My buddy Chris Skinner has written a book introducing the study of the Gospel of Thomas and CBD has discounted copies for a limited quantity.
Now, I kind of think it is funny CBD had it listed as “What Are They Saying About the Gospel of Thomas? – Slightly Imperfect”
Ha ha ha ha! Yes, the Gospel of Thomas is “slightly” imperfect…
Have you ever wondered, What are They Saying About the Gospel of Thomas? My buddy Chris Skinner can answer that question – and he has! In the Paulist Press WATSA series, his new book is due in May and can be pre-ordered for a very nice deal on Amazon ($6.40). Check it out! Congrats, Chris!
I am pleased to announce the (summer 2023) publication of a multi-contributor book, The Beginning of Paul’s Gospel: Theological Explorations in Romans 1-4 (Cascade Books), edited by John Goodrich and myself.
This comes out of the Pauline Theology seminar that John and I co-chair for the Institute for Biblical Research. This book includes excellent essays in specific theological issues of importance in Romans 1-4. Contributors include: John M. G. Barclay, Ben C. Blackwell, Timothy G. Gombis, Erin M. Heim, Chee-Chiew Lee, Grant Macaskill, Marcus A. Mininger, Matthew Monkemeier, Matthew V. Novenson, Rafael Rodriguez, Benjamin Schliesser, Paul T. Sloan, and Ruth Whiteford (essays by John and me as well).
ENDORSEMENTS:
“This is a stellar collection of essays by a cadre of eminent Pauline scholars. The rich, carefully argued essays shed new light on important aspects of Romans 1-4, especially on interpretative controversies old and new. Every serious student of Romans should therefore engage this stimulating volume.”
–Michael J. Gorman, professor of biblical studies and theology, St. Mary’s Seminary & University
“Through the ages, Paul’s Letter to the Romans has been regarded as his most important letter. This collection of lively essays offers important and impressive analyses of Romans 1-4, the theological fulcrum of the letter. They provide a valuable starting point for delving more deeply into the theology of Romans.”
–David E. Garland, professor of Christian Scriptures, George W. Truett Theological Seminary
“Scholarly study of Romans–the most discussed and debated letter in Paul–continues in this fascinating set of essays. The authors don’t all agree with one another, but the essays provoke fresh thinking and reflection on Romans. The essays here should be consulted and discussed in the ongoing conversation about Romans.”
–Thomas R. Schreiner, professor of New Testament interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
“Nijay Gupta and John Goodrich have assembled an impressive volume on an important topic. The contributors attend to the contexts, content, and arguments of the Pauline texts without losing sight of either exegetical detail or theological relevance. These essays are at all points informative and, at many points, offer insights that open up fresh questions for future scholarship–a welcome contribution to studies of Romans and of Paul’s thought.”
–James B. Prothro, assistant professor of Scripture and theology, Augustine Institute
“Readers of Paul’s Letter to the Romans are indebted to Nijay Gupta and John Goodrich for this collection of leading specialists grappling with the first four chapters of Romans. The array of essays provides a roadmap and critical evaluation of the most recent scholarship, including on such hot-button topics as intertextuality, audience, rhetorical patterns, ethnicity, and theology. The Beginning of Paul’s Gospel would also be an excellent text to help introduce students to these chapters.”
–A. Andrew Das, Niebuhr distinguished chair, Elmhurst University
Dr. Thomas Andrew Bennett has published the 1-3 John volume in the Two Horizons New Testament series. Eerdmans kindly sent me a copy and I appreciated some of Bennett’s fresh thinking on approaching these letters. In the past, scholars have spent a ridiculous amount of time and energy “reconstructing” the so-called Johannine community, and then fitting 1-3 John into elaborate situational theories. Is that the best way to approach these texts? Bennett says “no.” I asked Bennett to write up some thoughts on this—enjoy!
When I began seminary in 2005, the crumbling conventional wisdom was that the job of biblical studies was—through the careful application of historical-critical methods—to discover “what really happened.” The assumption was an academic (and secular) one: the Bible, like any other ancient document, is riddled with errors and fantasies and the job of the academic study of the text was to separate truth from fiction, cross over the gaps of history, mine the texts and whatever archeological findings to grasp once and for all what the biblical authors were hiding and what it all meant. The job of the preacher, then, was to sort through the assured findings of modern scholarship and figure out what it might mean now.
It was a disaster.
Seminarians who enjoyed this kind of study would give up quickly on actually serving the church, would take the academic track, and produce more volumes trying to figure out whether Jonah was a fairy tale (Consensus: yes), if it really took three days to cross Nineveh on foot in ~750 BCE (Consensus: it didn’t), and if there was a sea creature capable of sustaining human life in its belly (Consensus: there’s not). The seminarians who wished to preach preached, but did so mostly ignoring the work of their former classmates-turned-PhDs.
I say the conventional wisdom was “crumbling” because a cadre of ecumenical and confessing scholars were busy taking a sledgehammer to it on account of the revolutionary notion that the Bible should be for the church and that whatever scholars are doing with it should be of benefit to real, practicing Christians. The goal was not to leave the search for the truth behind, but to make it subservient to the “theological interpretation of Scripture,” that is, Scripture study that develops actual knowledge of and love for the God the texts were pointing out.
A noble end, to be sure, but it is taking some time to work out exactly how this should all work. And, over the last twenty or so years, everything from the academically rigorous approaches to methods mined from lay study have been tried: attending to the church Fathers, reinvigorating allegorical exegesis, spiritual exegesis, the canonical approach, etc. My own approach is highly syncretic, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
The result has been extremely promising. Fresh (or freshly recovered) ways of engaging texts have begun leading to whole new vistas of bible reading that nourishes the life of faith. Sometimes classical historical methods are tossed by the wayside; sometimes they are integrated with others; sometimes they take center stage. What drives theological interpretation and ultimately unifies it is its creedalism. All theological interpretation assumes from the outset that the Bible is meant to bless and nurture and convict and affirm readers because it testifies to the Triune God, the Father who sends the Son, the Son who, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth fully reveals the divine nature, and the Holy Spirit, who vivifies, guides, and empowers the church to witness to the world. When interpretation leads us to know and worship and love this God, there is a good chance that it is aiming in the right direction. Now, what does all this have to do with 1-3 John?
The Sermon and the Letters
1-3 John are some of the more enigmatic texts in the New Testament. 1 John has usually been classified as a letter, but it doesn’t read like one. 2 and 3 John are very short missives to a Patroness and her church and to “Gaius” and his church respectively. Moreover, these three texts bear strong linguistic and thematic links to the fourth gospel and Revelation. The church traditionally believed that “John,” the beloved disciple who followed Jesus and knew him wrote 1-3 John to the small churches in and near Ephesus where he lived and preached. But as we have just seen, what interested modern scholarship was not what the texts say, but what they hide. Who was John really? Was it really the same person who wrote the gospel? What kind of community did he lead? What did they believe and how was it different from churches Paul founded? Did the author really know Jesus? Why is the fourth gospel so different from the synoptics and what does that mean for 1-3 John? What occasioned 1 John? Who were the secessionists in 1 John 2:19 and why did they leave? The questions multiply themselves, not in the least part because, apart from 1-3 John, the Gospel of John, and Revelation, we have zero historical evidence on which to rely.
And so the most elaborate speculations were raised. 1 John is a commentary on the fourth gospel, meant to address theological problems raised by its idiosyncrasies. No, 1 John is a warning to churches not to succumb to incipient Docetism. No, 1 John is a manual written to identify heretics. No, 1 John gives us insight into the theological beliefs of the “Johannine community.” And what of 2 and 3 John? Of little note and certainly no historical value except insofar as they might have been cover letters for the main tract. All this is of incredible interest, no doubt, but not unfortunately to preachers and Christians who thought that there might be some Eternal Life to be gleaned from texts in which, unbelievably and incomprehensibly we are told, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). So how does the church take 1-3 John back?
The Solution
My commentary on 1-3 John proceeds from two closely related assumptions. The first is theological: because the church past, present, and future is One in the Spirit, the same Spirit who inspired John—whoever he (or she or they) may have been—to write these texts lives in the community of faith today and breathes into us the same Life. Because we share the same Spirit, 1-3 John is just as much to us as it is to those who first received it. You see, from a theological perspective, that is, from an ontological one, we are them and they are us. There are not “Johannine Christians” and “Pauline Christians,” there are just all those who share in the Spirit. Whatever was written was not written “for them” so we can find out how it might still be “for us.” No, it was written to us today because God the Holy Spirit binds us and makes us catholic.
The second assumption is philosophical: the text and only the text is the arbiter of meaning. Meaning is not “what really happened.” The meaning is the portrait of God that this text paints. This bears some further explanation. 20thCentury linguistic philosopher Paul Ricoeur developed a theory of meaning that I’ve called the “hypothesis of the text.”[1] Ricoeur thinks that every text, really every piece of art, projects a novel world. By attending closely to language, syntax, history, culture, etc., the reader can function as a kind of scientist, projecting what sort of world the text evokes. In effect, every interpretation of a text is a hypothesis. This text of this world is like this and not like that for reasons, a, b, and c. Ricoeur stands on the shoulders of Hans Georg Gadamer, an early 20th Century theorist who suggested something similar, that every text projects a horizon and that we bring our own horizon to it. Interpretation takes place when the horizon of the text begins to merge with and push back and be corrected by the one(s) we bring. When we bring this philosophical perspective to 1-3 John our concerns are less about what really happened and a lot more about Who is God in 1 John? And who does this text say we are? And how is that the same or different from what we normally think? How does that compare and contrast with other biblical texts? And if we were to adopt 1 John’s vision, how would that change the way we live?
Such an approach is no less academically rigorous than hard-nosed historicism. It might even be more so since it compels us to listen to the Fathers and contemporary sciences and literature and Greek and any other possible resource that might give us a handle on the world John tells. My prayer is that such an approach can give 1-3 John back to the church, back to sermons, that it can once again speak the truth to us now. And in that, I pray, we may once again be shocked by and conformed and united to the God who is love and so join in the storied and faithful communion of the saints.
[1] See Thomas Andrew Bennett, “Paul Ricoeur and the Hypothesis of the Text in Theological
Interpretation,” JTI 5 (2011): 211-30.
NKG: Check out Bennett’s new book
Recently I had the delightful opportunity to have a long chat with Professor Francis Watson (Durham University) about his stimulating new book, Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective. I would like to share that conversation with you through mostly summary with occasional quotes from particular statements Professor Watson (FW) made that I found especially rewarding or interesting.
The Beginning of the Journey towards Gospel Writing
We started off our conversation with my question how did you come to be interested in the subject matter of the Synoptic Problem and the composition of the gospels? FW explained that, even as a student new to the Greek New Testament, he fell in love with Albert Huck’s Greek synopsis and found issues related to the interrelationship between the gospels fascinating.
Fast-forward to FW’s years in Aberdeen, and he inherited a course on the gospels taught to first-year students. FW made it a point to include the study of, not only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but also some of the non-canonical gospels. FW found that students welcomed engagement with these texts. He also mentioned his interest in Mark Goodacre’s The Case Against Q and how it prompted him to look at the Synoptics carefully and see how Luke may have worked from Matthew.
While FW has been publishing a lot in Pauline studies in recent years, he has regularly published in the area of gospels studies and the canonical approach to biblical interpretation.
Thinking about Thinking
Given that FW has been ruminating on this subject in publications for a number of years, I asked him if he has changed his mind on any important matters. In the main, he assured me he hadn’t, but I was intrigued by his whole approach to the maturity of thought and scholarly circumspection.
“I am sure there are individual points where I have changed my mind, but it is hard to differentiate between changing one’s mind and just one’s thought developing as one thinks about things more and acquires new knowledge and understanding in new areas.”
(I found this a salutary point in view of questions about whether St. Paul “changed his mind” or “developed.” This way of looking at it, which FW has articulated, seems quite normal and human, and even necessary and rich. Perhaps so also for Paul.)
“Is Q Still a Hypothesis?”
I fondly remember an occasion, in my time as a Ph.D. student at Durham, when FW gave a richly-rewarding paper to the NT seminar called “Is Q Still a Hypothesis?” In Gospel Writing, FW argues that Q is not the best way to answer the Synoptic Problem despite its position as the default theory in many circles. I asked FW if there were other like-minded scholars who are doubtful of Q. He reminded me of a collection of essays edited by Mark Goodacre and Nicholas Perrin called Questioning Q. However, he noted that, even though there are a number of scholars critical of Q, they do not all agree on the better hypothesis. This led me to my next question:
If not Q, then What?
Gospel Writing develops very carefully FW’s own theory, but he was kind enough to explain to me the key points.
First, he told me, it is not enough to limit one’s material only to Matthew, Mark, and Luke when trying to sort out the early work of “gospel writing.”
“my basic assumption is that material related to Jesus, and specifically sayings attributed to Jesus get written down from quite an early stage.”
FW admitted that this is a point in favor of Q (the theory of an early piece of writing not in story-form), but FW appeals to the Gospel of Thomas as a “late example of what would have been an early primitive Christian genre of a ‘sayings collection’” – indeed, he added, “simple, non-literary sayings collections are one of the roots of the developing gospel tradition.”
A second point FW made was that, then, Mark is not really the first attempt to put the Jesus tradition into writing. Thirdly, Matthew, then, is a further interpretive project building from, but even seeking to replace, Mark. Thus, Matthew serves, FW stated, “as a rival attempt at a revised, expanded, second-edition of the text.”
FW recognized that the language of “rivalry” could sound combative, but he explained that authorial names do not get firmly attached to the gospels until the mid-second century or so. In the first century, gospel writing appears to have been an anonymous activity. Thus, when readers/auditors encountered Matthew, FW is not sure whether it would have been understood as an entirely separate work from Mark, or some kind of expansion. What we see in the first century is not a clear intent for known authors to publish individual books, but, rather, all signs point to a more “fluid and ongoing process of gospel writing.”
In the next post we continue the dialogue, focusing especially on this idea of gospel writing as interpretation and re-interpretation, as well as the benefits of the plurality of the fourfold gospel collection in the New Testament.
I had a dream one night that I had book contracts to write both a systematic theology textbook and also a commentary on Romans (two of the most serious challenges a Christian scholar might face in his or her career). I turned and looked in the mirror and saw red hair – for I had become Michael F. Bird.
No, not really. But I am delighted there are people in the world like Mike who feel comfortable in the Biblical Studies world as well as the theology world. And I am honored to have Zondervan send me his Evangelical Theology to review.
By now there are several reviews finished or started on the web, so I won’t try to be comprehensive here. The bottom line for me is that this is the first thing I would mention to anyone who asked me to recommend a systematic theology. When I was in seminary, I found the pick of systematic theologies woefully inadequate and they talked about theology in such stale and confusing ways. Mike’s approach is clear and engaging, and offers the best reflections from Biblical Studies and systematic (and historical and cultural) theology.
You may already know that the way Mike approaches an “Evangelical Theology” is by focusing on the “Evangel,” the Gospel. Here is his definition:
The gospel is the announcement that God’s kingdom has come in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord and Messiah, in fulfillment of Israel’s Scriptures. The gospel evokes faith, repentance, and discipleship; its accompanying effects include salvation and the gift of the Holy Spirit (52).
This is a wonderful way to proceed with a systematic theology. I am not sure it is infused in every part of the theology, but it is there enough to make it distinctive. Bravo!
Truth be told, I did not read every single word of the book of 900+ pages, but I read bits that were most interesting to me. From the portions I read (and a glance at the indexes), I noted that the greatest influences on Mike evident in the work are: Augustine, Barth, Calvin, Millard Erickson, Michael Horton, Thomas Schreiner, Kevin Vanhoozer, and (last but not least) N.T. Wright.
How shall we proceed with my own reflections? I thought it appropriate to refer to what I thought was Groovy and Not-So-Groovy.
Groovy
1. The book is just a lot of fun. I laughed. I cried (at his Calvinism). I ate popcorn. I said a prayer. I fell asleep. It fell on me.
Seriously, though, it is a very engaging textbook with great excurses and charts. The outline is clear and the topics flow very smoothly. It would be easy to organize a course around the book sections.
2. Mike’s discussion about his “doctrine of Scripture”:
“In my thinking, a doctrine of Scripture should not be a locus of its own. Such a doctrine stands somewhere between ecclesiology and pneumatology, or between church and Spirit, in terms of its appropriate place in a Christian theology” (196)
3. Mike offers a very groovy summary of Richard Hays’ reasons why we need “apocalyptic eschatology” (241-243).
4. Mike has a discussion of “cool internet resources” (291)
5. Mike quotes Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (301)
6. Mike argues that Jesus is a theologian. He also says that the epistles, Acts, and Revelation could be called the “Jesus Festschrift” (381)
7. Mike’s discussion of models of atonement is the best I have seen. See the handy charts on 410 and also 421. Every time I teach on the atonement I will appeal to this.
8. I love Mike’s explanation of the Christological heresy of the Monophysites: “two natures in a blender Christology” (483).
9. Mike’s work on ecclesiology is reason enough to get the book. He presses for the evangelical world to have a strong sense of the church’s identity and mission.
Not-So-Groovy
1. Perhaps the biggest concern I have with Mike’s textbook is that I couldn’t quite see where “ethics” and “redemptive living” fit into his framework. There is no specific category for it. Something like ethics gets into his order of salvation vis-a-vis regeneration and sanctification, but this can come off as very individualistic. His discussion of the life and mission of the church is better on the concern for the life lived, but it did not come across as distinctive of a Gospel theology.
2. In relationship to the above, I was not that excited about his short discussion of the final judgment of believers. He takes a Schreiner-ian stance, I think: “Good works demonstrate the necessary evidences of a saving faith in the Savior” (303), where works are demonstrations of faith. But, if this is so, why not judge the “faith,” why judge the works at all (especially if God knows our hearts)? Perhaps this is explained by his statement that judgment will determine “how successfully believers have cooperated with his grace of renewal” (303). I think this gets closer to a helpful answer, but, again, it can come across as very individualistic (as if renewal and sanctification is about me and Jesus) – what about the Christian and the Church’s worldwide mission? Are we not held accountable because the world needs our works? I wish Mike had done a better job wedding his judgment-theology with his robust ecclesiology.
3. I found the discussion of hell to be too systematic. Imagine my surprise when Mike starts talking about two separate sheols in the OT, one for saints and one for the wicked; and then later in salvation history the saints go with Jesus and the bad sheol gets dumped into hell. Don’t get me wrong, this is the kind of thing systematicians do (so Mike’s discussion may be par for the course), but I just don’t see how it can be worked out in that way with that level of detail (and a timeline with pictures!). Also, you might not be surprised that Mike defends a traditional view of eternal damnation in hell for the wicked, but I was not satisfied with his short dismissal of annihilationism, and I wish he had brought in C.S. Lewis’ mature and rewarding thoughts on the language of the “eternality” of hell that comes from The Problem of Pain. I know you can’t expect a theologian to talk about everything, but — for me — Lewis’ approach ties up a lot of philosophical and moral loose ends. (Also, Mike – leave Rob Bell out of the book; in five years when this textbook is being used regularly across the world students are going to read your book and ask “Who’s Rob Bell?”)
Last Word
Please don’t take my few negative comments as the last word. My last word is that this is a better read than any other theology textbook I have read. Mike is humble, clear, entertaining, balanced, and studied. He is thoroughly evangelical, but cites and works with anyone that offers something useful (like Moltmann). If someone asked me if Mike’s Evangelical Theology was groovy or not-groovy, I publicly state now that I dubbeth it groovy – indeed.
I have, sitting on my desk, about 25 new books that I got at SBL and elsewhere – can’t wait to be done with finals grading and kick back with a good book (or 2 or 20) during the Christmas break. I would like to spotlight or review each and every one eventually, but for now I would like the mention five new and interesting books on Jesus and the Gospels.
The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed (Helen Bond, Continuum). I am about halfway through this book and it is a very engaging work. Sometimes Jesus books are tedious and stale. Bond writes in a very attractive style. She gives just the right amount of information and divides up the short book (194 pp.) into 13 chapters. She is neither a pious optimist, defending everything the Evangelists recount about Jesus point-by-point; nor is she a thoroughgoing skeptic, trying to deconstruct the Christ of faith and propose her own revised Jesus of Nazareth. She clearly has a deep appreciation for her own Doktorvater James Dunn and appears to be basically on-board with the Third Quest. I will have some critical comments about this book in a later post, but I want to make it clear that anyone interested in the “Historical Jesus” would find this book an extremely cogent and illuminating “state of the discussion.”
Unity and Diversity in the Gospels and Paul: Essays in Honor of Frank J. Matera (eds. C.W. Skinner and K.R. Iverson, SBL). While Festschriften tend to be “hit or miss” in terms of how insightful they are, there have been several as of late that have been “keepers.” I especially like when FSs truly engage with the honoree by focusing on a particular subject where the honoree made his or her mark. This is absolutely the case of this FS as it looks at this unity/diversity dialectic in NT theology, a hallmark of Matera’s work. The Synoptics are given special attention in the first half of the FS (“Unity and Diversity in the Gospels”), with eminent contributors such as Francis Moloney, Jack Kingsbury, John Donahue, Paul Achtemeier, William Kurz, and John Meier.I am particularly interested in Donahue’s essay: “The Lure of Wealth: Does Mark Have Social Gospel?” (71-94).
Jesus, Matthew’s Gospel and Early Christianity: Studies in Memory of Graham N. Stanton (eds. D.M. Gurtner, J. Willitts, and R.A. Burridge; T & T Clark). Speaking of Festschriften! Here is another one, this time for the late Graham Stanton. While I did not have the privilege of ever meeting Prof. Stanton, he was known through the UK as a true gentlemen, the kind of scholar and all-around gracious fellow that most students desire to emulate. Contributors in this FS (almost all focusing on Matthew) include Richard Burridge, Scot McKnight, James Dunn, Don Hagner, Craig Evans, Chris Tuckett, and David Catchpole (among a few others). What a fantastic memorial and tribute! The one problem is that this FS retails for $120, while the Matera FS sells for $50! Cost, in either of these cases, does not reflect quality! It is simply the way publishing works (sadly).
Reading the Gospels Wisely: A Narrative and theological Introduction (Jonathan Pennington, Baker). I just finished reading this book rather recently and I must say that it is extremely well written and a very fresh theological perspective on the hermeneutics of the Gospels. Like a good dialogue partner, I found myself at times nodding in agreement with Pennington, at other times scratching my head in confusion, and even still wanting to throw the book across the room out of frustration and disagreement! That is a good thing! He’s making me think! I talked with Pennington at SBL and congratulated him on the book. I told him, quite directly, that I was surprised that a profess at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary had the [shall we say ‘guts’] to push some of the buttons that he does in the book. One can even get a sense for this “button-pushing” in Thomas Schreiner’s tempered back-cover endorsement where he says “While I don’t agree with everything Pennington says…” I never thought of myself as the “conservative” while reading a book by a SBTS prof, but, sure enough, I was! Thanks Jonathan for your boldness. I will have a series of blog posts on this excellent book, underscoring, not the Good/Bad/Ugly, but the Great, the Good, and the So-So.
Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (eds. C. Keith and A. Le Donne; T & T Clark). Last, but not least, I got in the post yesterday this very attractive volume that relates to a conference held earlier this year. James McGrath has a nice “round-up” of how that conference went. Together, the contributors attempt to bury the “criteria-movement” of HJ research in the ground. By many people’s accounts, this is an important “snapshot” in the history of NT scholarship where we see the progression towards a consensus that the choppy and marble-pitching approach to the study of the Gospels historically is a dead end. The “quest” will, no doubt, still go on for the foreseeable future (sorry Scot!), but memory studies and oral culture habits seem to be paving the way. More to come…
This blog series spotlights 50 NT scholars and their research. The goal of this series is to introduce readers to a wider circle of scholarship than they have encountered. The majority of people on this list are early or mid-career NT scholars who are doing great research and writing.
Johannine Ethics: The Moral World of the Gospel and Epistles of John (with Sherri Brown; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017)
I am very excited to announce that Chris Skinner and I are now teaming up here at the blog Crux Sola. As of today (Jan 22, 2014), he will be posting from here and I am looking forward to working with him: Watch out Mike and Joel and Anthony and Chris– there is a new “Brangelina” in town (did I just say that?).
Here is what Chris posted on his own (former!) blog:
I am happy to announce that as of today, Wednesday, January 22, 2014, I will be joining forces with Njiay Gupta over at Crux Sola. We have decided to combine our blogging powers in an effort to conquer the blogosphere and pursue worldwide domination! Actually, Nijay’s invitation to join his blog was laced with greater humility than that, but I’m currently having delusions of grandeur.
Nijay has been blogging since 2007 and his focus has largely been on issues related to the interpretation of the Pauline literature. Most of my blogging has been related to the Gospels, the historical Jesus, and early Christianity. Between the two of us, we hope to blog about the entire NT, Judaism during the time of Jesus and Paul, and Christianity during the first four centuries C.E.
In the four plus years that I have blogging here at PEJE IESOUS, the most frequently visited pages have been my interviews with scholars working on the Gospel of Thomas. All of these interviews will be moved to Crux Sola. You will find these under the tab, Chris’s Pages. So, if you have me (or Nijay) in your blogroll or you have linked to this blog on your webpage, please make note of the change. Also, if you have subscribed to this blog (which I greatly appreciate), please subscribe over there and continue to follow what I’m doing. This will be my last post here at PEJE IESOUS. I appreciate those of you who have paid attention to what I’ve been doing here for the past four years!
Crux Sola: Formed by Scripture to Live like Christ
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