In a lengthy Theopolis essay entitled “Pentecost and the Gift of a New Politics,” Alastair Roberts asks why Jesus had so little to say about the evil empire in their midst. “Jesus declares the coming of the kingdom of God: should not such a kingdom have involved, at a bare minimum, the defeat of the Romans?” It’s a question worth asking today as the world waits with bated breath to see whom Americans will entrust with supreme power.
Matthew Thiessen says that to understand the historical Paul we must relocate him in the world of first century Judaism, and here’s a book that does just that: Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston, eds. Reading Romans in Context: Paul and Second Temple Judaism (2015).… ()
Matthew Thiessen is keen to demonstrate that “Paul did not convert from an established religion called Judaism to a new religion called Christianity” (A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles, 57). We can agree on that.
His conversion was to a radical … ( | 3 comments)
In the introduction to his book A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles (2023), Matthew Thiessen says that his broad aim is to present a reading of Paul that does not perpetuate an old “Christian” or “Lutheran” view of Judaism as “inferior or even pernicious, something left… ( | 1 comment)
Jesus’ parable of the net in Matthew 13:47-50 is commonly read as a parable of indiscriminate inclusion: both good and bad people may come into the kingdom. For example, Hagner writes with respect to the phrase “fish of every kind”:
The exaggerated inclusiveness of… ()
Why did the Jewish authorities hand Jesus over to Rome for crucifixion? It cannot have been because he was judged to have been a false prophet, a deceiver of the people, opposed to Torah, opposed to the temple, or even a messianic pretender. On the last point, Brant Pitre quotes the Spanish… ()
In some recent comments on a post about the salvation of “all Israel” Alfred encouraged me to look at the argument of Jason Staples that the “fulness of the nations” (Rom. 11:25) is a reference to the northern kingdom of Israel or Ephraim, and that the salvation of “all Israel” must consist in the… ( | 1 comment)
I have been working through Brant Pitre’s rather too methodical and, in my view, tendentious (I know, the pot calling the kettle black) Jesus and Divine Christology, in which he makes a case for reading divine identity into certain of the words and deeds of Jesus. ()
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