Growing up, I was told “Jews don’t believe in Jesus.” Though I was hearing this from the vantage point of Judaism, many Christians have believed, been told, and said the same thing. But the first thing that struck me about the New Testament, when I first read Matthew 1:1 was that this was a Jewish […]
After centuries of confiscating and burning copies of the Mishnah and Talmud, Christians had not only lost the ability to read and understand the language of the Tanakh (the Old Testament) , they also lost the trust of the Jewish people who might have taught them Hebrew. After driving God’s Chosen people from their countries […]
What people have called for 200 years “Liberal” and “Conservative” theology, then, are not extreme ends of a pole, but two variations of the same heresy, that stand apart from and against an orthodoxy that holds the Cross of Christ and the Teaching of Christ in balance and in tension with each other.
When Jesus went to His “Father’s House” to “prepare a place for us” He was not simply going there to dust the furniture and change the sheets. He had come to earth to make sinners fit for Heaven. He has returned there to get Heaven ready to receive sinners, to receive us…
The logic behind the idea that Moses could not have written Deuteronomy is simply because it’s too accurate. As its author, Moses would have prophetically spoken of things that would happen 900 years later. If our assumption is that prophecy doesn’t occur, Deuteronomy must be a later composition. If we are going to accept the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy we will need to be open to miracles or at least vast coincidences.
The definition we have of “Apostle” is “one who was with us from the beginning” who will “bear witness to His resurrection”. (Acts 1:21-23) Since “Apostle” carries the idea of “one who is sent” there is an idea of being commissioned (Matthew 28:18-20) This are qualifications that Paul recognized himself unqualified to fill. Mary Magdalene, […]
The motive for historically changing Junia’s name to a male but weird “Junias” was because certainly this person was an Apostle. Now that there is scholarly concensus that Junias was a woman we suddenly have a problem determining whether she was an a apostle based on what is meant by “among”
Matthew 4:-11 Are you as troubled as I am that the first thing the Holy Spirit did after Jesus baptism is to lead Him into the wilderness to be tested? This seems a good place to begin a challenge to our ideas about suffering, being filled with the Spirit, and certainly about what the Gospel […]
From the years 1985 to 1990, I spent hours a day performing music in Harvard Square and in the subway stations of Boston in Cambridge. I wrote a lot of songs during that time in part so I would have new things to play. A lot of these songs I never recorded, others I never […]
Ok. I am not one to talk about Bible texts as being troublesome, but here is my exception. What is Jesus talking about in Matthew 11:11-12? He says “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has been treated violently, and violent men take it by force.” How is […]
