A New Podcast — Launching Soon
Without the theology.
Without the cynicism.
What if the most famous moral story in Western culture isn't actually about being nice to strangers?
What if it was originally told to confront people with the idea that their enemy — the person they had been taught to despise — might be more moral than they are?
And what if we've been telling it wrong for two thousand years?
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About the Show
For those outside the faith, it's easy to walk past Jesus entirely. The supernatural claims don't compel the way they do for the devout — and without them, the whole edifice can seem to collapse.
But strip away the theology, and something unexpected remains. A first-century teacher from rural Galilee who attracted a serious following. Whose ideas were radical enough to get him killed. Whose words were preserved, argued over, and transmitted across twenty centuries — because something in what he said kept striking people as true.
Every tradition does what traditions do — it preserves some things and quietly sets others aside. What if what was lost is exactly what's worth finding? What if the people who first heard Jesus understood something we've since forgotten — genuinely useful to believers and skeptics alike?
Every factual claim is grounded in peer-reviewed scholarship or primary historical sources. Historians, biblical scholars, archaeologists, and whatever field each teaching demands — psychology, political science, economics, cultural criticism. We follow the evidence wherever it takes us. Sources are always in the show notes.
How It Works
What We Inherited
The version of the teaching that has filtered down through the centuries — through institutions, translations, cultural osmosis, and two thousand years of interpretation. What most of us think it means.
What He Actually Meant
What a first-century Jewish audience actually heard. The history, the scholarship, the archaeology. The gap between what we inherited and what was originally said is almost always more interesting — and more demanding — than the version we know.
What It Asks of Us
An honest reading of the teaching in the present day, grounded in whatever discipline the subject demands. Not theology. Not self-help. Something harder: genuine ethical reckoning, for believers and non-believers alike.
First Episode
Episode 1
The phrase "Good Samaritan" has become a secular synonym for basic human decency. But to a first-century Jewish audience, the word Samaritan was not a neutral term. It was closer, in its emotional charge, to an ethnic slur. And the parable Jesus told using that figure wasn't a gentle lesson about helping strangers. It was a controlled detonation.
"The lawyer, at the end, cannot even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He says only: the one who showed mercy. The name sticks in his throat."