Boldly professing the obvious since 2009
Since once again it’s that festive season, I thought it might be good to link everyone to a couple pieces on Luke 2 by Stephen Carlson. In the first (recently published in NTS), he shows (in spite of the constant threat of the Spanish Inquisition) that Luke 2:7 in fact involves no “inn” (the word [...] Read more »
Mark Goodacre has posted an interesting piece, considering whether much of Matthew’s redaction of Mark could be seen as “an attempt to fix some of the potentially troubling ideas and implications in Mark.” He pushes forward three examples: the question of Jesus’ father, Jesus’ baptism by John, and the introduction of post-resurrection appearances, concluding, Matthew’s [...] Read more »
My historical Jesus course just finished going through the four canonical gospels in sequence (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John). I thought a couple of my students’ observations on Luke (and its relationship to the other Synoptics) were especially noteworthy. First, as one of the (admittedly weaker) arguments in favor of the existence of Q is that [...] Read more »
Had some fun with my Historical Jesus course last night, asking my students (who had just finished reading Mark) to answer the following question: What exactly did Jesus preach? Eventually, one enterprising student rightly called attention to Mark 1:14–15, After John had been handed over, Jesus went into Galilee, preaching the gospel ["good news"] of [...] Read more »
Been wanting to post on this book for over a week now, but other work has interfered. That said, this book is absolutely a must-read for those interested in the historical Jesus and is one of the better scholarly monographs I’ve read. As my primary research has focused on Paul’s concern with the restoration of [...] Read more »