How did we get the specific books of Bible that we hold in our hands today? Who decided and on what basis? How was the New Testament originally formed? How can we have confidence we have the right books today? These are just a few of the questions Scott discusses with our guest, Dr. Michael Kruger, one of the leading contemporary NT scholars who specializing in the formation of the NT canon.
Dr. Michael Kruger is an internationally known New Testament scholar, President and Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte campus. He is the author of 11 books and numerous articles and blogs regularly on his site, Canon Fodder.
Episode Transcript
Scott: How did we get the Bible that we have today? Who decided what books were included and on what basis? Specifically, how was the New Testament originally formed and how can we have confidence that we have the right books today? These are just a few of the questions we're gonna explore today with our guest, Dr. Mike Kruger, one of the leading contemporary New Testament scholars who specializes in the formation of the New Testament canon. I'm your host, Scott Rae, and this is Think Biblically, a podcast from Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. Mike, so glad to have you with us. Thanks for taking time out from your duties as president of Reformed Seminary to join us for this conversation.
Mike: Yeah, Scott, great to be with you and good to be back. I think you and I were just discussing this, I think this is my third time on the show, so, love it.
Scott: Always glad to have you back. So tell me, Mike, you've been studying this for a long time. What first got you hooked on studying questions related to the New Testament canon and how that came together?
Mike: Yeah, my story is kind of interesting in the sense that it started very young when I was at college at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Some may have heard the story in my other conversations, but when I was an undergraduate, I found myself in a religion class on the New Testament. And I was a committed Christian, I grew up a Christian home, I had Christian beliefs and I was in college hoping to make an impact for the kingdom of God and pretty optimistic and happy with my Christian life. And then I found myself in this religion class and the professor started going after the Bible, particularly in the areas we're discussing today, which is how it got put together, who picked the books, are those books reliable, have they been transmitted faithfully and so on. And it really shook me up, but at the same time it shook me up, it also spurred an interest in the subject. And some may know that that professor was Bart Ehrman, who—
Scott: I was wondering if that was who it was. Interesting.
Mike: Yep. And so, studying under Ehrman there, I grew to be very fascinated with this subfield of Christian origins, development of the New Testament canon, transmission of the New Testament text, and realized that a number of things that center around our trust in scripture are hinged on these matters. And on top of that, I also began to realize that not many people in the evangelical space were that keen to study them. And there'd been a few examples over the years. And so, I was fascinated and decided to pursue it. And then one thing led to another and eventually a PhD. And so, yeah, in a very sort of strange turn of events—maybe paradoxically—I got interested by talking to a non-Christian professor.
Scott: So, Mike, tell us a little bit about how the discussion about the canon has changed over the past few decades. Is there more interest or less? Are there folks on certain questions and issues? How's the discussion evolved over time?
Mike: Well, I've been encouraged. On one level, one could say that the issue of canon has always been there, right? In the church, we always have wanted to justify why these books are no others. And so on one level, the conversation has always been lurking in the background. But when I started studying it, it was pretty thin places to go, especially from evangelical perspectives on the canon. I mean, it was just classic works like Bruce Metzger, whose classic work on New Testament canon still gets circulated. And then in evangelical worlds, probably FF Bruce with his canon of scripture. But other than that, there were a lot of people working on it. And so what I've seen over the last 30 years is just an enormous expansion of interest in canon. Part of that has to do with probably the discovery of the manuscripts. Part of that has to do with the new generation of scholars that I think have been pulled into this space. But the work has exploded. And I've been just sitting back and watching it over the years and making my own contributions, of course, but really thrilled to see more and more people interested in the subject. And then particularly more and more evangelicals contributing to the subject in a way that I think is doing the church a really good service. So, it's changing fast, but I think for the better.
Scott: Now, Mike, it was fairly big news in the New Testament circles about a manuscript that was just recently released that had been discovered. Tell us a little bit about that and how that has an impact on the question of the canon of the New Testament.
Mike: Yeah, this is fascinating timing for our podcast conversation because just a couple of weeks ago, the latest volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papari was published, volume 87. And the sort of lead manuscript in there is a manuscript called Pioxy 5575. Now I know to the average listener, this probably sounds like, you know, strange language and gibberish. What in the world are all these numbers and everything? But this is just a nomenclature we use to describe manuscripts. But this manuscript has garnered a lot of attention over the last couple of weeks, precisely because of its content and its date. Its content has a mix of what we call sort of synoptic material, kind of a combination of Matthew and Luke. And then that's laid aside material that seems to come from the Gospel of Thomas. Now, that in its own words is quite fascinating. Then on top of that, they date it to the second century, which is stunningly early. And so, everybody's just chit-chatting about this. In fact, even yesterday, I just wrapped up an article that I'm publishing on this. I believe it's gonna go up on the Gospel Coalition site. So, you know, all of this is moving very quickly. I think that the main question people wanna know the answer to is does this type of phenomenon, apocryphal material, alongside canonical material threaten, you know, our belief in the uniqueness of Scripture? And I can reassure the listeners, I don't really think it does. Now, as fascinating as it is, it's actually a fairly common phenomenon in the second century. Almost all our apocryphal Gospels are actually mixtures of material from the canonical Gospels and then new material that has been added to it. So, it's always a mix at some level. We see this both in formal Gospels, like the Gospel of Peter, but we also see this in other places like citations in the Apostolic Fathers. And so, on one level, it's new and interesting. On another level, it's actually fairly much par for the course. And I think at the end of the day, it probably was some sort of collection of Jesus' sayings that people found useful, but not necessarily something they regarded as Scripture.
Scott: Now, I suspect, Mike, that this is breaking news to some of our listeners, that apocryphal materials are included with the books that were recognized, that we recognize today as part of the New Testament. But you say that's not an unusual thing. How does that not give credibility to including things like the Gospel of Thomas in the canon of the New Testament?
Mike: Yeah, I think people need to recognize there's a difference between material about Jesus that's useful and material about Jesus that's regarded as Scripture. And the early church was, believe it or not, quite able to make this distinction. In the earliest centuries of the church, we do know that oral traditions circulated. We know that they cited sayings of Jesus and deeds of Jesus that didn't occur in our New Testament texts. And we know that we even have some other Gospels outside or canonical four that include sayings and deeds of Jesus that didn't include, or weren't included in our original four. And I think what we have to do is take a lesson from the church fathers here. They're quite able to recognize that some of that material might have been useful, profitable, interesting, helpful from time to time. But even if they were to utilize it, maybe in a collection of sayings—such as the one we're looking at now—they were quite willing also at the same time to say, but those don't belong in our Bibles as inspired Scripture. And so, I think we have to distinguish between those two things. And so, it's okay to use Jesus' material in these early centuries, but at the same time when pressed, it seems pretty consistent that they recognize that really only four books are regarded as belonging to the Bible. And so, I think in that way, it doesn't really threaten the distinctiveness of the Gospels at all.
Scott: Okay, so let's go back a little bit. And you started to hint at this in the answer to my last question, but tell us the story of how you believe the New Testament canon was formed. Sort of, so what happened and what were the main factors that contributed to how it all came together?
Mike: Yeah, what might be helpful if I lay out a very quick synopsis of the way the canon was formed is to first just lay out very quickly what the general narrative of most people hear and then kind of correct it. So, the general narrative that most people hear is that a bunch of books were written by followers of Jesus in the first century and they were fine and okay. And then much later, people again began to notice these books. And then even much later after that, they began to read them and like them. And then eventually a group of people got together and said, well, what if we called these scripture? Oh, that's a great idea, let's call these scripture. And then eventually there was a meeting or a council somewhere that swept books together and voted. And then they fought about which books to go in, some like some books, some like others. And then after a big theological war, they finally picked the books we have and that's how we got our canon. Now, just that narrative alone is probably recognizable to a lot of the listeners. It's what you'd get at a major university, is what you'll get if you read about the canon online in most places. And it's what I call a top down version of canon where the books of the canon are chosen by official ecclesiastical authorities. And then they're sort of forced on the church long after the books were written. And they use these books for a purpose that maybe the original authors could never have foreseen. So, that's narrative A.
I have been pushing for, and I think the historical evidence supports what I'll call narrative B, which is that it wasn't really something that happened top-down, but happened bottom-up. If, in fact, Jesus said and did these things, then we know that he also commissioned a number of people to tell his story, namely the people we call apostles. These are what we might call as official authorized biographers. They started telling their story originally by word of mouth. That's not surprising. That's how you would have done it in the ancient world. But eventually they wrote down the things that Jesus said and did because Jesus had asked them to tell his story. And so, the books that we have in our canon from the very beginning were seen as books that were authorized precisely because they were produced by the very people that Jesus had authorized to speak for him. And, we would argue, those books therefore were recognized quite early in the church as being official guides for church practice and for church teaching. So, it didn't take some committee later or some counsel in the fourth century to make that decision. It happened more organically, happened more innately and intrinsically. And, of course, there was an ongoing discussion about a few books here and there, but for the most part, a core was in place then very early, probably by the time of the middle second century, we can see a burgeoning canon solidly there.
Scott: Okay, that's really helpful, especially realizing that they're two competing and somewhat pretty different narratives that are out there to try to explain this. So, I'm not even sure how to ask the question, but would it be fair to say that there were criteria that were either formally or informally in place for how this came together from the bottom up?
Mike: I think you could say it that way. In my writing, I don't normally use the word “criteria of canonicity,” but I think you're still on the right track there. The reason I hesitate around the term “criteria” in some of the books I've written is because it gives a more formalized impression that the church got together, decided it needed books, developed criteria, and then went out searching for books. And I think anybody knows that's not really how it happened. The books were recognized so early that they were almost a given within the early Christian communities handed down from the apostles. So, many of the justifications for the books were almost retrospective, meaning that they understood as this all unfolded why these were the books they should use. And I think, fundamentally, the thing that they were responding to is that they believe these books bore the very voice of their Lord. Why did they think they bore the voice of their Lord? Well one is because of the thing we already mentioned. If they're connected to apostles, then they would be connected to the people who have the authority to speak for Christ. And so, there would be sort of this inherent recognition from the very start that, oh, when Paul writes a letter, I need to pay attention because he speaks for Jesus. So, this idea that that was a formal criteria, well, I guess you could say it in a sense it was, but in another sense they were just reacting to the thing that was in front of them, namely someone who was clearly positioned to speak for God and speak for God in an authoritative way.
Scott: So, that's helpful. So, one of the things that enabled these books to get recognized was it's linked to the apostles and ultimately back to Jesus. But how important was it that the book was widely accepted, widely used in the church? But was that an important component as well? Or was it—
Mike: It was. In fact, I think it's very clear that sort of acceptance in various quarters of the church and usage in various quarters of the church really played a role in terms of accelerating a book's overall acceptance. But one of the things that I think is important to point out is that that's not an entirely different conversation than the one about apostolicity because they're very much connected. When you ask, how do I know a book is from God? Part of the reason you get there perhaps is that you're really sure who the author is, okay, fine. But another reason you might decide a book is from God is because God's people are responding to it and reacting to it and recognizing the voice of their Lord in it. Which, of course, means that the author must be one who speaks for God. So, you end up a little bit in a mutually affirming, mutually complementary angle on the canon, one from the side of authorship, one from the side of reception—but ultimately they're getting to the same place. So yeah, in the early church, there's no doubt that in as much as books were widely recognized by God's people as being from God, that was a further confirmation that indeed that book has some special status. And should be regarded as such. Now, one clarification on that, there are many books in early Christianity that were widely popular that were still not regarded as scripture. So, it's not just simply popularity, it's recognition and reception of the book as being from God, those are different things.
Scott: Okay, so what was it that, other than the connection to the apostles, what was it that tended to disqualify certain books from being accepted as having what we would call biblical authority?
Mike: Yeah, so I make a case in my book, “Canon Revisited,” that when early Christians were faced with books, certainly authorship was a part of that as we've already discussed, but the other part was the book's content. And I argue for what I call—and it's not me that made this up historically, theologians have called divine qualities or divine indicators, things in a book that demonstrate it's consistent with what God would say. And so, when you talk about Christians sifting books, if we could say it that way, and maybe even rejecting books, one of the fundamental ways they know a book is not part of the canon is if it's inconsistent with prior revelation. If a book says something that's just flat out contradictory to a prior received canonical book, then they know that it can't be God speaking because God doesn't contradict himself. And this is actually one of the reasons a lot of these heretical books got rejected because upon reading them, it became very clear that the type of worldview they're in, the type of theological structure it had was radically at odds with prior revelation. And the most obvious prior revelation was the Old Testament itself. So, if you have an Old Testament revelation that says there's a singular God and that he created the world and he created it good, and then you read a book that's considered Gnostic that says, no, there's multiple gods, and that there was a different God that created the world and created it bad, well, you can already see that a lot of Christians are gonna say, that's dead in the water. That book has no chance of being part of what we would call the canon. And so that was the large part of the process as a recognition of theological mistakes, errors, and contradictions that basically eliminated certain books from consideration.
Scott: So, in the first narrative that you described a few minutes ago, you mentioned that the Council of Nicaea that met in the early 300s, had a determinate effect on the establishment of the canon. The narrative that you think is more accurate is the less top-down, more bottom-up, but something significant seems to have happened at the Council of Nicaea. What exactly took place there in its relationship to the formation or recognition of the New Testament canon?
Mike: Yeah, this has been one of those perplexing ideas that has been circulated for so long that some of us in the scholarly community have just scratched our heads how it even got started and who started saying it because it's often so mistaken. And when it comes to the Council of Nicaea, this is a good example of how sometimes mistaken ideas can be said so often that people assume they're true. So, there was a Council of Nicaea in 325, we know that. And we know that that Council was designed primarily to talk about the best way to articulate the divinity of Jesus. And even contrary to other misconceptions, it wasn't designed to decide the divinity of Jesus, but more how to articulate it in a way that was faithful to Scripture and to the beginnings of Trinitarian theology. But what did not happen in the Council of Nicaea, for any reason we would think, we have no evidence of this, there's no evidence that the Council of Nicaea had anything to do with the formation of the New Testament canon at all. And so, when people say it was chosen at the Council of Nicaea, that's sort of what you might call an internet legend, might be sort of popular, sort of old wives tales type things, but there's nothing about historical evidence to suggest that the Council of Nicaea had anything to do with the formation of the canon. I think that what's lurking behind that idea is a desire in the minds of some to pin the canon on an authority, to make it top-down, to say, look, this was imposed, usually with Constantine lurking in the background, that this was sort of forced on the church by the powers that be. And see, this just proves that you can't trust the powers that be. Don't you wanna think for yourself and not just be told what to do and what to think and so on. And it creates a narrative that religion is all about power players and we need to find what's really true. And I know I get that narrative, it's very popular in our postmodern world, but I think there's no evidence to support that's what happened. I think the evidence is actually the opposite—which is that the canon was already well in place before Nicaea in most ways and that Nicaea really had nothing to do with it.
Scott: Mike, what do you make of the, I wouldn’t say ongoing, but that there was debate within the early church about the inclusion of certain books like Hebrews, James, Revelation, others. Now, I think we can have confidence that that got settled, but some books were debated more so than others. How do we make sense of the discussion that took place around the inclusion of certain books?
Mike: No, it's a great question. Yes, we did have some discussion of a number of books in the early centuries, what you might call a disagreement or debate. A couple of things to observe about that. One is I think it's curious to observe how often Christians when they find out there's dispute or debate over books find that very disturbing and upsetting. And I often pause there and probe into that with people. I'd say, well, what exactly about that is concerning to you? Like, do you think that if there's disagreement that there can't be truth or if there's disagreement, you can't know the truth? And if you believe that, do you apply that to other areas of life? I mean, scientists disagree or we disagree over theology. We don't just disagree over canon. I mean, is everything now up for grabs? And I think there's a weird assumption built into people's mindsets that don't even realize it's there, which is they believe if God gave books that there would be this instantaneous, automatic, almost universal acceptance within the first 25 years or something like this. And I push back on that and say, no, no, no. If it's given through normal historical channels and the time period where there's lots of debate and disagreement and turmoil, you're gonna have starts and stops and ups and downs. And some books are more quickly received than others. Why is that so surprising? So, I think the first thing to say to people there is that this is not unusual. It is not strange to have disagreements. I mean, think about the person of Jesus. There was so much disagreement over who he was, his identity. I mean, is he Elijah? Is he a prophet? Is he the Messiah? What is he? But no one says, therefore, we just can't know who Jesus is. And so, I think the same thing would apply to the books.
The second thing I'd say about these disputed books is that actually there's really not that many that had any notable dispute. There's really about five and they're almost all very small. These are gonna be 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, James, and Jude primarily as the books that had gotten the most discussion. And that's not surprising; small books are less known. Small books are used less frequently and they're gonna take longer to be recognized. Hebrews and Revelation have their own story. We could get into that if you want to, but really they had a lot less discussion than the books I just indicated. And the other thing I would say to people is that if the church really was trying to make sure that false books did not enter into the canon, maybe they did take their time on some of the disputed books. But taking your time and really looking into it, really being sure isn't a bad thing, right? Sometimes that's a good thing.
Scott: Yeah, I'd say that's a good thing, yeah.
Mike: So, I think at the end of the day, I think we can still have a lot of confidence in the results.
Scott: So, Mike, one of the things that I think some of our listeners might be curious about is that we routinely talk about the role of the Holy Spirit in the inspiration of Scripture. But how do you understand the role of the Holy Spirit in the bottom-up recognition of the books that came to be in the canon of the New Testament?
Mike: Yeah, this is hugely important. And you'd asked me earlier about sort of the state of canon studies. One of the things that I noticed very quickly in my study of canon a number of years ago is that almost all canon studies were what I call data studies, where they just simply examine the when and the how. And so, it's a bunch of quotes from church fathers and lists and things like that. And that's all good and well and fine. And I get into that a good bit. And I think those are important pieces of data. But what was missing from most of these discussions of canon was any sort of theological framework, any sort of theological system for understanding what canon is and how it's authenticated. In fact, to get that, you actually had to go way back. And that's what I ended up having to do for my book. I actually went back to, first of all, Reformation Era authors, including really Calvin did a lot of this, and even John Owen and a number of other Reformation authors that had sort of an epistemology of how you understand the Bible through the power of the Holy Spirit. And then even further than that, back into the early Patrictic sources, where they talked a lot more about the rule of the Holy Spirit in the authentication of books. So, I picked up a lot of this in my book, "Canon Revisited," and I have a really strong place for the Holy Spirit as important in this. So, you're right, the Holy Spirit inspires the books, but there's another category theologians have called the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, which helps the church receive the books. And this is well established throughout the theological trajectories of Protestant thought and before, and it's really important. Now, there's ways to misunderstand it. The internal testimony of the Holy Spirit is not some secret revelation telling us which books are in the canon, right? The internal testimony of the Holy Spirit is an opening of our eyes to see what's already objectively there. And that's a really important distinction.
Scott: Thank you, I appreciate it. That's helpful 'cause I don't think we often consider the role of the Spirit in that later process, where we're pretty clear on it in the earlier process of inspiration.
Mike: Now, yeah, and let me add there, if I can, Scott, that a lot of people, when you say the Spirit played a role in receiving books, people have an idea in their head what that means. In other words, they think if the Spirit plays a role that you had some feeling or some experience or some encounter, and I would just push back both biblically and theologically that the Spirit can help you see something is true without you being able to look back later and say, I had some ecstatic experience of the Spirit. You may not even have been aware that the Spirit was helping you see what's true. And so, I think we can acknowledge the Spirit's work without trying to make it sound like the only time the Spirit works is if there's some corollary experiential component, I just don't think that's necessary in order to say the Spirit's busy helping the church see what's true.
Scott: That's really helpful, thanks. Now, our listeners may or may not be aware that Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox have differences in which books they recognize as being part of the New Testament canon. How do you account for the differences between at least those three branches of Christianity?
Mike: Yeah, those are tricky things. Primarily, what's in view here really is a difference over the Old Testament, of course, not the New Testament canon. The Orthodox have a little bit more of a mediating view where the books we call the Apocrypha—which are a reference to the Old Testament books that were sort of between the end of our formal Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament period, First Second Maccabees, Judith Tobit, and so on. They have more of, I think, a more moderated view of the function those books serve. The Catholics, on the other hand, have declared, of course, famously at the Council of Trent, that these books are fully scripture. And so, this is a struggle. You got one church saying one thing and another church saying another thing. How do we account for that? Well, I mean, Protestants have historically said, well, look, if we're gonna wanna know what books were appropriately involved in the Old Testament, then you don't go to the 16th century to figure that out. You wanna go back to the time of Jesus and the apostles to figure that out, because there was an Old Testament then. And historically we've argued that there's an Old Testament in place when Jesus is doing his ministry and when the apostles are doing their ministry and that it seems that Israel had received those books in such a way that there's no indication among Jesus and his contemporaries that there was any real disagreement over the books. There was no sense that he disagreed with the scribes and Pharisees over which books belong in the Bible. It seems like that's the one thing they did agree on from what we can tell. So, the question then is: what is the state of the Old Testament canon in the first century? And when you look, the books we now call the Apocrypha were definitively, we would argue, not part of the received canon at that time, but were added later. And so, there's so much more that can be said, of course, about why they were added later and what does it mean that they were added later? And what does that say about the state of the Catholic Church in terms of its sort of spiritual sensitivities and so forth? And those are big complex questions. But nonetheless, I think that's the normal rationale that Protestants use. And one way we test that is we ask, is there ever a point in the hundreds of hundreds of citations of the Old Testament that Jesus and the apostles give where they cite a book from the Apocrypha, the scriptures? Is there even a single example? And the answer, I think, fairly stunningly, is not. There's not a single example of a book from the Apocrypha being cited as scripture even a single time. And I think that would be very unusual if in fact there were no, if those books were in the canon at the time.
Scott: So Mike, one last question here. What would you say to someone who is not confident that we have all the right books in the New Testament?
Mike: Yeah, that's hard. Like any doubt that we have, there are certain steps you can take to address those doubts. If someone came to me and said, what do I do if I'm not confident that Jesus is the Son of God? That might be another doubt. There's various things you can do. When it comes to whether we have the right books, there's several steps I would encourage. One is to recognize that throughout the history of the church, most people have come to believe these books are from God, not through historical investigation, not through just doing all the data work, but rather from embracing and reading and studying the books themselves. Famic's example of this is a second century philosopher by the name of Tayshyn, who became a Christian. And the way he became a Christian is not by going and doing all the historical data research, but rather just by reading the Bible.
Scott: What a concept.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. And so, I'm not suggesting that's the only thing to do, but I would say that's certainly one of the first things to do is to encourage that individual who's doubting, put yourself under the teaching of the Bible, put yourself in a good church, listen to the word taught, and I believe by the power of the Spirit, someone can begin to very much see that the power of God is in these books. Now, secondly, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing the hard historical work. I wrote my books for exactly this reason. I'm not suggesting my books are the only ones that address these issues, but I would certainly say that I hope my book could help that person. Several of my books perhaps could help that person. And if they read, they might realize, wait a second, there's actually more evidence for what we believe than I thought. And there can be an awakening there. A God can use historical evidence to encourage people's faith. And so I would encourage doing that too. Look at the data and realize I think there's very good reasons why we can trust the Bible we have.
Scott: So, of all the books that you've written on this subject, give our listeners the one that you would recommend for them.
Mike: If your listener is concerned with how do I know, right? And what assurance can I have that these books are from God? And why should I think the church got it right? My book, "Canon Revisited" is written precisely for this purpose. Now fair warning, it's not a light read. You know, it's 300 pages and it's technical at points. And so, I also have a website that I might mention called "Canon Fodder" which is designed to deal with exactly that problem, which is that a lot of people aren't gonna read my books and that's perfectly fine. It's more of a popular level treatment of canon issues. And so, I have articles and blog series and videos and all kinds of sources there that hopefully people can benefit from.
Scott: That's great. I appreciate that. I hope our listeners will take advantage of that. These are really important questions. And I'm so grateful Mike for you devoting a lot of your professional life to figuring this out for us and making this clear. And again, as is true with every time we have you on, your clarity on these subjects is so helpful. And I hope our listeners appreciate it, you got a really nice education on the New Testament canon in about 30 minutes. So, we're really grateful for that.
Mike: Thank you, Scott. Great to be with you.
Scott: This has been an episode of the podcast, Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. Think Biblically podcast brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, offering programs in Southern California and online, including our accelerated Bible theology and ministry program that allows students to earn bachelor's and master's degrees in just five years. Visit biola.edu/talbot in order to learn more. If you would like to submit comments, ask questions, make suggestions on issues like us to cover or guests you'd like us to consider, you can email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu. That's thinkbiblically@biola.edu. If you enjoyed today's conversation with our good friend, Mike Kruger, give us a rating on your podcast app and share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening. And remember, think biblically about everything.