Powerful ancient Near Eastern men competed for commodities like livestock (e.g. cattle & sheep), draught animals (e.g. donkeys & horses), slaves, precious metals (e.g. gold and silver), and, of course, fertile land (cf. Genesis 13:2, 20:14, 30:34, Job 1:3, 1 Kings 10:14-29). It comes as little surprise, therefore, that the promise of just such a … Continue reading Promises and polygyny in ancient Israel
Proponents of the early emergence of divine christology sometimes appeal to Paul's creedal formulation in 1 Corinthians 8:6. These interpreters maintain that the Apostle attests to the widespread acceptance of Christ's deity just two decades after the death of Jesus. For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for … Continue reading The Lord among lords: Christ’s imperial cult
Christian theological models tend to personalize and sentimentalize the love of God. Within these frameworks divine love becomes personal in that it pursues individuals and sentimental in that it arouses emotional faculties. Christ's sacrificial death for sins, in turn, sustains this system by generating the personal and sentimental love that satisfies the introspective and existential … Continue reading Jesus hates Edomites: the politics of divine displeasure
Biblical depictions of divine violence present an ethical problem for contemporary Christianity. For many Christians representations of the warrior God elicit feelings of discomfort and doubt. The prevailing cultural sentiment that violence, especially violence in the name of punishment and vengeance, is morally indefensible only adds to Christian disillusionment with their scriptures. In response to … Continue reading God’s unfailing wrath: divine violence and the cruciform mirage
Last time I attempted to articulate the rhetorical function of logos christology as it pertained to the Johannine community. I argued that the identification of Jesus with God's word represented and at the same time provoked a radical break between John's own dissident form of Judaism and the mainstream Judaism of the synagogues. Once the … Continue reading A light in the dark: Dualistic ideology within and without Johannine community
In the previous post I began to make the case that the experience of expulsion from the synagogue (ἀποσυνάγωγος—John 9:22, 12:42, 14:2) sparked the development of the logos christology found in John 1. I suggested that in order to cope with the dissonance caused by their estrangement from mainstream Judaism, Johannine Jewish Christians came to … Continue reading Christology in crisis: Johannine Judaism outside the synagogue
The traditional Christological discourse surrounding John 1:1 seeks to assess the nature of God's word as it relates to the nature of God the Father. Interpreters involved in this enterprise attempt to understand how the Word can be both God (θεός) and yet distinct from God (ὁ θεός). Early Christians appropriated Greek philosophical terms like "substance" … Continue reading God’s functional word: sectarian Christology in John 1
In the columns below I've juxtaposed summaries of the Pentateuchal books as they are understood by two divergent hermeneutical models—the one christological, the other political. The former model, on the one hand, interprets Israel's founding documents so as to corroborate the Christian divine-savior myth—a psycho-religious system according to which humans attain personal otherworldly salvation through … Continue reading A tale of two Pentateuchs: Christian appropriation of Israel’s imperial constitution
The historian Josephus records that various 1st century messianic leaders promised to perform public Exodus-style signs so as to inaugurate God's powerful reign over Israel and the world. Many Jews were persuaded to follow such figures "into the wilderness," hoping to participate anew in the liberation and founding of the nation.1 For such Jews the … Continue reading Prophets of the new Exodus: Loaves and fishes as military provocation
Most theological systems conscript the Lukan birth narrative, along with its Matthean counterpart, into the service of incarnational Christology. This is to say that Luke's nativity story—the virginal conception in particular—is understood to present the mechanism by which God became a man. In this way the Lukan account fills the lacuna left by the Fourth … Continue reading Jesus the patriot: Jewish nationalism in Luke’s Christmas story
The History and Reception of the New Testament
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Scribes of the Kingdom 