Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, third edition (OUP: 2014), 28. Yet despite undeniable chronological and geographical discontinuities, the literary, religious, and institutional traditions of the Levant, including ancient Israel, are best understood as part of a cultural continuum that, allowing for local particularities, was consistent and... Continue Reading →
Over at the website The Bible and Interpretation there is a piece by religious scholar Jay Williams on "Eden, the Tree of Life, and the Wisdom of the Serpent." It is at once both a very interesting and very bizarre piece. Williams points out not long after the piece begins that the serpent isn't Satan as Christians would like... Continue Reading →
In the Spring/Summer 2018 edition of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin there is an interesting piece by Jade Sylvan, an MDiv student at Harvard Divinity School, discussing what the Gospels share in common with the modern literary genre of fan fiction. They write, As a divinity school student new to biblical scholarship, I’ve found it interesting... Continue Reading →
Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures (Oxford University Press, 2014), 40-41. There are...important differences in content [between the two creation accounts]. For example, the first account of creation opens with a watery chaos; in the second, the world is an arid landscape. In the first, animals are... Continue Reading →
To see other posts in this series, please go to the series' page. In the last installment of "Invasion of the Bible Snatchers" we investigated Ray Comfort's claim that the text of Job 26:7 affirmed that our planet was "freely floating" in space. As I pointed out in that post, Comfort's bad science led to... Continue Reading →
"God wants us to stop obsessing about the future and trust that He holds the future. We should put aside the passivity and the perfectionism and the question for perfect fulfillment and get on with our lives. God does not have a specific plan for our lives that He means for us to decipher ahead... Continue Reading →
"I think we have to allow that John’s Gospel differs from the Synoptic Gospels in this fundamental respect: it is not an attempt to remember the historical Jesus; it is an attempt to restate the significance of the historical Jesus from a later theological vantage point, shaped in particular by a bitter controversy with the... Continue Reading →
Shaily Patel, "Excursus: Methods of Ideological Criticism," in Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction To the Early Christian Writings, sixth edition (OUP, 2016), 193. Like feminist criticism, queer criticism is a way of reading the New Testament that contests certain norms depicted in the text, especially those that privilege heterosexuality and fixed gender... Continue Reading →
Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, third edition (OUP, 2014), 186. The Deuteronomic school, as we have seen, had connections with both the Levitical priesthood and the prophets. It continued to revise its core text, the book of Deuteronomy, as Israel's circumstances changed from autonomous nation to... Continue Reading →
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