I was almost persuaded the other night, sitting outside a pub in Glasgow with some Communitas friends, that the story about Jesus inviting himself into the house of Zacchaeus has been widely misunderstood. The suggestion was that Zacchaeus was all… ()
Thanks to James McGrath, I’ve been fretting a bit more over the “fishers of people” saying in Mark 1:17 and Matthew 4:19. In his commentary, Hagner decides in the end that it “refers in a general way to the work of the new disciples, who are now to… ( | 4 comments)
I was asked whether there is any connection between the condemnation of lust in Matthew 5:27-30 and what is said about marriage in Jeremiah 16. I suggested in the last post that the sayings in the Sermon on the Mount about being thrown into Gehenna… ( | 2 comments)
Ron got in touch to say that he’s persuaded by the argument that Gehenna in Matthew stands for a historical judgment. He can see how this makes good sense of the sayings about anger, hypocrisy, retaliation, and love of enemies, which presuppose a… ()
John Walton must know a lot more about the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11:1-9 than I do—it was the subject of his doctoral dissertation, and, of course, he is an eminent Old Testament scholar. Still, I am not persuaded by his argument in a… ( | 2 comments)
I did an interview last week with John Morehead, who directs Multifaith Matters. His organisation aims to provide support for individuals, churches, and organisations doing mission in a pluralistic religious context, so we talked about “narrative-… ()
A friend rang this morning wanting to know whether the thousands who died, and no doubt are still dying, in the earthquake that devastated the region around Gaziantep and Aleppo last week are now continuing to suffer in some far worse post mortem… ( | 3 comments)
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… ( | 2 comments)
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… ( | 6 comments)
Mike Bird is one of the editors of the Studies in Early Christology series (Wipf & Stock), of which my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul is the first published title. Mike is prodigiously… ()
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… ( | 1 comment)
I recently did an interview with Sam Tideman for his Transfigured YouTube channel. It’s also available as a podcast.
Sam gave me a chance to present some of the ideas developed in my book on the question of whether Paul believed that Jesus had pre-… ( | 1 comment)
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.… ( | 7 comments)
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… ()
This isn’t what I was planning to do today, but a blog post by Roger Olson suggesting that evangelicals are more tolerant towards the modalism of Oneness Pentecostals than they used to be got me thinking again that we are moving towards some… ( | 10 comments)
It’s well worth listening to Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discussing the historical Jesus in their The Rest is History podcast. I plan to write something about how they understand Jesus’ teaching about the “kingdom of God,” but here’s a short… ( | 5 comments)
Krishna is a practising Hindu whose “knowledge of the Bible/Gospels is basic at best,” but he asks a perceptive question—the sort of question that Christians don’t usually bother to ask, assuming that one size fits all—about the relevance of… ( | 3 comments)
While we are on the subject of the pre-existence of the exalted Christ, and since Christmas is nearly upon us, I feel we have to ask the question: What do the Christmas stories tell us about the pre-existence of Jesus? We start with Matthew, then… ()
I don’t deal with this in the book, but I’m wondering whether the retrospective argument about the pre-existence of the exalted Christ gains a polemically heightened character in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch (d. 107/108). Or to put… ( | 7 comments)
This is a German translation of “In the form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul: what the book is about and why.” With many thanks to Helge Seekamp.
Mein Buch In Gestalt eines Gottes: Die Vorexistenz des Erhöhten… ()
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