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The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
As you’ll notice on the right of the page, my survey of the gospels, a sequel of sorts to House for My Name, will be available in November. You can check out the Amazon page by clicking on the cover icon.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 6:31 am
As Markus Barth saw it, Bultmann was Protestant accommodation gone to seed: “Bultmann’s conception rests on the thesis that visible miracles (signs) are only a concession to man’s weakness, and that the appearances of the risen Christ are, likewise, a concession to the weakness of the Apostles. But . . . even in the Old Testament the visible appearance of God [is] not something temporary – a means to an end or a mere concession – but rather . . . the fulfillment of Israel’s ultimate and supreme hope.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, September 4, 2009 at 4:19 pm
The Pharisees often act as a group, but the gospels also speak of individual Pharisees (Luke 7; 11; Acts 5:34). Some of the Pharisees even show some deference to Jesus.
No individual Sadducee is ever mentioned in the gospels. They are always a collective, a single mind, a united front.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Gregory Beale writes (We Become What We Worship) that by the first century, Judaism had turned its own tradition into an idol. Citing Paul’s claim that demons are behind the idols, he asks whether Israel too was incited to worship of tradition by demons, and rightly answers Yes:
“The upshot of this evidence and the presence of the devil and his demons in the Gospels shows that they were active in Jesus’ day as in Isaiah’s, though the idols that they were influencing Israel to worship this time were not molten statue but dead tradition. The presence of these demons even in the synagogues shows that they were active in the religious establishment of the day and in influencing the religious leaders to focus on dead tradition and not on God and his word.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, April 13, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Madden examines the Jewish War (66-70 AD) in some detail, using it as an illustration of the difficulty of controlling religiously motivated terrorism, and he interestingly points out that Diaspora Jews not only celebrated the exploits of Palestinian guerillas but also initiated conflicts in their own cities:
“As news of the violence in Jerusalem spread [in 66], the killing was mirrored across the region and then the empire. . . . Diaspora Jews sympathized with their coreligionists, but few would condone this sort of slaughter. And yet, in some places in the Middle East, Jews celebrated the massacre of Romans. Several cities with large Jewish populations saw open warfare between them and their Gentile neighbors. . . .
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Mike Bull from Australia sent the following, which I reproduce with his permission:
“We don’t know how many wise men travelled from the east, but perhaps we can make a guess via God’s deliberate typology.
“We do know there were three gifts. With Christ as the human Ark of the Covenant (most holy place), these three gifts correspond to the furniture in the “firmament.” As the Ark contained Word, Sacrament and Government (Hebrews 9:4), the response of these Babylonian elders around the throne was gold (Lampstand -government), frankincense (Incense Altar – prayer in response to Word), and myrrh (Table - sacrament). . . .
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Cicero advised his brother, “Take care to employ on every day men of every rank and order and age. For one can conjecture from those very numbers how much strength and opportunity you will have in the assembly. . . . A daily throng to lead you down to the Forum brings a great reputation and great authority.”
No wonder the Pharisees envied Jesus for the throngs that surrounded Him.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 12:46 pm
In the time of the New Testament, Judea was a multi-lingual region. Aramaic was the common speech among Jews; but most had at least a smattering of Greek, could hear Latin spoken all over Jerusalem, not to mention Hebrew in certain settings. Linguistically, first-century Palestine was far more like Switzerland than like the US.
Now, in this situation, the normal thing is to become a comparative linguist. It doesn’t require any formal training; becoming multi-lingual was a demand of survival, and once you know a few languages the natural thing to do is to play them off each other: The Aramaic is X; what’s the Latin equivalent? Or Greek?
Interest in cross-linguistic puns, translations, word derivations in one or the other direction, seems inherent in the situation. And the textual evidence is there, at least a bit: John translates Cephas, Rabbi, Messiah, and other terms into Greek equivalents.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, August 1, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is full of intriguing information and innovative arguments. At least the arguments look innovative in the context of contemporary NT scholarship. In any other context, they look like common sense. Like this: “We [NT scholars] have become accustomed to working with models of oral tradition as it is passed down through the generations in traditional communities. We imagine the traditions passing through many minds and mouths before they reached the writers of the Gospels.” Even on the the dating accepted for the gospels “the period in questio is actually that of a relatively (for that period) long lifetime.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, July 26, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Austin Farrer said, “The datings of all these books are like a line of tipsy revellers walking home arm in arm . . . The whole series can lurch five years this way or that without colliding with a solid obstacle.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, June 1, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Jesus is described twice in Revelation as the “root of David” (5:5; 22:16). “Son of David” or “Seed of David” makes sense; Jesus comes from the Davidic line. But Jesus is not only the fruit, but the root of the Davidic house. He is the original Anointed One before who David stood, the Lord to whom Yahweh promised a seat at His right hand.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Jesus chooses a couple of sets of brothers to be among the Twelve: Andrew and Peter, James and John. Plus, there’s Thomas the Twin.
Why did Jesus do this? Possibly, because the Old Testament so often shows us brothers in conflict, especially older brothers hating and abusing younger brothers, while the younger brothers triumph. For the New Testament brothers, we don’t even know which brother is the older one. We just know that brothers are following Jesus together. Jesus comes to divide families, but ultimately to bring peace and reconciliation, to turn the hearts of fathers back to children, of children to the fathers, of brother to brother.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, April 3, 2008 at 4:34 am
Brueggemann again. He writes as if power were necessarily oppressive, but with some qualifications he has a profound point:
“The replacing of numbness with compassion, that is, the end of cynical indifference and the beginning of noticed pain, signals a social revolution. . . . The capacity of feel the hurt of the marginal people means an end to all social arrangements that nullified pain by a remarkable depth of numbness.”
Jesus’ compassion embodies this opposition to the “dominant culture”: “the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief. . . . The imperial consciousness lives by its capacity to still the groans and to go on with business as usual as thought none were hurting and there were no groans. If the groans become audible, if they can be heard in the streets and markets and court, then the consciousness of domination is already jeopardized. . . . Newness comes precisely from expressed pain. Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into pain and giving it voice.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 21, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Walter Brueggemann (Prophetic Imagination) cites Hannah Arendt’s claim that Jesus’ offer of forgiveness was his “most endangering action because if a society does not have an apparatus for forgiveness, then its members are fated to live forever with the consequences of any violation. Thus the refusal to forgive sin (or the management of the machinery of forgiveness) amounts to enormous social control. While the claims of Jesus may have been religiously staggering, its threat to the forms of accepted social control was even greater.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 21, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Augustine points out that the eclipse during Jesus’ death was not a natural occurrence, since Jesus’ death took place at Passover and eclipses normally take place only in the “last quarter of the moon.”
So, why did the Lord rearrange the cycles of the heavens for this purpose? The symbolism on one level is obvious: The Sun/Son is being eclipsed in His death, only to rise on the third morning. But if it was indeed an eclipse, the symbolism deepens. The moon is the light of the night, symbolizing the Old Covenant, the covenant of Passover and new moon festivals. The sun is the light of the day, the dawning day of the New Covenant. For three days between Jesus’ death and resurrection, the Old eclipsed the New, symbolized by the three-hour eclipse (Matthew 27:45) during Jesus’ crucifixion. In the end, darkness could not overcome the light.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, January 25, 2008 at 6:13 am
Cyril of Jerusalem wrote: “But Jesus, son of Nave, was a type of Him in many things; for when he began to rule the people, he began from the Jordan; thence also did Christ begin to preach the Gospel after He was baptized. The son of Nave appoints the twelve to divide the inheritance; and Jesus sends forth the twelve Apostles, heralds of truth, into the whole world. He who was the type saved Rahab, the harlot, who had believed; the True Jesus on the other hand says: ‘Behold, the publicans and the harlots are entering the kingdom of God before you’ (Matt 21:31). With but a shout, the walls of Jericho collapsed in the time of the type; and because of these words of Jesus: ‘There will not be left here one stone upon another’ (Matt 24:2), the temple of the Jews just opposite us is fallen.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 9:59 am
In a book published in 1959, R. M. Grant attempted “to explain Gnosticism as arising out of the debris of apocalyptic-eschatological hopes which resulted from the fall or falls of Jerusalem.” According to a reviewer in Theology T0day, “Grant stresses the Jewish element which, as he rightly says, has in the past been unduly neglected; but lie is fully aware that this was not, the only element in the very complex phenomenon which we know as Gnosticism. Jonas in his recent book The Gnostic Religion says that nothing as yet has convinced him of ‘the judaistic thesis,’ rightly if this means a theory which sees in Judaism the sole fons et origo; but in regard to the importance of the Jewish contribution Grant surely provides evidence enough and to spare. The second chapter finds confirmation for the theory in the ways in which the Gnostic picture of the heavenly world emerged from speculations characteristic of Jewish apocalyptic, while the third deals with the traditions relating to Simon Magus and with some other systems which show similar attitudes to the Jewish Law. The fourth chapter is concerned with ‘the Syrian Gnosis specifically related to Christian ideas of salvation,’ and the fifth with the major systems of the second century. Here Grant takes issue with the thesis of Bultmann and Jonas, that Gnosticism begins in mythology and ends in philosophy. Finally the closing chapter discusses Gnosticism and early Christianity, and a brief conclusion completes the book.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 21, 2007 at 6:33 am
We might not have the Nag Hammadi library if it had not been for a gruesome murder. The collection was found in 1945 by two brothers in Egypt, Muhammed and Kalifah Ali. As Giovanni Filoramo tells it, when the brothers took the jar containing the texts back to their village, they got caught up in a blood feud: “The father, a night watchman of the irrigation system for the neighboring fields, had some months previously surprised a thief during one of his tours of inspection and killed him. The following morning, in accordance with a widely held tradition of vendetta, he too was murdered. About a month after the discover of the library, Ahmad, a molasses dealer who was passing through, fell asleep in the midday heat near the house of Muhammed Ali. A neighbor informed Muhammed Ali that the unfortunate man was his father’s murderer. Muhammed Ali thereupon rushed home to tell his brothers and his mother the good news. The whole family set upon the victim, and literally tore him limb from limb. The climax of the blood feud was to cut up his heart and divide it among themselves.”
The police learned of the murder, and issued a warrant for Muhammed’s arrest. He believed the texts were cursed, and had deposited the texts with a Coptic priest, and from there, through a complicated series of exchanges, they finally ended up in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 20, 2007 at 5:27 am
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 with Gentiles. The gospel moves from Jew to Gentile and back to Jew.
The NT canon, arguably, does something similar. The gospels describe Jesus’ work in Israel, with the occasional contact with Gentiles. Acts begins in Jerusalem, but ends with Paul turning from the Roman Jews to Gentiles. Turn the page, and Paul is writing to Christians in Rome, a neat epistolary continuation of Acts. His letters are mainly addressed to Christians in Gentile areas, and to what are partly (if not predominantly) Gentile churches. If Hebrews is Pauline, it marks a shift in focus, a canonical replication of Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11. (Hebrews makes a neat numerological conclusion to a Pauline corpus – 14 letters.)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, June 9, 2007 at 9:56 am
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 and articulate speech. . . . Women and children yell, weep, shake; men act and speak.”
Against this background, Paul’s instructions for women to be silent have a different impact than is often thought:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, February 10, 2007 at 5:17 pm
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