The story of the “Golden Calf” episode, offers three different answers to the question: Who brought Israel out of Egypt. And they are attributed to different people and recounted to us by different people! This opens lots of interesting possibilities for interplay of points of view. When there are “rough edges” like this in a [&hellip...
In this post we’ll discover some humour from below. The humour of the oppressed often pokes fun at the oppressor. Those who subjugate others fear them, and this fear generates feelings of inferiority that in Exodus some oppressed women manipulate delightfully. Please open your Bibles at Exodus 1-2. The original audio only version of this [&hellip...
In a post Why the Bible is just not (so) funny David returned to a theme he’s argued before, that the Bible is not funny. Aparently back in 2007 he issued a challenge that readers of his blog could not give examples of humour from every book in the Bible: Funny Stuff in the Bible. [&hellip...
It is about time I finished this casuistry thing (unless any of you know different), but first I think I should show that this approach to Scripture is not just a Matthew thing, but does indeed come from Jesus. We’ll look at a neat case from Mark ...
Here’s the third (I hope gripping) installment of this series on why the distinction between casuistic and apodictic matters beyond the form criticism of the legal corpora of the Pentateuch 😉 Apart from that one (corpora) no new “long words” this time, and that one is NOT in the podcast 😉 — with Gospel of [&hellip...
This is the video version of the second part of this three part series. (Part one, explained the difference between the two sorts of law.) Here I claim that the distinction helps us make sense of Jesus seemingly contradictory teaching about Old Testament law. I was a bit careless in narrating this one, note that [&hellip...
Here’s a video version of a podcast I did a while back, about one of the most dull-sounding topics in biblical studies 🙁 Yet distinguishing these two (whether or not you remember the names) is vital to understanding the New Testament! Tomorrow I’ll explain why 🙂...
Often in biblical narrative things “just seem to happen”, rather like they do in our lives 😉 But are such “happenings” chance or divine providence at work? We’ll try to decide, using Gen 37:12ff. (read with Gen 39) and Ruth 2 as examples. ...
What does it mean to “believe”? Can Alice in Wonderland help us avoid a common Evangelical error? And does “it’s in the Bible” end conversation about the “Canaanite genocide”? (( The scare quotes round Canaanite genocide indicate my question, still as far as I am concerned unanswered whether such an “event” occurred, or even was [&hellip...
Bonhoeffer has some hugely stimulating ideas in his discussion of the “fall” story in Genesis 3. Probably none are more stimulating, or easy to fail to grasp as his thought about “conscience” – at least difficult for people for whom the idea that conscience is the “voice of God within” is deeply embedded, since Bonhoeffer [&hellip...
