The Bible and Culture

In this book, Acts is dealt with separately from Luke's Gospel, though it may be doubted this was a good idea, since the vast majority of scholars think the same person wrote both books, and it would have been good if the case for anti-imperial rhetoric in the former volume was compared to the case in the latter volume. Certainly it is true, as D.J. Strait points out, that there were various cities visited by Paul and other early Christians, where there were inscriptions like this one found in … [Read more...]

Anyone at all familiar with the Gospel of John knows that it begins with the logos hymn, and that that hymn in a significant way sets the agenda for what follows, especially Christologically. Knowing where the Son came from, and where he is going is the key to knowing who Jesus is. The characters in the narrative, apart from Jesus, do not know he is God the Son prior to the resurrection, and so they make all sorts of false judgments about him, or at least inadequate ones. The crescendo of … [Read more...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg8lRGqtMHcThere is one slip in this video, namely it's not Jesus but Paul who is speaking in 1 Thess. 4. Otherwise, see what you think. BW3 … [Read more...]

The NT was mostly written by early Jews. One possible or likely exception to this rule is Luke, who, nonetheless, shows such a knowledge of the LXX that it is possible he was a God-fearer, and so on the margins of the Jewish community before he became a follower of Jesus. Most NT scholars, including this one, believe that the Gospels were written in the last third of the first century, and that would include Luke's Gospel, and Acts as well. In other words, these documents were written after the … [Read more...]

AN INTERVIEW WITH SCOT MCKNIGHTBen: It appears that the purpose of this book was to offer a certain tempering of the recent rhetoric about the anti-imperial rhetoric found in the NT? Yes? Yes, in part, but only because both Joe and I thought the entire issue was getting out of hand. We didn’t, however, actually know all that much about what the individual authors in the volume thought about all the issues. We wanted an even-handed analysis of the evidence being used for a … [Read more...]

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One of the obvious growth areas in the study of the Gospels is the study of Matthew as a possible vehicle of anti-imperial rhetoric, largely due to the voluminous output on the subject by Warren Carter (20 articles and more). In the chapter by Joel Willits on Matthew he interacts with various of the major points Carter and others have been making about Matthew. On the surface of things, Matthew seems an unlikely candidate for anti-imperial rhetoric, being not only the Gospel that gives us … [Read more...]

The article by Judith Diehl (pp. 38-81, the longest article in the book) is a condensation of several survey articles she has done on the subject of the NT and the Imperial Cult. It is a very useful piece of summarizing and evaluating, but it has some surprising lacunae-- for example where is the treatment of Chris Bryan's important Render unto Caesar book? Nevertheless, you can't cover everything in one Reader's Digest sort of article, and what it does give us, including the biblio is … [Read more...]