Category Archives: People

Counting the cost

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In his celebrated book Holiness, J.C. Ryle urges ‘the true-hearted and holy Christian’ to count up and compare,

1. The profit and the loss. You may possibly lose something in this world, but you will gain the salvation of your immortal soul. It is written: “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36.)

2. The praise and the blame. You may possibly be blamed by man, but you will have the praise of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.…

Why did Jesus do nature miracles?

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N.T. Wright (Jesus and the Victory of God) points out that in addition to the healing miracles of Jesus, we find him exercising power over the natural order, as with the miraculous catch of fish, the stilling of storms, feeding of multitudes in the desert, and (negatively) the cursing of a fig tree.

In these actions, Jesus is demonstrating his power to bring the natural order into ‘a new harmony with itself’ in ways that had only occasionally been glimpsed previously, as with the crossing of the Red Sea.…

Repentance and forgiveness, the Wright way

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Until recently (writes N.T. Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God), it was generally assumed that ‘repentance’ was a major theme in the teaching of Jesus, and that this meant more or less the negative side of personal conversion.  His message was one of divine grace, in contrast to the prevailing legalism of Judaism.  It is now ‘widely recognised’, says Wright, that this involved a ‘complete caricature’, both of Judaism and of the teaching of Jesus.  …

The tyranny of scholarship

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‘Let no one ever again affirm that conservative evangelicals have no regard for scholarship.’

It was with that statement that Bishop Stephen Neill began his review of a 1976 book entitled ‘History, Criticism and Faith’.  This book was a collection of four essays by F.F. Bruce, R.T. France, Colin Brown, and G. Wenham.  In it, they discuss ‘Myth and History’ (Bruce), ‘the Authenticity of the Sayings of Jesus’ (France), ‘History and the Believer’ (Brown), and ‘History and the Old Testament’ (Wenham).…

The psychology of eyewitness testimony

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I have referred, on several occasions, to the work of Richard Bauckham on Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.  In that book Bauckham sets out a range of evidence in support of his view that the four Gospels are based very largely on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and therefore should be regarded as having a high index of historical reliability.

Writing in the 2nd edition of the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (art. ‘Historicisms and Historiography’), J.…

Rescuing the Bible from its friends

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Enns, Peter (2014). The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

I offer a summary of some of the book’s main points, and then an assessment.

What the Bible is not

The Bible, says Enns, presents us with at least three kinds of problem:-

  • moral (God is responsible for a great deal of slaughter)
  • historical (many of the events recorded in the Bible did not happen, at least not in the way the Bible describes them)
  • theological (the biblical writers present diverse and contradictory points of view about God and what it means to follow him).
…

Male and female disciples in Mark’s Gospel

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Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses) observes that in Mark’s Gospel the male disciples are represented as oscillating between understanding and misunderstanding, and between loyalty and apostasy.

‘In both cases,’ writes Bauckham, ‘the disciples oscillate between the possibilities, but the negative pole in each case (misunderstanding and apostasy) tends to predominate, resulting in the overall portrayal of them as fallible and failing disciples, whose inability to understand the necessity for Jesus’ suffering and death is connected with their failure to remain faithful to him when his passion begins.’…

The plural-to-singular narrative device in Mark’s Gospel

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Referring back to an old (1925) and neglected article by Cuthbert Taylor, Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses) notes that there are twenty-one instances of a narrative device in Mark’s Gospel that invite attention.  This is a device in which switches, slightly awkwardly, from third-person plural to third-person singular.  Here are some examples:-

Mk 5:1f – ‘They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when he had stepped out of the boat .…

The twelve disciples as ‘official’ eyewitnesses

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At first glance, the lists of Jesus’ disciples (Matt 10:2-4; Mark 3:16-19; Luke 6:13-16; see also Acts 1:13) seem simply to introduce some of the key players in the story.  But these lists probably serve a more specific purpose, especially given that about half of the characters named in the lists are never named again in the Gospels.  So this more specific function of the lists of disciples is that they display continuity between Jesus and the early Christian community, and provide the latter with reassurance about the overall shape and content of Jesus ministry that could only come from those who had closely associated with him.  …

Why did Jesus heal?

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Briefly, we may say that healing miracles

  1. provide ‘signs’ to authenticate the gospel message.
  2. show God’s mercy and compassion in bringing relief and comfort to the suffering.
  3. equip and strengthen people for God’s service.
  4. give opportunity for God to be glorified as people see concrete evidence of his goodness, love, power, wisdom and presence.

According to N.T. Wright (Jesus and the Victory of God) the healing miracles of Jesus went further than the relief of physical suffering, or even social acceptance.  …