We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Quotes to Chew on: How First Century Jews Came to Worship a Man
“Legends do not generally arise in contradiction to fundamental convictions held by the culture of those who create and embrace them. Yet if the Jesus story is largely a fictitious legend, this is exactly what we must suppose happened. We submit that the initial historical implausibility of this supposition should be enough for us seriously to consider alternative explanations.”
“One such explanation is the one given us by those who first told the Jesus story. It is simple and straightforward, and it explains all that needs to be explained–though it requires that we accept the reality of the supernatural. In essence, the earliest disciples tell us that they report what they do about Jesus (despite its conflict with their own cultural/religious expectations) because this is how things actually happened. Most importantly, they tell us they believe Jesus is the Son of God and worship him as Lord because, though it violates some of their most fundamental Jewish religious convictions to do so, his life, teachings, miracles, and resurrection convinced them.”
Boyd, Gregory A., Lord or Legend? Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma, Baker Books, 2007, p. 37.
Related Reading
The Cruciform Beauty of Horrific Divine Portraits
“Only a person who is aware of the crucified Christ can properly understand Scripture.” Luther (Table Talks) In the last three posts I’ve been wrestling with how insights from Matthew Bate’s book, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation might help us interpret violent portraits of God in the OT in a way that discloses how…
What Makes the Good News So Good
While God was revealed in various ways and to various degrees through the law and the prophets of the Old Testament, in Jesus we finally have the one who is “the exact representation of God’s being” or essence (hypostasis, Heb. 1:1-13). This is the heart of the Good News that reverberates throughout the New Testament.…
How can you believe Matthew’s report about the Jewish cover up of the resurrection?
Question: In Matthew it’s reported that Jewish authorities tried to cover up the resurrection of Jesus by saying the disciples stole the body while the guards were sleeping. I don’t buy it. How would Matthew know about this story, since it was a secret conversation the authorities had with the guards? And how could they…
Thankful for the Passion of God
The classical view of God has held that God is impassible, meaning he is above pathos (passion or emotions). The main reason the church came to this view was that, following the Hellenistic philosophical tradition, they associated emotions with change while believing God was above all change (immutable). Moreover, experiencing emotions implies that one is affected by…
Part 7 (of 15): Hierarchies, Masculinity, and Femininity
Assessing Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life by Greg Boyd “Do male crustaceans oppress female crustaceans? Should their hierarchies be upended?” In the previous two posts we reviewed Peterson’s conception of life as a delicate balancing act between order and chaos (post 5) and we’ve explored how he applies this conception to biological and cultural…
In the Wilderness of Religion
Eric Bryan via Compfight There are an awful lot of us in the Church today who are no longer feeling at home in Evangelicalism. Regardless of how you feel about World Vision’s hiring policy decisions, the spectacle of thousands of people discontinuing their child sponsorships (relationships with flesh and blood children in need) because of…