The Secular Frontier

WHERE WE ARE In my initial post on miracles, I analyzed eight different definitions of the word "miracle" into seven different elements: IMPACT – the emotional or psychological effect of a miracle GENUS – the most general category to which a miracle belongs SPECIES – the sub-category (of the most general category) to which a miracle belongs AGENT/CAUSE – the person(s) or kind of being(s) or kind of thing(s) that brings about a miracle EXCEPTION – the way in which a miracle departs from ordinary or normal circumstances BASELINE – the ordinary or normal circumstances from which a miracle departs PURPOSE – the goal or intention behind the making of a miracle In Part 1 of this series of posts, I argued that the element of IMPACT should be eliminated from definitions of "miracle". I also suggested that the GENUS and SPECIES elements of the definition by Habermas were the best, and that the SPECIES element in the definition by Evans was a ... Read Article

WHERE WE ARE I have previously analyzed eight different definitions of the word "miracle" into seven different elements: In Part 1, I examined the elements of Impact, Genus, and Species. In Part 2, I examined the elements of Cause/Agent, Exception, and Baseline. In Part 3, I argued that we should eliminate the Exception and Baseline elements from the definition of the word "miracle" in order to avoid importing questionable or controversial philosophical assumptions into the definition. THE ELEMENT OF PURPOSE In this current post, I will examine Purpose, the seventh element of definitions of "miracle": PURPOSE – the goal or intention behind the making of a miracle Habermas indicates that miracles must have some sort of purpose, they are "effected for a purpose". This seems only to imply that miracles are events that are produced intentionally by some person or agent. If the definition already requires that God be the cause of the event, then this very general requirement is red ... Read Article

BASELINE AND EXCEPTION ELEMENTS I have analyzed eight different definitions of the word "miracle" into seven elements: Two elements found in most definitions are what I call the "Baseline" and "Exception" elements: BASELINE – the ordinary or normal circumstances from which a miracle departs EXCEPTION – the way in which a miracle departs from ordinary or normal circumstances Only the definition by the Christian philosopher C. Stephen Evans lacks these two elements: An event brought about by a special act of God. (Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion, Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2002, p.76.) I find the clarity and simplicity of Evans' definition appealing, but before I toss aside these two elements (baseline and exception), I will try to determine the REASON why Aquinas and Hume include these two elements in their definitions of "miracle". AQUINAS AND HUME ON MIRACLES AND NATURE Much philosophical discussion about miracle ... Read Article

In 2011 I was searching for scholarship engaging Christ Myth Theorist Earl Doherty, who argued Jesus never existed, and I found Prof James McGrath’s blog where he was critically blogging through Doherty’s book.  For example: Chapter 1 of Earl Doherty’s Jesus: Neither God Nor Man This year as Public Theology/Philosophy, I tried blogging through “The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus (2024).”  I took 1 to a few excerpts from each chapter and did a little commentary.  Hopefully people will be inspired to read this great book: (2) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Reception History by Halvor Moxnes (3) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Beyond The Jewish Jesus Debate by Adele Reinhartz (4) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Biography by Helen K. Bond (5) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Beyond What is Behind by Chris Keith (6) The Next Quest For The Historical Jesus: Missing Pieces by Mark Goodacre (7) The Next Quest ... Read Article

As is clear from the genealogies of Jesus, both of which belong to Joseph, Jesus is adopted into Joseph's bloodline (since he isn't Jesus' biological father), just as the new believer is adopted into the family of God through Jesus who Paul calls the first born of many brethren. Jesus' death is a literary pair with John the Baptist in Mark, though more painful and humiliating, as Jesus' death is a pair with forgiving Stephen's in Luke-Acts. We have characters wondering whether Jesus is John the Baptist raised from the dead, which is just a way of saying Jesus is the new and greater John like Matthew's Jesus is the new and greater Moses. Shedd comments: In our earliest portrayal of Jesus, the Gospel of Mark, the somatic violence of the beheading of John the Baptist and the crucifixion of Jesus are keyed together. Both John and Jesus, for instance, are “handed over” (e.g., 1:14; 15:1, 10, 15), “grasped” (e.g., 6:17; 14:44, 46), and “bound” (e.g., 6:17; 15:1). At Mark 9:11–13, the design ... Read Article

APOCALYPTICISM AND MILLENARIANISM reflect the idea that the end of the age is at hand and would be followed by a judgment. This was the type of thing Jesus and John the Baptist were preaching. The world in which Jesus grew up that gave birth to this worldview was a time of anxiety and instability. Crossley writes: In this essay, I look at more precise comparisons that keep the emphasis on premodern, peasant apocalypticism and millenarianism as a vehicle for expressing discontent with the world.... Put crudely, a minority of urban elites dominated access to power and controlled resources produced by the overwhelmingly rural population from whom surplus was extracted. In the Levant, the town-countryside relationship helps explain class-based conflict, which included urban projects that introduced changes in traditional patterns of households, production, and demands on labor. In Galilee as Jesus was growing up, this involved the rebuilding of Sepphoris and the building of Tiberias, while in Judea this i ... Read Article

As I note in my essay A Critique of the Penal Substitution Interpretation of the Cross of Christ , an extremely important aspect of the resurrection is that Christ as a spirit, Christ in you, could now possess the believer in a positive way as booster, the resister of Satan par excellence and greatly aid the believer in their walk of spiritual warfare. Bazzana argues: A means through which New Testament criticism has been able to avoid dealing with the “spirit world” as a continuum has been to restrict artificially the concept of “possession” only to the influence of evil pneumata or to an illness that must be redressed by eliminating possession itself. Ethnographic study conducted by scholars like Michael Lambek, Janice Boddy, Frederick Smith, and Brent Crosson demonstrates instead that, in almost all cases, possession has a “positive” side as well, one that benefits both mediums and their social groups in various ways. It would be strange if that were not the case also for the early Christ ... Read Article

In previous posts I noted how in Mark we have the satire of how the crafty Jewish leaders were manipulating scripture and tradition to invent a case against Jesus. Matthew shows something similar in one of Satan's temptations of Jesus misusing scripture. In a later addition to the gospel of John, we see this same pattern repeated of Jews trying to trip up Jesus with their knowledge of scripture. Levine writes: According to John 8:2–11, a text absent from the earliest manuscripts of John and sometimes appearing in Luke 21, scribes and Pharisees bring to Jesus in the temple a woman caught in adultery, cite the “law” (the appeal is to Lev 20:10) regarding stoning adulterers, and ask Jesus for his view. Were he to say “stone her,” he would be violating Roman law (adultery was not a capital offense; in John 18:31 Caiaphas tells Pilate that “we” [Jews] are not allowed to execute); it also runs against the direction of rabbinic literature, which attempts to make capital punishment all but impos ... Read Article

I'm a little out of order today, Barber's essay being near the end of the book, but there were some things that are worth addressing now so here we go! Jesus predicting his passion and resurrection is multiply attested to throughout scripture.  However, as Ehrman points out these run contrary to the fact that Mark, despite his Pauline bias promoting the passion and resurrection, contrarily also has Jesus preach ways to salvation different from his death.  To begin his ministry, Jesus preaches the Kingdom, not himself.  He tells of the rich young man who is saved by following the law and giving his money to the poor.  This echoes the image of the sheep and goats in Matthew.  It seems then since Mark is going against his bias to portray the cross and resurrection as the salvific element, Mark has included some ideas about Jesus that go behind Paul and Mark’s use of him.  On Mark’s use of Paul see HERE .  In terms of Jesus’ death, I’d like to look at the Lord’s ... Read Article

Did Jerusalem reflect the final destination for Jesus’ ministry.  Ferda marshals a number of points in the affirmative: the so-called triumphal entry of Jesus to Jerusalem on a donkey, which all the evangelists imply or explicitly state aimed to evoke Zech 9’s prophecy about “the king” coming to Jerusalem; the troublesome “temple saying” about its destruction and rebuilding in three days (Mark 14:57–58; Matt 26:61; John 2:18–22; Acts 6:14; Gos. Thom. 71), which the evangelists handle in very different ways, with some trying to distance Jesus from it; the symbolic action in the temple that, despite its myriad interpretations, likely anticipates a new eschatological temple; the Q saying (13:34–35) in which Jesus expresses his earnest desire to “gather” Jerusalem, and laments that it was thwarted; the parable of the wicked tenants in which Jesus is sent to the vineyard and its keepers—read, the temple and its leadership—understood within the larger sweep of Israe ... Read Article

One of the key points in Walsh’s chapter is the presence of wonder (thaumazein) and how that connects Mark’s book to earlier literary models.  For example, she writes: Thus, in the Gospel of Mark we see an even more pronounced engagement with thauma-writing as Jesus elicits the same reactions from eyewitnesses in the text as Vergil’s Camilla: wonder, fear, confusion…  Following Jesus’s first appearance in Mark’s Gospel and the subsequent confusion and wonder this engenders (e.g., ethambēthēsan; 1:27), Jesus returns to his pied-à-terre in Capernaum and draws an inquisitive mob. They bring a paralyzed man to the scene and, when they are unable to enter at the door, they gain access through the roof (2:4). Jesus, “seeing their faith” (idōn … tēn pistin autōn; 2:5), while simultaneously perceiving perceiving “in his pneuma” (tō pneumati autou; 2:8) that some local grammatici (tōn grammateōn; 2:6) are questioning him, elects to reward the faithful and rebuke his doubte ... Read Article

In Matthew we read: 25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life?[ 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Fat ... Read Article

Jesus lived in a time and place where a few central urban centers were beginning to incorporate the surrounding rural centers, and Myles begins to ask the Marxist question of how such conditions and dynamics were ripe circumstances to birth the Jesus movement.  In regard to such class conflict, Myles points to: The basic outline of this economic situation should be familiar to most biblical scholars: within an agrarian society, the smaller propertied class, by virtue of its control of the means of production, appropriated surplus off the larger class group made up of those who worked the land and water. Exploitation usually took its form in unfree labor (including slavery, medieval serfdom, and debt bondage), as well as in the form of taxes and tribute, and, more typical for first-century CE Palestine, the letting of land and house property to leasehold tenants in return for rent paid either in money, kind, or services…Even Josephus’s account of the building of Tiberias does not shy away from cl ... Read Article

Zeichmann makes the point in Jesus’ time soldiers were not functioning as what we would understand as occupying forces: First is the counterintuitive insight that there was no monolithic “Roman army.” Rather, there were a variety of military forces in early Roman Palestine—forces that had little in common by way of purpose and demographics… There is no reason to think the historical Jesus ever encountered a legionary, despite the ubiquity of such soldiers in the popular imagination of Roman antiquity. Roughly equal in number to the legionary soldiers across the empire were auxiliaries. Auxiliaries, like legionaries, served the government of Rome but were divided into two distinct military types: cohors (speira) and ala (eilē)—infantry and cavalry, respectively—with a few mixed units termed cohors equitata as well. Auxiliary soldiers were almost exclusively noncitizens who became soldiers under the promise of receiving Roman citizenship in exchange for their military service; this citizensh ... Read Article

This essay is a general overview of synagogue life shaping the Jesus story. Runesson writes: These Jewish institutions, which were ubiquitous in the ancient Mediterranean world and, importantly, can be reconstructed based on sources both beyond and within the New Testament texts, thus provide us with a critical entry point into the world of Jesus, as he shared it with his contemporaries. Indeed, it is within these types of settings that we should locate his earliest followers too, as well as the transmission and textualization of traditions preserving his memory; “synagogues” offer us nothing less than access to important clues not only about the person but also about how his memory and message were preserved and shaped. Elsewhere, I have called this approach, through which we may also learn about ancient theology and ideology based on the institutional contexts within which they were formed, “institution criticism.” ... The bottom line is that it is hardly possible to ask the questions “who w ... Read Article