Over at ABC Religion and Ethics, N.T. Wright writes On Palm Sunday, Jesus Rides into the Perfect Storm. Here’s a taste: If we try to follow Jesus in faith and hope and love on his journey to the cross, we will find that the hurricane of love which we tremblingly call God will sweep in from a fresh angle, fulfilling our dreams by first shattering them, bringing something new out of the dangerous combination of personal hopes and cultural pressures.... Read more

Over at ETC, Christian Askeland has a great piece on Jesus’s Wife Resurrected. Christian points out that any ambiguity in the carbon dating of GJW does not automatically favor its authenticity and thereby vindicate Prof. Karen King’s claims. Ye there are so many other factors which call into question its authenticity. He writes: Karen King has produced no new evidence to authenticate this fragment.  On the contrary, her prior contentions that the GJW fragment was (1) part of a literary... Read more

Over at Stand to Reason, Amy Hall has a good piece showing what Bart Ehrman and Evangelicals actually agree on concerning Jesus and divinity. With all the hoopla and debate – which to be frank I have deliberately cultivated in many ways – I think it is important to stress that not everything that Bart says about christological origins is disagreeable. Its a good summary. Read more

The latest issue of Harvard Theological Review includes some more data on the question of the authenticity of the Gospel of Jesus’ wife fragment. There are some excellent early responses from Larry Hurtado and Francis Watson to the HTR issue and the HDS press release. Anthony Le Donne (recently appointed to United Theological Seminary) has written a book about alleged stories about The Wife of Jesus and I wonder what he has to say on the matter. Read more

Miroslav Volf was recently in Australia talking at conferences, on Aussie TV, spoke to seminary students, and gave a talk to our Radio National about Exclusion and Embrace. You can listen to his audio lecture here. Professor Miroslav Volf presents the idea of loving embrace as a theological response to the problems of alienation. This embrace is based on remembering events and actions truthfully and appreciating the position of people who have wronged you. And Miroslav Volf goes even a... Read more

His name was Encyclopedia Brown. He was a protagonist of about 10 years old who in my third grade year I  thought was the most interesting character in story. And I was  a boy who cared little for reading. It has been many years since third grade and to be hones I’ve only thought about that hero in elementary school book fair books only occasionally in the 3 decades since. But if I would guess, I think the whole idea... Read more

Over at CT is a big write up on Surprised by N.T. Wright, which talks about Wright’s writing ministry and how it is effecting the church. I loved the part about Wright being bigger than Bultmann: Now picture Wright as a student attending similar lectures. How could one overturn this status quo? What scholar could dethrone, say, theologian Rudolf Bultmann? Not so much in the weeds of Bultmann’s thought—he’s hardly read that carefully any more, and two generations of theologians... Read more

My good friend, well-known blogger, and world renowned NT scholar Scot McKnight will be ordained as a Deacon in the Anglican Church later this month in April at the Church of  the Redeemer (PEAR USA). Scot gives an account of his journey here. All the best to Scot and Kris in their new ministry role!!! Read more

Just read a very interesting piece at ABP News about a Virginian Baptist church that looks deliberately Anglican. Sunday mornings at All Souls Charlottesville are fairly common for an Anglican congregation. The Book of Common Prayer and the Revised Common Lectionary are standard, creeds are spoken together, the Eucharist is the central focus of the liturgy and the minister blesses the congregation before it scatters back into the world. But the Charlottesville, Va., congregation isn’t an Episcopal church. It’s Baptist — in fact it’s a plant of the Baptist General... Read more

Dean Flemming Recovering the Full Mission of God: A Biblical Perspective on Being, Doing and Telling Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2013. Available at Amazon.com By Andrew Prince (Lecturer Ministry and Mission, Brisbane School of Theology). Historically there has been a tension within the Church concerning how it is to carry out its God-given mission. Is the church’s primary task to proclaim the gospel or to serve others? Is its priority telling or doing?  The aim of Dean Flemming’s Recovering the... Read more