The podcast I did with Justin Brierley and Matthew Hartke for Justin’s Unbelievable? show is now available on the Premier Christian Radio site. Matthew and I agree that Jesus has to be understood as an apocalyptic prophet—his mission was defined by… ( | 3 comments)
The Catholic Church is unhappy with the line “lead us not into temptation” (mē eisenenkēs hēmas eis peirasmon) in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:13; Lk. 11:4). The problem is that it appears to attribute responsibility for a person falling into… ( | 2 comments)
What I rather grandly call the narrative-historical method works on the assumption that the Bible is essentially a story told by a people about its historical experience and should be read from that perspective. The historical existence of this… ( | 8 comments)
With all due respect to those who think that Jesus was a kindly, loving, unworldly pacifist who rose above the Old Testament logic of sin and violence, I think that this is a serious misreading of the Gospels. The “historical” Jesus—by which I mean… ( | 23 comments)
I suggested in a recent post that the biblical “kingdom” paradigm was put in place when the people of Israel asked Samuel to appoint a king because they needed someone 1) to judge them and 2) to lead them out against their enemies (1 Sam. 8:20… ( | 17 comments)
Earlier in the week I was in Billingham on Teesside where I gave a talk on narrative-historical theology to the super Galilee Network and friends. In a typically overloaded (when will I learn?) introduction I used this image—one which I have… ( | 3 comments)
Jerel Kratt has been making a vigorous case against my suggestion that Isaiah 60-66 describes an enhanced but essentially historical future for Israel that was not fulfilled, either in the decades after the return from exile or in the events… ( | 8 comments)
In “21 reasons why the coming of the kingdom of God was not the end of the world” I stated that “There is no new creation in the Old Testament…, only kingdom.” There are, however, two explicit references to new creation in the Old Testament, both in… ( | 15 comments)
I recently took part in a recorded conversation with Matt Hartke for Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? programme on Premier Christian Radio. It will be broadcast and made available on podcast some time in the next few weeks, I believe.Matt has been on… ( | 8 comments)
In Matthew and Mark Jesus speaks of events in the heavens prior to the revelation of the Son of Man: the darkening of sun and moon, the falling of the stars, the shaking of the powers of heaven (Matt. 24:29; Mk. 13:24-25). In response to Dale… ( | 1 comment)
Shortly before his arrest in Jerusalem, as Mark tells the story, Jesus made a prediction: after a period of severe tribulation the sun and moon would be darkened, the stars would fall from heaven, the powers of heaven would be shaken, people would… ( | 3 comments)
I’m a little mystified by Larry Hurtado’s argument about “the son of man” as an “Obsolete Phantom”.He is taking issue with the now rather dated view that when Jesus spoke of “the son of man”, he was referring to someone other than himself,… ( | 9 comments)
I argued last week that Jesus believed that his mission would lead not to a fundamentally new people of God, following the destruction of national Israel, but to the restoration and renewal of Israel, on the basis of repentance and Jesus’ atoning… ( | 10 comments)
I saw a comment on a Reddit thread which said that this blog “takes a conservative unitarian view of things”, adding, “It’s very well-argued.” I also get accused of being a Preterist from time to time, though not so much recently. I understand… ( | 5 comments)
My response to Peter Wilkinson’s attempt to show from Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus had no thought of reforming or restoring Israel as a nation has grown too long to post as a comment. My contention, more or less in agreement with Caird and Wright, is… ( | 22 comments)
I was pointed to G.B. Caird’s Ethel M. Wood Lecture “Jesus and the Jewish Nation” last week. The lecture was delivered in 1965 and published by The Athlone Press. It can be downloaded from Rob Bradshaw’s BiblicalStudies.org.uk.
I tend to trace my… ( | 20 comments)
Tim Challies has produced a helpful diagram to explain the differences between the three most prominent views of the end times—premillennialism, postmillennialism and amillennialism.
I say “helpful”, but “unhelpful” might be a better word for it,… ( | 20 comments)
This may be getting much too speculative for most people’s taste, but I’ll have a go….It’s basically another attempt to talk about biblical narrative, missional context, and same-sex sexual relations all in the same breath, with an overblown chart… ( | 13 comments)
The furore surrounding the Nashville Statement may have come and gone, but I have been in a lot of discussions about the missional implications of the LGBT “problem” recently and I feel I ought to make a belated stab at an appraisal.The Statement is… ( | 25 comments)
Who was/is Jesus? If we read the New Testament as historical narrative—rather than through later theological grids—the dominant story by a country mile is the one about the man who was marked out at birth, and by his birth, as Israel’s… ( | 8 comments)
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