Part One The Flight to Egypt Joseph is told to leave for Egypt before Herod finds the child and tries to kill it. He and Mary take Jesus away that night “until the death of Herod.” What Matthew does next appears interpretively strained. He claims that Hosea 11:1 is fulfilled in this incident (Matt. 2:13-15), or at least in the return from Egypt. But Hosea 11:1 in its original setting is speaking about Israel not its Messiah. What is …
Category: Biblical Studies
Part Two The Annunciation of Jesus’ Birth in Matthew Matthew famously begins his Gospel with a stylized genealogy. Placing a genealogy upfront like that bespoke a narrative rooted in the Jewish heritage. Starting your book off with a genealogy hardly seems to us to be a great attention-grabber, but Matthew’s Gospel certainly didn’t suffer on account of it (by all accounts Matthew was the most popular Gospel in the early Church.)[1] Certainly, this way of beginning a narrative about a …
Part One As one comes to Luke’s second chapter the census is mentioned, but only because it furnishes the reason for Joseph and his family to go south to Bethlehem, the town of David’s birth (Lk. 2:4-5), while also giving the location for the extraordinary vision of the shepherds in Luke 2:8-20. That event is also filled with covenant expectation. Notable is that the angel announced, “good tidings of great joy which will be to all people.” (Lk. 2:10). The …
The annunciation passages in Matthew and Luke are our first introduction to the way the Holy Spirit will pick up the threads of the OT and join them with the new revelation that came with the advent of Jesus Christ. We start with those passages where angels announce the birth of the Savior. I am going to begin with Luke’s account, and move on to Matthew’s Gospel. Even John could be considered since his account, although it skips the birth …
When we cross over from the OT into the NT we might think that we ought to expect a very clear continuity. After all the OT, particularly the covenants and the Prophets have led us to expect a great future for the nation of Israel. Even though that people had gone and done their own thing, we would think that God would stick with His covenants and promises to that nation and bring them to Himself. We would also expect …
Part One We see another instance of the constancy of God’s word in the intertextual links of the seventy years prophecies: “Six years you shall sow your land and gather in its produce, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave, the beasts of the field may eat. In like manner you shall do with your vineyard and your olive grove.” – Exodus 23:10-11 (cf. Lev. 25:3-5). The …
Introduction Modern biblical hermeneutics has become increasingly sophisticated and complex. Yet with all of the subtlety of the “science of hermeneutics” it is easy to forget that the Bible is its own best interpreter. I do not advocate throwing contemporary hermeneutics manuals into the trash; I have benefit from many of them, but I do believe that we can blindly follow these manuals and not take thought for some of the simple lessons which Scripture presents us with. I think …
Over the many years I have been reading and writing about the Christian Faith, I have become just a little irritated by those well meaning people who try to tell me that in order to really know about Jesus, or ‘Yeshua’ as they like to call Him, it is necessary to get a Jewish perspective on the Gospels. (Actually, “Yeshua” is Hebrew, and Hebrew was rarely spoken in Israel in His day. According to the esteemed Jewish historian David Flusser, …
This is an update of an previous post. An interesting phenomenon in regard to the reading of the Old Testament and the New is the respective chronologies of the authorship of the canons. Whereas the Old Testament was written over a period of approximately 1,300 years – taking Job as the earliest book (c.1750 B.C.) and Malachi as the last book (c. 450 B.C.), the New Testament was written within one average human lifetime. This represents a vast difference which …
Part One This completes the thoughts offered previously. 4. Systematic Theology Coming now to Systematic Theology the first thing that must be said is that the pretended stand for a partial system must be summarily dropped. Dispensational Theology cannot be switched out for the term Dispensational Premillennialism. In point of fact, I make bold to say that the notion of Dispensational Premillennialism is a bit of an odd bird without a full-orbed system to back it up. Most Dispensationalists have …