A There were many temples of Apollo, as the chart above shows, and for that matter many temples of Artemis as well, and Claros, near Ephesos has both. In fact it is one of the most ancient Greek prophetic sites anywhere. It is very well worth exploring, and I finally got to go there on June 5th, and the next few posts will be about this important site. Here’s some helpful info from wikipedia accessed June 8th. “The Temple... Read more
Clifton Black, Mark’s Gospel. History, Theology, Interpretation, (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2023), pp. 556, $46.00 hardcopy. The blurbs for this book are stellar, and do not involve the usual hyperbole. This is probably the best monograph all around I’ve ever read on the Gospel of Mark, and worth every penny it costs. What we have in this book is the collected essays over various decades of Clifton Black on this earliest of Gospels. Unlike some collections of essays, which are... Read more
Q. The catena of quotations in Rom. 15 includes the exhortation at the very outset to ‘welcome one another’ after the word ‘therefore’ and means surely there is a connection with what came before in Rom. 14. The phrase itself implies a group of people Paul is here addressing, indeed he is referring to two groups, just as we see in the following chapter Rom. 16. In light of the mention of both ‘the circumcision’ and Gentiles in what follows... Read more
Q. You argue that Christ as the telos of the Law in 10.4 means that Christ is the goal and completion of the Law for Gentiles in Christ. This is not Paul’s view. Paul believes the coming of Christ has inaugurated the eschatological and messianic age for Jew and Gentile alike and so the Gospel about this is for everyone. Christ is the goal, fulfillment completion of the law for anyone, but only if they are in Christ. Paul sees... Read more
Q. On p. 126 you suggest that what dikaiosune theou means, at least primarily, is God’s covenant fidelity to Israel. What is odd about this assertion is that not only is Paul mainly addressing Gentiles and talking about right standing or rectification for them, but also interestingly, this is what Brueggemann and others have asserted hesed means in the OT— and they are wrong. The term hesed is even applied to Rahab and Ruth in the OT and has the... Read more
Q. Here are some thoughts about some of the major building blocks of your argument and my issues with how you read the text of Romans. I don’t really think you can get around the universalism of 3.20 ‘by works of the law ‘all flesh’ which includes Jews cannot be set right with God’. This is so for two reasons: 1) Paul believes in the universality of sin and of all being sinners, and that all need Christ, the Jewish... Read more
Q. P.109ff. I found the argument that what is being opposed is only adult circumcision in Rom. 2 doesn’t make sense to me when I consider what Paul is arguing against with his fellow Jewish Christians in Galatia, who want to circumcise Gentiles, regardless of age so they can become full-fledged Jews. Clearly Paul views circumcision as the sign of the Mosaic covenant just as baptism is the sign of the new covenant inaugurated by Christ. Put another way, circumcision... Read more
Q. I think part of the problem I have with the Paul within Judaism folks is that they either ignore or dismiss or selectively use the evidence in Acts, and then they misinterpret Paul at crucial junctures. This especially doesn’t work if in fact Luke was a sometime companion of Paul on his 2nd and 3rd missionary journeys and knew what he was talking about. The other problem is no matter how hard Nanos and Fredriksen and others try, they... Read more
O.K. I’m a bit late to the party. The movie came out while I was flying to Greece and leading a tour for two weeks. I believe I’ve seen all the previous iterations of this series, and I did not think that they could outdo some of the previous special effects, particularly with cars. I was mostly wrong. The central characters and the interaction of the ensemble I’ve enjoyed, as it’s in one sense a series about family, and in... Read more
Q. So far as I can see, Gentiles did not go around calling themselves Jews, even if they were God-fearers. Besides the general anti-Semitism of the Roman culture (see e.g. Juvenal’s satires), they were perfectly happy to just be called God-fearers. Consider for example this inscription from the theater in Miletus—– it reads. “τόπoς Ειουδέων τῶν καὶ Θεοσεβίον”the place for the Jews and the God–worshipers”. This inscription was surely made by Gentiles. So far as I can see the person... Read more
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