Tag: From the Bookshelf
Gospel and Testimony
In his 2006 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham suggests: that we need to recover the sense in which the Gospels are testimony. This does not mean that they are testimony rather than history. It means that the kind of historiography they are is testimony. An irreducible feature of testimony as a form of human utterance is that…
Augustine on Varro on the Naming of Athens
Citing Varro as “a most learned man among the [pagans], and [a man] of the weightiest authority” on paganism (Civ. 4.1 [NPNF1 2:64]), Augustine summarizes Varro’s account of the naming of Athens (Civ. 18.9 [NPNF1 2:365]): Athens certainly derived its name from Minerva, who in Greek is called ᾽Αθηνη [Athena], and Varro points out the…
BHS with WHM 4.2 (Logos ed.): An Erratum
Online, things change. In the current version of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia with Westminster 4.2 Morphology in Logos 4, the “Text” section of the Preface refers readers to http://www.wts.edu/hebrew/whm.html for Al Groves’ “Supplement to the Code Manual for the Michigan Old Testament” (last rev. June 7, 1989). As of this writing, this URL redirects to Westminster Seminary’s homepage,…
Gadamer on Prejudicial Frameworks
According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, Prejudices [i.e., prejudgments] are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they inevitably distort the truth. In fact, the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word [i.e., prejudgments], constitute the directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are biases of our openness to…
Irenaeus on 666 and 616
In his Against Heresies, Irenaeus argues that 666 is a particularly “fitting” number for the name of the beast in Rev 13:18: since he sums up in his own person all the commixture of wickedness which took place previous to the deluge, due to the apostasy of the angels. For Noah was six hundred years…
Learning a Proverb from a Pagan
Earlier this semester in Exploring Religion, we discussed Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, and one paragraph particularly struck me as an apt illustration of Qoheleth’s advice that עת לחשות ועת לדבר (Eccl 3:7b; there is a time to be silent, and there is a time to speak): When Cotta had spoken, Velleius said, ‘It was indeed…