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The true meaning of Luke’s Christmas, part 4
The Benedictus of Zechariah (Lk. 1:68-79), like Mary’s Magnificat, is a pastiche of Old Testament phrases and imagery celebrating the fact that the God of Israel is acting to transform the socio-political circumstances of his people. A previous commentary post from Christmas 2006 lists the… ( | 0 comments)
The true meaning of Luke’s Christmas, part 3
Mary’s extraordinary hymn of praise to God her saviour gives us an excellent opportunity to consider the question of the relation between the individual and the national in Luke’s Christmas narrative. The point I have been trying to make in these Christmas posts is that the true-meaning… ( | 2 comments)
The true meaning of Luke’s Christmas, part 2
Six months later the angel is back. According to Luke’s matter-of-fact account Gabriel is sent from God to a city in Galilee called Nazareth. She is a virgin engaged to a man from the house of David called Joseph. The girl’s name is Mary. With the customary angelic formalities Gabriel… ( | 2 comments)
The true meaning of Luke’s Christmas, part 1
A couple of statements that I heard in church last week have stuck in my head (along with the tune of the little drummer boy, which I now can’t get rid of). The first was in a song by someone whose name I forget that was played during the collection—a ludicrous line about the little boy Jesus… ( | 15 comments)
The Word became flesh: John and the historical Jesus
Not least at this time of year we bring a lot of conventional expectations to the reading of the prologue to John’s Gospel. We hear a familiar story of God sending his pre-existent Son into the world so that people might believe in him and become “children of God”. In order to sustain that… ( | 15 comments)
Scot McKnight: review of the interview about the book
Frank Viola has an interesting interview with “New Testament Scholar Scot McKnight”, who is all over the place at the moment, about his book One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow. Scot makes the point in the interview that it is impossible to do justice to the book in such a short space—… ( | 0 comments)
Brian McLaren and being evangelical
In one of his Q&R posts Brian McLaren responds to the question: “I appreciate your person and work, but why are you still an evangelical, emergent or not?” The argument, for the most part, is that evangelicalism is Brian’s heritage and that he has had no compelling reason so far to… ( | 1 comment)
Bob Dylan, The Little Drummer Boy
For some unaccountable reason Michael Jackson's The Little Drummer Boy has always been one of my favourite Christmas songs. I make no apologies. But the video for this version of the song by Bob Dylan from last year, which I found on Francis Beckwith's blog, is rather more poignant—in an oddly… ( | 2 comments)
Post-eschatological
I sometimes use the term “post-eschatological” with reference to the situation of the people of God after the major eschatological horizons of the Jewish war and the victory of the community in Christ over Greek-Roman paganism. This is a little misleading, but it is meant to take account of… ( | 1 comment)
The problem of Constantine: it depends on your point of view
I have argued both in The Coming of the Son of  Man and in The Future of the People of God that the foreseen clash with Greek-Roman paganism and the suffering and vindication of the early church constitute the determinative trajectory of Pauline eschatology. Jim Hoag points… ( | 0 comments)
On earth as it is in heaven
I referred a couple of days back to an old interview done by James M. Hamilton with Justin Hardin (seemingly now tutor in New Testament at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford) in which Hardin discusses the extent to which Paul was consciously engaging with the Roman imperial cult. I want to go back to it… ( | 3 comments)
Scot McKnight and the completion of Israel's story
Scot McKnight articulates what is essentially a “New Perspective” take on the gospel for a mainstream evangelical readership in a nicely judged cover story on the apparent tension between Jesus and Paul for Christianity Today. He gives a rather personal account of the journey that many evangelicals… ( | 6 comments)
The advent of Vespasian and the good news of Jesus Christ
I have just finished reading an excellent essay by Craig Evans entitled “The Beginning of the Good News and the Fulfillment of Scripture in the Gospel of Mark” in [amazon:978-0802828460:inline], edited by Stanley Porter. I think I can just about spin this as a belated advent post.Evans suggests… ( | 0 comments)
Seeing Differently (and Daniel Kirk's review of The Future of the People of God)
I started out to write a response to some questions by Jim Hoag about my understanding of Romans 8 and then came across an excellent review of The Future of the People of God by Daniel Kirk. Since Jim’s comments and Daniel’s critique converge on the same issues, albeit from… ( | 1 comment)
Ancient text and modern reader: a simple hermeneutical model
Here is a simple model that captures what seem to me to be the three basic constructive hermeneutical options that we have for describing how the ancient text of scripture speaks to the modern (committed) reader. There is the common understanding that the Bible as sacred text or “Word of God”… ( | 2 comments)
The salvation of humanity or the salvation of Israel?
Paul’s statement in Romans 3:21-26 that the future justification of God has been revealed in anticipation in the present time through the faithfulness of Jesus for all who believe is clearly of central importance for our understanding of “salvation” in Paul. Discussion has… ( | 0 comments)
Douglas Campbell and the right(eous)ness of God
Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God is a highly polemical argument about the nature of salvation and the character of God. It is polemical inasmuch as it is driven from the outset by a rigorous opposition to what Campbell calls “Justification theory”—the argument that salvation… ( | 13 comments)
Post-Christendom and the global church
A substantial gain to be had from reading the New Testament narratively rather than simply theologically is that the approach allows us to describe a meaningful continuity between the outlook of the New Testament and the subsequent history of the people of God. So, for example, it… ( | 1 comment)
How does scripture speak to the world?
The Bible is a formative text for the people of God. I have argued that it is formative primarily in a narrative or diachronic sense—that is, it speaks to the church today by narrating a critical period, a determinative trajectory, in the historical development of the people. It begins… ( | 6 comments)
Do you rob temples? The Fulvia scam
This is a fascinating exegetical insight. Douglas Campbell notes the relevance of a passage in Josephus’ Antiquities for understanding Paul’s otherwise rather odd complaint regarding a Jew who claims to be a teacher of the Law but who steals, commits adultery, and robs temples (… ( | 2 comments)