One of the mistakes often made in studying controversial words in the Bible is a failure to consider the entire semantic range, the range of meanings a word can have. This becomes all the more problematic when you are dealing with a hapax legomena— a word that appears exactly once in the NT, like the verb AUTHENTEO. And the mistake is not merely failing to look at the full range of meanings of this word, but also failing to even... Read more

(Yes that’s me in the hot seat of a vintage Sting Ray) Recently my friend Larry Hurtado commended the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek (ed. F. Montanari), and with good reason. It gives coverage other dictionaries don’t both from classical Greek literature and the early church fathers as well as the LXX and the NT itself. Now Brill books are hardly ever cheap, but you know the old saying— you get what you pay for. That is very often true... Read more

Perhaps some of you have seen the recent Netflix movie Come Sunday and the subsequent TV interviews with the Pentecostal minister who was defrocked for his denial of Hell, based on his belief that the Holy Spirit told him there wasn’t such a place, that in the end ‘Love Wins’, to borrow a familiar phrase. The movie raises the question about the universal love of God, and the universal atonement of Christ, and how anyone could end up in Hell... Read more

Annual Conferences are just around the corner all over the USA and there will be petitions submitted to annual conferences suggesting something along the lines of a local church option when it comes to defining what counts as Christian marriage, what counts as proper sexual morality, what counts as moral fitness for ordination. It is no use denying our beloved and belabored Methodist Church is in a crisis, but neither of the local church options that are currently being noised... Read more

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Paul Doherty is frankly an expert in medieval British history. And if you ever wanted to understand the life and times of that chaotic era in British history, reading his Hugh Corbett novels is an easy way to ease yourself into that labyrinth. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and dining with Paul while in London, and frankly prolific is too small a word to describe his ouevre. He’s written over 100 novels in 13 different series and various stand... Read more

Perhaps you don’t know beans about humans. But coffee is the original Christian beverage, invented in an Ethiopian monastery with Yirgacheffe beans. See the Nat Geo special ‘From Beans to Buzz’. Quiz question where did the name cappuccino come from? A. From the Cappuchin monks who made coffee that way (and the color of the beverage was the same as the color of their robes). Read more

James Sire’s book Habits of the Mind can be commended to one and all. Here is a quote from this fine book—- “When loving the truth is quite out of fashion, as it is at present, the very mention of the word can call up hatred. Veritas otium Parit, said the Roman poet Terence –truth engenders hatred. The desire to flee truth is deep, deep in human nature, and that fact is not obscure to anyone.” It is one of... Read more

Here’s a small quote from my forthcoming capstone work entitled Convergence. See what you think—- BW3 Doing Biblical theology is not an exercise in pushing theological ideas around a pre-existing theological playing board. It is also not an exercise in reading later theological ideas back into the Biblical text, for instance the idea of the later distinction between God’s being and his doing, or the later fuller description of the Holy Trinity. The raw data for the construction of a... Read more

So, I hopped on my bike and made a little trek down to Vandy to give a couple of lectures…. Whilst lecturing down at Vandy, I was at a friends house where the following picture was hanging on the wall….. This house also featured a frog driven to drink by the bowdlerization of the ten commandments…. You never know what those Nashville cats will be up to next (cue John Sebastian and the Loving Spoonful). Read more