Jesus evaluates and assesses the angels of the churches of Asian Minor (Revelation 2-3). On what basis? What does He know about them?Mainly, He knows their works (erga), as He repeatedly says: “I know your works” (2:2); “I know your works” (2:19); “I know your . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Paul and the Torah, Lloyd Gaston argues that the Pauline phrase erga tou nomou, “works of the law,” is a subjective genitive. That is, it refers to what the law works, and specifically to what Torah works, not to the obedience that one may or may not render to the law.He . . . . Continue Reading »
The parable of the sower teaches that some receive the word, have life, and grow, only to wither and die. Yet in other places the NT seems to indicate that those who ultimately die were never alive to begin with. Tares were sown by the evil one from the outset.How to put those together?There . . . . Continue Reading »
In his study of Papuans of the Trans-Fly, F.E. Williams remarked on the role of homosexual relations in the rites of initiation:“The bachelors had recourse to sodomy, a practice which was not reprobated but was actually a custom of the country - and a custom in the true sense, i.e., fully . . . . Continue Reading »
Abortion rights have been defended as a matter of protecting a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body.Why not allow a woman to choose to use her body to sell sexual favors, or to perform sex acts before a camera? That is even more obviously a choice about her body than abortion . . . . Continue Reading »
A woman clothed in the sun, standing on the moon, crowned with stars, is about to give birth (Revelation 12). The child is a male (arsen, v. 5), the shepherd who will rule the nations (v. 5).He is a new Adam, a point neatly underscored by the sixfold repetition of the tek- root: The woman is about . . . . Continue Reading »
Wittgenstein, Jamie Smith argues, “relativizes the claims of logic without simply rejecting them.” He rejects not logic but “logical foundationalism” that takes logic as an “ideal language” that functions as “the norm for all languages” (Who’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Jamie Smith (Who’s Afraid of Relativism?) defends Richard Rorty against the charge that he leaves behind an antirealism that implies we cannot refer to the world, perhaps an antirealism that denies the existence of extra-linguistic things.In Smith’s summary, “realist critics . . . . Continue Reading »
Drawing from Pindar’s seventh Olympian Ode, Barbara Kowalzig (Singing for the Gods, 230-1) argues that the poem provides an etiology for the fireless sacrifice established for Athena at Rhodes. Why a sacrifice without fire, given that “as is nowhere clearer than in Aristophanes’ . . . . Continue Reading »
Israel gets its first taste of war after the exodus when the Amalekites attack the women, children, and stragglers (Exodus 17; Deuteronomy 25:17-19). Yahweh vows to make war against those who make war on the weak, until He blots out “the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Deuteronomy . . . . Continue Reading »
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