greedy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let me just read one thing here. Did you not know? So here's an example, right? So for

those at home, I'm looking at this commentary. I go down to did you not know, which is what Christ said to the Blessed Virgin, and it says, Jesus is not rebuking Mary and Joseph as though they had done something wrong, but instructs them on how their Parental role must be subordinate to the will of the divine father his divine father His parents do have an important part to play in his mission as indicated in the subsequent Context where Jesus submits himself to their leadership and honors them with the faithful obedience of a son What else can you teach me about this? Because as I say, you know, sometimes you pray the rosary and you think, I'm running

out of ammunition, like there's nothing, or I'm running out of content to meditate on. I don't know, that might not be your problem, but for me it is, you know, there's certain mysteries. It's everybody's problem. For me, certain mysteries, you can really visualize it, and then there are others, you're like, I don't know what I'm supposed to be thinking about right here. Help me out. Well, I mean, first of all, all five of the Joyful Mysteries are unique to Luke.

So the Annunciation of the Angel Gabriel to Our Lady, that's really only in Luke. The angel appears to Joseph in Matthew. So you can sense that, okay, the Son of the Most High, whoa, holy is His name. She gets it. And then over and again you have in the first two chapters in the Annunciation and in the Visitation where Elizabeth declares, you know, who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me? You know, and the babe leaps for joy in the womb. So this idea of recognizing this miraculous grace of divine sonship. I mean in some ways that's like wallpaper or that's like, you know, a staircase with well-worn steps, you know, you don't even notice it anymore.

But when you go back and you sort of reacquaint yourself with it, it almost requires you to defamiliarize yourself and then read it in Luke 1 and 2. And look at the notes as well, because when she goes up for the presentation, scholars in most study Bibles would say, you know, this is the law that you find in Exodus 13 verses 12 and 13 and Leviticus 12, where you redeem your firstborn son with five shekels, only they offer a pigeon. And so Luke must be getting it wrong or, no, What the presentation involves is nothing less than not buying your firstborn son back so that some Levi is replacing him. But doing what was initially commanded in Exodus 13,

verses 1 and 2, where all of the firstborn, including the humans, belonged to God because they were redeemed by the blood of the Passover lamb. Now later on, the Lord sees what's going to happen with the golden calf, they're going to desecrate themselves, the Levites alone are going to become the priests. But this is like one of those things. I mean, Ratzinger notices it in volume 3 of Jesus of Nazareth. Renée Laurentin notices it. David Michael Stanley, a Canadian Jesuit scholar, notices it. But what you have here is something seismic, quiet, almost silent. But she is not redeeming her son.

She is consecrating him every bit as much as Hannah did with Samuel in the opening chapters of 1 Samuel. And that's why the Magnificat so closely resembles Hannah's song. And when you make the connections, you want to go back and read Hannah's song, you want to go back and realize, okay, Samuel was vowed to the priestly house, even though he wasn't a Levite. So Jesus now belongs to God. He belongs to God the Father. He is the Son of the Most High. He is the firstborn Son of the Father. And so when the Bar Mitzvah, or whatever you want to call it, occurs in Luke 2, you get a sense, as it were, why Jesus would say, you know, Behold, your Father and I have been looking for you anxiously.

And he said to them, how is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house? Literally in the Greek, the note points out is not house, but in that of my father. In other words, I must be completely caught up in my father's business, my father's affairs. Now father's house would refer to the temple. So in a real way, Joseph might be tempted to say, yeah, you should have been in your father's house. We would be in Nazareth by now. But Joseph and Mary understand the mystery by faith that they're raising the Son of the Most High, that it really is the Son of God and the Son of Mary.

And Mary can say, Behold, your father, not your foster father, not your legal father, but because Matthew describes how Joseph named Jesus in terms of the covenant law, he really is a father figure in his life, not biologically, but spiritually and legally. Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously. And he said to them, How is it you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house? Well, which father? Well now that he's come of age He really does belong but he goes back home and is obedient to them and he grows in a wisdom and stature in favor with men

But there's one other thing I want to point out that you just mentioned and that is when they found him After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them respectfully, honoring his elders as it were, asking them questions. And you just mentioned the Socratic method, because I and you, we're sure, I mean, he was asking questions, but not that I've always wondered about this, but he's asking questions instead of just stipulating what he knows to be true from his father. He's asking questions to evoke proper responses, sitting there among the teachers, listening to them and asking

questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. Wow, there you go, his answers. So in St. Peter's, you've been to our parish many times, there is that stained-glass window of the finding of the boy, Jesus, in the temple. And Mary and Joseph are in the background. Jesus is sitting there respectfully among all of these elders, and you can just see him, he's asking questions, and they're looking at him with amazement. And the thing that I contemplate when I get to that mystery is, Jesus, you seem to have the same passion for teaching divine truth that gets me up early every morning and keeps me up late every

night. Only you have it a hundred times more than I do. But this idea of feeding people's souls the bread of life, I mean, this is the fire in his sacred heart at 12 years of age. And how much he longed to teach them, how much more he could have taught them that they probably weren't ready, is a clear indication of how much he wants to teach us. Interesting. He loves us, he respects us, he'll listen to us, he'll ask us questions, but to open us up. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Do you think he was asking them a question

so as not to offend their pride, so that they would be open to receiving instruction that way? I think that's exactly right. They're amazed at his understanding and his answers. I mean, he's youthful, he's 12, he's a diplomat. Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way. So you ask the right questions at the right time to lead them to the answers that they might never

arrived at apart from that kind of art of Socratic dialogue. Yeah, imagine being a fly on the temple wall, listening to that. But if we were believers sitting there or just standing back, he would look at us and smile even more than Jonathan Rumi, you know, might wink and just impress upon us, I love you. I am the truth. I want to communicate the truth that I am to you in the most compelling way, but not

just to convince you, but to light your heart on fire. So would it be right to assume that Christ, in asking questions, was not in need of the answers? In other words, was he learning from them? Well, he grows in wisdom and stature. So, stature. So, we distinguish between his infused knowledge, because he has that being divine. He also has acquired knowledge because he's truly and fully human. So through experience and through study, he is going to grow, and that's acquired knowledge. But he also has what the second person of the Trinity could never get rid of, and that

is beatific knowledge. So he doesn't tap into the knowledge that he doesn't need to be faithful to his father's will in his life, in his public ministry, but it isn't as though this is like out of reach. It isn't inaccessible, but in his own self-emptying, in his own kenosis, what he does, he doesn't, in a sense, he doesn't divest himself of that which is divine But he's also not concealing his divinity There really is a sense in which he's revealing the greatness of God does not consist in showing that I'm always smarter than you I can always dominate you the superior the supremacy of God lies more in a love

That is life-giving that is the eternal life and truth of the Godhead. That the Father doesn't expect the Son to grovel, doesn't push him around, and the Spirit who binds them in love, this is the reality of divine supremacy. And so instead of assuming that he's concealing his ignorance, no, he's revealing a way of knowing that it's rooted in the divine humility of love. I wish we had more time to talk about it. It's almost like a semester-long course in Christology. Yeah, but this...

What kind of feedback are you getting from those who've gotten the Bible? Have you got much yet, or are people just now digging into it? Yeah, I'm getting emails and text messages, I'm getting WhatsApp, I'm getting people, somebody from China is coming over, getting a copy, because it would be confiscated if it was sent there. And this person, I just won't say he or she, is so excited because people have heard over there that they're going to be able to study the Word of God in a way that is utterly faithful and reliable. This other person said to me that they've been reading it now for weeks, and no matter where they are, they've described what they called an

Emmaus effect, that reading the text that they know, because they're focusing on the New Testament, they went back to the Psalms, they began actually reading in Leviticus. But this Emmaus effect, how did he put it? That no matter where I am, my heart's burning within me. And so I can't wait to go back to Mass. The Emmaus effect is what this Bible is going to have, not just with the generation of Catholics living now

But with generations to come Wow You can die now. I don't know. I don't want you to I don't want you But I do I feel like simian and Luke, you know now let thy servant depart in peace I feel as though this exceeds anything I ever expected to finish It represents a legacy of faith that I never presumed I wouldn't have been able to do this myself. There is no way, and I wouldn't have been able to do it without the other people doing almost all of the heavy lifting. And to have a role in their formation, and then to have their, they play the role in the formation of this.

You know, for example, my oldest son now is Professor Dr. Hahn the Younger at Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg. Whenever I talk to him, I always learn something. I taught him everything I knew. Now he teaches me so much more. The sense of spiritual grandfathering, you know, where you have students who become your teachers, you have your own firstborn son who's become your teacher, it's so much more fun to be a launching pad than it was to be a rocket. I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded

prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first. It's outstanding. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. I use it, my family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music, including my lo fi. Hello has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better.

It helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all. Just go check it out. Hello.com slash Matt Fred. The link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Fred.

I got another question for you. And greedy, greedily of me. Um, I keep getting told that the earliest apostles believe that and disciples believe that Jesus was going to come back in their lifetime, and there are verses here that make it appear that that's the case. You know, Christ saying things like, you won't taste death until the Son of Man returns. So isn't that a prophecy from the mouth of Christ that disproves Christianity, and shouldn't have he returned by now? I'm sure you hear these objections. Oh, yeah. And I mean, this is one that stumped C.S. Lewis.

Really? Yeah. It was something that he felt he could not answer. And you know why? Because he didn't have the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. I wouldn't say it, but I wouldn't deny it, because I tell you, this is one of the main points in the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. Really?

All right. one of the main points in the Ignatius Catholic Sunday Bible. Really? Alright. Yeah. In Matthew chapter 16, where he says, there in verse 28, truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. Well, it sounds like he's talking about the second coming, and it sounds like he's expecting it to happen in the lifetime of at least some of his disciples. Well, that depends if we assume that the coming of the Son of Man in the kingdom is reducible to one thing only, and that is the second coming. Matthew 16? Yeah. So, page 1756. You'll see that there were some standing there who didn't taste death before they saw the Son of Man coming in his kingdom, because three of the twelve are selected in the

very next verse at the beginning of Matthew 17 to accompany him up to the top of Mount Tabor to witness the transfiguration. So you have a kind of pre-deification of his own humanity. He's already divine. But I mean, more than Moses who came back with his face aglow, you hear the voice of the Father, �This is my beloved Son, listen to him.� And they're all in the cloud, which is not cumulus, it's the shekinah glory of the Holy Spirit. So Moses and Elijah appear, the law and the prophets, and they're testifying to him. Peter, James, and John are seeing the Son of Man riding the clouds of glory. The Ancient of Days from Daniel 7 verse 13 and 14 is identifying the Son of Man as his only beloved son.

The kingdom is not some futuristic utopia. The kingdom of heaven is life in the Holy Trinity. And so when the Father identifies his beloved son in the power and the glory of this Spirit, this cloud, the Shekinah, three of them didn't taste death before they were enveloped in the everlasting kingdom. Is that all it is? No. It's not just a futuristic utopia, so it's not just the Mount of Transfiguration, but ultimately we're not going to get to heaven in order to catch a glimpse of the Trinity.

We're going to get to heaven in Revelation 21 and 22 and discover that heaven is the Trinity. Revelation 21 verse 22 says something really stunning. Here is the New Jerusalem and there is no temple in it. Well, that would be shocking. That would be bad news. The New Jerusalem has no temple? No outer court? No holy place? No holy of holies? No. Why? For the Lord God Almighty is the temple, and then the Lamb who sits upon the throne, and the first verse of Revelation 22 verse 1 shows the living water that flows from the throne of the Lord God Almighty, and the Lamb and the living water is the Holy Spirit.

And so the New Jerusalem doesn't have a temple. The New Jerusalem is a temple, but not a created temple made by human hands, but the uncreated temple. So the triadic architecture of the temple was actually a foreshadowing of the triadic mystery of the Holy Trinity. So for now, when we live in a state of grace, our bodies are temples of the Holy Trinity. When we live in a state of grace, our bodies are temples of the Holy Trinity. But in heaven, when we move into a state of glory, the eternal Trinity will be the temple for every believer.

And so if there are some standing here who don't taste death and they enter into the mystery of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit, but even more, I'm just going to say part two in Matthew 23, 24, and 25. This is again what most fundamentalists would say refers to the end of the world, period. The last day. The perusia, which they basically translate as second coming, although the real meaning of perusia back in the first century, the Greek term in any lexicon means presence, a person's presence, a real presence, as in the son of man who comes looking like bread and wine, but is truly the divinized son of man. So what we do with Matthew 23, 24, and 25, it's the Sermon on the Mount of Olives, also

known as the Olivet Discourse, and we have a topical essay on page 1770 called End of the World? And what we do is connect the dots. We show how Jesus' discourse is drawing extensively from the Old Testament prophets, Joel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Amos, and others, where the prophets would announce the judgment of God that would be coming down upon a kingdom that was opposing God's purpose and plan for His people. So it might be Egypt, Babylon, Edomaiah, depending upon the Old Testament prophet, and the sun will be darkened, the moon won't give its light, you know, and then the stars fall from heaven. You know, in the ancient world, you didn't have clocks or watches. So what did you have?

Well, you had the sun, and that tells you what a year is, the moon that tells you what a month or a month is, and then the stars tell you what age you might be in. And so if you're announcing to rulers of an enemy kingdom, intent upon opposing God's people, then, you know, if the Prime Minister of England flew me over and said, you know, what would you give me as a prognosis for the future of the UK? Well, if I were a prophet, I might not use words,

I might just do a symbolic action, put, you know, a mini, you know, a miniature version of Big Ben on the table, take out a mallet and smash Big Ben. What am I saying? Your time is up. So Jerusalem and the temple are under judgment. He says, basically, this generation will not pass away until my words take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away." So that's the climax, that's the midpoint of what he's saying in the Olivet Discourse.

So what he's talking about concerns the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, but it also relates to the end of the world, heaven and earth passing away. You read Josephus, you read, and you read the footnotes of the Ignatius Study Bible, they'll make these connections, because every Jew would look at the Jerusalem temple and see that as a microcosmos, that when God made the cosmos, he made it like a temple. In six days to consecrate on the seventh day of the Sabbath, well, is that clock time? It really reveals the purpose primarily, so that when Solomon builds the first Jerusalem temple,

he just crushes all the construction records by building it in seven years to dedicate it in the seventh month, in the seventh feast, the feast of tabernacles, which lasted seven days. So 1 Kings tells us that Solomon consecrated the temple on the seventh day of the seventh feast of the seventh month of the seventh year. Why? Because he's imitating his father. He's the first Israelite to ever be referred to as the Son of God. I will be his father and he

will be my son. So the idea is that the Jerusalem temple is an architectural sacrament of the cosmos. The cosmos is a cosmic temple in Genesis 1. The Garden of Eden is a sanctuary in Genesis 2. Adam is not just the first father, he's the high priest of humanity. For example, in Genesis 1, the Garden of Eden is a sanctuary in Genesis 2. Adam is not just the first father, he's the high priest of humanity. He doesn't just disobey, he desecrates the sanctuary when he's driven out and the two

cherubim are posted there to keep him out or to prevent him from returning to the garden sanctuary. Every Israelite would read that and say, where are two cherubim? In the Holy of Holies, overshadowing the Ark of the Covenant. That forms the mercy seat. That's off limits. For everyone, even the high priest

can only go in one day out of the year. So only when Messiah comes will that be transformed. So the destruction, the judgment on the Jerusalem temple is at once a judgment on the cosmos that has been desecrated, and so it's also a sign. So Ratzinger points this out, a number of other Catholic scholars do, that the fulfillment of the prophecy is initial, the initial fulfillment is in 70 AD. This generation didn't pass away before all these things took place, but why would he

add heaven and earth will pass away but my words won't pass away, except that his words also apply to the passing away of heaven and earth, because Jews understood the heavens and the earth form a cosmic temple. I mean, I don't wanna use a voodoo analogy, but if you put a voodoo doll on the other side of the ocean, the guy might say, ouch.

So if you bring judgment upon the old covenant temple in the old Jerusalem, you're setting in the motion what will eventually... And this is like, this is an Augustine, this is an Aquinas, and so we have citations there and to other sources too. And so, I mean, the one objection that really kind of stumps C.S. Lewis and many others, Protestants generally say, well, it refers to the end of the world if they're fundamentalist, or it refers to the destruction of Jerusalem. But what if it's both? And if you don't just say, well, it's A and B, because I can't figure out which one.

What if A is the Jerusalem temple, which is an architectural sacrament of the cosmos? So what happened to that in the first century is already foreshadowing what will happen to the cosmic temple at the end of time. And again, I would say that in the writings of the doctors and the fathers of the church, this sort of thing was the air that they breathed. And it can become the air that others breathe today as well. I remember thinking about doing my doctoral dissertation on this topic. Jesus seems to have expected to return in the lifetime of His own disciples. But what He's talking about is

destruction and the judgment of Jerusalem. So I asked my sponsor, who was gonna help me enter the church, he was a professor of political science, how do you interpret the Olivet Discourse? Was Jesus talking about Jerusalem or was He talking about the end of the world? He said, you know, I think it's both. I think there's a connection between the temple and the whole cosmos. And I'm like, you're a professor of political science. That's taken me like six years to discover. Where'd you get that? And he said, well, funny it asked, because you're in my pocket, New Testament.

And he opened it up, and he showed me the footnote that read that it pertains to both, and sure enough, you know, Augustine and then a Summa Aquinas both indicate that it applies to both. That, you know, in fact, Aquinas calls this the Rule of Jerome. That is, Jerome sees that if there's a partial fulfillment that is only partial, then there's a partial non-fulfillment. So there will be a perfect fulfillment at the end of time. And so, yes, Jesus' words apply to his own generation, and he does come on the clouds of heaven in judgment, as he told Caiaphas he would, but then what was invisible will become visible in the end. And, you know, this is just the way that the Church reads the Bible. The first week of Advent, when you look, this is just the way that the Church reads the Bible. The first week of Advent, when you look at the readings from the Brevery, you have Cyril

of Jerusalem quoted. There's a first coming and a second coming, and they're inseparably linked. And then Bernard of Clairvaux speaks of a middle coming, that, yeah, there's a first coming in the first century, there's a final coming, but Christ comes again in the sacraments and by other means And if you look at the word parousia, which fundamentalists have translated as Second coming you actually realize the word meant presence in Philippians 2 Paul says as in my presence So and now in my absence work at your salvation with fear and trembling the word for presence is parousia since work at your salvation with fear and trembling, the word for presence is parousia. So when we profess our belief in the real presence of the resurrected Lord of glory,

wherever the king is, there is the kingdom, but wherever the Eucharist is, guess what? There's the kingdom. So it was in the lifetime of his own disciples, it's also in our lifetime, you don't have to die to go to heaven, go to mass, the kingdom of heaven is what envelops us, and at the end of time, the curtain is pulled back and it will all be apocalypse, literally unveiled. Well, there you go, everybody. If you like that, then buy the, get this Bible, because it's, you get smacked in the face

with this beautiful wisdom as soon as you open it up. Let me say one thing. I'm being kind, I'm confident in you. I know. I know. It's so lovely what you're sharing. You're too kind. I would say what I've been doing is more like a fire hydrant.

Yeah. And what this does is more like a water faucet. Yeah, that's right. Or a water fountain. Yeah. You can sip at your own pace. Yeah, because I want to go back and listen to what you just said five times in like half speed.

It took me five years. I understand it. I totally get it. So thank you for putting this together. Where can people get it? Through the St. Paul Center. I mean, Ignatius Press publishes it. It's available from them.

What's the... Do you know the URL? We'll put the link below. StPaulCenter.com. We'll see on the homepage, you know, the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. We have bought thousands because we were also able to really assist in the whole project. I mean, Curtis was a founding board member of the St. Paul Center. He's also done a lot of teaching for us. We're so grateful for him, so proud of him. I mean, you can go to the conventional outlets like Amazon,

but you can also get full access for free for our Emmaus Academy, where we have like 20 plus courses that you can access on how to read the Bible, the Gospel of John, the prophets, Psalms, and that kind of thing. And if you sign up for that and register, you'll get it for free. This is a perfect time to get it too, because people like to read the Bible in a year. I don't. I mean, I admire people who do, but I don't have the discipline. But this would be lovely to have this alongside you

as you run into things that you don't quite understand to be able to turn right to that. Yeah, I am so grateful. I'm so, yeah, grateful to God for the privilege of having a part to play in the production of this. And I do feel like this is going to be a legacy of faith and love, not just from me,

but from a whole team of beloved colleagues for generations to come. God bless you and thank you for the work you've put into it and everybody else on that page, even the ones we may have forgotten. God bless them too. Amen. Thanks, Matt.

Hi, I'm Chris Gafford and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. them too. Amen. Thanks Matt. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings, crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's gonna happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today, Beautiful Anonymous.