Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
Tag: Jesus
You know you’re an apologist when. . .
you already know what you want to prove even before entering the conversation
you take criticism as a sign of eschatological conflict
you relinquish relationships with people who don’t agree with you
you only listen to one talk show host on the internet
the hardest thing to believe is that most people don’t believe you
you think everyone would be better off if they just thought like you
you scorn people for missing a point so obvious to you
human feelings and rights seem less important than “truth”
the friends you hang out with never disagree with your opinions
you’re willing to bother a perfect stranger to express your opinion
you’re willing to let tradition and authority replace good evidence
you can’t believe foreigners don’t think like you, but you’ve never been outside the country
you view intellectuals as a threat to good government
you don’t know that you do not—and cannot possibly—know what you think you know for certain.
what’s the one thing that made Socrates wise? He knew that he did not know.
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
Review of John Knox, Marcion and the New Testament: An Essay in the Early History of the Canon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).
- Marcion’s canon was the first “closed” canon of distinctively Christian writings. “No one before Marcion said of a restricted number of documents ‘These and these alone among Christian books are to be accepted in the church.’” 19.
- Marcion set his collection over against the Jewish scriptures and thought of his canon as having the same relation to the God of Christ as the Jewish-Christian Bible had to the Creator God. It would thus have been for him, in very truth, a new (even if the only true) ‘testament,’ whether Marcion used that phrase or not.” 21.
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
Abomination of Desolation, Part 2
The meaning of the “abomination of desolation” in the Maccabean past affected its meaning in the present of the little apocalypse. Mark 13:14 probably envisions the initiation of a Hellenic sacrificial cult directed at a foreign cult statue (ho andrias, which is a masculine word in Greek). This statue would indeed stand on the temple mount.
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
The Abomination of Desolation
Outside the book of Revelation, nothing has done more to fuel the apocalyptic imagination of Christians than the “little apocalypse” embedded in Mark 13 (with parallels in Matthew 24 and Luke 21). This bite-size apocalypse has it all: false prophets, false signs, the near failure of the elect, earthquakes, the surging of the sea, and the coming of the Son of Man. But perhaps most memorable is the famous (or infamous) “abomination of desolation” in Mark 13:14.
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
Review of David Trobisch, On the Origin of Christian Scripture: The Evolution of the New Testament Canon in the Second Century (2023).
In this fascinating book, Trobisch proposes that the canonical edition of the 27-book New Testament had a single, mid-2nd century editor who used a consistent system of nomina sacra (8) and who divided the 27 books into four volumes (a 4-gospel volume, an Acts-Catholic epistles section, 14 letters of Paul, and Revelation). 82. It was a collection using first-century “apostolic” voices for second-century concerns. 58.
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
Review of A Lost Edition of the Letters of Paul: A Reassessment of the Text of the Pauline Corpus Attested by Marcion (1989).
Once one considers the textual affinities of the Pauline Corpus reflected by Marcion, “it becomes far more likely that Marcion’s role was not the creation of a new text but the adaptation of an already existing Pauline Corpus which began with Galatians; it called Ephesians ‘Laodiceans’; it had the fourteen-chapter form of Romans; and it contained a great number of variants which scholars have wrongly assumed were created by Marcion.” 4.
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
Review of Laird, The Pauline Corpus in Early Christianity: Its Formation, Publication, and Circulation (2022).
Laird argues that an early edition of the Pauline letters was “initially formed around the time of Paul’s death using duplicate copies of his writings” and that “someone, such as Luke or another companion of Paul, may have initially published a ten-volume edition of the corpus and that this edition as later expanded to include the Pastoral Epistles and Hebrews.” 317. Luke even “played a significant role in the production of the Pastoral Epistles and Hebrews, contributions that would also tie him to the one or both of the expanded editions of the corpus.” 303.
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
Daniel Glover, Patterns of Deification in the Acts of the Apostles (2022)
In this fantastic book, Glover shows that the author of Acts was not a critic of deification as such, he was a proponent of his own notions of deification. He was a man of his time, not standing over the Hellenic world wagging his finger at “idolatrous” acclamations. He was part of the Hellenic mindset, presupposing that divine honors should be granted to those who produced superhuman benefits. Paul was considered to be such a benefactor.
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
Review of Markus Vinzent, Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels 2014
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
M. David Litwa, Ph.D. 