The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode

What Was Jesus’s Religious Life Like?

An Interview with Dr. Meredith J. C. Warren

Dr. Meredith J. C. Warren

We asked Dr. Meredith J. C. Warren to describe how Jesus’s family and followers would have practiced their religion. They were probably a typical Jewish family, where the types of houses and everyday life were all intertwined with religious practices. She claims that both Jesus and his mother were probably less unusual than we have been taught to think, especially in everyday life—except that Jesus was probably more radical in his commitment to Torah teachings.

Dr. Meredith J. C. Warren is a Senior Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield, in England, where she is director of the Sheffield Centre for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies and is editor in chief of its journal, The Journal of Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies. She is also an associate editor for the Enoch Seminar Online Reviews.

Her publications include several books and articles, and they cover topics such as gender, anti-Judaism, feminism, the senses, and clothing for early Judaism and early Christianity. Her co-authorship of Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean provides the basis of this podcast interview.

In addition to this interview on the Bible and Beyond Podcast, Warren has given interviews on BBC Radio, NPR, and The Guardian. More information about her publications and scholarly work is available on the following platforms:

Website (Humanities Commons) | Google Scholar | Bluesky | YouTube

Audio

Video

Some Bible and Beyond podcast episodes are made available as video podcasts on our YouTube channel. This month’s episode can be found here.

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson:

I am delighted to welcome to the Bible and Beyond podcast, Dr. Meredith JC Warren. I learned about her work from the book she co-authored, Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean. And so, building on that today, we’re going to zero in on how people lived their religion in antiquity.

Meredith is a Senior Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield in England. Her publications include several books and articles and cover topics such as gender, anti-Judaism, feminism, the senses, and clothing for early Judaism and early Christianity. She studied all kinds of topics I’d love to ask her about, but we’re going to try to keep our focus right now on this one question that I hear from our listeners. How did Jewish or Christian people actually live their religion in antiquity? So welcome Meredith. So glad to have you with us today.

Meredith Warren:

Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Shirley Paulson:

Thank you. Alright, so we often find it difficult to understand some things in the Bible or ancient writings because we imagine the lives of the characters as we imagine them in our lives today. So I think it’s helpful for us to hear from you how we might get a better look at the world from an ancient perspective. If you don’t mind, let me start with a question about Jesus.

Since he was born into a Jewish family, I think it might be helpful if you would give us a sense of what Jewish practices might’ve been like. I mean, I know that’s a very broad question, but maybe you can give us some highlights that might be different from our modern Christian practices.

Meredith Warren:

Sure. For starters, we have to remember that the way that people lived in antiquity—as it does today—varies a lot. It varies a lot geographically, and it especially varies in terms of status. So people on the lower socioeconomic levels of society are going to have very, very different ways of living their lives than people who are living in palaces. So part of the problem with knowing how people are living in antiquity is that poorer people tend to have material objects that don’t survive as well, compared with rich people. So we don’t have marble inscriptions or really nicely preserved villas that would’ve belonged to the kind of family that Jesus was born into. So this is one of the challenges. We have to make do with what we have. We do have some houses like that, that are preserved, and archeologists do an amazing job. I am always in awe of the kinds of things that they discover.

So we have to kind of piece together clues from other sources. So literary sources, whatever material remains that we have, inscriptions, any kinds of paintings, frescoes, mosaics that have survived and kind of piece together a picture from those items. One of the things that we know about Jesus is that he probably grew up in a household that cared about practicing Torah, that cared about paying attention to Torah. Now, what exactly that means in antiquity, of course, varies from house to house, from geographical location to other geographical location, from Egypt to Syria to North Africa, to Spain. Different Jewish families are going to live that in a different way, but we know that Jesus cared a lot about that. So we can imagine that his household probably observed the Sabbath in some way.

They probably paid attention to the kinds of foods that they prepared and ate and shared with each other. They might have cared about going to assemblies with their neighbors and family members. Maybe we might call those synagogues, whether that’s the building or just the assembly itself. And we also know that they probably had to work a lot because of their lower socioeconomic status. There’s a tradition of Jesus’ father being a woodworker, carpenter. So probably his family was going to be pretty active for most hours of the day in doing some kind of subsistence living—either building things, working things, growing food, trading.

And that would’ve meant that their house would’ve been not as private as we imagine our houses today. So there’s going to be a lot of interaction and comings and goings with people that they’re working with. Maybe there’s some farm animals going in and out of the houses or sharing living space with people. Maybe they’re entertaining guests or neighbors, maybe they’re doing business. And so there’s a lot of stuff going around in that house. Nothing in antiquity that is distinct from religion. Religion is mixed into all of that. So the way that you engage with your neighbors, the kinds of foods and drinks that you offer them, the kinds of prayers that you say before sharing a glass of wine with your business partner, the kinds of contracts that you sign, all of those are bound up in your religious practice.

Shirley Paulson:

Wow, that’s very interesting. So I was wondering then, besides the Torah, what kind of comparisons would there be between, say, the larger world of the Roman gods in the first century and the way the Jewish people would’ve been living?

Meredith Warren:

Yeah, I mean, again, I think this varies quite a bit, and some Jewish families are going to be very resistant to having any kind of Roman or pagan god or hellenistic god in their house. But we also know that Jews were neighbors and friends with non-Jews. They lived next door to each other. They did business with each other. And we have people who also may have been raised non-Jewish and then developed an interest in Judaism. And we know that there must have been some kind of syncretism or sort of blurred lines between what a Jewish house looks like and what a pagan house looks like if we’re just going to use those kinds of very clunky categories.

So on the one hand, there’s going to be differences. Jewish houses for the most part probably wouldn’t have a shrine to the household gods that are common in Roman houses. They wouldn’t necessarily have the kinds of offerings that you would give to those gods. On the other hand, some may well have, and some may well have decided that, “Well, we’re living in an area that’s predominantly non-Jewish Roman, and we’re going to do a couple of the things the way they do it because it’s just easier to get along with our neighbors, or we kind of like that idea. We want to incorporate it into our general religious practice.”

And some people might have said, “Nope, that’s definitely not for us. We’re going to maintain our identity as distinct from that.” So I think there’s a lot of variety. There’s certainly a lot of discussion about the kinds of things that’s appropriate and not appropriate for Jews to be doing. And so that is a suggestion for scholars that it wasn’t clear cut for everybody.

Shirley Paulson:

That’s interesting. Okay. So you’ve mentioned the shrines and the Torah. Are there any other kinds of distinct ways that you would identify religious practice going on by anybody?

Meredith Warren:

Yeah. I mean, we know about religious practice such as, I mean in the house or outside of the house. There’s different things that happen depending on where you are in your community. So if you’re in the house, for example, from a female perspective, marriages might happen in the house. And so there’s a religious element to that.

Childbirth certainly has a ritual component and might take place in the house. Certainly your postpartum recovery period would be taking place in your house, which has some religious requirements surrounding it, if you’re a Jewish woman. If you’re outside of the house, maybe you are getting together with your friends and neighbors and you are reading the Torah together. Maybe you’re talking about what the Torah actually means and you’re discussing what the implications are for your life. Maybe you’re having a dinner party, maybe you’re having a festive meal. So there’s all kinds of those kinds of things going on in people’s houses and in their sort of community centers.

Shirley Paulson:

That’s really, really interesting. What a colorful picture you’re painting for us. Very helpful. So in our Bible and Beyond programs, we’ve often talked about concepts of gender that were so different in antiquity. Maybe going back to Jesus again, could you help us find ways that Mary, the mother of Jesus might be similar to or different from her contemporaries?

Meredith Warren:

I think this is a really interesting question to me because I’ve just been watching and reading and thinking about, and preparing some lectures on that new Netflix Mary film that’s just come out. And that film is sort of based on a text called the Proto Gospel of James or the Protevangelium of James, which is a fascinating text. But I think one of the really interesting things about that text that the film really leans into is trying to make Mary seem exceptional. It’s trying really, really hard to make Mary seem extraordinary. And whenever I see a text that’s working that hard at something, it makes me a little bit suspicious that maybe she wasn’t that different from everyone else.

Shirley Paulson:

Wow. Okay.

Meredith Warren:

Well, we don’t have a lot to go on in the gospels. There’s not a lot. We know that she was betrothed. So we’ve got some sort of corroboration of what we know of Jewish marriage practices—that there’s a betrothal area that takes place before the actual marriage. We know that she has some encounters, at least there’s imagined encounters with angelic beings. That’s the sort of thing that lots of people were writing about at that time. We’ve got apocalyptic literature that also imagines kind of angelic conversation partners for various people. We know that she is kind of hanging around with Jesus from time to time. In John 2, she goes to a wedding with him. She’s at the cross. She’s going about her life. The other thing that we know about her is that she must’ve been at least a little bit ordinary because some people talk about how ordinary she is, as a way of being surprised about how peculiar Jesus is, I suppose. They say, “Is this not the son of Mary? Why is this guy being so extra when we know that his mom is kind of normal?” The only way that that comparison works is if she is relatively normal.

Shirley Paulson:

Wow. Okay. This is mind boggling to say the least, but let me go back a little bit where you were saying that when something’s extremely something, it makes you suspicious. So we’ve always heard that Mary’s extremely, extremely. Tell us a little more about why you become suspicious then.

Meredith Warren:

Well, I mean it’s the same when texts take a long time to talk about something. So there are late texts by church fathers that really are trying to control the way that people are doing religious practice.

So Justin Martyr and John Chrysostom—they’re really obsessed with controlling the way people are doing their religion. Specifically, there’s examples of “If you’re a Christian, you’ve got to stop going to the synagogue. You just have to stop doing it.” That’s what these texts are trying to say.

So as scholars, that leads us to say, “Aha! People must have been going to synagogues, because otherwise they wouldn’t have made such a big deal of Christians not being allowed to go to synagogues!” So for me, when I see a text that says, “Okay, Mary was so special that she got to live in the Holy of Holies, in the temple, and weave the curtain for the temple.” Weaving is such a marked occupation as well. It’s such a loaded practice because it signifies virtuous womanhood that has been written into this tradition about Mary.

That to me, not to mention the immaculate conception with Joachim and Anna, her parents in this text, the Protevanglium of James having that whole tradition built up. The Proto Gospel also is the earliest reference that I think we know of that hints at the perpetual virginity of Mary. So a text that’s doing all of this work to combine various elements to show just how out of the ordinary Mary is, tells me that it was trying to do that for a reason. It was trying to make her as special as they thought she should be for such an extraordinary son. Whereas the earlier stuff—the gospels—doesn’t really lean into that as much.

Shirley Paulson:

Alright, well that’s helpful to have some background on why we’re going that direction. That’s very interesting. Then let’s go to Jesus, her son. Do you think of his teachings about women as a radical departure from his contemporaries, or is he sort of fitting in maybe more normally also? What would you say about that?

Meredith Warren:

I think he’s fitting in with his contemporaries. I think it makes perfect sense for everything that Jesus says about women. You can find basically a parallel somewhere else. There’s a couple of things that are kind of intentional, and the first thing is that Jesus seems to have women followers and women supporters in his ministry according to the gospels and according to Paul’s letters. Sara Parks has written a great book, Gender in the Rhetoric of Jesus that talks about how Jesus’ words offer a male and female counterpart, or male and female example, in his teachings. I don’t think that’s incompatible with saying that that is par for the course in what was going on at the time within Judaism. I also don’t think that’s incompatible with recognizing that Jesus was not as pro-woman as many people today would like him to be.

Shirley Paulson:

Okay, help me with that one.

Meredith Warren:

So I mean for the first bit, the fact that Jesus is incorporating women into his teachings, Jesus was expecting God’s reign on earth to come imminently. He was an apocalyptic thinker. There is no time for shenanigans with gender roles. Okay, keep the pace. Don’t do anything wild, but ‘all hands on deck’ here. This is it. This is the moment. Okay, so on the one hand we’ve got that. On the other hand, there’s this strange phenomenon where people think that Jesus was outrageously kind to women as opposed to Judaism. I think that’s really dangerous. I don’t think that’s true, and I also think it’s really dangerous.

And one of the things that I think we need to look at is that Jesus actually was quite conservative in his views about women, more conservative than the Pharisees most of the time. So he’s rude to the Samaritan woman; he calls her out on her husbands; he’s not kind to her. He’s rude to the Syrophoenician woman. He’s rude to his own mother at the wedding. And he is not going out of his way to strip down any kind of patriarchy. There’s nothing in there.

So people like to hold up, for example, first of all, the Samaritan woman as sort of radical inclusivity. I don’t think he’s radically inclusive. Her own community seems to already be perfectly fine with her living in their community. He’s the one who calls her out on how many husbands she’s had and that she’s now living with someone who’s not her husband. So that to me sounds like that’s a Jesus problem rather than a Samaritan problem. There’s nothing radical about that.

The other example that often gets pulled up is the adulterous woman in John 8 where he stops people from stoning this woman to death. Jesus doesn’t say, “I’m sex positive, and why are you bothering this woman about her private business?” He says, “who is without sin, cast the first stone.” He’s not saying that it’s not sinful. He’s saying, “Everyone is sinful, and actually God’s the one who’s going to be doing some judgment in about five minutes if you just hang on a second.”

So there’s also this weird popular culture thing where Jesus dined with sex workers, had dinner with prostitutes. I don’t know where that is from, because it isn’t in the Bible. The only time that Jesus talks about sex workers is to compare them with tax collectors in order to shame the elders and the chief priests to say, “I would rather be with these people than with you guys,” but he doesn’t actually ever eat with them.

I mean, of course there is this is tradition with Mary Magdalene, but that’s another story.

Shirley Paulson:

Right. We’ll go there right now then. With Jesus’ own Jewish traditions and his upbringing, do you think that he was offering pushback against his Jewish traditions, that it goes back to that danger area that you were talking about? Or was he comfortable in his Jewish traditions and upbringing?

Meredith Warren:

I think he is very comfortable in his Jewish traditions and upbringing. I think he’s actually reinforcing a lot of that and trying to bolster the traditions that he grew up with. And we see a lot of him sort of arguing and debating with the Pharisees especially, and people today misread that as animosity. But actually debating about how to interpret Torah is pretty much the most Jewish thing that you can do. That is part of Jewish tradition. That is what makes up the Mishnah and the Talmud: a bunch of people who are very well educated about the Torah, debating and disagreeing with each other about how to interpret it. And that’s exactly what happens between Jesus and the Pharisees throughout the gospels.

Shirley Paulson:

Okay. Well then, you’re right. I think we hear that when Jesus is saying, “Woe to you, Pharisees! Woe to you, Pharisees!” You think that he’s sort of against them, but would you say that he’s maybe more favorable or less favorable toward other groups like the Sadducees or the Essenes?

Meredith Warren:

I don’t think so necessarily, the Sadducees. Jesus is very close in terms of what we can know of his beliefs according to the Gospels—however reliable those are—his beliefs line up fairly well with what the Pharisees believe. So resurrection, reward or punishment after death—those are things that the Pharisees believe. The Sadducees don’t believe in those things. So I don’t think Jesus would get along very well with them. Interestingly, they’re not really his conversation partners in the gospels, right? The Pharisees and Jesus both wear fringes on their garments and phylacteries for prayer. They both care a lot about the correct way to wash dishes. There is a debate about this in the gospels. They both care a lot about this. They both care strongly about the right way to observe the Sabbath. They disagree about the particulars, but they agree that it’s important to talk about these things. Jesus is actually a lot more stringent or conservative than the Pharisees on a couple of really important issues such as divorce.

And I think this is why he has that list of woes or why that sort of disagreement comes to a head—is because Jesus actually thinks the Pharisees are not going hard enough on what they say. So they say that they are the true, right interpreters of this, but Jesus says, well, they actually need to be more. They need to put a ring around this practice a little bit more.

And this is another thing that happens in Judaism, is that there is a mitzvah, a commandment, but to make sure that you don’t accidentally break that commandment, you can put a bunch of rules around it to sort of protect it. And so Jesus’s rules of protecting that commandment are slightly different than the Pharisees, and that’s where a lot of their debate comes from. It’s what kinds of things need to be done to make sure that that commandment—which both of them agree is very important—is not breached.

Shirley Paulson:

So this idea of agreement on importance leads to another question that I think a lot of people think about. I think Christians often think of Jesus as kind of a supercessionist, meaning that he replaced his Jewish practices for a superior way of doing things. So you’re telling us that that’s not so, is that right?

Meredith Warren:

I just don’t see how it can be. Because Christianity didn’t exist, there’s no indication that Jesus thought he was starting some sort of new religious movement. He seems very, very invested in the law that he talks about all the time. He says that he doesn’t want a single letter changed from the law. It’s so important.

And Paul, I mean we can talk about Paul as well. I don’t think Paul is trying to replace anything either. Paul is saying that people shouldn’t practice certain aspects of Judaism. Circumcision is one that gets brought up a lot, but with kosher food laws and things like that, Paul is not writing to Jews. He’s writing to Gentiles, right? He’s not saying that Jews need to stop being Jews. He’s saying that Gentiles don’t need to become Jews in order to follow Christ, whatever that means. So I don’t think Jesus was supersessionist. I definitely think the text gets used in supersessionist ways all the time.

Shirley Paulson:

I see, I see. Okay. But it wasn’t really meant to be written that way.

Meredith Warren:

Yeah. I don’t think it was meant to be written that way. In the earlier gospels, Adele Reinhartz has written a great book called Cast Out of the Covenant, about the Gospel of John, and in that book she talks about how John’s gospel may actually be trying to create a bigger schism between Judaism and Christianity, and that might be one of these early places where we see the so-called parting of the ways.

Shirley Paulson:

Yeah. Alright, so let’s move into other more practice kinds of questions too about church-making. There’s this passage in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus tells Peter that he’s going to build his church on the basis of Peter’s insights about his identity. So was he able to do that in his lifetime and what did he end up building?

Meredith Warren:

Yeah. This is such a strange passage for me because I think this is the only place where Jesus actually says that word, ekklesia (‘church’). It just stands out as something that does not seem like something the historical Jesus would say, to me. Now, to back up a little bit, it’s very difficult to see the original meaning of ekklesia because we’ve used it so frequently to mean ‘church,’ and we have this idea of what church means in our heads. And it’s like a little building. It’s got a little cross on top, and it’s got some little windows and pews, and there’s a bit at the front, an altar. Ekklesia, in antiquity, was your standard way of referring to any assembly. So the town council is going to have an ekklesia, okay? The local synagogue, sometimes it’s a synagōgē, a coming together, and sometimes it’s ekklesia, an assembly. Those are basically synonyms for each other. And so we have to sort of disconnect the idea that an ecclesia necessarily means a purpose-built building for the specific worship of Christ before we can kind of unpack what’s going on in that. Now, I do kind of think that represents a later tradition. It’s very handy. Jesus loves the nicknames: Peter, Cephas, Rock. Well, Cephas is the Paul version of that, but Jesus has tons of nicknames for everyone, which I think is adorable.

But it makes sense that you’re going to use that nickname to make a pun on a foundation. But I don’t think Jesus was trying to build anything. I think Jesus was trying to talk to people about the coming day of the Lord. That seems to be the core of some of the oldest material from Jesus’s mouth, this apocalyptic warning about the day of the Lord coming. And so it doesn’t really make sense for someone who is very concerned with the day of the Lord to be like: “but in the meantime we’ll just build a church here.” So there’s some real tension there.

That’s not to say that—I mean obviously—the apocalypse didn’t happen because we’re all still here, and later Jesus followers and even later Christians had to grapple with that and sort of figure out: “Okay, well, we got the calculations a little bit wrong. What do we do now?” And developing out of probably synagogue practice, probably other Greco-Roman ways of gathering together to talk about important things in assemblies—ekklesia—people did start to gather and did start to form those communities.

And we have letters from Paul talking about the assembly that meets in certain people’s houses. And so we do have communities that are coming together, probably at certain times of the week. We have the letter from between Pliny and Trajan, for example, that talks about certain rituals that are happening on certain days, certain times of day, and whether or not those are worrying to Roman writers. They’re a little bit weird, as far as the Romans are concerned. But we do have that development of a community in some sort of formal structure in the later ends of the first and second centuries. It’s only much later that people could afford to actually purpose build something for their space.

Most of the time, even our old—our old synagogues, our old churches—you can see, and archaeologists (God bless them!) have done this work of saying, “Okay, originally this was a house, and this was the living room or whatever. And you can see that here’s the little niche in the wall where the household Gods used to be”—Jenn Cianca has written a book on this, which is excellent—”and we’re going to just reuse this for our Jesus group on every second Sunday or whatever.” Also, gods might still be there every second Sunday, like hanging out, watching what’s going on. But only after it’s well established, only after you get some wealthy patrons who can afford to help you with those renovations, can you change the layout of that house to become a specialized building that’s set aside for worship rather than living as well as whatever else you happen to be doing in it.

Shirley Paulson:

Okay. That’s very helpful to get a picture of how to rethink the word church in antiquity. It’s a whole new concept that’s very, very helpful. You were talking about the connection between these Jewish practices and their Roman contemporaries that were starting to look different. What about the broader world, then, of Judaism by the time of Jesus? Were the Jews spread out everywhere, and if so, how did they mingle? And if not, how did they stand out or how do they do to try to integrate?

Or is there a single answer to this?

Meredith Warren:

Oh yeah. I mean, as always, I’m going to say it’s really complicated and it varies from time and place. But yeah, by this time, Jews are pretty much all over the Hellenistic and later Roman worlds. From Babylon after the destruction of the first Temple, we get people in exile. Those communities exist. We know that we had Jews living in Alexandria at the time of Philo, because he’s from there. So there are large Jewish communities in Alexandria. We know that Paul is from Asia Minor, and he’s hanging out with a bunch of communities of Gentiles, understandably, but living around Asia Minor. We know that there are other groups, because Revelation has these imaginary letters to communities in Asia Minor as well, which he’s not going to make those up wholesale, right? Those are going to be believable enough that he’s writing to actual groups.

I’ve also written a paper arguing that at least by the second or third century, we’ve got at least two Jews living in Scotland at that point. There’s a tombstone in the University of Glasgow Museum, the Hunterian Museum, dedicated to a guy called Solomon. And so, although that is a Syrian name as well, I make an argument that we can’t always tell.

Jews are not always going to live in distinctively Jewish ways, but Jews are going to be living in different ways. They’re going to be living in similar ways to their neighbors. No matter where they’re living, they’re going to have local practices. There’s a great diversity in how Judaism is practiced. We should not imagine that there are no Jews, simply because we haven’t found a giant menorah somewhere. So we’ve got this name, we’ve got this inscription in Scotland by the Antonine Wall. I can imagine that Jews would have come along with the soldiers who are guarding that. There’s lots of merchants that came along for the ride, families—we have lots of civilian burial grounds around there. I don’t see why we shouldn’t imagine Jews in every settlement where there would’ve been trade, where there would’ve been immigration, all those kinds of things.

Shirley Paulson:

That’s really mind blowing for us. Again, that’s very helpful to get that bigger picture. So now that we’ve changed a lot of our opinions about things, I’m wondering if you could give us your maybe biggest takeaway for us to think about in terms of just religious practices in the time of the first followers of Jesus. What would you tell us to think about?

Meredith Warren:

I think my main takeaway is that you should expect the unexpected. That you shouldn’t necessarily come into this material with ideas about what you think you already know;  be ready for a lot of diversity. Sometimes as scholars, we try to smooth away things that seem unusual to try to make them fit with the greater body of evidence. And I think the reality is always a lot weirder than we imagine, and it’s really exciting to find those little weird bits and to celebrate them. It’s just an accident that this particular weird practice survived. And I think that’s wonderful, and I like to imagine. I think that gives us a really rich idea of what people, like real people living back there were like, right, quirky and bickering with their neighbors, or going over for lunch on Friday, or sharing eggs from your chickens, or whatever these little peculiarities are. The more you let yourself experience those little peculiarities, the more rich and vibrant the ancient world will seem to you.

Shirley Paulson:

So this is really helpful. What I think you’re doing, for me anyway, is to say we can’t just look at those people as museum pieces and just say they’re strange and weird, and that’s what they are, but they’re people like us who are living in different times that we have to understand in a different way.  Combining both our personal lives and understanding how antiquity has its own special place.

Meredith Warren:

Yeah.

Shirley Paulson:

Oh, very good. Well, gosh, thank you for this conversation! I know it’s one that people have been wanting us to have for quite some time, and I’m grateful you could come and talk to us about this. I’m very, very grateful. Thank you so much, Meredith.

Meredith Warren:

Oh, thanks so much for having me.