CADRE Comments

We're running out of groups of New Testament texts where Jesus isn't on rare occasion called {ho theos}! (Or {ton theon} or {tou theo} or some grammatic equivalent that still would translate to "the God" in English.) Several times in the Johannine texts ; at least once (maybe twice) in the Petrines ; at least once (maybe two times) in Hebrews ; at least once in the Pauline Pastorals (Titus) ; most likely once in Acts. It's starting to look like the popular understanding on the topic may be reversed--Jesus might be called {ho theos} more often in the New Testament than He is called merely {theos}! (Although neither is particularly common of course.) But these texts seem so late in composition. Maybe that makes a difference? (Actually, the supposed lateness of their composition hinges routinely on scholars recognizing high Christological characteristics in them and using that as evidence for late composition! Acts is the exception; its theories of late compositi...

In a recent Triablogue post , Patrick Chan links to a brief apologetic for Christianity by Douglas Jones, in which Jones makes the remarkable claim that in performing such a seemingly mundane task as buying a bottle of milk, the average person actually betrays the knowledge (or at least the belief) that Christianity is true, because only Christianity undergirds the tacit assumptions about the nature of reality that such a task takes for granted. It follows that the average person's failure to explicitly acknowledge this truth is due to that person's desperate attempt to evade God's claim upon his or her life and the truth that he or she is a sinner, the fitting object of God's wrath. I do not think Jones' apologetic is a very good one, and in this post and the next one I want to highlight what I see as its weaknesses. In so doing I do not mean to attack Jones personally or (God forbid) undermine the truth of the Gospel. My main purpose is to issue a note of caution...

Click here for Part 2 of this Round, where I cross-check Bishop Spong's theory about "Judas" being a codename used for denigrating orthodox Judaism in the eyes of the Jewish Christian audience of the Gospels, with actual textual details. (Readers can follow links back to the beginning of this Round, and of this series of analysis, too.) In an attempt to make this theory sound like it has a shred of credence, Bishop Spong writes: “The leaders of the orthodox party of that nation, who defined the worship of the Jews, were by the time the gospels were written increasingly the enemy of the Christian movement. It is simply too convenient to place the blame for Jesus' death on the whole of orthodox Judaism by linking the traitor by name with the entire nation of the Jews. […] The Romans killed Jesus, but by the eighth decade of the Christian era, when the story of Jesus was being written, something compelled the gospel writers to exonerate the Roman procurator, Pilate, and...