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as much of a hurdle as it seems to travel back in time to the Emmaus road, the gap between us and the biblical world is actually wider culturally than temporally.
have you ever considered the fact that Moses was actually eighty, Aaron was eighty-three, and Miriam was in her mid-nineties? The three dynamic heroes of this action adventure were all senior citizens, old-timers who’d be long out to pasture in our world.
The biblical world, like most of the world throughout history, struggled against hunger, not flab. Yet there’s no end of people who have scoured the Bible for weight-loss secrets.
This is so funny and thought provoking.
But, in fact, the Greek word for gospel, euanggelion (literally, “good news”), in the New Testament also comes from terminology that was used in regards to kings and their dominions. When a new king was crowned, the euanggelion was the announcement that the monarch had taken the
throne, that a new kingdom had taken power.
Strictly speaking, the gospel, the euanggelion, is simply that God had appointed Jesus as his chosen King.
What’s a person to do, then, to get the truest sense of the original text? Rather than clinging to one translation, you’ll actually get a clearer idea if you read from more than one version and then compare them. Read from a few major translations that aim to be more word-for-word and then look at some that are more thought-for-thought.
When God first commanded Israel to build a tabernacle, the purpose was not just so he could dwell in it but could dwell among them (Exod. 29:45). Then he commissioned Solomon to build the temple and filled it with his presence. Finally, through the atoning work of Christ, God came to indwell our hearts as his bayit, his house, and achieve his greatest goal of living intimately with his people.
Jesus’ parables, however, embraced the fact that our material world is multifaceted and complex. If God’s creation surprises and perplexes us, shouldn’t its Creator do so even more?
If it sounds logical, Westerners will find it persuasive.
A growing number of scholars believe that the reason Christians haven’t been obligated to observe the law is because they are Gentiles, not because Jesus abolished it. This would agree with his own declaration in Matthew 5:17.
Instead of stringing together syllogisms in order to logically deduce what Christ might have meant, we can ask how his original audience attempted to live out his words.
Through God’s name he was proclaiming how he would reveal himself: “I will be known by what I do.”
The Bible is not a philosophical book, but a history book, the book of God’s mighty acts, in which God becomes knowable to us.
Karl Bath
the Bible says that “God was mindful of Abraham and removed Lot from the midst of the upheaval” (Gen. 19:29 NJPS). God delivered Lot from the catastrophe for the sake of Abraham—as a response to Abraham’s faithfulness, not Lot’s.
This “doctrine of merit” is not an infrequent theme in the Bible and constitutes many such incidents in which the righteousness of chosen individuals may sustain other individuals or even an entire group through its protective power.
Nahum Sarna
Greeks learned in order to comprehend. Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use. . . . To the modern man everything seems calculable; everything reducible to a figure. He has supreme faith in statistics and abhors the idea of a mystery.
When Westerners open Genesis, we struggle with the Bible’s lack of proof that God exists. But in the biblical world, this simply wasn’t a question on anyone’s mind. From the perspective of the ancients, it was simply inconceivable that a puny human brain could be the ultimate source of God’s existence.
You need to “think small” in order to appreciate the impact of Exodus on its original audience. God didn’t just thunder a theological pronouncement from the sky in order to reveal himself to the world. He proved himself by duking it out with the mightiest deities they knew. More than once, when Israel approached other nations, the nations reacted in terror at the reputation of this God who had vanquished the Egyptian gods (see Num. 22; Josh. 6).
In the ancient Near East, it was assumed that humanity was created to be the slaves of gods who were capricious and not terribly interested in their lives. As they saw it, the world was arbitrary, unpredictable, and cruel, and humans had no guarantee that their lives were meaningful in any way.
The idea that human life was uniquely precious to God was radical, unparalleled. To us it is second nature, but this was a shocking notion in the world of the ancient Near East.
Jesus was assaulting the money-changing tables, which were called the “booths of Annas” because they were owned by the family of the high priest Annas (or Ananias). It’s historically known that the house of Annas charged greatly inflated prices on sacrificial animals, extorted money, and stole funds intended for priests who had no other income. Heard in its full context, Mark 11 expands into a prophecy about the destruction of the temple because of priestly corruption.
Noah built an ark, a tevah, to save his family from the flood, and Moses’ mother placed her son in a tevah on the water to save him from death. The word tevah is only used in those two narratives.
Before, God had created Adam, filled him with the breath of life, and then pronounced this final creation of his “very good.” Now, as the Spirit descends on Jesus, God voices his pleasure, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
But don’t forget that while God made many promises through the prophets, he genuinely loved the nation of Israel and he spoke to their present-day situation. The prophets’ main concern was to respond to the matters of their own time.
In 118 BC, the Egyptian king Ptolemy VIII proclaimed a Jubilee, and the first thing he did was to pardon sins “both intentional and unintentional, except murder and sacrilege.”
Kings of many nations liked to give themselves the title of “son of god.” Caesar often stamped this claim on his coins. You could, in fact, read God’s promise to David in 2 Samuel 7:14 as saying that a human king would come who had such a close relationship with God that he would call him “father.” Because this status was so widely claimed, the title “son of god” may not have sounded like automatic proof of divine identity.7 Two other Messianic titles would have actually hinted at a superhuman identity in a much more distinctively Jewish way. One of them, believe it or not, was “Son of Man.”
