“The message of Romans is not just apostolic instruction: it is prophetic outcry and warning. The problem is that it comes dressed in such symmetry, profundity, and intellectual elegance. It has become a Rubik’s Cube for erstwhile expositors instead of a fire alarm to rouse God’s people from their lethargy and shallowness.”
— Robert W. Yarbrough, “The Theology of Romans in Future Tense,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 11:3 (2007): 57.
I just uploaded five new MP3s to the D. A. Carson archive:
I’ve just spent some time examining an outstanding book hot off Zondervan’s press:
Gary M. Burge, Lynn H. Cohick, and Gene L. Green. The New Testament in Antiquity: A Survey of the New Testament Within Its Cultural Contexts. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009. 480 pp.
While flipping through every page and dipping in here and there, I noticed a few relatively minor disappointments (e.g., the bibliography on p. 122 lists the first rather than the second edition of Craig Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, and the book lacks an author index), but overall, I agree with the above scholars. My text for New Testament introduction in college was Robert G. Gromacki’s New Testament Survey (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1974). I sure wish that it would have been this one!
I don’t recall hearing this twist to the textile-imperial metaphor before (D. A. Carson, review of David Rensberger, Overcoming the World: Politics and Community in the Gospel of John, Themelios 17:1 [October–November 1991]: 27–28):
Somewhere along the line, the text has been left behind. Not only have too many speculations been built on other speculations, but the obvious features of the text, such as its Christology, its claims to bring witness, its insistence on the uniqueness and exclusiveness of Jesus the Messiah, its remarkable ability to distinguish between what happened ‘back there’ during Jesus’ ministry and what was discerned only later, are all lost. Many scholars doubt that John 3:3, 5 is primarily about baptism, and that John 6 is primarily about the eucharist; but at very least, the point must be argued, and not assumed on the basis of a doubtful assumption as to how easy it is to read the ecclesiastical realities of the end of the first century off the surface of the text. And how can the Johannine emphasis on the uniqueness of Jesus as the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, as the one who dies so that the nation may be saved, as the shepherd who gives his life for his sheep, be so quickly transmuted into a call that we in our turn take away the sin of the world by opposing injustice? I am not for a moment suggesting we should ignore injustice; I am merely saying that this is an extraordinary reading of John’s gospel.
Indeed, I have gradually come to the conclusion the Fourth Gospel was not written primarily for church consumption anyway, but as an evangelistic booklet. I realize this point is debatable; but the very fact that it is debatable but is not, by and large, being debated, is profoundly troubling and indicative of what is going wrong in Johannine scholarship. The hesitant suggestions of earlier scholars have now become the ‘givens’ of this generation of scholars, who feel free to build fresh, hesitant suggestions on top of them. I am tempted to say that the emperor has no clothes—or, more conservatively, he is down to his underwear.
Rob Bell further undermines his credibility in the Nooma DVD Store | 016:
And then, the Bible says [in Mark 3:5] that Jesus looked around at them in anger. Jesus gets angry. Now this story was first told in the Greek language, and there’s a subtle nuance to this word “anger” in the Greek language. It’s in what’s called the aorist tense, which is a technical way of saying that Jesus’ anger is a temporary feeling. It comes on him, and then it leaves him.
Response:
This is not an isolated example. When Bell talks about ancient history, customs, language, etc., he not infrequently undermines his credibility.
Related:
Update:
Jim Hamilton, associate professor of biblical theology at Southern Seminary, teaches both Hebrew and Greek. This week he shared some wise and motivating advice for beginning Hebrew and Greek students (though it applies in some ways to more advanced students, too):
The below list does not reproduce a particular chart from D. A. Carson and Douglas J. Moo’s Introduction to the New Testament (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), but it is based on the text. They roughly date the twenty-seven New Testament books as follows (though the exact order of the twenty-seven books is fuzzy, e.g., re the prison epistles):
This morning a friend emailed me a thoughtful question in response to reading my post last night about the contest between King Darius’ three bodyguards.
I just read your post on 1 Esdras. Very enjoyable to read! I don’t think I have ever read much of the Apocrypha before, but this has piqued my curiosity. Are there any redeeming reasons for reading it? If there are, I would like to know them so I can be aware of them as I read.
Yes, I think that there are redeeming reasons for reading the Apocrypha. Even though Protestants reject its canonical status, the Apocrypha continued to be included between the covers of most English Bibles as late as the nineteenth century, and even the King James Version of 1611 included it. Although many English translations printed a small disclaimer that the Apocrypha was not on par with the Old and New Testaments, it was nonetheless between the same covers with sacred Scripture. The 1599 edition of the Geneva Bible was the first English Bible printed without the Apocrypha. So what was the Apocrypha doing in all those English Bible? Christians believed that it possesses spiritual value. How so? I’d suggest at least three ways that the Apocrypha is valuable: [Read more…] about The Value of the Apocrypha