All right, so let's get started. Off the bat, the first thing that I think is a really big question because it's something that you've talked about in the past is biblical commentaries. You've not always had real positive things to say about biblical commentaries. So what now? Why now? What makes this different? What makes yours different? What's your goals here with this commentary? Well, Clark, I'm blessed that I've got readers who are not passive.
They give me feedback if they don't feel like something I'm saying is maybe right on. So that was in the book. Will the theologians please sit down? And I got a lot of feedback from readers that I listened to. And I realized they had a valid point. Most people are not, if they're going to be giving a sermon or a Sunday school class or whatever, they're not going to be in a position to just pick up the Bible necessarily and feel qualified to speak from it. And so they are going to turn to commentaries.
And so my real issue isn't so much commentaries. It was that so many commentaries negate what the Scriptures say. I mean, you'll be reading the Bible and then the commentary will tell you, no, it doesn't mean that. It means just the opposite. Or they will have supposed historic information that is totally bogus. So those are the things that I was having an issue with. So yeah, it occurred to me, all right, a commentary that would truly reflect the historic faith. What did they believe in the beginning?
And to do that, it meant the last three years I've been putting into research on this, rereading the ante-Nicene Fathers, rereading Josephus, Philo, primary sources like that so that the commentary will reflect real information and will reflect what Christians believed in the beginning.
So really, I think what it sounds like is maybe your goal with this commentary isn't so much what David thinks it's saying, but trying to take already known historical information from the early church and their writings about this book, the Gospel of Matthew, and bringing those together as a commentary from their perspective, almost, to an extent, versus necessarily just from your perspective. Exactly. To be honest, it would have been easier to write a David Bercot commentary series. It'd been a lot easier. Yeah.
Yeah, this is going to be what they thought. Now, I will be taking their quotes, digesting it. The commentary will have lots of quotes, lots of footnotes and citations, but it's not going to be just nothing but quotes. I am going to be bringing it together. So it will be readable. It won't just be overly dry. So you're taking their comments, their input, their teachings on those subjects, and then synthesizing it into something that's digestible to read through. It's practical for us to understand it. Exactly.
Yeah, very good.
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