Tag: New Testament

Deeper Waters Podcast 3/22/2014: Charles Hill

What’s coming up this Saturday on the Deeper Waters Podcast? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

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This Saturday we have quite a show planned for you. He is the co-editor of the book “The Early Text of the New Testament” and the writer of “Who Chose The Gospels?” as well as a contributor to the upcoming book “How God Became Jesus.” That is Dr. Charles Hill.

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Dr. Hill got his Bachelor’s at the University of Nebraska. His Master’s came at Westminster Theological Seminary and he received his Ph.D. at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. He is currently professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.

Let me put his lists of books and accomplishments and such this way. His CV is thirteen pages long. It would be extensive to list all of them.

So let me give you some idea of the kind of thing that we’re going to be talking about.

First, we’re going to spend about an hour talking about the early text of the new testament. This is also the title of the book that I mentioned above and we’ll be looking at how it is that we can believe that the text of the NT has been handed down to us reliably, which will be held in distinction to someone like Bart Ehrman.

As I wrote in my review of this book, it is indeed very scholarly. I won’t claim to understand a lot of the fine points of language that are in it, so hopefully we’ll be getting something here that can be readily understood and increase the certainty that the text that we have is reliable.

From there, we’ll be talking about the book “Who Chose The Gospels?”. This one is a book that will be definitely much more accessible. In fact, I’ve even let a friend of ours borrow it for the time being because it’s so accessible to everyone.

This is an entertaining read on canon criticism that deals with many of the ideas of conspiracies in getting the Gospels in the canon, poking fun throughout at the idea of who all was involved in this grand conspiracy to bring us four Gospels.

Both of these of course are extremely important for the texts of the New Testament. We need to know about the reliability of the text that we have insofar as it is text. (After all, saying the text has been handed down reliably says nothing about if the message in the text is true.) We also want to be sure that we have the Gospels that God intended for us to have.

That’s why I’m delighted to have on the show a scholar who specializes in these areas. I hope you will be just as excited as I am and be ready to listen to our program when it airs on March 22nd. As always, the call in number to the show if you want to call and ask a question is 714-242-5180. The time of the show will be from 3-5 PM EST.

The link can be found here.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Jesus and His World

What do I think of Craig Evans’s book on archaeology and the life of Jesus? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

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Craig Evans is a favorite writer of mine and I quite appreciate the style he has with taking to task the opponents of Christianity. (For a clear example of this in this book, just look at him going after Tom Harpur. It gives the impression of using a tank to kill a spider.) Evans is also fluent with the world of archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls and uses that knowledge in this book to explain further the life of Jesus and show some misconceptions.

To start off with, he looks at the hometown of Jesus. Nazareth was a small little town, but it was also near the city of Sepphoris. Some have thought being near such a major city which had Greek influence would mean Jesus was strongly influence by Hellenistic culture and would then be a cynic sage.

Sorry. Doesn’t work. Sepphoris might have been more Hellenistic than some, but the evidence is still that they were devout in their Judaism. Consider for instance as one example that pig bones don’t show up in their garbage dumps until after 70 A.D. You might think that’s one item by itself, which it is, but it’s an example of many more that Evans shows to his audience to indicate that Sepphoris was devout in its Judaism.

How devout? Well that’s the next chapter. The next chapter looks at the building of synagogues for instance and places of worship and how seriously the Jews took this, including the notion that Gentiles who entered the grounds of the temple where they were not allowed would be responsible for their subsequent deaths.

Okay. Well these people were devout, but how about the Law? How did they value their Scripture? That’s next on the list. Evans takes a look at literacy from various archaeological findings and writings and shows that if anything, the Jews would most likely have the most literacy since they were people of the book and were trained to teach their children the Torah and why it is that they do what they do. This then gets into the question of if Jesus was literate, which Evans thinks it is extremely unlikely that he was not.

So what about the ruling establishment that Jesus dealt with? As Evans continues his progression, he looks at the way the priests and leaders in the area of Judea ruled. What were the people like who Jesus was butting heads against?

Finally, in the main sections, he looks at the life among the dead. What were the burial customs? He explains that it’s quite unreasonable to think that Jesus’s body would be thrown to dogs or that Jesus would not have been given a proper burial. This is another answer to someone like Crossan.

Finally, there are a couple of appendices in the book dealing with the claim of the supposed family tomb of Jesus and then answering the question of what did Jesus look like.

This book is small and easy to read and will be an immense help to students wanting to understand archaeology and the NT. It also has the benefit in this case of several pictures that show the archaeological discoveries so there can be shown clearly what these findings look like and help the student better visualize the subject matter. I highly recommend it.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Deeper Waters Podcast 3/15/2014: Darrell Bock

What’s coming up this Saturday on the Deeper Waters Podcast? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

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Our special guest this weekend will be Dr. Darrell Bock to talk about the Gospel of Luke. As it stands, another friend of mine is hosting an interview with Darrell Bock right before mine so we have decided to work together to bring you “Back-to-Back Bock.”

Bock will be on Agustin Astacio’s show to talk about blasphemy and exaltation in Judaism. Specifically, he’ll be dealing with the answer given to the high priest at Jesus’s trial in Mark 14. Other verses could be touched on as well. A link to that can be found here.

This program will air from 2-3 EST.

We’ll be having Dr. Bock on our show to talk about a different topic. However, before saying what that is, let me tell you a bit about Dr. Bock.

“Darrell L. Bock is Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. He also serves as Executive Director of Cultural Engagement for the Seminary’s Center for Christian Leadership. His special fields of study involve hermeneutics, the use of the Old Testament in the New, Luke-Acts, the historical Jesus, gospel studies and the integration of theology and culture. He has served on the board of Chosen People Ministries for over a decade and also serves on the board at Wheaton College. He is a graduate of the University of Texas (B.A.), Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.M.), and the University of Aberdeen (Ph.D.). He has had four annual stints of post–doctoral study at the University of Tübingen, the second through fourth as an Alexander von Humboldt scholar (1989-90, 1995-96, 2004-05, 2010-2011). He also serves as elder emeritus at Trinity Fellowship Church in Richardson, Texas, is editor at large for Christianity Today, served as President of the Evangelical Theological Society for the year 2000-2001, and has authored over thirty books, including a New York Times Best Seller in non-fiction and the most recent release, Truth Matters, a response to many issues skeptics raise about Christianity in the public square. He is married to Sally and has two daughters (both married), a son, two grandsons and a granddaughter.”

On our show, we’ll be talking about the Gospel of Luke mainly with Darrell Bock and it’s value for apologetics. When it comes to a Gospel that can be used best in apologetics endeavors with skeptics, I find the Gospel of Luke to be the best as it is full of historical claims that can be verified, as well as the prologue of Luke which we will definitely be spending some time on. Perhaps we can also discuss some of the book of Acts in relation to Luke as well and how we can be sure that Luke is indeed a reliable author.

So please be listening this Saturday to our show and remember to be listening to Agustin’s show as well to hear Bock speak about blasphemy in Judaism. For us, you can listen to the show from 3-5 PM EST. The call-in number with your questions is 714-242-5180. The link can be found here.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: The Question of Canon

What do I think about Michael Kruger’s book? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

In our day and age, there is much debate about the topic of biblical canon. For those who don’t know, that means how is it that we got the list of books that we have today in our NT? One of the latest volumes discussing this question is Michael Kruger’s “The Question of Canon.”

Now this is pretty much a book about formation to be sure. You won’t find in here a list of the history of the debates as to what books should or should not be in the canon nor will you find information on when this canon was finally ratified. (Though let me give a quick hint. It was not at the Council of Nicea.)

Kruger’s work in this book is largely critiquing the extrinsic model of the canon. This is the idea that there was no idea in the early church at the time of the writing of the NT canon to form a list of books that would be authoritative and it was largely the work of Marcion that led the church to think “Yeah. We need to establish a rule of faith.”

Kruger does admit that the extrinsic model is the most popular one and admits that several aspects of it are in fact true. It is certainly not the case that, for instance, when the Gospel of John was written, it started glowing and the church knew “Ah! That’s one of the books in the canon!” Of course there was dispute over a few books, but the extrinsic view of canon and Kruger’s own intrinsic view must explain the same data and see which explanation has the greatest explanatory scope.

It’s refreshing to hear on page 22 that Kruger writes that his model is historical in nature. In fact, one need not believe in inspiration in order to hold to Kruger’s position. I suspect an atheist could read this and disagree that there is any truth to Christianity and still say “Yes, I can see how they arrived at the canon anyway and that does seem fair and accurate.”

Kruger’s book is certainly rich in scholarship starting with the definition of canon. From there we move on to the origins and the realization that in a Gospel such as Matthew, Matthew would have seen himself as presenting a continuation of Israel’s story. There will be more on this later, but a quote said in the book is that New Israel would need New Scriptures. We could say a new covenant would need a new testimony to it.

The next question is if the early Christians were adverse to writing. Now I think Kruger might be too skeptical of oral tradition, but I also think those of us who highly value oral tradition should not be too skeptical of written tradition. Christianity, like Judaism before it, was a religion of the book. This is in great contrast to a religion like Mithraism which has left us to this date, zero texts to it.

In fact, we have a great clue in this due to how many manuscripts we have of the NT in relation to other works of antiquity. Churches also had readers who had the assigned job of reading the text and a liturgical reading would often be composed just for a church. Epistles were highly prized and passed around and as is shown in the writings of the Early Church Fathers, the passages would be quoted by the fathers and the assumption would be that these were well known. When a father recommended reading the epistles of Paul, it would be assumed the church had those epistles.

He also explains the Papias quote about a living voice. Papias is not saying he doesn’t care about written testimony, but he is saying he would prefer to talk to an eyewitness or someone who knew an eyewitness. Most of us would prefer the same today! Would you rather read a book about something like the Kennedy assassination or would you prefer to hear about it from someone who was there?

So what about the writers themselves? Did they know they were writing Scripture? Kruger abundantly thinks they did. In fact, he even quotes Armin Baum in saying the historical books are anonymous to match the kind of writing of the historical books of the Old Testament, a fascinating idea to consider!

Kruger throughout this chapter will quote from several books of the NT to show that the writers did see themselves as passing on the commands of the Lord and continuing the story of Israel. If they considered themselves doing that, it is quite likely they knew they were passing on new Scriptures.

Finally, we get to the dating of canonization. When did this happen? Here Kruger goes through the early church fathers and shows that they were quoting books that were seen as authoritative in their time and there is no hint that they were producing something innovative. It is as if they were speaking in terms their audience would already recognize.

Kruger’s book is an excellent question on the topic, though it must be read for what it is. You will not find information about what books should be in the canon as much as you will find how books were recognized to be in the canon and early Christian attitudes to canonicity.

I also want to thank IVP for providing me a copy of this book for review purposes.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Note — fans of this blog and the Deeper Waters Podcast will be pleased to know that IVP is working on getting in touch with Dr. Kruger to talk about coming on the Deeper Waters Podcast to discuss this book.