Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
John 18, 19: Latter Prophets and the Writings John 18 and 19 record the arrest, trial, torture, and death of Jesus as laid out in detail in Isaiah 53. After the Roman soldier pierces Jesus’ side, John quotes Zechariah: “They shall look at him whom they pierced” (Zech 12:10). In…
John 12.12 – John 17: Latter Prophets In the Hebrew Scriptures, Kings is followed by the Latter Prophets. John 12:15 quotes Zechariah 9:9 as having prophesied Jesus’ triumphal entry: “Do not be afraid, O Daughter of Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.” [1] N.T. Wright…
John 6.16-70: Joshua The book of Joshua documents the nation of Israel entering the Promised Land. Consider the order of events: (1) Israel is still receiving the daily miracle of manna; (2) Israel miraculously crosses the Jordan on dry foot; (3) The day after Passover , Israel eats produce of…
Since my educational and professional training have revolved around story and narrative structure, I approach John’s Gospel from a literary and narrative perspective. In doing so, I have noticed structural story patterns and followed them where they seem to lead: the Gospel of John parallels the ordering of the books…
The Mt. Sinai Hospital was neolithic on the black hill of Hollow, New Hampshire. Winter dampened the trees and the wind bit at the sparse branches, the sidewalks and stairs were perilous with soggy leaves, and the dim yellow light cast a pallor upon the milky stone building. Ambling inside…
The Revelation can only be understood in the light of Old Testament symbols and sequences. The same is true of the epistle of Jude, which serves as a blistering hors d’oeuvre to John’s fiery feast. Possibly written by the apostle Judas Thaddaeus (Luke 6:16; Acts 1:13; John 14:22), the epistle…
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Gracia’s own suggestion is that we can make sense of the determinateness and indeterminateness of meaning by distinguishing between “essential” and “accidental” meanings: “although texts may have a well-delimited core of meaning (an essential meaning), they may have other meanings that are the result of contingent conditions, such as changes…
In the entry on meaning in the Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Baker), Jorge Gracia responds to the view that textual meaning has no limits with this: It is true that “texts are understood by different persons, or even by the same person at different times, to mean…
Joel Garver writes, in response to several posts from Raymond Tallis’s Not Saussure : “Most post-structuralist authors I’ve read aren’t dealing with things such as cups or trees or rocks, but rather things such as rationality, madness, criminality, virtue, etc. Foucault, for instance, seems to take bodies as ontologically basic,…
Fisch yet again: After reviewing the influence of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, on prose writing in the seventeenth century, he adds: “it is worth bearing in mind that this is not only a matter of the seventeenth century. It is found earlier in the antiphonal plain-song of the…
Fisch again: Hebraic prose is different from the grand style of the sixteenth century, and different too from the pared-down plain style shared by many Puritans and all Baconians. It is a rhetoric, not an anti-rhetoric, but it is a rhetoric purified by Puritanism, Senecanism, and scientism. It is biblical…
In his 1964 book, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature , Harold Fisch argues that Blake provides a more insightful and broader account of the seventeenth century’s “dissociation of sensibility” than Eliot, who coined the phrase. For Blake, the great crisis of England was the dissociation of…
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