When Paul says, “if you call yourself a Jew” (Rom. 2:17), the traditional understanding has been that this is addressed to a Jew whom he is about to charge with hypocrisy: “You call yourself a Jew but you do this, that, and the other! Shame on you!”

It is sometimes argued, however, in keeping with the position generally taken by the “Paul within Judaism” school, that the critique in Romans 2 is directed not against Jews but against Gentiles, and that Paul’s interlocutor here is a non-Jew who mimics Jewishness. I have just read two recent defences of this view by Jacob Mortenson and Matthew Novenson. It’s a striking piece of re-interpretation, we’ll go through what I have taken to be the main arguments, but I’m not persuaded.

I had a go at explaining the place of the quotation from Psalm 102 as an apparent address to Christ as YHWH in a recent post on the “Is Jesus Yahweh?” debate between James White and Dale Tuggy, but I’m not sure I got it quite right. So I’m going to try again, at least in outline—I won’t repeat all the detail.

Matthew Poole was a seventeenth century English Presbyterian minister. Towards the end of his life he started work on a commentary on the Bible called Annotations upon the Holy Bible. Wherein The Sacred Text is Inserted, and various Readings Annex’d, together with the Parallel Scriptures, the more difficult Terms in each Verse are Explained, seeming Contradictions Reconciled, Questions and Doubts Resolved, and the whole Text opened. They don’t write titles like that any more, sadly.

I am writing this in answer to some questions sent to me about the reading of the New Testament presented on this blog and in my books. The specific point at issue is my contention that we now understand the New Testament best if we map most of the stuff of New Testament eschatology—the weird future stuff—on to two foreseeable historical events. But let’s back up a bit first and briefly address the underlying hermeneutics.

According to James White, when John says that “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory” (Jn. 12:41), the allusion is to the glory of YHWH revealed in the throne vision of Isaiah 6:1-3. Since John is speaking about Jesus in this passage, we may infer that John in some way identifies Jesus with the glorious figure on the throne, whose glory, according to the Septuagint version, filled both the temple and the whole earth.

How should Good Friday be observed? With mournful solemnity because this is the death of Jesus? Or with subdued but joyful celebration because this is the death of Jesus for our sins?