“The main reason so many conservative Christians today so publicly and so belligerently condemn homosexuality and wave their Bible around as their authorization (even as they reject and abandon other elements of the Bible’s sexual ethics) is precisely because that condemnation has become a central identity marker. This is particularly true for conservative Christians seeking to structure power, values, and boundaries in favor of their right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation.”
– Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2025), 188.
- καταπέτασμα weighs in on the meaning of Judges 5:8a, rendered in the NRSVue as “When new gods were chosen.” For reasons that he explains, he renders the clause “He chose new godlings.”
- Why don’t we find descriptions of how Jesus looked in the Gospels? Robyn Faith Walsh weighs in.
- Relatedly, in anticipation of the publication of his forthcoming volume on Jesus’s physical appearance, John Nelson talks about the view of Jesus’s looks by members of the early church. Apparently he was U-G-L-Y and he don’t have no alibi.
- Over on BlueSky, Jeremiah Coogan recommended a translation of Eusebius’s work on church history that came out in 2019 from Jeremy Schott. I had no idea this existed and plan on getting it soon!
- I’ve mentioned the upcoming Nicholas Cage movie The Carpenter’s Son on a previous roundup. I can’t wait for it. And here is a review from the website Slash Film!
- Eric Cline talks about the Amarna Letters and how they amount to ancient gaslighting. (HT: Lex Lata.)
- Paul Davidson has a new video out, this time on the Amalekites.
- I was reading an article in Sky at Night on blackholes and there was a link to an animation from NASA on the sizes of the largest black holes we know about. Boy howdy, are some of them really big. Like, I can’t even wrap my head around how huge they are.
The Amateur Exegete 
I read Dan’s book, it is awesome, and he is an awesome scholar of Christianity, Hebrew & Christian scripture, and religion in general but you don’t have to be a scholar to know that there is no one (and I mean no one!) more full of cr@p than a conservative evangelical or fundamentalist Christian. They lie – through their teeth – constantly, even to their own congregations. Just listen to Christian radio! They frequently misquote authors, sources, or interpretations regularly. And, if that isn’t bad enough, they voted overwhelmingly for Orange Jesus! If that doesn’t say it all, nothing does!
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I have two questions, just to better understand the framework that Kloppenborg is using.
First, when Kloppenborg refers to Jewish traditions in which God “tempts” people to do evil, which specific texts or examples does he have in mind? I would really like to study those passages more closely.
Second, is there a risk that Kloppenborg may be conflating two distinct categories — (1) moral temptation (that is, inducing someone to sin), which James explicitly denies as coming from God, and (2) metaphysical evil or divine testing/providence (calamity, suffering, judgment), which many Jewish texts do attribute to God?
It seems to me that James is rejecting the first category, not the second, and that reading these passages without distinguishing between “temptation” and “testing” can create an unnecessary tension between James and the earlier traditions.
If you have already addressed this and I failed to grasp it, I apologize for the misunderstanding.
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Job is the primary text from which Kloppenborg draws., but there are plenty of others: Gen 22:1 (the sin of human sacrifice), Exodus 16:4 (the sin of not following God’s instructions), and more. We could also easily include places where the deity otherwise tries to cause others to sin, like when Yahweh incites David to count the people of Israel and then confesses that he has sinned in doing so (2 Sam 24:1, 10ff) or when the deity sends a spirit to deceive Ahab (1 King 22:19-23).
As for the distinction between moral temptation and divine testing, you can attempt to make that case but I have found that more often than not it boils down to semantics. If God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son and human sacrifice is evil, then God is asking Abraham to commit an evil, regardless of the outcome wherein he tells Abraham not to do so. As for James, I think it is the case that he rejects the idea that God tempts anyone to do evil (as Kloppenborg says). James is following a different understanding of God’s activity.
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Thank you for the response! This really helps me understand Kloppenborg’s point more clearly.
Regarding the distinction between testing and moral temptation, what I’m trying to clarify isn’t just terminology but the divine intention assumed in each literary context. The definition of “temptation” is indeed broad, but it seems to me that James has in mind a very specific kind of temptation—namely, the kind activated by desire, that is, inducing someone to sin through their own internal inclination (Jas 1:14). In that sense, Job and Abraham appear to be operating in a completely different category from what James is addressing.
In addition, in the cases of Job and Abraham, the “evil” or trial comes from the outside—an external circumstance placed before the character, in highly exceptional narrative settings. In James, however, the problem originates from within, from the internal desire that gives birth to sin. This difference between external evil and internal evil further reinforces that we are dealing with distinct categories.
In texts like Job 1–2 or Genesis 22, the divine action functions as a narrative testing, localized and exceptional—rather than a moral inducement. These are singular episodes with specific theological purposes, not descriptions of God’s regular way of dealing with his people.
For that reason, it seems plausible to say that, “in a broad sense,” God may test, but not in the way James is ruling out. James’s context is pastoral, dealing with the ongoing, everyday experience of believers, whereas texts like Job and Abraham describe extraordinary and unrepeatable situations. Thus, when James says that God “tempts no one” (1:13), he is not denying every form of divine testing, but rejecting specifically the idea that God induces someone to moral sin from within their own desire, which is precisely the kind of temptation James is addressing.
Thanks again for the explanation and for the list of texts—this gives me exactly the starting point I needed for deeper study.
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