David has provided a very nice commentary on my previous post about the resurrection of Jesus on the third day. He has made it clear that he gets the main contention about the historical framing: “Too often we read the New Testament as if it dropped out of the sky rather than emerging from a real story, rooted in Israel and moving outward into the world.” But he pushes back at a number of points. He insists that the resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament is treated not merely as a moment in Jewish history but as an event of universal human significance. I have highlighted his main concerns and responded.

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I have been meaning for some time to respond to some comments made by Jason Clark to the effect that the emerging church lacks a coherent ecclesiology. He was commenting on a piece I wrote four years ago asking: What does the emerging church stand for? Jason acknowledges that there have been some… ( | 5 comments)
Doctrinal revisionism is in the air, and unsurprisingly it makes people nervous. Currently it appears that many of the fundamental tenets of modern Protestant orthodoxy are being subjected to critical re-examination from the inside—among them justification by faith, penal substitutionary atonement… ( | 28 comments)
This is another attempt to sketch the “eschatological” narrative that underlies 1 Peter and shapes the theological content of the Letter. My argument is that the eschatology—the narratively constructed future that can be extrapolated from the Letter—is not merely a component of Peter… ( | 11 comments)
During a lively dialogue with Larry Hurtado at the British New Testament Society conference this morning Jimmy Dunn put forward his well known view that there is a significant functional differentiation—even subordination—between Jesus and God in the New Testament that should not be obscured in our… ( | 7 comments)
Behind every letter in the New Testament there is a story. Behind Romans, for example, there is the story of communities of Gentile Christians called in Christ to be living sacrifices for the sake of the eventual victory of Israel’s God over the gods and powers of the pagan world. That’… ( | 9 comments)
In his address to the Jews in the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia Paul draws on three distinct passages from the Old Testament in order to say something about the resurrection of Jesus: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” (Acts 13:33; cf. Ps. 2:7); “I will give you the holy and sure… ( | 2 comments)
The basic template for New Testament belief in any sort of life after death is the Jewish idea of the resurrection of a person from the dead at the end of the age—and probably the resurrection of the righteous Jew who has lost his or her life out of loyalty to YHWH (cf. Dan. 12:2-3). Personal… ( | 5 comments)