Here’s an irony, surely. The Gospel to which everyone turns for their definition of the “gospel” is one of the few books of the New Testament in which the euangelion word-group does not appear. The other gospel-free texts are Titus, James, 2 Peter, the letters of John, and Jude—all minor epistles and three of them Johannine. It’s John who gives us the classic statement, so beloved of “evangelicals”, so often the theme of “evangelists”: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16). But he nowhere uses either the noun euangelion or the verb euangelizō.

Does that tell us anything interesting? I think it does. I think that the anomaly highlights a pervasive and persistent misunderstanding of “gospel” in the New Testament.

An article in the London Times today reports on what it calls the “patriarchy paradox”, which is that social equality between men and woman appears currently to reinforce rather than weaken gender stereotyping. You need to subscribe to the Times to view the article, but I’ll summarise the content here.

The assumption has been that when women are presented with the same opportunities as men, when the playing field is levelled, gender stereotyping will slowly disappear: we will increasingly see women taking on traditionally male roles in society, and vice versa.

Alastair Roberts is an astute, articulate and assiduous commentator on both scripture and society. I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of what he has written. But I’m disappointed by his defence of the complementarian view of male-female relations in family and church.

In a recent video he makes the case against women’s ordination. He begins by listing briefly the obvious biblical arguments against the egalitarian position: the explicit restrictions found in 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2; the circumstantial evidence that Jesus chose male disciples; the presumption of male leadership in the New Testament church (he defers discussion of the “apostle” Junia); and the precedent of male kingship and priesthood in the Old Testament.

Alex had a question about how Christ reveals God in texts like John 1:18, Colossians 1:15 and Hebrews 1:3, where there seems to be more going on than the “kingdom” story about how Jesus became Lord and would judge and rule over Israel and the nations of the pagan oikoumenē or “empire”. Here are a translation and some exegetical notes on Hebrews 1:1-4. I may or may not get round to doing something similar with the other passages.

It seems to me that the kingdom narrative is firmly in place in Hebrews 1, though the hard political edge has been blunted. It has plainly been overlaid with the Jewish wisdom motif, but I don’t think it amounts to a straightforward identification of Jesus with the eternal wisdom of God. The eschatological outlook remains determinative for understanding the relation between Jesus and God.

Roger Olson discusses what he calls a “paradigm shift in Christian theology” in the modern era. The largely novel thesis is that Jesus is the full and perfect revelation of God. There is no other God “lurking behind Jesus with a different character, disposition, than the one revealed in the person of Jesus Christ”. Or in the words of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey: “God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all.” For theologians like Greg Boyd this means, in particular, that the seemingly violent God of the Old Testament has to be reinterpreted through the lens of the crucified and “pacifist” Jesus.

Olson notes the statement in the Epistle to Diognetus (2nd century AD) that “Violence has no place in the character of God” (7:4) and argues that the “immediately surrounding context indicates strongly that this strange statement is based on the person of Jesus Christ as the perfect manifestation of God”.

I pointed out last week that in the standard “redemption in history” construal of the biblical narrative—as represented, for example, by Chris Wright’s The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission—all the history is found before Jesus. Nothing of significance happens between Pentecost and new creation. Perhaps this defect is repaired elsewhere in the book, you may wonder. Sadly not. The only chapter that sheds any further light on how Wright understands the narrative after Jesus is chapter 11: “People who proclaim the gospel of Christ”; and what we find here is fully consistent with the diagram.