Archives for “New Testament”
“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 greater part of this post explaining the problem that many Christians have with that statement, but you might be surprised where I end up — I certainly am.
Recently a friend pointed out how frustrated he was with this particular evangelical meme. I, too, have been annoyed by just such claims before. “Cerebral” Christians like myself are usually critical of those who simply trust what they think they know about God, since we have – not infrequently correctly – identified many of their beliefs as erroneous understandings that are sometimes counterproductive to the Christian mission. Surely no small part of the disgust that many feel toward those who typically speak of an “intimate relationship” with God issues from a sense that these evangelicals are stereotypically not as close to God as they seem to think they are: for these, daily prayer times, emotional worship services, and a commitment to avoiding “the world” seem to be the central components and hallmarks of a robust “relationship” with God, but this more often manifests as a general out-of-touch heaven-mindedness. In effect, it all sounds so make-believe, and a disappointing deficit of healthy fruit this type of “relationship” seems to produce bears that out.
- 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...
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,...
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...
Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned…
I need to find the best references for textual variants in the Gospels. I’m not as much interested in the critically identified “best readings” of the text themselves, but good apparati that show the variants. Right now I’m finding that Aland’s invaluable Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum has a cracking good apparatus, but I need at least one more good source to try to fill in gaps. My goal is to identify variations between the Vorlage and each of the early translations I’ll be working with, so while I don’t have time to become a textual critic, I do have to avail myself of the best available critical work in order to get an idea of what each translation’s Vorlage might have looked like so that I’ll be able to distinguish a stylistic/synctactically significant divergent rendering from a calque of an obscure MS variant.
- 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...
- The Truth Project and critical thinking The most dangerous shyster is the one who has convinced himself to believe his own pitch. Over at The Creation of an Evolutionist, Mike is continuing to blog through his...
- 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...
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 may have originated/developed based upon dialectal considerations. As I run across patterns such as Matthew’s preference for plural nouns and lexical issues such as synonym substitution that by all appearances don’t significantly influence thematic or other conscious stylistic differences, I automatically think dialect, although of course idiolect variation occurs within a single dialect. This is contingent, of course, on being able to identify the place of origin for other texts with which they may be compared, so I recognize it’s a tall order. I assume there are plenty of guesses about where certain Gospels (John, for instance) originated based upon other considerations.
Related posts:- Help wanted: critical editions of the Gospels Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned… I need to find the best references for...
- 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...
- Editorial fatigue : author :: progressive latitude : translator 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...