The Bible and Culture

I've grown weary of so many Christians using the phrase "well it's just common sense!" I've grown weary of it especially when what follows this exclamation is usually ideas which are not compatible with what the Bible says. Take for example "neither a borrower nor a lender be". I've heard that one quoted quite a lot following the exclamation about common sense. This word just in--- that's not in the Bible and it's not even compatible with what's in the Bible! It's from the Bard, not the … [Read more...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tukQDg22o9MSometimes things are just not as advertized. This movie is one of them. It has a few good scenes. One of the better ones can be viewed above. It also has a boat load of the F word and the S word, and some absolutely grotesque violence scenes, including one in a church in Kentucky, supposedly. We folks don't behave like that in church, not even in the snake handling churches--- honest. I understand that this movie is something of a spoof on the … [Read more...]

It is the conclusion of Richard Hays that we "must learn to read Israel's Scriptures not only through the filtering lens of modern critical methods, but also through the eyes of John and other authors of the canonical Gospels" (p. 93). Thus "the hermeneutical key to this intertextual dialectic is the practice of figural reading: the discernment of unexpected patterns of correspondence between earlier and later events or persons within a continuous temporal stream." Such a reading is only … [Read more...]

http://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/02/26/finding-jesus-season-1-episode-1.cnn/video/playlists/finding-jesus/" title="Finding Jesus" … [Read more...]

When you are dealing with a docu-drama, sometimes it's hard to get the balance right between education and what is dramatically effective on the screen. The first episode of Finding Jesus was indeed well filmed, the cinematography was excellent, and it involved a nice array of voices as the talking heads interspersed between the recreations of the scenes related to the burial shroud of Jesus. Obviously, the focus was on the shroud, now called the shroud of Turin. There was a nice balance of … [Read more...]

12) In the second volume of the Lightfoot Legacy series, the volume on the Gospel of John to be published next year, Lightfoot says almost exactly the same thing you do about Jesus as Temple and the fulfillment of the Festivals etc. and about the backwards reading of the Scriptures as exhibited in John as well. It is interesting as well that he insists as you do on p. 131 n. 24 that the backwards reading does not negate the historical forward reading of Scripture but that one should see them as … [Read more...]

10) I would like to suggest a dictum, and get your reaction--- No backward reading of the OT that violates or contradicts a forward reading of the meaning in the OT text is found in the NT. Yes, or no?***Here, Ben, I think you are “leading the witness.” I have not made an argument for the dictum that you suggest. It is such a broad generalization that I would hesitate to affirm it without a great deal more careful and comprehensive study than I have been able to do. Certainly there are pla … [Read more...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQjYdcqeFkYIs there archaeological evidence that helps us sort out the questions about the historical Jesus? Obviously, I do not yet know how the interviews and story of Jesus has been edited in this series, but we may hope it at least asks the right questions about the interface between faith and facts when it comes to Jesus. It will be worth watching. BW3 … [Read more...]

8) One of the issues often raised about Matthew is the difference between prediction and fulfillment, the latter being a much larger category of things. So when Matthew says Is. 7.14 is fulfilled in the story of Jesus, would you take him to mean that it was predicted in Isaiah, or that Isaiah simply said more than he realized, speaking to his own immediate audience, and so Christ is a filling out of the story and a fulfilling of it that would go beyond the original intended meaning, but not … [Read more...]