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Category Archive: Bible - NT

Jew Gentile Jew - June 09, 2007
The gospel comes to the Jews first. When they resist, Paul turns to the Gentiles. But he hopes to provoke the Jews to jealousy by his ministry among the Gentiles, so that in the end Jews would be saved along...

Silencing women - February 10, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy notes that the ancient world observed a division of labor with regard to speech: "Women are expected to contribute wild, passionate, inarticulate shouts of blind feeling. Men are expected to build on this natural stratum the structure of high...

Historical Jesus - February 09, 2007
Historical Jesus studies, Rosenstock-Huessy claims, attempt to reduce the four gospels to a single unified story, turning the gospels into "material for our reconstruction of the life of Jesus from all the material." Or, historical Jesus studies attempt to place...

Cultural Change - August 29, 2006
Hebrews says that with a change of priesthood there is also a change of law, and these two are the main features of covenantal shifts. In context, "law" has specific reference to the rules of qualifications for priests. One might...

Good news for NTT - August 09, 2006
Kavin Rowe reviews a number of texts in New Testament Theology (NTT) in JBL (125:6), and finds that "recent work in NTT has reached the point of consensus on the importance of the OT for NTT: readings of the NT...

AD 70 and the Birth of the West - August 02, 2006
Augustine's City of God created the Christian West because it enabled believers to think about a future of Christianity that did not depend on the persistence of Rome. Augustine relativized the story of Rome to the story of the City...

Grace and gratitude in Hebrews - April 15, 2006
In a couple of books, David deSilva interprets the letter to the Hebrews in terms of Greco-Roman clientage and patronage systems. I have my suspicions about social-science interpretations of the NT, but deSilva's work is illuminating. In a brief study...

Observations on 2 Corinthians 1 - April 06, 2006
1) Verse 4 moves from the affliction of the apostles ("our") to the comfort of "those who are in any affliction." This movement does not depend on any similarity or identity between the affliction of the apostles and the affliction...

Sermon Outline, Palm Sunday - April 05, 2006
Much of the following was inspired by a lecture by Dr. David Powlison of the counseling center at Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia. INTRODUCTION As disciples of Jesus, we are all called to take our cross to suffer with Him. He suffered...

Bultmannian irony - March 04, 2006
Bultmann says that we moderns who can flick on electric lights cannot believe in the dichotomous anthropology of the New Testament, which distinguishes absolutely between the spiritual core of the self and the physical body. Problem is, that's not the...

Sermon on Mount - April 05, 2005
Roland Worth provides a valuable treatment of the Sermon on the Mount by discussing the OT background to Jesus' teaching. His overall argument is that the antitheses of Jesus' sermon do not offer anything especially new but are "firmly rooted...

Exhortation, Easter Sunday - March 27, 2005
�That Easter day with joy was bright; the sun show out with fairer light, when to their wondering eyes restored, the glad apostles saw their Lord.�E So wrote a Latin poet of the fourth century. Joy, however, is not the...

Jesus and Uncleanness Laws - March 08, 2005
Jesus came to fulfill the law. Jesus consistently flouted the ceremonial laws of cleanliness. How can we put these two statements together? Perhaps the "uncleanness" laws are misnamed. The intention of the laws is not to invent new ways to...

NT Wright, Prophet - January 22, 2005
Speaking of Wright, there is a remarkably prophetic passage early in Jesus and the Victory of God where Wright seems to predict the response of some conservatives to his work. Enlightenment thought deployed history as a weapon to critique and...

Da Vinci Code - May 03, 2004
Ben Witherington III has an excellent review of the errors of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code in the May/June 2004 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. Brown's book would be comparatively harmless fiction but for the fact that he begins...

"Kingdom of God" - February 04, 2004
The fact that the NT uses a political term, "kingdom of God," to describe the salvation that Jesus achieves is puzzling to moderns. Part of the resolution to that problem is to recognize, as I've argued elsewhere, that the Bible...

Dating of the Gospels - February 03, 2004
Late dating of the gospels is historically preposterous. Even the most "conservative" dating assumes that Jewish Christians, who believed that the long-awaited salvation had finally occurred in Jesus, would wait over a decade before putting an ordered account on paper....

The Oikoumene in the NT - January 27, 2004
Jim Jordan has pointed out that the Greek word "oikoumene" is used in the NT to refer to the Hellenistic and Helleno-Roman world, rather than to the entire inhabited earth. It could be translated as "empire." Against this background, the...

Joseph - December 26, 2003
Poor Joseph, we say. He's on the margins of every Christmas story, every depiction in art, every medieval dramatic rendition. Leave it to Barth to find theological significance in Joseph's marginality: Speaking of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, Barth says...

Galilean Apostles - September 27, 2003
The Twelve apostles are all men of Galilee, but as soon as Acts opens they are based in Jerusalem and remain there, even after the stoning of Stephen and the dispersal of the church. Perhaps there's a connection with the...

Richard A. Burridge, Four Gospels, - August 28, 2003
Richard A. Burridge, Four Gospels, One Jesus? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). Richard Burridge, dean of King's College, London, has produced an insightful and very accessible introduction to the gospels. The book is straightforwardly organized: After an introduction that treats the...

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