Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

All Things to All People

Paul as a Problem in History and Culture: The Apostle and His Critics through the Centuriesby patrick graybaker, 274 pages, $32.99 Albert Schweitzer once remarked that the quest for the historical Jesus revealed more about the questers than it did about Jesus: They saw in the historical figure . . . . Continue Reading »

Christmas and a World Upside-Down

Biblical scholars generally agree that Luke’s Gospel was written at least a generation later than Paul’s first letter to the Christians at Corinth. Yet whatever the dating, and irrespective of scholarly disputes about whether “Luke,” the author of the eponymous Gospel and the Acts of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Traditio Deformis

The long history of defective Christian scriptural exegesis occasioned by problematic translations is a luxuriant one, and its riches are too numerous and exquisitely various adequately to classify. But I think one can arrange most of them along a single continuum in four broad divisions: some . . . . Continue Reading »

Shipwreck and Mission

The post-Vatican II Lectionary for Mass has many fine features, one of which is the continuous reading of the Acts of the Apostles during weekday Masses in the Easter season. As the Church celebrates the Resurrection for fifty days, the Church also ponders the first evangelization: the primitive Christian community, in the power of the Spirit, brings the surrounding Mediterranean world the history-shattering news that Jesus of Nazareth, having been Continue Reading »

What Saint Paul Originally Said

Did St. Paul’s originality as a thinker, preacher, and letter-writer lie in his Christology or in his teaching on the inclusion of the Gentiles in the Church? Trying to answer that question on its own terms misses the interconnectedness of Paul’s Christology and his missionary practice. Continue Reading »

Filter Tag Articles