I have a lot of work to do on hermeneutics in the coming months. One of the books I am reading is Craig Bartholomew’s Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics: A Comprehensive Framework for Hearing God in Scripture (2015), which seems to be both a general introduction to the field and a defence of a trinitarian hermeneutic—that is, reading the scriptures through a trinitarian lens—in particular. Why a trinitarian hermeneutic is so unhelpful for New Testament interpretation is apparent from this statement (I’m reading on Perlego, so I can’t provide the page number, which is very annoying):

The emphasis on perichoresis in trinitarian doctrine… stresses that while all three persons of the Trinity are involved in all their acts, the Father is particularly associated with creation and Israel, the Son with the fulfillment of redemption, and the Spirit with mission.

This is an odd two-part post. I came across Cleanthes’ “Hymn to Zeus” in Mike Bird’s Jesus among the gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World. It’s an outstanding early example (third century BC) of the pagan instinct to identify a supreme god who created and now manages the cosmos rationally, by means of his “word.” “In the Stoic sphere,” Bird says, “the Logos was the ubiquity of divine rationality that holds all things together” (131).

A couple of days after my Transfigured interview, Sam Tideman recorded a conversation with Mike Bird about his book Jesus among the gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World. Mike does a really good job of painting in the neglected pagan religious background to the evolution of christology in the New Testament and the early church. I think Mike and I broadly agree that the richly detailed, restored pagan fresco is much more important for understanding the early response to the testimony to Jesus than has generally been appreciated. But we disagree, it appears, about the interpretation of 1 Corinthians 8:6.

Seventeen hundred years after the conversion of the Roman Empire, with European Christendom and its offshoots rapidly becoming things of the past, the common opinion—not least among Christians—is no doubt that the whole thing was a massive mistake. I take the somewhat contrary (with the stress on either the first or the second syllable, take your pick) view that the conversion of the nations of the Greek-Roman world was exactly what the early church had in mind as it spread beyond Judea and Samaria.

Paul Gabriner has posted a thoughtful comment on an old article about the mission to the Gentiles in the New Testament. This started out as a hurriedly written reply but has grown too big for the comments section. I’ll quote Paul Gabriner in places, but you should read what he has written, which I take to be essentially a critique of the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith as a departure from Jesus’ more practical moral teaching. We begin with the “justification” of Abraham.