In traditional Reformed interpretation, Romans 12:1-15:7 is regarded simply as a piece of Christian parenesis—that is, practical and ethical instruction or exhortation to be followed in all times, in all places. The letter tends to get sectioned thematically: justification by faith in the first four chapters, sanctification in chapters 5-8, what appears to be a digression or parenthesis in chapters 9-10 in which Paul discusses the fate of Israel, and finally some solid teaching about how to do ministry and deal with conflict to round things off.

I don’t want to make this an issue about trinitarianism; it is to my mind simply a matter of literary-historical perspective. Seriously. But what was the author of the Johannine letters—let’s call him John—getting at when he warned that “many deceivers went out into the world, those not confessing Jesus Christ coming in flesh” (2 Jn. 7*)?

He is concerned about the harmful influence of certain “false prophets” or secessionists who were once associated with the core Johannine fellowship: “They went out from us but they were not from us, for if they were from us, they would have remained always with us” (1 Jn. 2:19*; 4:1). On the face of it, it appears that these people denied the incarnation: the coming of Jesus in flesh, in that sense. The pre-existent divine Jesus only seemed to have become human—a heresy that became known as docetism.

At the beginning of Euripides’ play Bacchae, the god Dionysus—the god of “wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre,” according to Wikipedia—enters and delivers a monologue. He identifies himself as “son of Zeus,” born to the daughter of Cadmus, Semele, and says that he has exchanged the “form” which he had from a god (morphēn… ek theou) for that of a “mortal” (Euripides, Bacchae 1-5).

The New Testament gospel came in two parts—two proclamations distinct from each other with respect to content, audience, and geographical reach.

The first proclamation was addressed to Israel. It was that the God of Israel would soon “judge” his unrighteous people and inaugurate a new order under the rule of Jesus of Nazareth, who had been condemned by the leaders of the nation and executed by the Romans.

There is an argument that there is a third creation account in the Old Testament, in addition to the two creation accounts of Genesis 1-2, in which God as storm deity defeats the chaos monster of the sea in order for dry land to emerge.

Dahood, notably, argued that translation of Psalm 74:13-14 has been “influenced by the assumption that the psalmist is here describing the division of waters during the passage through the Sea of Reeds.” What we have rather is the shattering or breaking of the sea. “The Ugaritic parallels show that vss. 13–14 do not describe historical events but rather primeval happenings.”

I was at a fairly mainstream but non-traditional Anglican Church in east London on Sunday—mostly singles and young families. We had a good, thoughtful, and well presented sermon about the offence taken by the people of Nazareth at the wisdom and mighty works of Jesus (Matt. 13:53-58). I tried not to take offence at it but failed.

Ever wondered why the Jerusalem crowds turned against Jesus so abruptly—cheering him into the city at the start of the week, yelling for him to be crucified at the end of it? Lots of scholars think it all very improbable. We’ll get to that in a moment, but first some reflections on a hermeneutic that fuses narrative and history.