From-the-Bookshelf on J. David Stark

Irenaeus on 666 and 616

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 12:09:42 +0000

Irenaeus of Lyons

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 old when the deluge came upon the earth, sweeping away the rebellious world, for the sake of that most infamous generation which lived in the times of Noah. And [Antichrist] also sums up every error of devised idols since the flood, together with the slaying of the prophets and the cutting off of the just {cf. Matt 24:37–38/ Luke 17:26–27}. For that image which was set up by Nebuchadnezzar had indeed a height of sixty cubits, while the breadth was six cubits; on account of which Ananias, Azarias, and Misaël, when they did not worship it, were cast into a furnace of fire, pointing out prophetically, by what happened to them, the wrath against the righteous which shall arise towards the [time of the] end {cf. Matt 24:15/ Mark 13:14}. For that image, taken as a whole, was a prefiguring of this man’s coming, decreeing that he should undoubtedly himself alone be worshipped by all men {cf. Rev 13:15}. Thus, then, the six hundred years of Noah, in whose time the deluge occurred because of the apostasy, and the number of the cubits of the image for which these just men were sent into the fiery furnace, do indicate the number of the name of that man in whom is concentrated the whole apostasy of six thousand years, and unrighteousness, and wickedness, and false prophecy, and deception; for which things’ sake a cataclysm of fire shall also come [upon the earth]. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.29.2 [ ANF 1:558; affiliate disclosure] square brackets original; curled brackets added)

Rasputin and Romans 6

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 14:34:27 +0000

In his Tyndale series Romans commentary, F. F. Bruce offers the following colorful, if also sad, illustration as he discusses Rom 6:

A notable historical instance [of a tendency to read Paul as advocating antinomianism] may be seen in the Russian monk Rasputin, the evil genius of the Romanov family in its last years of power. Rasputin taught and exemplified the doctrine of salvation through repeated experiences of sin and repentance; he held that, as those who sin most require most forgiveness, a sinner who continues to sin with abandon enjoys, each time he repents, more of God’s forgiving grace than any ordinary sinner.((Bruce, Romans ( affiliate disclosure), 134.))

A Hermeneutic of Love

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 16:35:34 +0000

Communication is hermeneutical; it involves people sending and receiving messages. To make the communication process work, the sender(s) and receiver(s) both have to meet their own particular, communicative responsibilities. Of course, with literature like the New Testament, the people who sent the messages it contains cannot clarify or supplement anything they have already said. So, if communication is to happen, any modern readers, or receivers, must try to understand the text’s own communicative horizon, for all the problems that task entails (see this post for a discussion). On this task, consider the following, insightful comments from N. T. Wright’s New Testament and the People of God:

Review of Longman, ed., "Baker Illustrated Bible Dictionary" in Logos

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 12:50:00 +0000

The Baker Illustrated Bible Dictionary is a helpful resource with some useful enhancements in the Logos Bible Software version.

Heiser, "Supernatural"

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 16:35:00 +0000

Heiser, Supernatural

The folks at Lexham Press have kindly sent along a copy of Michael Heiser’s book, Supernatural. Heiser holds a PhD in Hebrew Bible and Semitic Languages from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Supernatural is a follow-up to Heiser’s previous volume Unseen Realm (Lexham, 2015; see Supernatural, 9). Both continue following up on themes Heiser previously explored in his doctoral thesis on “The Divine Council in Late Canonical and Non-Canonical Second Temple Jewish Literature” (2004).

Why Searching Shouldn't Replace Reading

Wed, 28 Oct 2015 16:13:35 +0000

Yes, search, but also read, note, and remember.

Excerpts from Selby’s Comical Doctrine, Part 2

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 17:51:57 +0000

At the end of chapter 1, “Questions of Truth and Epistemology,” in her Comical Doctrine: An Epistemology of New Testament Hermeneutics (Paternoster, 2006), Rosalind Selby summarizes:

If this chapter has concluded with an appropriate understanding of the logical structure of grace and faith as we contemplate how it is that we know God, it must be important to pursue it in terms of the relationship between the individual and the community. The community of the ‘church’—however we define that—is founded by and founds its texts. This is a dialectic which itself rests in the priority of the founding acts of God. The priority over community, individual and the textual conveying of revelation always belongs with God; and the Christian will take that fundamentally seriously. ( 52; emphasis added)

Excerpts from Selby's Comical Doctrine, Part 1

Wed, 11 Feb 2015 19:05:07 +0000

In her Comical Doctrine: An Epistemology of New Testament Hermeneutics (Paternoster, 2006), Rosalind Selby has several insightful observations. Summarizing the thought of Karl-Otto Apel, Selby comments:

Apel himself proposes a dialectical mediation of objective-scientistic and hermeneutical methods with a critique of ideology. Philosophical hermeneutics is reflexive in as much as the subject must self-objectify in order to be self-critical and avoid any hidden prejudices. ( 36)

Or, at least to avoid them as much as possible. Slightly later, Selby also reflects:

Sacred Texts and Paradigmatic Revolutions

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 23:30:30 +0000

The latest Bloomsbury Highlights notes the newly available volume 16 in the T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts Series. The volume is a revision of my 2011 dissertation at Southeastern Seminary and primarily explores paradigmatic, or presuppositional, aspects of the hermeneutics at play in Romans and some of the Qumran sectarian texts.

Bloomsbury presently has the hardback on sale for 10% off and is also making PDFs available at a still more substantially reduced price.

Gospel and Testimony

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 16:31:41 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_2129” align=“alignright” width=“87”] Richard Bauckham[/caption]

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 it asks to be trusted. This does not mean that it asks to be trusted uncritically, but it does mean that testimony should not be treated as credible only to the extent that it can be independently verified. There can be good reasons for trusting or distrusting a witness, but these are precisely reasons for trusting or distrusting. Trusting testimony is not an irrational act of faith that leaves critical rationality aside; it is, on the contrary, the rationally appropriate way of responding to authentic testimony. . . . It is true that a powerful trend in the modern development of critical historical philosophy and method finds trusting testimony a stumbling-block in the way of the historian’s autonomous access to truth that she or he can verify independently. But it is also a rather neglected fact that all history, like all knowledge, relies on testimony. ( 5; italics original)

Augustine on Varro on the Naming of Athens

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 19:15:36 +0000

[caption id=“” align=“alignright” width=“175”] Louis Comfort Tiffany, “Window of St. Augustine” (Lightner Museum, St. Augustine, Florida; photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

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 following reason why it was so called. When an olive-tree suddenly appeared there, and water burst forth in another place, these prodigies moved the king to send to the Delphic Apollo to inquire what they meant and what he should do. He answered that the olive signified Minerva, the water Neptune, and that the citizens had it in their power to name their city as they chose, after either of these two gods whose signs these were. On receiving this oracle, Cecrops convoked all the citizens of either sex to give their vote, for it was then the custom in those parts for the women also to take part in public deliberations. When the multitude was consulted, the men gave their votes for Neptune, the women for Minerva; and as the women had a majority of one, Minerva conquered. Then Neptune, being enraged, laid waste the lands of the Athenians, by casting up the waves of the sea; for the demons have no difficulty in scattering any waters more widely. The same authority said, that to appease his wrath the women should be visited by the Athenians with the three-fold punishment—that they should no longer have any vote; that none of their children should be named after their mothers; and that no one should call them Athenians. Thus that city, the mother and nurse of liberal doctrines, and of so many and so great philosophers, than whom Greece had nothing more famous and noble, by the mockery of demons about the strife of their gods, a male and female, and from the victory of the female one through the women, received the name of Athens; and, on being damaged by the vanquished god, was compelled to punish the very victory of the victress, fearing the waters of Neptune more than the arms of Minerva. For in the women who were thus punished, Minerva, who had conquered, was conquered too, and could not even help her voters so far that, although the right of voting was henceforth lost, and the mothers could not give their names to the children, they might at least be allowed to be called Athenians, and to merit the name of that goddess whom they had made victorious over a male god by giving her their votes.

BHS with WHM 4.2 (Logos ed.): An Erratum

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:44:21 +0000

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, but Groves’ supplement is presently still available here.

Gadamer on Prejudicial Frameworks

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 07:37:14 +0000

Philosophical Hermeneutics

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 the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something—whereby what we encounter says something to us.((Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics ( affiliate disclosure), 9.))

Learning a Proverb from a Pagan

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:43:16 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_8406” align=“alignright” width=“200” caption=“Image via Communio”] [/caption]

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 rash of me to attempt to argue with someone who is both an academician and an orator. I would have no fear of an academician who had no gift of words or of an orator however eloquent who was not a good academic philosopher. I am not put out by a stream of empty words, or by subtle propositions quite devoid of eloquence. But you, Cotta, are a champion on both counts. You only lacked an audience and a jury. But more of this another time. Let us now hear Lucilius, if he will favor us with his views. ( 123; underlining added)

Cicero on the Earth as Sphere

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 09:25:36 +0000

The Flammarion woodcut is an enigmatic wood en…

Jim Davila has picked up a discussion about ancient testimony to the earth’s spherical shape. Cicero also, by way of his Stoic character Balbus, comments to this effect, saying,

[T]he sea, which is above the earth, tends still toward the earth’s centre, and so is itself shaped in conformity to the globe of the earth and nowhere spills or overflows. ( 171; affiliate disclosure; italics added)

Et tu, Brute . . . Facts

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:53:39 +0000

Van Til’s perspective resembles Kuhn’s. One major difference is that, where Kuhn has mutable paradigms, Van Til has a reality-constituting mind of God.

Translation and Rewriting

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:09:29 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_7680” align=“alignright” width=“80” caption=“Marcus Tullius Cicero”] [/caption]

In his translator’s comments on Cicero’s Nature of the Gods, H. C. P. McGregor makes the following observation about the task of translation:

One can . . . choose verbal accuracy at any price, translate each sentence word for word, and so produce a safe bud deadly crib. In an opposite extreme, one may throw all scholarly impedimenta overboard, let vocabulary and syntax go, seeking only to preserve in English dress the sense and argument of the original. . . . A third method goes beyond translation altogether and creates a new work in the image of the old, as Pope and Chapman did with Iliad and Odyssey. ( 64)

Letting Paul Be Paul

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 14:30:09 +0000

In his Romans commentary, F. F. Bruce gives the following, sound advice for those who want to understand Paul better:

We may agree or disagree with Paul, but we must do him the justice of letting him hold and teach his own beliefs, and not distort his beliefs into conformity with what we should prefer him to have said ( 136).

Of course, determining what exactly Paul believed is a task that inevitably involves readers and those readers’ preunderstandings, but still the adage holds: “if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time” (cf. Hermeneutics and “the Near”).

Licona on Paul's View of Believers' Possible Fates

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:20:31 +0000

[caption id=“attachment_6870” align=“alignright” width=“80” caption=“Michael Licona”] [/caption]In his new monograph, The Resurrection of Jesus, Michael Licona summarizes as follows how he sees Paul conceiving of believers’ possible ends:

Paul sees two options before believers. Some believers will die prior to the parousia and will become disembodied until the general resurrection, while believers alive at the parousia will have their earthly bodies clothed with their new resurrection body made by God. Paul certainly prefers to avoid the former. But his faith gives him confidence that, if he dies prior to the parousia, he will be with the Lord, although in a disembodied state, which he prefers over present life in the earthly body. And being with Christ is what matters most to Paul ( 435–36).

Paul in Acts and the Letters

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 18:37:51 +0000

While expressing doubts about the correctness of the “New Perspective(s) on Paul,” Stan Porter makes the following, interesting observation about the New Perspective(s) vis-à-vis the question of continuity between the portraits of Paul in Acts and the letters:

If this new perspective is correct, then it would appear that the Jewish elements that typify the account in Acts, such as Paul’s beginning much of his local preaching with a visit to the synagogue . . . , his agreeing to participate in the ritual in Jerusalem ( Acts 21:17–26 . . . ), and his defenses focusing upon his continuity with Judaism, all point toward continuity between the Paul of Acts and of the Letters. Thus, the new perspective on Paul would appear to render this criticism of [E.] Haenchen [that Luke is unaware of Paul’s answer to the question of the law and the Gentile mission] no longer valid ( 191).

Second Temple Literature as a "Cultural Script"

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:00:00 +0000

While reading Darrell Bock’s Studying the Historical Jesus in preparation for class this fall, I came across the following, insightful comment:

Every culture has its “cultural script” that is assumed in its communication. These [Second Temple Jewish] sources help us get a reading on the cultural script at work in the time of Jesus. They also help us understand the reaction to Jesus and his ministry. They also deepen our own perception of Jesus’ claims ( 40–41).

Hansen on Christian Community and Obedience

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:06:17 +0000

In commenting on Phil 2:12 in his recent Pillar series volume, Walter Hansen observes the following about Paul’s description of Christian community and obedience:

The church is an eschatological community, a colony of heaven. But in order for the heavenly reality to be a present, earthly experience, believers need to work out the salvation promised to them. Paul desires to see an ecclesiological fulfillment of the eschatological promise of salvation. This understanding of working out salvation as a present expression of God’s promise of salvation does not contradict but rather implements Paul’s earlier instruction to look after the interests of others ( 2:4) ( 174–75; cf. 177).

History and Collective Memory

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:45:26 +0000

Defending the legitimacy of the category of “collective memory,” Maurice Halbwachs observes the following:

History is neither the whole nor even all that remains of the past. In addition to written history, there is a living history that perpetuates and renews itself through time and permits the recovery of many old currents that have seemingly disappeared ( 64).

Thus, in some respect, the “collective memory” provides the means by which a community recovers for itself things that it has forgotten or allowed to fall into the vague and dusty corners of its memory. Without such collective memory, these lost currents would have no presence in relation to the community and they would have to be recovered—if they would ever be recovered at all—in the same manner as the community discovers new things of which it had not previously been aware.

Torah as Interpreted Torah

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:57:53 +0000

In an essay entitled “Paul and James on the Law in the Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Martin Abegg incisively observes that

The interpretation of the law, which had been revealed by God, is the focus of the phrase “works of the law” [at Qumran]. . . . No doubt the emphasis is on Torah in its entirety (see 1QS 8.1–2) but “obeying the law” was in accordance with the correct interpretation, that which had been revealed by God. . . . [T]he phrase does not simply mean “works of the law as God has commanded,” but rather “works of the law that God has commanded and revealed fully only to us” ( 72–73; italics original).

The Power of Private Presuppositions

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:06:51 +0000

Presuppositions that remain unacknowledged at least to oneself can still exercise strong influence. Indeed,

[a] person who believes he is free of prejudices, relying on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo. A person who does not admit that he is dominated by prejudices will fail to see what manifests itself by their light [because it will not be foregrounded from them] (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2006, 354 and Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2013, 369).

Tradition and Method

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:12:56 +0000

Despite the preeminence sometimes assigned to method in hermeneutics,

[i]n seeking to understand tradition[,] historical consciousness must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as if this preserved it from mixing in its own judgments and prejudices. It must, in fact, think within its own historicity. To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible ( Gadamer 354).

Jesus as Paul’s Hermeneutical Key

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:12:04 +0000

Regarding the place of Jesus in Paul’s hermeneutic, James Aageson suggests that

[Paul’s] hermeneutic is inherently theological and is governed by his experience on the Damascus road and its legacy. From a persecutor of the early church, Paul was transformed into a man with a mission to carry the name of Jesus to the Gentile world. The divine mystery that was revealed to Paul in Christ opens for him new ways of reading and listening to the ancient texts of the Jewish people. His belief in Christ is both an experience and a conviction that, in his eyes, allows him to comprehend the “true” meaning of the religion of his people and their sacred texts ( 155–56).

Judges as Shepherds

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:22:09 +0000

In an essay on “Jesus, John, and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Craig Evans observes that

Jesus’s appointment of the twelve ( Mark 3:14; 6:7) is an extension of John [the Baptist]’s typology. The Jordan River has been crossed, and now representatives of the restored tribes have reentered the promised land, announcing the rule of God. If the nation repents, restoration will take place. It will be a time when the twelve apostles will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, judging not in a condemning sense but in an administrative, even shepherding sense ( Evans 60; emphasis added).

The Commonality of Communication

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:07:41 +0000

In an introductory essay for his edited volume Modelling Early Christianity: Social-Scientific Studies of the New Testament in Its Context, Phillip Esler observes that

All human groups, however diverse, are capable of communicating with one another. Merely to entertain the possibility of one culture seeking to understand or even translate another presupposes the necessary foundations in human nature and human sociality which transcend ethnographic particularity ( Esler 6).

Consequently, despite all of the task’s attendant dangers, there is this good reason, among others, to be hermeneutically hopeful when approaching the New Testament or other ancient pieces of literature, for “[t]ime is no[t] primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted” ( Gadamer 297).

מורה הצדק and Qumran Hermeneutics

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:45:13 +0000

In working through some bibliography recently for a conference paper proposal about מורה הצדק ( the teacher of righteousness), I came across the following:

Der Lehrer [der Gerechtigkeit] ist von Gott autorisiert, die Geheimnisse der Prophetenworte zu enträtseln, denn die Worte der Propheten sind Geheimnisse (רזים [pHab] 7,5), die man ohne Auslegung des Lehrers nicht verstehen kann. Der Lehrer tritt also mit seiner Verkündigung nicht neben die Schrift, sondern er basiert auf der Schrift. Er allein hat von Gott das rechte Verständnis offenbart bekommen. Darum kann er und mit ihm seine Gemeinde nach dem Willen Gottes leben ( Jeremias 141).

Hermeneutics and “the Near”

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:37:30 +0000

Concerning interpreters’ obligation to look beyond themselves, Hans-Georg Gadamer observes the following:

We are always affected, in hope and fear, by what is nearest to us, and hence we approach the testimony of the past under its influence. Thus it is constantly necessary to guard against overhastily assimilating the past to our own expectations of meaning. Only then can we listen to tradition in a way that permits it to make its own meaning heard ( Gadamer 304).

Burnett Streeter and Proto-Luke

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:52:12 +0000

In his Four Gospels, Burnett Streeter articulates his view of the sources of Luke and proto-Luke as follows:

The hypothesis I propose in no way conflicts with the generally accepted view that Matthew and Luke are ultimately dependent not only on Mark but on Q—meaning by Q a single written source. Most, if not all, of the agreements of Matthew and Luke, where Mark is absent, are, I think, to be referred to Q; but I desire to interpolate a stage between Q and the editor of the Third Gospel. I conceive that what this editor had before him was, not Q in its original form—which, I hold, included hardly any narrative and no account of the Passion—but Q+L, that is, Q embodied in a larger document, a kind of “Gospel” in fact, which I will call Proto-Luke. This Proto-Luke would have been slightly longer than Mark, and about one-third of its total contents consisted of materials derived from Q (Streeter 208).

History and Hermeneutics

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:09:19 +0000

To the extent that New Testament Studies is a historical discipline, it shares the features of other historical disciplines. Among these features are its own historical-affectedness:

If we are trying to understand a historical phenomenon from the historical distance that is characteristic of our hermeneutical situation, we are always already affected by history. It determines in advance both what seems to us worth inquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation, and we more or less forget half of what is really there—in fact, we miss the whole truth of the phenomenon—when we take its immediate appearance as the whole truth ( Gadamer 300).

Blogging and Biblical Studies: Thoughts from N. T. Wright and Thomas Kuhn

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:58:10 +0000

In his Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, N. T. Wright reflects:

It is really high time we developed a Christian ethic of blogging. Bad temper is bad temper even in the apparent privacy of your own hard drive, and harsh and unjust words, when released into the wild, rampage around and do real damage. . . . [T]he cyberspace equivalents of road rage don’t happen by accident. People who type vicious, angry, slanderous and inaccurate accusations do so because they feel their worldview to be under attack. Yes, I have a pastoral concern for such people. (And, for that matter, a pastoral concern for anyone who spends more than a few minutes a day taking part in blogsite discussions, especially when they all use code names: was it for this that the creator God made human beings?) ( Wright 26–27; cf. Köstenberger, “Internet Ettiquette”; Köstenberger, “Internet Ettiquette, Part 2”).1

Excellence in Writing

Thu, 28 May 2009 06:49:26 +0000

In preparing for another revision of the Theological Writing Handout, I am rereading William Strunk and E. B. White’s little classic, The Elements of Style. The fourth edition contains a forward by Roger Angell, White’s stepson, where Angell recalls the following pattern of behavior from his stepfather:

Each Tuesday morning, he would close his study door and sit down to write the “Notes and Comment” page for The New Yorker. The task was familiar to him—he was required to file a few hundred words of editorial or personal commentary on some topic in or out of the news that week—but the sounds of his typewriter from his room came in hesitant bursts, with long silences in between. Hours went by. . . . When the copy went off at last, in the afternoon RFD [Rural Free Delivery] pouch—we were in Main, a day’s mail away from New York—he rarely seemed satisfied. “It isn’t good enough,” he said sometimes. “I wish it were better” ( ix).

Roland Deines on Halakah and Community Definition

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:00:05 +0000

In reading Roland Deines’ essay in Second Temple Judaism (“The Pharisees Between ‘Judaisms’ and ‘Common Judaism’”), I came across the following, astute paragraph:

If it is correct that it was particularly halakah that constituted Pharisees as Pharisees, it is also true that it constituted Essenes as Essenes and Sadducees as Sadducees. The same can be said regarding the other Jewish groups that existed prior to 70. This explains why the differences and even antagonism between these three basic movements (which included diverse elements within themselves) did not lead to the complete suspension of religious association within Judaism, whereas the association with early Christians broke off quite soon. All three Jewish movements oriented themselves basically around the Torah as the center of individual and national Jewish existence. In this system the Messiah was subordinated to Torah. For Christians, on the other hand, Christ became the center of individual as well as communal existence. In him, a person’s profound relationship with his own nation was expanded to an eschatological and thus at the same time universal horizon. The final breakdown came when the soteriological marginality of the Torah in relation to Christ could no longer be overlooked in the course of generational change. Even where Torah was observed with sincerity in Jewish-Christian congregations, it had still lost its absolute, eschatological dimension. It had, even in these congregations, reached its τέλος in Christ ( 499–500; italics added).

Wisdom in the Muratorian Fragment

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:15:44 +0000

The Muratorian fragment curiously includes a book named “Wisdom” in the middle of its discussion of New Testament literature (see Westcott 562). The standard interpretation of this reference appears to be that the fragment refers here to the well-known Wisdom of Solomon (e.g., Carson, Moo, and Morris 492; Ehrman 241).

The relevant sentence from the fragment itself reads, “Moreover, the epistle of Jude and two of the above-mentioned (or, bearing the name of) John are counted (or, used) in the catholic [Church]; and [the book of] Wisdom, . . . written by the friends of Solomon in his honour [ sapientia ab amicis Salomonis in honorem ipsius scripts]” ( Metzger 307; Westcott 562). B. F. Westcott, however, in his Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament, considers the phrase ab amicis Salomonis (by the friends of Solomon) to refer to Proverbs as a figurative designation for Hebrews ( Westcott 245). This interpretation is prompted by the tension Westcott feels at having a document by this title listed with New Testament literature.

Irenaeus on the Fourfold Gospel Tradition

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:26:05 +0000

In the third book of his work, Against Heresies, Irenaeus takes up a defense of the fourfold Gospel tradition.

James Dunn on Faith and Scholarship

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:50:51 +0000

To complement the current series on faith and scholarship over at Café Apocalypsis, we might note some interesting comments from James Dunn’s Jesus Remembered. Dunn favorably mentions Gadamer’s alliance with “those who want to maintain that faith is not in principle at odds with the hermeneutical process in its application to the study of the NT” ( 123) because the whole Jesus tradition began from a “faith stimulus” ( 127). That is, “the original impulse behind these records was . . . sayings of Jesus as heard and received, and actions of Jesus as witnessed and retained in memory” ( 129; emphasis original). This tradition emerged and was preserved “as an expression of faith” ( 132). All this is to say, as Dunn helpfully summarizes, that:

Jesus and History

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:29:32 +0000

In his Jesus Remembered, James Dunn makes the following, insightful observations about the interplay between the study of Jesus and the study of history:

For those within the Christian tradition of faith, the issue [of Jesus’ relationship to history] is even more important. Christian belief in the incarnation, in the events of long ago in Palestine of the late 20s and early 30s AD as the decisive fulcrum point in human history, leaves them no choice but to be interested in the events and words of those days. For the incarnation, by definition, means the commitment of God to self-manifestation in Jesus at a particular time and place within human history, and thus places a tremendous weight of significance on certain events in Palestine in the years 28-30 (or thereabouts) of the common era. Christians cannot but want to know what Jesus was like, since he shows them what God is like. . . . [T]he new questers of the third quarter of the twentieth century showed that faith could and does have a theologically legitimate interest in the history of Jesus. Honest historical inquiry may be granted insights regarding Jesus which are crucially (in)formative of honest (self-critical) faith. . . . The point of [this historical] otherness of Jesus is, in part at least, . . . the otherness in particular of Jesus the Jew—again something we ‘moderns’ have forgotten at our cost. Without that sense of Jesus ‘born under the law’ ( Gal. 4.4), of Christ ‘become servant of the circumcision’ ( Rom. 15.8), with historical awareness of what that means in terms of the particularities of history, then the humanity of Christ is likely to be lost again to view within Christianity and swallowed up in an essentially docetic affirmation of his deity. Although the failures of earlier lives of Jesus at this point . . . are now widely acknowledged, the instinctive compulsion to extricate Jesus from his historical context and to assume his [a-historical,] timeless relevance still has to be resolutely resisted ( 101–102).