Matthew 5:17-20 Compare Mark 13:31; Luke 16:16-17 There are those, particularly among Evangelical Protestants, who sometimes seem (to me, at least) to come perilously close to teaching an antinomian view of Jesus — one for which (or for whom) rules of conduct are, in a sense, irrelevant. Today’s reading provides little support for such a view. Which may be one reason why Martin Luther is reputed, amazingly, to have referred to the Sermon on the Mount… Read more
New Testament Notes 48-49
Mark 3:7-12 Compare Matthew 4:24-25; 12:15-16; Luke 6:17-19 The accounts of healings given in the passages cited above mention people coming from Galilee, Idumea, Tyre and Sidon, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, and Judea, and from what used to be called Transjordan (that is, the area across the Jordan River, in what is today the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which was itself known as Transjordan even into the twentieth century). “His fame spread throughout all Syria,” says Matthew 4:24…. Read more