There are generally two reactions I hear to this in Sunday School classes and church pews–it’s either fascination, as if the genealogies make or break the Bible or complete indifference, as in “who cares?” Both reactions miss the point. Matthew and Luke are each making a point, and they are making it in a way…
With a recent flurry of posts regarding the way in which the Old Testament is used in the New, at least peripherally, I wanted to call attention to one written from a different perspective. The post is Isaiah 7, Nativity, and the Theotokos, written by Mark Olson, who speaks from an Orthodox perspective. He discusses…
John Cassian was a monk and ascetic writer from Gaul and lived in the late 4th and early 5th centuries AD [source]. I found this in Hebrews: Ancient Christian commentary on Scripture, New Testament X, though I went to the Order of Saint Benedict Lectio site for the translation I use here: YOU must then,…
… at Clayboy. On the topic of the size of this carnival, allow me to give an opinion. I’m not in the current carnival. I didn’t nominate any of my posts, and not surprisingly nobody else did either. This is a good approach, I think. Use only the nominations as those of us involved in…
… you don’t know Greek and Hebrew, and there are certain things you cannot do, like, well, reading Greek and Hebrew. I don’t think this means you can’t read the Bible, or that your opinions don’t matter, but it’s a simple fact. When people pretend to know the Biblical languages, as they often do using…
I had just finished posting the previous note, Talk about the Method, when I went back to my Google Reader and found this YouTube video, complete with a call to a five year commitment to God, via Polycarp: Now if people had any knowledge of method, or were at least practiced in thinking about method,…
When I teach Sunday School classes, as I often do, there is nothing more likely to lull people to sleep than a discussion of hermeneutics. I get a great deal of attention talking about history. People are very interested as I explore some different interpretations of a particular Biblical passage and where and when those…
John Hobbins has produced an excellent post on exegesis, The unacceptable limits of traditional exegesis, in which he calls us to keep the various senses of the text together, or perhaps in tension. At some time I would like to extend this discussion to the use of the various disciplines we normally bundle under the…
I have been reminded several times recently in private conversations of just how inadequate the literal to figurative continuum is in discussing how we understand scripture. Bruce Alderman has written an interesting article on the number of things we take as figurative in Genesis 3, and then asks: Why is it that so many Christians…
I decided to check on what Holy Bible: Mosaic NLT might have for my lectionary reading this week. First I checked the material for the 18th Sunday in Pentecost. Their readings do not coincide with the Revised Common Lectionary at all this week, though they do follow the church year. The RCL readings (with United…