The book of Genesis stands at the front of the Bible and provides an account of origins, setting the stage for the exodus from Egypt and the foundation of Israel as the people of God. The book can be usefully divided into three sections: The primeval history of 1-11, the ancestor narratives of 12-36, and the story of Joseph in 37-50. Although this may seem obvious to the person who has studied the book or the Bible at length, it isn’t necessarily obvious to the “average” Christian.  As a long time Christian, familiar with the stories of scripture from infancy, this division was an insight that had escaped me until I first read Bill Arnold’s commentary (published in 2009).

The primeval history (ch. 1) begins with a sweeping and doxological view of creation. It is a hymn of praise to God. God alone created the universe and all that is found within. There is no combat between gods, no divine deities in the sky, no forces of evil in the deeps, all familiar themes in the ancient Near East. God created and formed the earth to function as a holy space, and populated it with humans created in his image to serve as his representatives.

This is followed by four stories connected by genealogies (chs. 2-11). The genealogies serve to flesh out the stories and serve as an important part of a whole narrative composition. The stories, Eden and the Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Deluge, Babel, follow similar themes of spreading sin and the grace of God, with significant and interesting additional features as well.

The literary structure of 2-11 defies the rather simple literal interpretation often assumed by conservative Christians. The complications are numerous, and many of them don’t originate from conflicts with geology, biology, linguistics or archaeology. They arise from the text itself. Even in the absence of external evidence forced harmonizations or interpolations and extrapolations are required to maintain literal rather than “merely” literary truth. As such these complications have been subject to Jewish and Christian thought and speculation for millennia. Walter Moberly (The Theology of the Book of Genesis) outlines several of issues.

The story of Cain and Abel assumes a context with other humans present. The indications include Cain’s wife, but go beyond this alone. Moberly outlines four more. The division of labor with Cain a tiller of the ground and Abel a keeper of sheep.  “Such divisions of labor with their particular categorizations would not be meaningful if there were only a handful of people on the earth.” (p. 24) Cain kills Abel in the open countryside.  “The point of being in the open countryside is that one is away from other people in their settlements.”(p. 24)  Cain is worried about danger from others when he is sent off as a wanderer (v. 14).  Building a city (v. 17) presupposes a population.  The “solution” to these problems require us to assume that Adam and Eve had many unnamed children before or shortly after Cain and Abel. (All in the 130 years (5:3) before Seth! Seth replaces Abel after Cain kills him (4:25).)

 Moberly suggests that a well known story has been used by the author/editor of Genesis for a purpose. “The story itself has a history, and in the course of that history it has changed its location.” (p. 27)  The original author/editor and audience was aware that the story was being appropriated for a purpose.

From this it follows not that would should not take the narrative sequence from Adam and Eve to Cain and Abel with imaginative seriousness as part of the developing storyline, but that in analytical terms one should recognize that the narrative is, in a very real and important sense, artificial and constructed out of originally diverse material. The purpose of the literary construction would appear to be to juxtapose certain archetypal portrayals of life under God so that the interpretative lens is provided for reading God’s call of Abraham and Israel that follows. (p. 28)

The story of Noah and the Flood is another example. Moberly suggests that the perspective of the story reveals its genre. “The omniscient narrator reports even the inner thoughts and words of YHWH (6:5-8, 8:20-21). But he says nothing whatever about Noah’s thoughts or words – Noah says precisely nothing throughout.” (p. 29)  The story isn’t concerned with practicalities on any level. Nothing about living conditions at all. The people and animals are placed into a dark box for the duration. Noah couldn’t see what was going on outside. He had to send a bird.  The bird returns with an olive leaf. After a year underwater no tree would put out leaves.  But that isn’t important. In the context of the story “the leaf shows a return of regular conditions for life on earth.” (p. 30) There is a re-creation following the uncreation of the flood.

Other issues include the presence of the Nephilim both before and after the flood (Num 13:33). The text is explicit: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when …” (6:4)  This can be harmonized … but the point is that it has to be harmonized. Moberly notes that some rabbis proposed that the king of the Nephilim rode the roof of the ark. Other more sophisticated strategies have also been used.

The discussion of Cain’s descendants in ch. 4 names Jabal as the ancestor of those who live in tents and raise livestock and Jubal as the ancestor of all who play stringed instruments and pipes. “The natural implication of the text is that it refers to peoples living in the time of the narrator: the living in tents and musical playing are depicted with an active participle; … this account of Cain’s descendants seems unaware of a Flood that wiped them all out.” (p. 32)

Where is the truth? Lines have been drawn. Tom Paine and Richard Dawkins among others have taken this evidence and used it to dismiss Genesis as misguided ancient myths and legends, “invented absurdities or downright lies.” Many Christians have responded by committing to the defense of literal truth at all cost. Answers are found for everything. Moberly suggests that both the atheistic critique and the conservative reaction are based on the same understanding scripture as the Word of God – and perhaps it is this understanding that is the problem.

The basic issue for the theological interpreter is the relationship between the human and the divine. The human dimensions of the biblical text have been extensively studied in the modern period; and interpreters sometimes conclude, or at least imply, that to take seriously this human element is somehow to eliminate the divine. (p. 38)

But there is no reason to assume that the human element cannot mediate the divine message.  Human language, specifically ancient Hebrew, is used to mediate the story. These words, and those of the human speakers, are in a language that arose later than the context of the stories. Even God’s thoughts are related to us in the human Hebrew language. The divine is mediated through human elements.  One should conceive the divine and human roles as complementary rather than competitive.

The real challenge is to grasp how these belong together.  Or, in other terms, it is clear that the early chapters of Genesis – like the Bible as a whole – is a work of human construction. The question becomes whether this human construction is itself a response to antecedent divine initiative, and so mediates a reality beyond itself, and, if so, how fidelity in mediation should be understood, evaluated, and appropriated. (p. 40)

If the original authors and editors appropriated and used older stories to tell this story of origins, they did so knowingly and they could have been inspired by God to do so.  Inspiration isn’t limited to simple composition and original reports.  Moberly quotes Jon D. Levenson: “If Moses is the human author of Genesis, nothing ensures that God is its ultimate Author. If J, E, P, and various anonymous redactors are its human authors, nothing ensures that God is not its ultimate Author.” (p. 39)

Among other things, we should read the text canonically. It is the received form as it has been edited and assembled that carries the divine message. The identity of the human authors and editors is secondary,  of little importance. Parts of the text may indeed originate at the time of Moses, other parts later. But it is of no import, except when details of context help us to better understand the message. We don’t read Genesis to sort truth from error, but to find and know our God.

A story of God. If the primeval history of Genesis 2-11 is assembled as a literary whole using “stories with histories” it still can and does reveal God. In fact, God is the primary actor in this part of Genesis. He creates the world and places humans, created in his image male and female, in the world to act as his representatives. When Adam and Eve are tempted and sin, God responds with both judgement and grace. His speeches are the most important. When Cain’s offering is rejected God warns of sin lurking at his door and when he murders Abel God knows and responds in judgement and grace. When humankind sinks to the depths of depravity God knows and responds in judgement and grace. But this solved nothing and resulted in a new covenant. When humankind builds a city and a tower in rebellion against God, God responds in judgement and grace.

And then God calls Abraham.

There is more that can be said about the text. Bill Arnold (Genesis (New Cambridge Bible Commentary)), notes that the primeval history establishes the God of Israel as the sovereign creator God of the entire world.

Gen 1-11 ties Israel’s ancestral covenant to the Creator of the universe. Yahweh is not simply the God of Jerusalem, nor of geographic Israel, nor is Yahweh only the God of the exodus plagues, nor of the Sinai desert. In a remarkable theological move that transcends most of ancient Near Eastern speculative thought, Yahweh of Israel, the God of the exodus and Sinai covenant as well as the God of the ancestral covenant, becomes the sovereign Lord of all. The God of Sinai and Zion is thus also the God of Eden and Ararat. (p. 124)

The God who calls Abraham is the one and only Lord of all.

Whatever position we take on the compositional history of Genesis 1-11, we can all agree on this.

What is the message of Genesis 1-11?

Is it true? Why or why not?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

You believe in spanking? Julie Beck:

Around the world, an average of 60 percent of children receive some kind of physical punishment, according to UNICEF. And the most common form is spanking. In the United States, most people still see spanking as acceptable, though FiveThirtyEight reports that the percentage of people who approve of spanking has gone down, from 84 percent in 1986 to about 70 percent in 2012.“The question of whether parents should spank their children to correct misbehaviors sits at a nexus of arguments from ethical, religious, and human-rights perspectives,” write Elizabeth Gershoff of the University of Texas at Austin, and Andrew Grogan-Kaylor of the University of Michigan, in a new meta-analysisexamining the research on spanking and its effects on children.The researchers raised concerns that previous meta-analyses had defined physical punishment too broadly, including harsher and more abusive behaviors alongside spanking. So for this meta-analysis, they defined spanking as “hitting a child on their buttocks or extremities using an open hand.”

They also worried that spanking was only linked to bad outcomes for kids in studies that weren’t methodologically outstanding. It’s hard to study real-world outcomes like this; there are only a few controlled experimental studies in which some mothers spanked their kids and some didn’t, in a laboratory setting. Those were included in this analysis, along with cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, for a total of 75 studies, 39 of which hadn’t been looked at by any previous meta-analyses. Altogether, these studies included data from 160,927 children.The researchers looked at the effect sizes from these studies, to see how strong their results were. There were 111 different effect sizes for 75 studies (some of the studies included more than one result). Of those, 108 found that spanking was linked to poor outcomes. Seventy-eight of the negative results were statistically significant. Only nine results indicated that there could be a benefit to spanking, and only one of those was statistically significant.“Thus, among the 79 statistically significant effect sizes, 99 percent indicated an association between spanking and a detrimental child outcome,” the study reads. Those outcomes were: “low moral internalization, aggression, antisocial behavior, externalizing behavior problems, internalizing behavior problems, mental-health problems, negative parent–child relationships, impaired cognitive ability, low self-esteem, and risk of physical abuse from parents.”

Thomas Daigle and Leicester City FC:

For hockey fans, it’s the equivalent of an AHL team making it to the Stanley Cup finals. Bookmakers said it was as likely as the discovery of the Loch Ness Monster. Even the staunchest supporters of Leicester City FC didn’t believe the team would make it this far.

With a win this Sunday, Leicester would clinch the English Premier League title.

“At the start of the season, I would have been happy with 17th place,” said longtime fan Charlie Cranston. “That would have been a good season for us.”

After spending much of the past decade in lower leagues, Leicester now sits atop English Premier League soccer with three matches left to play. The Foxes, as they’re known, stand a real chance of winning it all for the first time in the club’s 132-year history.

Not only does the team represent a city smaller than Halifax, Leicester’s payroll is only a fraction of those of internationally renowned clubs such as Chelsea and Arsenal. Manchester United is expected to become the first English team to earn £500 million — about $910 million Cdn — in one season, despite sitting four spots behind lowly Leicester.

“Money has shaped entirely the European game until now,” said John Williams, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Leicester who specializes in soccer.

“It’s unheard of, really, for a club of Leicester’s size to win the league title, so completely out of the blue,” Williams said.

The feat was so implausible that, at the start of the season, bookmakers gave Leicester 5,000-1 odds of winning it all.

Burning of the Tusks:

Tusks from more than 6,000 illegally killed elephants will be burned in Kenya on Saturday, the biggest ever destruction of an ivory stockpile and the most striking symbol yet of the plight of one of nature’s last great beasts.

The ceremonial burning in Nairobi national park at noon will be attended by Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, heads of state including Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, high-ranking United Nations and US officials, and charities. A wide network of conservation groups around the world have sent messages applauding the work.

On Friday, Kenyatta said Kenya would seek a “total ban on the trade in elephant ivory” at an international wildlife trade meeting in South Africa this September. “The future of the African elephant and rhino is far from secure so long as demand for their products continues to exist,” he said.

On Saturday about 105 tonnes of elephant ivory and 1.5 tonnes of rhino horn will burn in 11 large pyres, about seven times the amount previously burned in a single event. The bonfire, so big it will take about four hours to burn completely, highlights the continuing crisis in elephant populations. About 30,000 to 50,000 elephants a year were killed from 2008 to 2013 alone, according to the Born Free Foundation, and the rate of killing is outstripping the rate of births in Africa.

Prior to the burning, as much scientific and educational information as possible has been extracted, and Kenya will be left with about 20 tonnes of ivory that are still going through the legal process.

Ronnie Wood, the Rolling Stone and patron of the Tusk charity, was among celebrities speaking out ahead of the burn: “It makes me so sad to think that in another 15 years or so elephants, rhinos and even lions could have disappeared from the wild, denying our children the experience of knowing and loving them. We just cannot allow that to happen.”

Let’s pretend you are…, by Courtney E. Martin:

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in the US, this time in a place called San Bernardino. You’ve never heard of it. You’ve never been to the US. But you’ve certainly heard a lot about the gun violence there. It seems like a new mass shooting happens every week.

You wonder if you could go there and get stricter gun legislation passed. You’d be a hero to the American people, a problem-solver, a lifesaver. How hard could it be? Maybe there’s a fellowship for high-minded people like you to go to the US after college and train as social entrepreneurs. You could start the nonprofit organisation that ends mass shootings, maybe even win a humanitarian award by the time you are 30.

Sound hopelessly naive? Maybe even a little deluded? It is. And yet, it’s not much different from how too many Americans think about social change in the global south.

If you asked a 22-year-old American about gun control in this country, she would probably tell you that it’s a lot more complicated than taking some workshops on social entrepreneurship and starting a nonprofit. She might tell her counterpart from Kampala about the intractable nature of the legislative branch, the long history of gun culture in this country and its passionate defenders, the complexity of mental illness and its treatment. She would perhaps mention the added complication of agitating for change as an outsider.

But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girls’ secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even easily solvable.

I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know.

If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems.

Great story of the week, by Colby Itkowitz:

The fundraising page she’d created online more than a month ago sat stubbornly at $60. Meanwhile, the family scrimped and saved. They traded their nicer phones for cheaper prepaid ones. Donnie Davis stopped getting her hair and nails done. Everything that didn’t go to the bills was set aside for adoption fees.

Then they went through their belongings, getting rid of anything they didn’t need. They’d sell it all in a yard sale. “Even if I sell this for just a quarter, we’re a quarter closer,” Davis, 40, said she’d reasoned over an item.

Her son, Tristan Jacobson, a shy 9-year-old who loves math and basketball, wanted to help, too. So Davis suggested he set up a lemonade stand during the sale.

Tristan has been under Davis’s legal guardianship since he was 5, she said, but they’ve never had the discretionary income to pay the costs of legally adopting him.

“To me and my husband he’s already our son, we’ve raised him,” Davis said. “It gives him the assurance that he has his family that he will always be with us.”

Word got around their community in Springfield, Mo., about Tristan’s upcoming lemonade business to fund his adoption, and a local newspaper did a story about it. So did a few of the local television stations and radio stations.

[Hundreds of Flint children don’t fear washing their hands, thanks to one 7-year-old boy]

Over the weekend, people showed up at their home in droves. One couple drove 2 1/2 hours, Davis said. Another man was driving from California to Chicago and heard the story on the radio and detoured to get a bottle of Tristan’s lemonade. They were selling each lemonade for $1. Many people paid $20.

Karin Brulliard:

A year ago at this time, Illinois resident TR was flabby and fatigued. The black bear has since lost one-fifth of his body weight and has a new spring in his step. Benny, his bobcat neighbor, lost a good quarter of his weight.

Their secret? Not diet pills or bariatric surgery, but rather those boring things your doctor probably orders: Fewer sweets, more veggies and more movement. Evidently what works for people also works for zoo animals.

TR and Benny are among the denizens of Illinois’s Wildlife Prairie Park who received some bad news last year, according to the Peoria Journal Star: They were too fat. TR weighed 756 pounds; Benny weighed 41. Badgers, cougars, raccoons and other non-roaming animals at the park had also ballooned beyond reasonable proportions.

Unsurprisingly, this happens to captive animals with some frequency. Their conditions — human-provided menus and unnatural environments — are probably to blame.

In 2014, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported that 40 percent of African elephants in U.S. zoos were obese and at risk of developing heart disease, arthritis and infertility. Last year, the Copenhagen Zoo said its residents — “basically all of the animals except the birds,” as a spokeswoman put it — had packed on too many pounds. Lucy, a 42-year-old orangutan at the National Zoo in Washington, was deemed 25 to 30 pounds overweight last year, in part because she preferred slacking off to swinging on overhead cables.

Backlash — economic style — at the University of Missouri, by Jillian Kay Melchior:

His prediction proved spot-on. The 7,400 pages of e-mails, obtained exclusively by these two publications, reveal how Mizzou overwhelmingly lost the support of longtime sports fans, donors, and alumni. Parents and grandparents wrote in from around the country declaring that their family members wouldn’t be attending Mizzou after the highly publicized controversy. Some current students talked about leaving.

This passionate backlash doesn’t appear to have been a bluff. Already, freshman enrollment is down 25 percent, leaving a $32 million funding gap and forcing the closure of four dorms. The month after the protests, donations to the athletic department were a mere $191,000 — down 72 percent over the same period a year earlier. Overall fundraising also took a big hit. [HT: CHG]

Tom Service:

“It is a principle of music to repeat the theme. Repeat and repeat again as the pace mounts.” William Carlos Williams had it right, in words later set by one of music’s most repetition-obsessed composers, Steve Reich in his The Desert Music.

But it’s not just the minimalists, the likes of Reich or Philip Glass. Repetition is a musical fundamental that connects every culture on Earth. And it’s not just the songs, symphonies or operas we love that are so often built on patterns that repeat – drumbeats, rhythms, melodies, harmonic cycles – it’s also that we love to listen to the same music, the same recording, again and again. And instead of being bored by the fact that we know that particular moment of achingly expressive vibrato is coming up on Billie Holliday’s recording of Summertime; or that the fugue in the Kyrie from Bach’s B-minor Mass is going to resolve in its final bar so radiantly into the major key from the minor; or that, despite our fondest hopes, Violetta is always going to die to those morbidly delicious strains of Verdi’sLa Traviata, our enjoyment increases the more we hear them. Far from diluting our pleasure, repeating them only seems to amplify our involvement in these musical experiences.

It’s an odd phenomenon that has little crossover in other art forms. As Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis’s work has revealed in On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, her book on precisely this phenomenon, it’s certainly not the same with words. If you say a phrase – a collection of words – over and over again it starts to become simply a collection of sounds rather than “meaning” anything. (Gertrude Steinand other avant garde writers made a new kind of literature from this fertile borderland where words are carriers of sound instead of signifiers of meaning.) It’s called “semantic satiation” – that moment when a phrase is overloaded through so much repetition that it slips out of the meaning-processing part of our brains.

Dishwasher wisdom, by Jura Konklus:

Carolyn Forte, director of home appliances for the Good Housekeeping Institute, is paid to know the best way to get your dishes sparkling clean.

She is still amazed at all the differences of opinion about dishwashers and how to run them for maximum performance. “Loading the dishwasher causes a lot of angst. This is still a battle ground, and people have such strong feelings about things like pre-rinsing,” she says. “It’s a little bit of a control issue.”

Forte and her staff analyze new dishwasher models and how to get the cleanest result. Manufacturers continually update features to balance energy efficiency and performance while reducing water usage, she says.

She’s constantly being asked for advice. One of her favorite tips: before you start your dishwasher, run the hot water in the sink next to it until the water gets hot, usually about 15 seconds. The cold water sitting in your pipes will go down the drain and not into your dishwasher. And of course, don’t forget to read your manual.

We asked her to address six common mistakes consumers make when operating dishwashers.

Lee Camp’s moving reflection on Easter politics:

Christianity is often misunderstood, and often misunderstood by the “believers.”

Easter is a political fact: that the merciful governance of a power beyond our understanding has been inaugurated in human history. Easter is not a mere “religious doctrine” to which Christianity calls potential adherents to give their intellectual assent, so that they might receive some reward in the after-life.

But if Easter is to be rightly recognized as a political fact, it must always be kept in tandem with Good Friday: what Easter vindicates is not the self-righteous claims of any particular group of people who see themselves as the good guys. Instead, Easter vindicates suffering love.

Note that Easter is not the triumph of suffering love. The triumph of suffering love is demonstrated on Good Friday.

When the powers-that-be would trump the truth with their big sticks and walls and torture, and yet the threatened one chooses, still, to bear witness to the truth: this itself is a victory. When the powers-that-be mock the one who protests the conceit of the powers, or when the powers-that-be spur the crowds to violence: in the midst of such fear-mongering, where is one who will stand undeterred, who will exhibit courage, who will not return hatred for hatred? Where is the one who will embody the meaning of being a true human?…

But if it is true — that the way of suffering love has been vindicated, has been shown to be the way in which the universe ultimately works — then it is a question with which we must all deal, religious or not. To argue with Easter is like arguing with gravity: it does not matter whether one “believes” it or not; it is simply a matter of whether we will continue to wound and harm and destroy ourselves by refusing to respect its reality.

That the way of love, even when tortured and killed, shall not be kept dead: if this be true, then such a claim would re-order not merely one’s private life, but the whole of life, and the whole of history, and the whole of politics.

Easter vindicates a new kind of politics: “whoever would be great among you must be your servant.” “Let your yes be yes, your no be no.” “Do good to those who do evil to you.” “Welcome the little children.” “Pray for those who spitefully use you.”

So, after Easter, if we would speak of making our community “great again,” we must come to terms with the politics of Easter: to be great requires a deep and liberating humility, a mercy and quiet persistence in meeting others in their distress, an allowance for others to speak and to be heard, a universal proclamation of the goodness of all human beings.

The privilege of de-cluttering, by Arielle Bernstein:

Today, of course, my mother has plenty of choices, but throwing things away still makes her anxious. Now that my grandparents have both passed away, my mother still struggles to decide what to do with all that stuff. It’s very painful for her, and my father’s encouragement that she sift through everything, organize it in some kind of clearly delineated way, often falls on deaf ears.

A few months ago, when I was visiting home, my father asked if I would help go through some of the items. Now that he and my mom are older and my brother and I are grown, they’ve both expressed a desire to downsize. In the car, my dad recommended starting with my childhood bedroom, which looks exactly as it did when I was 14 years old, pink and purple, filled with childhood books and stuffed animals, half-filled journals, and never worn shoes. At first I was enthusiastic about the project. “We can give a lot of those things to charity,” I said.But at home, I sat in front of my bookshelf and did exactly what Kondo cautions most against: I started my project of decluttering by going through the things that mattered most to me: the books I loved when I was a child; the CDs made by dear friends and stacked high in no particular order; the college textbooks I never remembered to return. Objects imbued with memories of a person I once was, and a person that part of me always will be.I didn’t want to give any of it up.Kondo says that we can appreciate the objects we used to love deeply just by saying goodbye to them. But for families that have experienced giving their dearest possessions up unwillingly, “putting things in order” is never going to be as simple as throwing things away. Everything they manage to hold onto matters deeply. Everything is confirmation they survived.

Here is the question Professor James D.G. Dunn asks in his lengthy chp (Neither Jew Nor Greek) on the Jesus tradition in the 2d Century AD:

In particular, should the NT Gospels be regarded as the only true inheritors of the oral Jesus tradition, the only authoritative written expressions of the Jesus tradition? (406)

If you check out the bookshelves in bookstores, or read what is happening every year around Easter (though this year was mild), or think of Bart Ehrman or Dan Brown, you would think the answer to the question was No, No, No, and No because there was a massive diversity that was shunted and narrowed down to a diversity-degrading uniformity, conformity, coerciveness and false unity with the rise of the Nicene Creed and orthodox Christianity. Well, Dunn doesn’t play Ehrman’s game of conspiracy, for which he has become famous, but instead plays the game of evidence — fair and honest. Nor does Dunn play the game of “whatever the creedal tradition teaches us is all we need to believe.” He’s fair and honest.

We are treated to a patient investigation of the identity that was contested so virulently in the 2d Century. Here are some conclusions:

1. With one or two exceptions, the Jesus tradition, particularly the sayings of Jesus, was often cited and constituted an important element in catechetical and paraenetic teaching.
2. This was true across quite a wide spectrum of churches as attested by the documents reviewed.
3. Some of the use of the Jesus tradition is explicitly attributed to ‘the Lord’. But much more seems to have simply been absorbed into the lifeblood of these early churches.
4. While several features within the echoed Jesus tradition can be linked to distinctive features of one of the already written Gospels, particularly Matthew, but also John, the references do not demand to be interpreted as quotations or dependent on the writers having a written Gospel to hand.
5. The Papias testimony in particular confirms that oral Jesus tradition was still a lively resource for the early churches. (449-450).

What of the 2d Century apologists? (Aristides, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, and Melito of Sardis, here including Irenaeus, but leaving to one side the Epistle to Diognetus)

What is particularly interesting in comparing the testimony drawn from the Apostolic Fathers with the testimony of the apologists is the transition from a knowledge of the Jesus tradition primarily in oral terms (through regular liturgical and catechetical usage) to a greater awareness of and reliance on written Gospels. Also evident is little or no use of or reliance on the sort of tradition attributed to Jesus by the Gospel of Thomas and the apocryphal Gospels to be reviewed below — even though catechetical and apologetic presentations did not hesitate to elaborate the Christian teaching and claims by drawing on other sources. Together these facts strongly suggest: (1) that the oral Jesus tradition was steadily being conformed to the written versions in the NT Gospels — the NT Gospels were well on the way to providing the main body of Christians with the norm for what counted as Gospel; and (2) that the inscribing of the Jesus tradition was seen as a way of bracketing it off from the other Gospels which were beginning to appear in this period a way of preventing the Jesus tradition from being elaborated in ways which drew it too far away from its original inspiration in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus (462).

Another patient discussion of the Gnostic Gospels, leading to this:

In sum, the Gnostic Gospels show awareness of and reliance on the Jesus tradition as known to us from the NT Gospels, but provide no evidence of Jesus tradition which might have been known to but unused by the NT Gospel writers. They provide evidence only of Jesus tradition elaborated and adapted to fit with anthropological and soteriological claims, which, as with the Gospel of Thomas, had been drawn from a different perception of the human condition. Not least of interest are the number of indications that some groups saw in the special relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene opportunity to contest the patriarchal leadership of the great church (488).

Here are Dunn’s major conclusions of this lengthy chp on the Jesus tradition in the 2d Century:

1. It is very likely that the Jesus tradition continued to be known orally well into the second century.
2. There is sufficient indication that the inscribing of the Jesus tradition by Matthew and John in particular influenced the wider (oral) Jesus tradition, so that often the echo of or allusion to Jesus tradition, or the more widespread catechetical, liturgical and apologetic tradition, would bear the stamp of features introduced to the Jesus tradition by the versions which Matthew and John recorded.
3. As the second century progressed, it would appear that dependency on the oral tradition as such diminished as the NT Gospels became more widely known and influential.
4. The other (non-canonical) Gospels also attest the influence of the first-century Jesus tradition. But characteristically the more gnostically oriented Gospels weave earlier Jesus tradition into a diagnosis and narrative of the human condition which is not drawn from the earlier Jesus tradition but from elsewhere.
5. It is wholly understandable, therefore, that Irenaeus should see in the four NT Gospels both the foundation documents for Christianity and the bulwark against the distortions and perversions of the gospel content and format which were the other Gospels. In this Irenaeus was not taking an unusual step, or trying single-handedly to withstand a torrent of other Gospels causing confusion among the mainstream of Christians. He was simply summing up the trends that had always been there, from the late first century, and bringing to appropriate conclusion what had been the main thrust of the Jesus tradition into the second century (503-504).

Long ago the argument was made that when someone asks the question in the title to this post, which is the question we will explore in the post, the question makes an assumption that fails to deal adequately with the actual Christian claim. Here’s how the argument works:

If we ask whether or not Jesus is God,
We assume we know who God is,
So we can explore if Jesus “fits” our understanding of God.
But the Christian claim is not simply “Jesus is God”
But God is Jesus.

I prefer that way of framing the entire issue, but the older approach has its value because it’s the way many think, and it’s the question many in apologetics seek to answer, and perhaps more important, it’s the question many skeptics, agnostics, atheists, and even Christians ask. So, to Brant Pitre’s new book we go: The Case for Jesus.

First, Pitre makes an important point: If Jesus said he was God he would have done so in very Jewish ways, not by way of running around Galilee saying, “Hey fellas, I’m the Second Person of the Trinity (which we haven’t talked about), I’m God Incarnate, and I really am God.” Rather, Jesus was Jewish and his way of revelation was Jewish.

Second, do the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) depict Jesus as God? The claim is that many think that, while John shows Jesus to be God/divine, the Synoptics do not (e.g., Bart Ehrman). Pitre:

The problem is that the claim that Jesus is not depicted as God in the Synoptic Gospels is flat-out wrong. The only way to hold such a claim is to completely ignore both the miracles of Jesus in which he acts as if he is the one God, as well as the sayings of Jesus in which he speaks as if he is the one God. We will look at the sayings of Jesus in the next chapter. For now, let us focus on three of Jesus’s most startling deeds—(1) the stilling of the storm, (2) the walking on water, and (3) 
the Transfiguration—in which he acts precisely as if he is the God described in the Jewish Scriptures (121).

On the stilling of the storm, which if it happened (Brant does not prove historicity, but assumes historicity, and I agree it happened), says something about Jesus:

If you go back to the Jewish Scriptures and read them with this account in mind, you will discover something extremely important. Over and over again, the Old Testament emphasizes how the God of the universe displays his power by controlling two of the most powerful forces in creation: the wind and the sea (123). [E.g. Psalm 107.]

On walking on water, and the “I am”:

He is revealing his divine identity to them. Just as the LORD revealed his divine name to Moses in the context of his display of power over creation in the burning bush, so too Jesus reveals his divine name to the disciples in the context of his display of power over creation when he walks on water (129).

[He has a good section on “pass them by” which is language about divine disclosure.]

On the transfiguration, and who Jesus is:

On the mountain of the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah are finally allowed to see what they could not see during their earthly lives: the unveiled face of God. How is this possible? Because the God who appeared to them on Mount Sinai has now become man. In Jesus of Nazareth, the one God now has a human face (133).

I would put it this way: this is not a debate about Is Jesus God? so much as it is a debate about Is the witness of Scripture to Jesus true?

Valerie Hobbs reviewing Ruth Tucker’s new book:

Black and White Bible, Black and Blue Wife is a difficult read, and it is an essential read for every Christian who is grounded in these issues. Whatever conclusions one reaches about Tucker’s egalitarian theology of marriage, her story and her questions urge us to strive for greater understanding of Scripture, remembering the people at the heart of the issues about which we debate endlessly. As we work out our faith with fear and trembling, using God’s Word, Tucker encourages us to do so in love. Her book will devastate. It will encourage. It will humble. It will shake what so desperately needs shaking. It will send us back to the Bible.

The ugly food movement:

Giant watermelons ripen on the field but they won’t make it to market – too big to fit in the fridge. The same fate befalls curvy cucumbers and tomatoes that exceed the width of a burger bun.

Too big, too small, a slightly off color, an unusual shape – in the U.S., the future of such “ugly food” is grim: it rots in the field, gets eaten by livestock or is simply tossed in the trash or compost.

While European supermarkets have adopted the ugly foods movement by selling produce with superficial blemishes, most major American chains have refused to embrace the runner-ups in the fruit and veg beauty pageants – until now.

Whole Foods Market says it will sell the “ugly” produce that would otherwise go to waste at a handful of its Northern California stores beginning in late April. The pilot project, in collaboration with Imperfect Produce, an Emeryville, Calif.-based startup, marks one of the first forays by a national grocery chain into the movement to cut food waste.

Explaining last year’s home run surge in MLB:

While no single factor provides a clear cut answer for the home run surge, the best explanation may be a perfect storm. Combine the increases due to park effects, warmer temperatures, a generational rookie class, better informed hitters who are swinging harder than ever and the paring down of the game’s elder demographic to its best power hitters and it’s reasonable to believe that combination could produce the 723-homer spike in 2015.

But perhaps there is one more cause. The biggest culprit might be expectations.

After a nosedive in the home run department in 2014, we would expect some sort of progression back to “normal” levels in 2015. In the nine seasons since the end of the steroid era in 2006 to 2014, major leaguers have averaged 4,801 home runs per season. In other words, if 2014 hadn’t been such an abysmal year for home runs and was instead an average year for long balls, the 2015 uptick would have been just 108, a mere blip we’d hardly notice.

Though it may not satisfy conspiracy theorists, a simple progression back to the post-PED era mean, combined with the variety of other factors above might just be the best theory to explain the single biggest home run spike since steroids swept through clubhouses in the 1990s.

Julie Zauzmer:

“Dear Carlos,” Pope Francis wrote. “I was pleased to receive your recent letter.”

A pope who has a penchant for surprising personal gestures has done it again — this time by personally replying to an 18-year-old imprisoned in Southern California for involuntary manslaughter in connection with a gang-related killing.

In a year that Francis has declared the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy, the pope told the prisoner, Carlos Adrian Vazquez Jr., that the “Holy Door to Mercy” is open to him and his fellow convicts.

And on Friday, which begins the third annual Catholic day of prayer called “24 Hours for the Lord,” the Vatican announced a new app that lets anyone seek mercy right from their iPhone.

Hotel shifts toward millennials:

The hospitality landscape has been a-changin’ since the turn-of-the-21st-century citizens came of travel age. Hotel developers have started to replace some of the fustier features, such as mini-bars and room service, with more modern ones, such as nightstands with USB ports and lobby lounges. High on the millennials’ wish list: free WiFi, plentiful outlets, community spaces, and locally sourced food and beverages.

For example, Holiday Inn Express recently installed community tables in some of its Great Rooms, a denlike space off the lobby. Now, guests can commune and charge their devices. Hilton’s new Canopy brand highlights the neighborhood culture with evening tastings and a welcome gift (think globally, act locally), supplies loaner bikes (a la bike-sharing programs) and offers mobile check-in (queuing up is so Y2K). And at Marriott’s Moxy Hotels, guests can unlock their doors using their smartphones. (For those with flip phones, there’s a vacancy at HoJo.)

Aaron Katz, president and chief executive of Washington-based Modus Hotels, has kept millennials in mind when planning the Pod D.C., the company’s newest property in the District. (Modus is licensing the Pod name from BD Hotels, which has two Pods in New York and two more on the way.) He says he hopes that the 245-room hotel, scheduled to open in Chinatown in mid-October, will captivate the Me, My Selfie and I Generation. But his target audience also includes those who came before (Gen X, baby boomers) and will one day follow (Gen TBD).

Multi billionaire Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, wears flea market clothing. (Might explain David Fitch, at Northern Seminary.)

With a net worth of more than $40 billion, Ingvar Kamprad, founder of the furniture chain Ikea, is among the richest people in the world.

He is also, it appears, among its most frugal.

This week, the eccentric billionaire — No. 9 in last year’s Bloomberg Billionaire’s List — revealed in a documentary broadcast this week on Swedish television that he buys his clothes at flea markets to save money, according to Agence France Presse.

“I don’t think I’m wearing anything that wasn’t bought at a flea market,” he told Swedish channel TV4, according to business daily Dagens Industri which previewed the film. “It means that I want to set a good example.”…

Among the reasons for his ranking, the website writes, is that he “reportedly drives a 20-year-old Volvo, recycles tea bags, and steals salt and pepper packets from restaurants.”

“His home is furnished with IKEA furniture he assembled personally, he uses public transportation, and his modest home would look at home in any suburban neighborhood,” Listserve adds.

In the documentary, AFP reported, Kamprad attributed his spending habits to his birthplace.

“It’s in the nature of Smaland to be thrifty,” he said, referring to Sweden’s southern agricultural region where he grew up.

Pregnant and exercising, by Kelyn Soong:

Not long ago, women were advised not to exercise while pregnant. Conventional wisdom in the early 1980s dictated that pregnancy was an occasion to relax, for women to be as sedentary as possible and to eat as much as they wanted, according to Dr. Raul Artal. And he would know.

Artal was tasked by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to write the first guidelines for exercise and pregnancy in 1982, and much has changed since then. Recent studies led by Artal, a professor and chair emeritus at Saint Louis University’s Department of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Women’s Health, have revealed that physical activity during pregnancy is not only allowed, but also beneficial to mothers.

[Strength training for pregnant women appears okay, despite a dearth of research]

It’s a development that still has its skeptics but one that has been given a boost by elite female athletes like professional runner Sarah Brown, who gave birth last Friday after training throughout her pregnancy and is now set to compete at the Olympic Trials in July.

“Initially, we approached the guidelines with much caution,” Artal said. “Over the years, it progressed to where we said, ‘It’s okay to exercise in pregnancy.’ It was not until this past year that we said, ‘It’s also okay to engage in vigorous, intensive exercise, provided there are no complications of pregnancy.’”

Brown, 29, was not planning on getting pregnant. Well, at least not yet. An Olympic hopeful, the Warrenton, Va. resident and former All-Met Athlete of the Year in outdoor track was on pace for the best season of her career by early summer last year.

One is not enough:

More and more, parents are protesting school policies that allow teachers and administrators to withhold recess to punish student misbehavior. Common infractions include tardiness, acting out in class and failure to complete homework—everyday childhood behaviors that result in numerous children having to go without recess on any given day.

A Texas school started giving children four recess breaks a day, and teachers and parents say the results have been wonderful.

Recess is a lot more than just a free break for kids to play after lunch period. That free, unstructured play time allows kids to exercise and helps them focus better when they are in class. Now a school in Texas says it took a risk by giving students four recess periods a day, but the risk has paid off beautifully.

Academic freedom under discussion:

Joanna Williams, a senior lecturer of higher education at the University of Kent in Britain, education editor at Spiked, and author of a new book called Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge, said she drew the distinction between teaching and expressing opinions (which in turn has implications for professional fitness).

“Academic freedom means she can — just like every other citizen — express opinions, no matter how offensive or blatantly ridiculous,” Williams said of Karega. But in a teaching situation, she said, “academics have a responsibility to teach content grounded in scholarship, evidence and research.”

That content may later be proven wrong, she said, and colleagues have a responsibility to challenge teaching content that is “ridiculous and very obviously untrue.”

Stanley Fish, the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University and author of Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution, said Karega can say whatever she wants on social media or even in her scholarship, even if it’s patently false and relates directly to her subject area — as long as she doesn’t attempt to present it in class as a fundamental truth (and there’s a sound pedagogical reason for presenting it at all). Fish said that the Steven Salaita case at the University of Illinois, for example, should have hinged entirely on Salaita’s teaching record — not uninterrogated fears about what his controversial, anti-Israel tweets might mean about his ability to teach.

“Are you trying to inform your students about the various views or perspectives that are out there or are you trying to enlist your students in some kind of political agenda?” Fish asked. “It’s very simple, and if you keep those other questions out of it, a lot of confusion can be avoided.”

Gotta love Jedi the dog, by Sarah Kaplan:

It was the middle of the night. The lights were off, the house was still, the six members of the Nuttall family were sound asleep. The machinery that monitors the blood sugar levels of 7-year-old Luke Nuttall, who suffers from dangerous Type 1 diabetes, was utterly quiet.

But Jedi, Luke’s diabetes-sniffing dog, was not.

The black Labrador retriever jumped on and off the bed Luke shared with his parents, thumping onto the mattress in an attempt to wake the slumbering adults. When that didn’t work, he lay on top of Dorrie Nuttall, startling her out of sleep.

She clambered out of bed and examined her son’s continuous glucose monitor, but its reading was normal. Still, the dog was unrelenting. He bowed again and again, repeating the signal he’d been trained to send if he sensed that Luke’s blood sugar had gotten too low.

“Then I knew he meant business,” Nuttall wrote in a Facebook post describing the incident. “The sleepy fog started to wear off and I began to think clearer. I suddenly was fully awake and I knew there was an issue.”

She pricked her son’s finger and got a blood sugar level that was almost half as high as the one on the monitor — much too low, and falling fast.

Nuttall quickly gave her son a glucose tablet and warily monitored the tense tableau: attentive dog, sleeping boy, a frightening number on a screen.

Then she took a photo.

Prof Morna Hooker, always careful and always insightful, on pistis Christou.

Anyone familiar with the Synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke — who then launches for the first time into the Gospel of John, or anyone familiar with the Gospel of John who launches into the Synoptic Gospels encounters a culture shock: John and the Synoptics are noticeably different. Those who think like the Synoptics wonder what has happened to their vocabulary and pet themes when they hit John, and it works the other way too.

James D.G. Dunn, in Neither Jew Nor Greek: A Contested Identity, examines the “reshaping of the gospel of Jesus” in chp 43 of his 3 volume set on the Beginnings of Christianity. This is tricky terrain and soggy turf for many conservatives who are trained to think the sayings of Jesus must be quotations and anything but accurate quotations are not “historical” and therefore not true. (Notable here is modernity’s way of framing what “truth’ means, but that’s another discussion to be had.) Let’s jump into Dunn’s chp to draw out his major conclusions, conclusions drawn from a patient survey of facts.

The differences between GJohn and GSynoptics are noticeable, e.g., virgin birth and logos incarnation, speeches and teaching vs. discourses and I am sayings.  So what happened? How do we account for the stylistic and substance changes? Do we pretend — as some have said — that John was private teaching and the Synoptics public? (Read the Gospels and you will see this doesn’t work consistently.)  What to say?

I will provide summary conclusions from Dunn, who proceeds carefully and boldly and challengingly for some. First, GJohn is deeply connected to the Jesus tradition the Synoptics drew from:

But we can be sufficiently confident that the Johannine tradition too goes back to the first disciples, and indeed, in this case, has retained a clearer memory of the overlap period than we could have deduced from the Synoptic tradition. A simple uniform rule that the Synoptic tradition is always more reliable than John’s is immediately ruled out. John’s version of the beginning of Jesus’ mission is itself an example of how the memory of that overlap was handled in at least one strand of earliest Christianity or in some churches (321).

GJohn is the result of a lengthy process and GJohn does things differently:

That is to say, the evidence of John’s Gospel itself suggests that we should not assume that he saw his role as simply recalling memories of actual events of Jesus’ mission, or simply reciting the earlier tradition, in the fashion of the Synoptics. John may have concluded that to bring out the full significance of Jesus’ mission he had to retell the tradition in bolder ways which brought out that significance more clearly (335).

In short, it is hard to doubt that John’s version of Jesus’ teaching is an elaboration of aphorisms, parables, motifs and themes remembered as characteristic of Jesus’teaching, as attested in the Synoptic tradition. At the same time, John’s version was not pure invention, nor did it arise solely out of Easter faith. Rather it was elaboration of typical things that Jesus was remembered as saying.

…To criticize John’s procedure as inadmissible is to limit the task of the Evangelist to simply recording deeds and words of Jesus during his mission. But John evidently saw his task as something more the task of drawing out the fuller meaning of what Jesus had said (and done) by presenting that fuller understanding as the Spirit both reminding Jesus’ disciples of what Jesus had said and leading them into the fuller understanding of the truth made possible by Jesus’ resurrection and ascension (336-337).

Christology and discipleship both affirm the tradition about Jesus and open up fresh and fuller understandings of the same, so Jesus is Messiah and Son of God but also Logos and Wisdom. Discipleship is about following but also “faith” as abiding and love is opened up.

Hence,

at to read and interpret John’s Gospel as though John had been trying to do the same as the Synoptics is to misread and misinterpret his Gospel. This remains the challenge for those who approach John’s Gospel from a conservative perspective: by so doing, they may be missing and distorting John’s message! The truth of Jesus, the story of his mission and its significance, was not expressed in only one way, as though the Gospel of Jesus Christ could be told only by strictly limiting the interpretation of the earliest Jesus tradition, the ways in which Jesus was remembered. It proved also acceptable that the character and themes of Jesus’ mission provided the basis for fuller and deeper reflection on what Jesus stood for and achieved — still the Gospel of Jesus Christ (369).

Some then will wonder what this does both to the red-letter mentality (it never was right, it always was modernity’s mindset) but also to something like the Gospel of Thomas, which is Dunn’s next section, but I will cut to the chase on this:

It is free-floating teaching, without substantive historical anchor. Nor are there any indications that Thomas’s distinctive message was itself part of the immediate impact made by Jesus. The basic narrative of Thomas is too distinctive and too different from the other first-century indications of the impact made by Jesus for us to find a root for the Thomas perspective in Jesus’ mission or the early oral Jesus tradition (400).

In short, in terms of genre and literary form, ‘Gospel’ may seem to be the most natural title for Thomas. But Thomas’s structure and content are so different from the ‘gospel’ as given definition by Paul and the canonical Gospels, that the ‘Gospel of Thomas‘ can and should be judged a misnomer. And if the title persists, as now well established, Thomas has to be judged to be a very different gospel from the Gospels of the NT. Its exclusion from the canon of the NT, the canon of the fourfold Jesus tradition, is both understandable and was entirely appropriate (402).

Though it is at times overcooked it is just as often undercooked — the Jesus who was remembered was interpreted in that very act of remembering. We are looking at James D.G. Dunn’s Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity,  which builds on Dunn’s earlier volumes: Jesus Remembered and Beginning from Jerusalem. This is the major accomplishment of Dunn’s academic career, and I am proud to have been one of Jimmy’s students.

[Post one, post two, post three.]

In this post I want to sketch what happened to Jesus as he was remembered by Mark when that remembered Jesus got to Matthew and then to Luke. Thus, the christology of Matthew and the christology of Luke. As Dunn emphasizes, there is massive solidarity in the Synoptic Gospels yet there are distinctive emphases in each. Most of what follows is citation from Dunn’s NJNG.

Here’s what needs to be noted as you read what follows — and read it slowly and you will catch the whole easily: Matthew and Luke carry on Mark’s Jesus but they shift emphases and enhance emphases and interpret the tradition they were given. This, in my view, is a model of how to do pastoral ministry and theology. Not revolutionary newness but gentle, discerning adjustments.

Matthew

(1) Somewhat surprisingly for a Gospel of Jesus, Son of God, Matthew breaks Mark’s inclusio formed by Mark 1.1 and 15.39. He retains the confession of the centurion (Matt. 27.54/Mark 15.39), but his opening verse designates Jesus Christ as ‘son of David, son of Abraham’ (Matt. 1.1). Matthew also omits one of Mark’s summary accounts of unclean spirits hailing Jesus as ‘the Son of God’ (Mark 3.11). On the other hand, Matthew significantly heightens the Son of God motif.252

(2) Matthew refers to Jesus as the Messiah (Christ) about as often as Mark, slightly emphasizing the titular significance of ‘Christ’ (1.16; 27.17, 22), but he has weakened the messianic secret motif so prominent in Mark. As for the ‘son of man’ motif, its more frequent usage in Matthew (principally due to Matthew’s incorporation of Q material) somewhat diminishes the effectiveness of Mark’s abrupt juxtaposition of Peter’s confession of Jesus’ as Messiah with the first of the suffering Son of Man predictions (Mark 8.29-31). 253

(3) In contrast to Mark, Matthew highlights the messianic theme of Jesus as ‘son of David. 254

(4) That Jesus was the answer to the hopes and expectations of Israel is one of Matthew’s great emphases, indicated particularly by his concern repeatedly to note that Jesus fulfilled various scriptures — scriptures whose messianic significance Jesus had brought to light… 255

(5) More disputed is the influence of a Moses-prophet expectation, rooted in Deut. 18.15, 18; but Matthew does seem to present Jesus as a new Moses, or as the fulfillment of Israel’s divinely intended purpose. 256

(6) Matthew, however, goes beyond what might be regarded as the traditional Jewish expectations. The birth of Jesus is not simply symbolical of God’s presence with his people (Matt. 1.23), as in Isaiah’s prophecy (7.14). Jesus himself expresses or embodies the divine presence — ‘Emmanuel, God is with us’. 257

(7) In a similar way, Matthew seems to go beyond the Q material in regarding Jesus not simply as the spokesman of divine Wisdom, but as himself embodying divine Wisdom. 258

(8) One other feature worthy of note confirms the conclusion that Matthew drew on and shaped the Jesus tradition to present a higher christology than his predecessors. This is the fact that Matthew uses the term proskynein far more frequently than either Mark or Luke. 259

Luke

(1) Luke enhances Mark’s christology of Jesus as the Son of God by his account of the virginal conception (Luke 1.32,35), and strengthens the tradition of Jesus speaking of God as his Father, but otherwise he simply retains the ‘Son/Father’ references of Mark and Q. 283

(2) Jesus as Messiah and son of David is also enhanced by the birth narrative (Luke 1.69; 2.11,26) and added at 4.41, but otherwise the Markan emphasis is retained. 284

(3) Distinctively Lukan is the emphasis Luke places on the role of the Holy Spirit in his christology — in Jesus’ conception (1.35), at the beginning of Jesus’ mission (4.1,14) and in his anointing for mission (4.18; Acts 10.38). 284

(4) This also links into the strand of Moses-prophet christology which Luke retains: provision of food in the wilderness (9.12-17); in the Transfiguration story, Moses and Elijah speak with Jesus about Jesus’ ‘exodus’ (9.31); Jesus casts out demons ‘by the finger of God’ (11.20; echoing Exod. 8.19). 284-5

(5) Luke takes over most of the Son of Man references in his material, but has some distinctive references, perhaps best explained as performance variations in recitals of Jesus tradition.285

(6) Another feature highlights the transition which Jesus’ resurrection formed between his mission and his post-resurrection exalted state, or, as we may say, between volume 1 and volume 2 of Luke’s two-volume work. This is Luke’s careful use of the title kyrios for Jesus. What is notable is that Luke refrains from having Jesus spoken of as the Lord during his mission by other actors in the drama that Luke unfolds.285

(7) Ironically, this reinforced emphasis on Jesus’ resurrection reflects also a shift in emphasis regarding the function of the cross as well as the resurrection in the Gospel according to Luke….In short, a rather remarkable feature of Luke-Acts is that the theology of Jesus’ death as atoning sacrifice is almost completely absent. The thought is much more of the wonder of Jesus’ resurrection, and (as we shall see) of the resultant power of the Spirit. 286, 287

Goofiest story of the week about churches:

Imagine Cinderella’s glass slipper scaled to about 100 times its original size and dropped on the coast of Taiwan.

That’s the new church in Ocean View Park in Budai township.

Looking like it was plucked from a distorted fairy tale, the glittering, shoe-shaped building is made up of about 320 tinted glass panels and stands 55 feet tall by 36 feet wide. It was reportedly constructed by the Southwest Coast National Scenic Area in an effort to attract female worshippers and tourists to the site.

“In our planning, we want to make it a blissful, romantic avenue,” Pan Tsuei-ping, the administration’s recreation section manager, told the BBC.

But the inspiration behind the design — and, no, it’s not gender-normative commercialism — is anything but blissful. The BBC reports:

“The shoe was inspired by a local story. According to officials in the 1960s, a 24-year-old girl surnamed Wang from the impoverished region suffered from Blackfoot disease. Both of her legs had to be amputated, leading to the cancellation of her wedding. She remained unmarried and spent the rest of her life at a church.

“The high heel is intended to honour her memory.”

Just in case a giant high heel with a tragic back story isn’t enough to lure women to the new church, another local government official said the interior of the church, too, will cater to women’s apparently delicate inclinations.

A better story about churches, by Maria Godoy:

Separation of church and state? When it comes to fighting food waste, the U.S. government is looking to partner up with the faithful.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday launched the Food Steward’s Pledge, an initiative to engage religious groups of all faiths to help redirect the food that ends up in landfills to hungry mouths. It’s one piece of the agency’s larger plan to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030.

“We can make leaps and bounds in this process if we tackle this problem more systemically and bring a broader number of stakeholders to the table,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy tells us. By engaging religious communities, she says, “we are tapping into incredibly motivated and dedicated people.”

Food waste connects to the core values of many faith communities, particularly helping the poor and feeding the hungry, McCarthy notes.

As we’ve reported, more than 1,200 calories per American per day are wasted, according to U.S. government figures. Loss occurs on the farm, at the retail level and in homes. We consumers often toss out foods because they’ve passed their sell-by date— but are still just fine to eat — or because we buy more than we can eat before it goes bad.

The “hemline” is rising, by Jorge Castillo:

Jerry West, the model for the logo of the National Basketball Association, wore basketball shorts the length of loincloths. Michael Jordan inspired a major alteration when he appealed for a longer and baggier cut. Then a group of freshmen at the University of Michigan known as the “Fab Five” became a national sensation in the early 1990s in part because of their sartorial swagger, with shorts that dropped below their knees. For years after, the subject of inseams inspired older observers of the game to fret: How low could they go?

But now the hemline is creeping back up.

In early November, Cleveland Cavaliers superstar LeBron James declared he would wear skinnier and shorter shorts this season, his 13th in the league, because he wanted to present a more professional appearance. But while he is the highest-profile convert to the shorter short, he isn’t the first. The emerging generation of pro basketball players, one that came of age wearing tighter clothes off the floor, beat him to it.

A solid article about food, diets, and health …

Fraser Nelson calls out OxFam every year on this; economics, folks, is not a zero-sum game. Persistent refusal to acknowledge how capitalism works and what are actual numbers makes me not trust those who want to play the anti-capitalist game. (Thanks to Kruse Kronicle.)

Your average milkman has more wealth than the world’s poorest 100 million people. Doesn’t that show how unfair the world is? Or given that the poorest 100 million will have negative assets, doesn’t it just show how easily statistics can be manipulated for Oxfam press releases? They’re at it again today: the same story, every January. “Almost half of the world’s wealth is owned by just 1% of the world’s population” it said in 2014. It has done variants on that theme ever year, each time selling it as a new “big” story. All peddling the impression that inequality is getting worse, that the rich are engorging themselves at the expense of the poorest.

This narrative (which is discredited as it is old) suits Oxfam’s fundraisers. (Rich dudes hoard power! “Even it up” by giving Oxfam money!) But the real picture is rather different. It looks like this:-

Global capitalism is lifting people out of poverty at the fastest rate in human history. Global inequality is narrowing, fast. Oxfam will not, and cannot, dispute such things – but this doesn’t suit its new anticapitalist agenda. So it talks about rich people and tax havens instead.

Carl Trueman:

Last year has provided an abundance of examples of how disenfranchisement is the order of the day for the Left. Does a significant historical figure not conform to the exacting moral standards of today’s Manhattan cocktail party-goers or over-indulged Ivy Leaguers? Then erase them from history. Nay, simply erase the history. Saves time later. And does somebody today hold to a position on marriage or sexuality which fails whatever test Slate cares to set? Then by definition they have no place in polite society.

And New Left philosophical mumbo jumbo plays an important role in this process too. The rebarbative jargon of thinkers from Althusser to Žižek has turned terms such as justice, equality, and the basic categories of personal identity into species of Gnostic knowledge on which only the illuminati can opine. And when Gnostic knowledge is the order of the day, then inability to understand the mumbo jumbo of the day is not a failure of mere literacy but of morality.

A truly liberal society and the Anglican Communion’s recent decision, by James Mumford:

The outcry is indicative of a profound shift. Institutions founded on certain precepts to which its members are expected to subscribe shouldn’t be allowed to act on them if those precepts don’t square with a prevailing agenda. Back in 2013 advocates for same-sex marriage argued that the church’s beliefs about sexuality shouldn’t be imposed on the rest of society. That makes sense. But now the church is being told it shouldn’t hold those beliefs at all.

It is easy to overlook how ominous this shift really is. The conviction that organisations and communities cannot determine their own distinct ethos, their own rules for membership and their own criteria for leadership imperils the very survival of a pluralistic society. What is the point of institutions if they don’t have the freedom to organise themselves in the way they see fit?

Consider a different case. Imagine that a female student leader of a church group at a university is expected not to sleep with her boyfriend. Now, one may think chastity a ridiculously outdated ideal, even a damaging instance of repression. One may think that group’s policy, and the way they justify it, is de facto judgmental about people who don’t live by their ideal. You may think it’s harsh that those leaders get removed from ministry if they break those rules. But for all our talk of diversity and pluralism, in reality this is what it looks like. Communities in society which look and feel very different from yours being allowed to look and feel very different from yours.

Melissa Puls, on what holds women back:

When thinking about barriers to female leadership, my mind is immediately flooded by the usual suspects: the patriarchal “boys club,” advancement discrimination, compensation inequality, and striking a successful work-life balance. These barriers are very real and thankfully, strong female executives are chipping away at them each year. I like to think we’re paving the way for the bright minds climbing today’s corporate ranks who will hopefully face fewer of these injustices over time.Which led me to wonder, beyond external barriers, what continues to hold women back? Honestly, it’s ourselves. Women can be our own worst enemy — but it’s a behavior that’s completely preventable.

Use yourself as an example. The last time you had a professional opportunity arise, was your first instinct toimmediately jump in and say “Heck yes, sign me up!”, or did you take a long pause to consider how it would impact your family and personal obligations? Be honest now. Too often, women’s bold career aspirations fall victim to nurturing instincts. While men seize these career-boosting turns with gusto, women often talk themselves out of them, labelling them as “too risky or burdensome” to the family: Who will pick-up the kids? Feed the family? Clean the house? Instead of speaking with their partners about how a great opportunity can be effectively managed for everyone, we martyr ourselves in silence.

Which America is yours? He had me until he had this Cubs family assigned to Yankeedom. Sorry, Colin Woodard — by Reid Wilson:

Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.

“The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history,” Woodard writes in theFall 2013 issue of Tufts University’s alumni magazine. “Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities.”

Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social issues to the role of government.“The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps — including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history,” Woodard writes in theFall 2013 issue of Tufts University’s alumni magazine. “Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities.”…Woodard lays out his map in the new book “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.” Here’s how he breaks down the continent:Yankeedom: Founded by Puritans, residents in Northeastern states and the industrial Midwest tend to be more comfortable with government regulation. They value education and the common good more than other regions.

Is Jesus or the Bible the Word of God and Does It Matter? by Austin Fischer

“Saying the Bible isn’t the Word of God because Jesus is makes as much sense as saying humans aren’t the image of God because Jesus is.”—Derek Rishmawy

Derek Rishmawy tweeted that last week, and I take his point. After a brief Twitter interaction between us, he linked a blog he had written on it a ways back, so I read and agreed with much of what he said (read it here).

In essence, it has become standard hat in many circles to point out that “the Bible isn’t the word of God because Jesus is the word of God”, and to do so in a way that seeks to denigrate Scripture by pitting Jesus against Scripture. And I agree with Derek—this is often done and it’s often done sloppily. For example, I often see arguments for homosexuality[1] that run something like this:

-Jesus was loving, kind, and compassionate.

-Telling homosexuals that acting on their desires is sinful is not loving, kind or compassionate.

-The Bible might condemn homosexuality but Jesus, not the Bible, is the word of God, so he overrides the Bible’s teaching and teaches homosexuality is ok because he is loving, kind, and compassionate.

To be clear, there are much stronger arguments for homosexuality, but, at the popular level, I frequently see a variation of this argument. And to say the least, it’s quite non sequitur and wrongly pits Jesus against the Bible in the sense Derek is pointing out.

That said, is there something “serious” here in the distinction between Jesus and the Bible as the word of God—something to be probed and explored—or is it, as Derek says, “a rhetorical sleight of hand, passing itself off as serious theology”?[2] While agreeing it is often a mere rhetorical sleight of hand, I do think there is something serious here. A few thoughts on why…

At the risk of simplification (because it could probably be further divided), there is at least a clear, 3-fold sense in which Scripture uses the phrase “the word of God.” First off, the Bible speaks of Jesus as the word of God (John 1:1-3, 14-18). It is important to note that when the NT writers speak of Jesus as the word of God, they are picking up a Hebrew idea, because throughout the OT we see “the word of God” coming to people (1 Kings 12:22, 1 Chronicles 17:3, Jeremiah 23:29, Ezekiel 16:1, Isaiah 55:10-11, etc.).

Clearly, this word of God is not a written scripture—it’s more alive than that. As N.T. Wright says, “Throughout the Old Testament, we find the elusive but powerful idea of ‘God’s word,’ not as a synonym for the written scriptures, but as a strange personal presence, creating, judging, healing, recreating…the word of God is like an enormous reservoir, full of creative divine wisdom and power, that the prophets and other writers tap into by God’s call and grace.”[3] We get to John and it would seem the claim being made (at least in part) is that this word of God that creates, judges, heals, and recreates is, in fact, Jesus the Messiah.

Hebrews 1:1-3, though not using the phrase, “word of God,” certainly seems to be saying this and implies a certain superiority of God’s “speaking” through Jesus in relation to his speaking through “the fathers in the prophets.” What is this superiority and what does it mean and what does it mean for how we read both the OT and NT? These are very important questions.

Second, the Bible speaks of the gospel as the word of God. I’ll list these verses so the point will not be missed.

• Acts 6:2,7- So the twelve summoned the congregation of the disciples and said, “It is not desirable for us to neglect the word of God in order to serve tables”…The word of God kept spreading and the number of disciples continued to increase greatly in Jerusalem.
• Acts 8:4-5,14 – Therefore those who had been scattered went about preaching the word. Philip went down to the city of Samaria and began proclaiming Christ to them…Now when the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent them Peter and John.
• Colossians 1:3-5- We give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love which you have for all the saints; because of the hope laid up for you in heaven, of which you previously heard in the word of truth, the gospel…
• 1 Thessalonians 1:6, 2:9,13- You have also become imitators of us and of the Lord, having received the word in much tribulation with the joy of the Holy Spirit…For you recall, brethren, our labor and hardship, how working day and night so as not to be a burden to any of you, we proclaimed to you the gospel of God…For this reason we also constantly thank God that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which performs its work in you who believe.

Although this sense is often lost on people, the “word of God” referenced in the NT is usually the gospel, meaning the story of Jesus—his death and resurrection (1 Corinthians 15). Wright is again helpful:  “Before there was any New Testament, there was a clear understanding in early Christianity that the word of God…was the story of Jesus, particularly his death and resurrection.”[4] 

So at this point we have clearly distinguished two senses in which the Bible talks about the word of God, neither of which is the Bible.

Third, the Bible, and more importantly, Jesus himself, does speak of Scripture as the word of God: “Jesus answered them, “Has it not been written in your Law, ‘I SAID, YOU ARE GOD’? If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came…” (John 10:34-35). Examples could be multiplied. And surely related to this is 2 Timothy 3:16 and its teaching that all Scripture is theoneustos, puffed out by God, inspired by God.

How do we put all of this together so that we can think more clearly about what we mean when we say “the word of God”? Here’s a simple categorization I’ve found helpful, borrowing a bit from Barth.

The Word of God, capital W, refers, first and foremost to Jesus. One step removed from that, the word of God refers to the gospel, which is the story of Jesus, the Word of God. And one step removed from that, the word of God refers to the Bible because the Bible tells us the story of Jesus (= gospel), who is himself the Word of God. Visually then:

Word of God = Jesus

word of God = gospel

word of God = Scripture

So I agree with Derek: we have good reason to call the Bible the word of God. Without it, it’s certainly fair to wonder if the gospel of the Word of God would have ever come to us. We should affirm and cherish the word of God in all three senses.

And yet, I do think it’s important to spell out these three senses because, in my experience, many people seem to think the Bible exists so they can have a relationship with the Bible. No—the Bible exists so we can have a relationship with Jesus. Handled properly, the Bible points beyond itself to Jesus. As Jesus himself says in John 5:39: “You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me!”[5] The Bible is the word of God in a derivative sense and I think this is a serious theological point that needs to be made, not a rhetorical sleight of hand.

Additionally, the derivative nature of the Bible’s being “the word of God” raises other questions. To just run with the analogy Derek offers regarding the image of God…

Yes, Jesus being the image of God doesn’t mean humans can’t also be the image of God. So yes, Jesus being the Word of God doesn’t mean the Bible can’t also be the word of God. But the analogy cuts both ways, because:

Jesus is the image of God in a “fuller” sense than humans are.

Jesus is the word of God in a “fuller” sense than the Bible is.

What are the implications of this for theology and epistemology? Scripture and orthodoxy insist that Jesus fulfills Scripture instead of abolishes it (Matthew 5:17), but it is unclear what all this means. Jesus’ “fulfillment” of Scripture cannot be understood in a straightforward sense in which he is simply elaborating on everything else Scripture has said in smooth, linear fashion, basically living and teaching all the same things, providing a bit of clarification. Far from it! Jagged edges abound—“You’ve heard it said…but I say to you…”

Jesus fulfills Scripture, not so much in the sense that he’s only saying what the rest of Scripture already says, but in the sense that he faithfully fulfills the big story of Scripture (Israel’s story) and in so doing casts a light forward and backward on the whole of Scripture. This light brings certain issues to the surface—for example, divine and human violence in Scripture.

I’ll end with a quotation, cited by Derek, from J.I. Packer:

“But who is this Christ, the Judge of Scripture? Not the Christ of the New Testament and of history. That Christ does not judge Scripture; he obeys it and fulfills it. Certainly, He is the final authority of the whole of it. Certainly, He is the final authority for Christians; that is precisely why Christians are bound to acknowledge the authority of Scripture. Christ teaches them to do so.”[6]

I agree with the general sentiment here in large degree, but the phase “Christ did not judge Scripture” is very ambiguous and if it is meant to mean, “Jesus never stands against, questions, challenges things said in the Hebrew Scriptures; he only obeys them”, then I disagree. Jesus’ relationship with Scripture was more complex and aggressive than that, in ways both implicit and explicit.

One need look no further than the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ “revision” (though one might well question whether this term is severe enough) of the lex talionis: “You have heard that it was said ‘AN EYE FOR AN EYE, AND A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evil person…” (Matthew 5:38). And of course, the crucifixion reveals the deepest meaning of this teaching, wherein we learn that God doesn’t merely want to limit our degree of retaliation—God wants us to retaliate with love and would rather us die than retaliate violently. That’s what Jesus did.

So is Jesus “judging” Scripture here? I suppose that depends on what we mean by judging. But at minimum, we are forced to concede that Jesus does not simply sign his name beside everything Scripture says and we are left to ponder the implications. Pitting black letters against red letters is an unhelpful way to frame things, but pointing out that the “red letters” clarify the deepest intention of the “black letters” (often in unexpected ways) strikes me as a particularly Christian epistemological habit that is essential for good Christian theology.

So in the end, I agree and disagree with Derek. Sometimes, asserting that Jesus and not the Bible is the Word of God is a rhetorical slight of hand, but sometimes it is a serious theological claim, even if we disagree about where it leads us.

[1] By which I mean arguments that it is ok for Christians to act on homosexual impulses.

[2] From his blog post: “If Jesus is the ‘Word of God’ Can We Call the Bible the Word of God?”

[3] NT Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God, 36.

[4] Ibid., 48.

[5] The Message.

[6] Packer, “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God, 61-62.