A wise priest once said that interpreting the Scripture is like eating a trout. Some bites are fleshy and fall right off the bone, easy to eat and tasty. Others are spiny and hard to swallow, the small bones sticking in your throat. This fellows says, “as with the Bible, go for the easy parts first, and when you’ve learned how good they are, and how good fish is, then go after the hard bites.”
The oldest surviving New Testament manuscript is being assembled and placed online as a resource for scholars and students. The British Library says the full text of the Codex Sinaiticus will be available to Web users by next July, digitally reconnecting parts that are held in Britain, Russia, Germany and a monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Desert.
Christoph Romhild and Chris Harrison offer a fascinating visual display of the cross references in the Bible.
Most every Anglican knows that Richard Hooker was the founding theological visionary of Anglicanism. But many have not read his writings nor sought to apply his insights to the present controversies in the Communion. The Archbishop of Armagh luckily has risen to the task.
When I look to the Gospels, I find significant support for what is called “the social gospel.” I find nothing at all, one way or the other, about faithful, life-long, same-sex relationships, those who live in them, and whether they should be ordained or not. Those who elevate concerns over the latter to the level of “gospel” are the ones who have some explaining to do.
Did the National Geographic and a team of well-known scholars botch the translation of the Gospel of Judas? The Chronicle of Higher Education makes a compelling case in an exhaustive article on how the text was discovered, preserved (badly) and finally translated and marketed.
When Dallas Theological Seminary professor Daniel Wallace examined New Testament manuscripts stored in the National Archive in Albania last June, he was amazed by what he did not find. The story of the woman caught in adultery, usually found in John 7:53-8:11, was missing from three of the texts, and was out of place in a fourth, tacked on to the end of John’s Gospel.
It isn’t all that clear what that means, “fishers of men,” and it doesn’t seem to be their reason for following him: there’s no new job description here. But Jesus is promising some kind of change that begins where they are. That’s the literal meaning of the Greek, I’m told: Follow me: and I will make you to become fishermen-of-people. They will be transformed into some new version of what they already are.
In a letter to the Corinthians written in mid-first century CE, Paul urges that female prophets at Corinth prophesy in the public assembly with a head covering, “because of the angels.” Paul recognizes women’s personal and public experience of the spirit, but his concern is that it seem unintelligible to outsiders.
For centuries, the discipline of Christian “Hebraics” consisted primarily of Christians cherry-picking Jewish texts to support the traditionally assumed contradiction between the Jews — whose alleged dry legalism contributed to their fumbling their ancient tribal covenant with God — and Jesus, who personally embodied God’s new covenant of love. But today seminaries across the Christian spectrum teach, as Vanderbilt University New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says, that “if you get the [Jewish] context wrong, you will certainly get Jesus wrong.”