Archives for “Biblical studies”
This is the second post in the guest series “Who is Satan?” by Arcamaede. An index for all posts in the series is here.
~ Steve
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Associations of the serpent in the Garden of Eden with Satan are problematic. Even if we were to view the Garden story as history (which I do not), we are faced with a contextual interpretation issue: the text of Genesis does not make a connection between Satan and the serpent. In fact, the story gives us a clear indication that the serpent is just a snake (albeit a talking one and apparently a walking one).
- Who is Satan? This is the first post in a guest series by Arcamaede, who has contributed previously. Hope you enjoy it! ~ Steve ___________________________________________________ This is the article that just wouldn’t die. ...
- Peoples of the New Testament world An unnamed Jesus Creed contributor writes (does that mean it’s Scot?): No passage in the New Testament ever describes the groups it assumes everyone knows. Yet, we beg for those...
This is the first post in a guest series by Arcamaede, who has contributed previously. Hope you enjoy it!
~ Steve
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This is the article that just wouldn’t die. It has been several months in the making and due to ever increasing materials on the topic, it has been broken into six pieces. I highly suspect it will evolve even after publication.
This article has been inspired primarily by my own curiosity into the origins, meanings, and application of all things “ancient.” I don’t see the material herein as conclusive or by any stretch of the imagination complete. This series is a result of my efforts to learn and grow in both knowledge and understanding.
I need to state my position from the outset that I see God as a reality which human words fail to encompass or describe as He is. I understand evil arises as a product of social interactions between humans and does not have an existence outside of them. Satan is a personification embodying those destructive interactions.
Related posts:- Satan in the Old Testament This is the second post in the guest series “Who is Satan?” by Arcamaede. An index for all posts in the series is here. ~ Steve ___________________________________________________ Satan’s development in...
- “Total war” or just plain old war? Apologist Matt Flannagan once again defends God against the charge of commanding the Israelites to commit genocide against the Canaanites. Not including the final sentence, his concluding statement articulates a...
Apologist Matt Flannagan once again defends God against the charge of commanding the Israelites to commit genocide against the Canaanites. Not including the final sentence, his concluding statement articulates a very important reminder about the importance of recognizing the Bible as a product of ANE literature:
Related posts:Consequently, if one does not read the texts in isolation and is sensitive to the genre of Ancient Near-Eastern writings then a literal reading is far from obvious. As Egyptologist James K. Hoffmeier notes, such a reading commits “the fallacy of misplaced literalism … the misconstruction of a statement-in-evidence so that it carries a literal meaning when a symbolic or hyperbolic or figurative meaning was intended.” This underscores an obvious but often neglected point, the bible is not written in accord with the conventions of 21st century English. It was written in ancient foreign languages and in the conventions that governed historical, legal, epic, etc writings of that time. To understand what it teaches accurately one needs to ask what it teaches given these factors. When one does this, it seems probably that the Old Testament does not teach that God commanded or that Israel carried out, the genocide or extermination of the Canaanites.
- Who is Satan? This is the first post in a guest series by Arcamaede, who has contributed previously. Hope you enjoy it! ~ Steve ___________________________________________________ This is the article that just wouldn’t die. ...
- Facing the music: genocide is just genocide Kenton Sparks contributes a humdinger of a post today, the second post in a seven-part series entitled “After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age.” He begins with...
- Lessons from the Canaanite Conquest Second century heretic Marcion was quite a character. Because the only contemporaneous descriptions of his beliefs that survived are those of his detractors it’s hard to say definitively, but his...
A fascinating discussion from two conservative evangelical scholars on the subject of the historical Jesus took place on last weekend’s episode of Unbelievable.
Adam Bradford, defending his book The Jesus Discovery, presented some interesting arguments in favor of the idea that Jesus was a lifelong participant in the religious community, trained from adolescence and recognized as an authority right up until the events that unraveled his rapport among the Jewish leadership and got him killed. David Instone-Brewer countered that Jesus, as a simple itinerant peasant from backwater Nazareth, was always an outsider to the Jewish leadership, as is commonly inferred from the Gospel of Mark especially.
Both sides were engaging and respectful. A brief pericope representative of the exchange: Bradford was arguing that Jesus would only have been allowed to drive out the money-changers and continue teaching within the temple habitually afterward (Lk 19.47) if he were recognized as having authority as a teacher, whereafter the host iterated, “Must have been some kind of authority he had then,” prompting Instone-Brewer’s quick and dry response, “Well, he had a whip in his hand…” All in all, I found most of Instone-Brewer’s rebuttals to be the more convincing, but there definitely seems to be something to Bradford’s contention as well.
Related posts:- The mission of Jesus: Mark 1 How did Jesus understand his own mission? I have been reading through the Gospel of Mark to see how the earliest portrait of Jesus answers that question. Mark is virtually...
- An intimate relationship with God “God desperately wants an intimate relationship with you!” Relax, I’m not going to spend the entire post bagging on this claim and those who make it. I will spend the...
- God’s love vs. God’s wrath; or, when a doctrine’s unpalatability suggests its reexamination Michael Patton, a man I respect immensely, has just reminded his readers that, “The palatability of a doctrine does not determine its veracity.” This is a principle based in logic,...
He begins with a starkly stated proposition:
The factual contradictions within Scripture or between Scripture and extrabiblical sources cited in my previous blog are not, in my view, the most serious difficulties that Christians face in the Bible. More troublesome are those cases where a biblical text espouses ethical values that not only contradict other biblical texts but strike us as down-right sinister or evil.
He then goes on to highlight the clear incongruence between Mat 5.43-45 and Deu 20.16-18.
Says Sparks, “These words from the lips of Jesus and the Law of Moses are profoundly different. How can one biblical text admonish us to love our enemies and another command Israel to commit genocide against ethnic groups because they have a different religion?”
I am quite familiar with most of the involved justifications for the ritual act of consecration-by-destruction, or “ban” as it used to be called, known as ḥerem. In my undergraduate Apologetics class (or was it Deuteronomy?) I devoted a paper to arguing how truly ethical and even merciful it was for God to want those men, women, children, and babies murdered.
Related posts:- The lost art of humility: homosexuality and usury Most of the hullaballoo surrounding Knapp-gate seems to have blown over for the time being, but its implications and the probability of similar future incidents continue to grow. Undeniably, a...
- Thinking “Outside the Box” about the Bible My friend Cliff Martin has written one of the best, most concise descriptions of the nature and purpose of the Bible that I have ever had the privilege of reading....
- Human interpretations of Scripture and nature This is long for a “quote of the day,” but it’s so well stated that I couldn’t resist. It’s from an article by Kenton Sparks, author of God’s Word in...
Today James McGrath published a post on an intersection between LOST and biblical studies. I know, who would have thought he’d do something like that? Check it out if you don’t believe me.
The gist of the post was that neither the Bible nor LOST are inerrant and that we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing far-fetched and overwrought theories that explain away internal tensions or the limitations of the authors/writers. Good point. But as a way of highlighting a couple shortcomings of some of the techniques of biblical criticism I’ve recently noticed, I’d like to explain why I find his specific example of inconsistency within LOST to be somewhat wanting.
If you haven’t seen LOST yet, you are forbidden to read the section between the spoiler alerts, on pain of being banned from the Internet. (Oh trust me, I’ll know.) Just pick up reading after the closing spoilers tag — you should still be able to catch on to my point.
Related posts:- The lost art of humility: homosexuality and usury Most of the hullaballoo surrounding Knapp-gate seems to have blown over for the time being, but its implications and the probability of similar future incidents continue to grow. Undeniably, a...
- Models of the Biblical Cosmos, Part 1 [A note to the reader. This post is authored by AMW, not Steve.] I have been having a debate with Arv Edgeworth on the scientific merits of the Deluge narrative from Genesis,...
- Facing the music: genocide is just genocide Kenton Sparks contributes a humdinger of a post today, the second post in a seven-part series entitled “After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age.” He begins with...
Richard Fellows, author of the blog Paul and co-workers, just put up a fascinating challengeto the near unanimous understanding of the message of the Galatian “agitators”, also adding a twist on how to understand the dynamic between Paul and the “pillars” at the Jerusalem church.
The typical scholarly understanding of the background of Galatians is that the agitators genuinely represented a Jewish faction that still believed in retaining certain Jewish customs as we see in Acts 15. The message these agitators were spreading among the Galatians is usually conceptualized something like this:
“You should be circumcised because scripture and the Jerusalem church leaders require it. Why should you believe Paul when he tells you that you don’t have to be circumcised?”
In other words, they challenged Paul’s apostolic authority, subjugating it to that of the Jerusalem leadership. Richard Fellows, however, thinks that their message was somewhat different:
Related posts:- An (ancient) introduction to “faith in Christ” vs. “Christ’s faith” Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As...
How did Jesus understand his own mission? I have been reading through the Gospel of Mark to see how the earliest portrait of Jesus answers that question. Mark is virtually unanimously recognized to have been the first Gospel written and the one upon which two other canonized Gospels were based. The author put a lot of artistry into painting a picture of what would it have been like to live in Palestine in Jesus’ time, hearing rumors about the intriguing Nazarene going from place to place.
To spill the beans up front, I’d like to submit a subtitle for at least the first portion of the Gospel of Mark: A Funny Thing Happened on My Way through Palestine Proclaiming the Advent of the Kingdom of God. A little long, perhaps, but I think it really captures Mark’s portrayal of Jesus and how he goes about his ministry.
Related posts:- I love “Historical Jesus” podcasts A fascinating discussion from two conservative evangelical scholars on the subject of the historical Jesus took place on last weekend’s episode of Unbelievable. Adam Bradford, defending his book The Jesus...
Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As a segue between my last post and my next, I thought I’d present it here with minimal edits. Please realize that the scholarship within this is a good decade behind, but given the modesty of the claims in this overview, I sincerely doubt that much of what is argued below has been soundly defeated.
The interpretation of Iesou Christou as an objective genitive (faith in Jesus Christ) in Galatians 2.16 and 3.22 (cf. Php 3.9) is the overwhelmingly pervasive reading of that construction. Fairly recently, however, scholarship has had to come to terms with the work of many scholars such as Richard B. Hays, who argues most strenuously that our modern fixation on the freedom of the individual conscience distorts Paul’s concerns. In his article, “Jesus’ Faith and Ours” (Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin, 7 No. 1 [S-O 1983], 2-6), Hays argued that nowhere in Galatians 3 does Paul place any emphasis on the salvific efficacy of “believing,” and nor does he speak of Jesus Christ as the object of human faith. Paul insists that we are redeemed/justified by Jesus Christ’s faithfulness (pistis Iesou Christou) on our behalf, not by our believing.
Related posts:- More on what NT faith is about Under the typical Protestant understanding of “faith” as “not doubting something that one believes without proof”, I as a young Protestant could never fathom why God would be so tickled...
- Defining faith in Hebrews 11.1 I have always thought that Hebrews 11.1 sounded beautiful, with a mystical air to it: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen....
- How do you know you’re in the faith? I think Paul gives us a somewhat unexpected answer in 2 Corinthians. I’ll return to the subject of this post after a (possibly irrelevant) discursus here. This morning in Sunday...
The so-called Synoptic Problem in biblical studies results from the search for an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that even in a cursory analysis essentially necessitates that there was borrowing between them. In many cases there are entire sentences that are reproduced verbatim in two or even all three of the Synoptics. Although the first to formulate the problem, Johann Jakob Griesbach, posited that Matthew and Luke were the source of Mark, the reverse order is the dominant theory today: the “priority of Mark” is the leading theory that posits Mark as the first written Gospel, which Matthew and Luke then used as a source.
Lately I’ve been interested to learn of Mark Goodacre’s special contribution to the argument for Markan priority. In essence, Dr. Goodacre has demonstrated that in parallel pericopes, while the different Gospels may differ significantly near the beginning of the passage, by the end they tend to conform to much more similar wording. After Goodacre goes on to show that the wording that corresponds more closely toward the end of each passage is more consistent with the wording of Mark throughout the rest of the passage, this amounts to a strong argument for Markan priority. This suggests that Mark was being used as the source, and the redactors of the other two Gospels, after starting off strong in their objective to make the story their own, had a tendency to undergo the effects of what Goodacre calls ”editorial fatigue”, i.e. they lapse into less creative, more verbatim borrowing from Mark.
Related posts:- Dialectology and the Gospels Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels...
- Meandering through the Synoptics Ok, I promised to write stuff I find interesting as I go through my diss research, so here’s a couple thoughts I had tonight as I was researching. These will...
- An (ancient) introduction to “faith in Christ” vs. “Christ’s faith” Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As...
My speech and my proclamation were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
Some charismatics take these words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 2.4-5 to reinforce their emphasis on charismatic acts such as healing, prophecy, and the other “manifestation” gifts, particularly in the proclamation of the gospel. The implication is that mere Christian teaching is lacking in power and in fact amounts to a potential distraction unless backed up by miracles.
When we look at Acts, however, the picture we get of the Corinthian situation is somewhat different. In Corinth we see Paul laboring long and hard at teaching, with words, making arguments day after day to those in the synagogue: “Every sabbath he would argue in the synagogue and would try to convince Jews and Greeks” (18.4); “…Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ” (18.5). He is admonished by the Lord in a dream to do something very specific: ” ‘Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent…’ ” (18.9). In obedience and faith, Paul “…stayed there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them” (18.10). He was persecuted, as Gallio described, because of a mere “matter of questions about words and names and [Jewish] law” (18.15) — in short, matters of teaching.
Related posts:- Christian responsibility according to St. Paul .!. A funny thing happened on my way through Paul’s epistles. I read through all of Paul’s letters over the last couple days, trying to take note of the commonalities...
- Campbell: what did Paul mean by “justified”? Here’s an excerpt from the first part of a review of a book I’ve been interested in since I first heard about it. It’s from the New Perspective school of...
An unnamed Jesus Creed contributor writes (does that mean it’s Scot?):
No passage in the New Testament ever describes the groups it assumes everyone knows. Yet, we beg for those descriptions and so scholars over the years have sketched and re-sketched, and then discarded and reconstructed what can be known about those groups. The most recent, and thoroughly readable — and every church library needs this book and I would say pastors need it and students need to know about it to save them a million errors of caricature — book that sketches these people is by William A. Simmons. The book is called Peoples of the New Testament World: An Illustrated Guide.
Now, I don’t have any inside information on this book — it could be sheer crap — but I was gratified to see an old professor of mine from my undergraduate career publishing something as potentially useful as this. I only had him for two courses (although one was a two-semester course), but I certainly respected him as an individual and, from what I knew at the time anyway, as a scholar. And to be reviewed so favorably by a site like Scot McKnight’s that is high-profile and has a comfortable relationship with current NT scholarship, I’ve gotta say, “Good on you, Dr. Simmons!”
- Satan in the Old Testament This is the second post in the guest series “Who is Satan?” by Arcamaede. An index for all posts in the series is here. ~ Steve ___________________________________________________ Satan’s development in...
- New world order This post is prompted by two recent comments, from two different commenters on two different issues. But their answer, it seems to me, is related. I was asked, “Why wouldn’t...