Boldly professing the obvious since 2009
I’ve been steadily plugging away at the first portion of my dissertation (the one having to do with early Jewish understandings of Israel and Israelite restoration eschatology) this summer, and I’ve found it necessary to spend a good bit of time parsing the distinctions between the key terms Ἰουδαῖος (Jews/Judaeans/Judahites), Israel, and Hebrew in early [...] Read more »
Jim Davila has called attention to a large number of LCL volumes that are now public domain and available in PDF form. The ones most relevant for studies of early Judaism and Christianity are listed by author here, while you can download a .zip file with all of them here. The translations may be a [...] Read more »
A couple weeks ago, Joel Willits posted a critique of the oft-used cliché “love the sinner, hate the sin,” arguing: This slogan is one of the most unbiblical ideas I’ve ever heard that get’s touted as if it were actually a verse in the Bible. However, the verses in the Bible, here Romans 5:1-11, actually [...] Read more »
Two posts ago, I talked about one big change I made to my Introduction to the New Testament class last summer, choosing to take the students through the Synoptic Gospels before teaching the Synoptic Problem itself. That change seemed immensely helpful, as it took an important (but typically uninteresting to the students) subject and forced [...] Read more »
I had the opportunity to teach a five-week course of “Introduction to New Testament Literature” at UNC-Chapel Hill this summer, and I took the opportunity to reexamine and revamp a few aspects of how I’ve taught that course (or have seen others teach it) in the past. In addition to a lot of fine-tuning and [...] Read more »