Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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There is further evidence concerning the meaning of nomos in Greek culture, coming from Martha Nussbaum’s Fragility of Goodness . In a discussion of Euripides’s Hecuba , Nussbaum points out that Polyxena, Hecuba’s daughter who is offered as a human sacrifice by the Greeks to appease the shade of Achilles,…
Sermon outline for Feb 15: In the Robbers’ Den, Luke 19:1-48 INTRODUCTION After a long journey, Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, and we learn that all along his goal has been the temple. He enters the city of the Great King as a king (19:37-38), and begins to drive out the…
The JSOT also includes an article by Daniel Hays arguing that 1 Kings 1-11 portrays Solomon in a very negative light. It is not merely that Solomon falls in 1 Kings 11; there are hints throughout these chapters that Solomon has gone badly wrong. I don’t agree with everything in…
F. Gerald Downing of Manchester has an intriguing paper on “Aesthetic Behavior in the Jewish Scriptures” in the December 2003 issue of the JSOT . Among the points he makes are these: 1) There has been remarkably little attention to Hebrew conceptions of beauty. This is due in part to…
Matt Jackson-McCabe argues in the current issue of JBL that the epistle of James presents a version of Messiahship different from much of the NT. Instead of a Messianic idea centering on the death and resurrection of the Messiah, James describes a “national restoration” in which the 12 tribes (dispersed…
Gary Knoppers argues in a JBL article that, contrary to accepted scholarship, the Chronicler shows the signs of influence of Greek historiography. I find this kind of article tedious and this kind of evidence unconvincing, but along the way Knoppers makes some useful comments about the organization of the Chronicler’s…
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