Poor translators! It is not an easy job.((Dr. Compton is Associate Professor of NT and Biblical Theology at Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, MN. This essay lightly revises his earlier “Where There’s Not a Will: The Covenant Theology of Hebrews 9,”...
In the latest ed. of the Master’s Seminary Journal (avail. free online), Michael Vlach of The Master’s Seminary reviews Wellum & Gentry’s biblical theology Kingdom through Covenant (KtC). It’s one of the more thorough reviews of the book I’ve seen lately (see...
John Rhoads argues in a recent article that it was Josephus, not Luke, who misdated Quirinius’s census. The gist of his piece is that the Judas whom Josephus associates with a tax revolt in A.D. 6 (Ant. 18.4–23) is the same Judas whom Josephus says was killed a decade...
Earlier this summer I had a chance to read and review a new and increasingly-influential book on Hebrews by David Moffitt, assistant professor of NT at Campbell University Divinity School. The review’s slotted to be published in the Fall edition of Trinity Journal....
Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood—Acts 20:28 What does Paul mean in his speech in Acts 20 when he says that God purchased the church with...
Hebrews says “yes.” But, I’m not yet sure this means Christian Jews (Israel) won’t have their own special zip code in the new creation. That’s a possible inference from Hebrews, but it’s not clearly a necessary one. Quite a lot, of course, depends on what is meant by...
In Gal 3:10–4:7 Paul gives two reasons why works will not justify. One the one hand, he says that justification by works would change the terms of God’s covenant with Abraham. And, Paul adds, one simply isn’t allowed to do that sort of thing with an established...
If one aim of biblical theology is to describe how the Bible hangs together, then one useful place to begin is with Judaism & Christianity’s various summaries of Israel’s story, which “function as abbreviated commentaries on the story of Israel, and each passage...
Sometime earlier in the semester I happened across a piece by Bruce Longenecker titled “The Narrative Approach to Paul: An Early Retrospective.” Like many of you, I’d been seeing all sorts of books and articles with some combination of “Paul” and “narrative” in their...
These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.—Colossians 2:17 Colossians 2:17 gives us another important insight into how the earliest Christians put their Bibles together. But, the NIV here nicely obscures some of the...
In 2 Cor 3:13 Paul says that “Moses put a veil over his face to prevent Israel from seeing the end of what was passing away.” What exactly was it that Israel couldn’t see? The answer: Israel had a hermeneutical problem. She couldn’t see the purpose of the Mosaic...
In Acts 1:12-26 Peter says that Judas Iscariot had to be replaced (see Acts 1:16, 21). The vacancy his defection (and suicide) created could not be left open, otherwise Scripture would be broken. After all, what Judas had done and what, then, the remaining apostles...
In a handful of places the NT interprets Jesus’ resurrection (+ ascension) as his exaltation to God’s right hand, which is to say, as his fulfillment of David’s prophecy about the coming messiah in Ps 110:1: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool...
There was some delay between the writing of the NT documents and their universal acceptance as Holy Scripture (= canon). In fact, the first list to recognize the 27 books of our NT comes from the mid-4th century (see here). The delay feels a bit unsettling, doesn’t...
One of the lingering questions I have about Wellum & Gentry’s (W&G) remarkable book Kingdom through Covenant has to do with their view of Rom 9–11. They argue that Rom 9–11 promises the future salvation of a lot of ethnic Jews (see 501; also their response to...
One of the lectures I give each year in my Gospels class is titled “Who’s Invited and What Should They Do?” In the first part (“Who’s Invited?”), I talk about who it was Jesus invited (invites) to follow him, to repent and believe, to enter his kingdom. Here we talk...
25 Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, 26 but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the...
Just last week I had a chance to reread Barnabas Lindars’ Theology of the Letter to the Hebrews and was reminded of how helpful I’d originally found his synthetic picture of Hebrews’ message. Now that I’ve worked through Hebrews more thoroughly, there are some bits of...
David M. Hay. Glory at the Right Hand: Psalm 110 in Early Christianity. SBLMS 18. Nashville: Abingdon, 1973. 176 pp. In this revised version of his 1965 Ph.D. thesis, completed at Yale under the supervision of Paul W. Meyer, Hay explores the use of Psalm 110 in early...
I have become [the church’s] servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness—26 the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people”—Col 1:25–26 (NIV) Here I’ll make three...
Ben Witherington—evangelicalism’s equivalent of the prolific Jacob Neusner—wrote a little article a while back on the influence of Galatians on Hebrews, which I’d been meaning to read in the course of my work on Hebrews. Well, just last week, I happened to be...
If you’ve ever worked your way through Matthew’s gospel, looking up the Old Testament texts he cites, then you’ve surely puzzled over what he has to say about Hosea 11:1 in Matt 2:15. Matthew claims that when Jesus returned with his parents from Egypt he fulfilled...
David Instone-Brewer argues in a recent article that the Talmud’s account of Jesus’ trial contains the original Jewish charge against Jesus. The lines, as preserved in the Munich ed. (1342), read like this: It was taught: On the Eve of the Passover they hung Yeshu the...
I had a chance to sit down with Clearwater Christian College prof. Carl Martin a few months back to talk about biblical studies, ministry preparation, and the sorts of things that get him out of bed in the morning. Below is the first part of that conversation, where...
Two profs from Southern Seminary published a biblical theology earlier this year that “fell like a bomb on the playground of the [biblical] theologians,” particularly disrupting the contented play of those of us hailing from either one of the two traditional...
I’ve been reading the Gospel of Mark together with some Christians and “seekers” over the past several weeks. (We’ve been using a fantastic study put out by the folks at The Good Book Company entitled Christianity Explored.) One thing that has struck me while...
John Davenants Dissertation on the Death of Christ - ComptonDownload
I’m working up a paper on ‘The Story of Israel in Hebrews 11’ and one of the preliminary matters I’m trying to get a handle on is the point of the chapter. That is, before I can say anything about how Hebrews tells Israel’s story, I need to figure out what the...
And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became sinner.—1 Timothy 2:14 Does 1 Tim 2:14 suggest women are more easily deceived than men? Here I want to answer this question by saying something (1) about the function of 1 Tim 2:14 and,...
If you think Paul wrote Hebrews, you’re in good company (see, e.g., here). One problem with this conclusion, however, is that what Paul says in Gal 1:11–12 seems to contradict what Paul says in Heb 2:3, presuming Paul wrote Heb 2:3. That is, in Gal 1:11–12 Paul...
Just yesterday I came across a brief op-ed piece with that title (see here), written by New York Times columnist David Brooks. If you don’t yet follow Brooks’ work, you really should. His work is not only well-written and informed, but consistently fair. In any case,...
C. S. Lewis once remarked that the biblical “accounts of the ‘miracles’ in first-century Palestine are either lies, or legends, or history. And if all, or the most important, of them are lies or legends then the claim which Christianity has been making for the last...
“[A]n understanding of the Exodus is...essential for understanding and probing the theology of the Bible as it unfolds historically.” Stephen Dempster makes this point in a recent article on the role of Exodus in biblical theology titled “Exodus and Biblical Theology:...
We’d just finished up another night at Christianity Explored when I stumbled upon a discussion my friend Lisa was having with a guest she’d brought to the study. Seeing me approach, Lisa said something to her guest about the fact that I taught the Bible for a living...
Who was John Stott? It’s been a couple of years since Stott died, and his legacy is still taking shape. I suspect that for many of us he’ll be remembered as the author of one or two books on our shelves—probably The Cross of Christ and/or Basic Christianity—or as the...
"I’m going to be gone soon. Don’t be sad. I’m not afraid of death.... Mother, we are all going to die someday. Don’t be discouraged by my death. Continue in your faith."... After a final public condemnation meeting, the militiamen shot him by the roadside and dumped...
But I ask: Did they not hear? Of course they did: “Their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world”—Rom 10:18, citing Ps 19:4 How can Paul prove that Israel has heard the gospel by citing Ps 19:4? The psalm doesn’t seem to have the...
I think I can make a pretty good case that Hebrews was a sermon, probably, in fact, a handful of sermons stitched together to respond to the urgent needs of a community in crisis. (You’re just going to have to trust me on this one.) Here I want to reflect on three...
If you’ve read anything about the history of the discipline of biblical theology, then you’ve come across the name J. P. Gabler and his now-programmatic lecture “On the Proper Distinction between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology....” The lecture, his inaugural duty for...
The pastor had a tough assignment. While on sabbatical he’d received word from his fellow elders that a group of Jewish families in the church were beginning to cause a bit of trouble. They were threatening to abandon their Christian confession and return to the...
In preparation for worship this Sunday, I’d like to follow up on a piece posted this time last year on TGC’s blog titled “The Neglected Resurrection” and suggest one more reason why the resurrection must not be neglected—one more reason why the resurrection is the...
This is the second part of a two-part post on the importance of history and historical work—like the quest for the historical Jesus—for studying and proclaiming the Gospels. For the first part, see “Why Christians Need History.” Since history matters, since it’s...
We just read through John 5 in our Greek refresher course. After working through the miracle story at the beginning of the chapter—the one where Jesus heals the lame man at the pool—I spent some time trying to figure out what it is that John wants us to take away from...
"I’m going to be gone soon. Don’t be sad. I’m not afraid of death.... Mother, we are all going to die someday. Don’t be discouraged by my death. Continue in your faith."... After a final public condemnation meeting, the militiamen shot him by the roadside and dumped...
Anne-Marie Slaughter kicked the hornet’s nest two weeks back when she published an article with that title in The Atlantic. In it she explained why the feminist ideal—women can have it all, a family and a fulfilling career at the same time, just like men—is still...
We discussed the Nicodemus narrative in my Greek refresher course last Friday. While I was preparing for the class, I was struck by John 3:16. It’s such a clear statement about Jesus’ mission and God’s character. Sometimes it just takes reading a passage in a...
Who was John Stott? It’s been nearly a year since Stott died and his legacy is still taking shape. I suspect that for many of us he’ll be remembered as the author of one or two books on our shelves—probably The Cross of Christ and/or Basic Christianity—or as the name...
One of the best-known lines from St. Paul is found at the beginning of his letter to the Philippians where he says, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (1:21). I think this was my life verse for at least a few years. In fact, I’m pretty sure I put the...
One of the inevitabilities of working in a seminary community is that you’re likely to lose quite a few dear friends over the course of your tenure. It’s not because seminaries require vows of friendlessness, alongside those of poverty and humility. Rather, it’s...