“Those you argue against always shape your argument.”
– Stanley Stowers, Christian Beginnings: A Study in Ancient Mediterranean Religion
(Edinburgh University Press, 2024), 8.
- Over on Facebook, Constantine Campbell linked to a volume he’s been working on as editor, namely The Greek New Testament Study Bible. I regularly use my Reader’s Greek New Testament and so I’m eager to see what this edition has to offer. It comes out in October of this year.
- Paul Davidson has updated his page of poor and misleading translations in the NIV.
- If you’re interested in the Logos Christology in John, Deky Nggadas recently published an article in HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies on the subject with relationship to the Gospel of Luke.
- John Nelson appeared on the Exploring the Language of Scripture channel to talk about Jesus’s physical appearance, the subject of his dissertation recently published book.
- Speaking of Jesus’s appearance, Andrew Mark Henry talks about Jesus’s long hair in a recent episode of Religion for Breakfast.
- Thomas Kazen and Hilary Lipka discuss Torah law and when it became truly authoritative. This was a particularly interesting piece, especially its development over the course of centuries in relationship to the ever-changing world stage.
- Do the various flood myths demonstrate that a global flood actually happened? Not at all.
- I think I might be on track for my annual goal of 52 books per year.
The Amateur Exegete 
Another awesome round-up!
I really enjoy reading Paul’s NIV mistranslations page, especially having grown up on the 1984 (or something like that) edition and because the Christian middle school I attended required it for Bible study.
The depiction of Jesus on the right in the one clip reminded me for some reason of the one creepy character (Beedle?) in The Legend of Zelda who travels around on ships selling random things.
(Don’t ask. I just remember firing cannons at those barges in The Wind Waker knowing there would be nothing but smoke. Nice distraction while sailing back and forth between fifty- something islands to “rescue” your in-game sister.)
On kind of a side note, I recently looked into an interpretation of a Bible passage and was curious on your thoughts:
The interpretation of the Sheep and the Goats parable in Matthew 25: 31-46 that up until recently seemed best to me was that the sheep were people who took care of the poor in general and that the goats did not show generosity (as Bart Ehrman argues).
However, someone online suggested an alternate understanding that seemed to both explain a few oddities of the passage and had some scholarly support: the gentile nations will be judged for how they receive Christians as the Son of Man (or Jesus’) emissaries.
This interpretation seemed to account for the reference to visiting people in prison (who could be Christians thrown in jail) and the phrase “the least of these, my brothers” implying that they were followers of Jesus (and gave up their possessions in the process). It could also explain why Luke doesn’t have something like this (since a parable implying that true Christ-followers were only to be found among the Jews would go against his inclusion of the gentiles in the Christian mission in Acts).
After consulting both the Oxford Annotated Bible and the HarperCollins Study Bible, the latter supported someone like the above exegesis.
Thanks,
J Source
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Sorry, just to clarify, the reason I thought that the Sheep and the Goats parable entails a distinction between Jesus followers and people from the gentiles was because the population of people being judged seemed to be exclusive of the group receiving aid (i.e. the nations in general are being judged for how they receive a group other than their own and “the least of these” are not themselves under judgement). So, if this were the case, people from “the nations” would be judged separately from the Jews based on how they received a sect from the latter.
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I probably lean toward Ehrman’s understanding, though I’ll admit I haven’t thought about it thoroughly. Do you know where you read that other interpretation? And did they have any citations for support? I’d be interested in seeing it.
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Oddly enough, I think I originally encountered it on an apologetics website.
Normally, there isn’t much merit in these type of motivated interpretations (especially when the purpose is to come up with a way to rescue inerrancy or the use of a passage as a proof-text.) So I remembered what I thought was only a desperate attempt to rescue the passage but not its exact provenance or whether the person actually cited any scholars.
Recently, though, the whole emissary interpretation again entered into my head and I consulted the two scholarly Bibles.
While my edition of the Oxford Annotated Bible didn’t discuss how to interpret the passage, the HarperCollins Bible refers to the parable under the heading “Judgement of the Gentiles.”
And it translates Matthew 25:40 as “And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” A footnote on pg. 1906-1907 claims “Here the least of these seem to be Christians.”
That got me wondering if non-Christians (regardless of their economic status) could be outside of the authors’ (or Jesus’) sphere of concern here.
It’s possible that my hermeneutical approach somewhat diverged from the original source, as they might have related it to the earlier story in which Jesus sends out the disciples without any possessions to minister among the towns of the Jews in chapter 10.
Sorry again that I don’t recall the website where I found this interpretation.
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Just wanted to apologize as well for maybe not phrasing things well when discussing scholarly support.
It probably would have been better to have said that what one scholar wrote in a study Bible included notes consistent with the interpretation or one similar.
I should probably check out the possible interpretations in a few commentaries or another source as well.
One thing I kind of realized too is that neither exegesis proposed for the parable really fits with a salvation by faith approach- which might be why I wondered if it might be more than a simply effort to avoid a contradiction.
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