Category: Weblog
Wisdom in the Muratorian Fragment
The Muratorian fragment curiously includes a book named “Wisdom” in the middle of its discussion of New Testament literature (see Westcott 562). The standard interpretation of this reference appears to be that the fragment refers here to the well-known Wisdom of Solomon (e.g., Carson, Moo, and Morris 492; Ehrman 241). The relevant sentence from the…
Irenaeus on the Fourfold Gospel Tradition
In the third book of his work, Against Heresies, Irenaeus takes up a defense of the fourfold Gospel tradition. This defense proceeds as follows: It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live,…
New Journal
[Update: As of 27 October 2017, the Ecclesia Reformanda website appears no longer to be available.] A new journal for British, Reformed theology has just launched, Ecclesia Reformanda. Ros Clarke, a fellow PhD student from our days at Westminster who is now sitting under Jamie Grant at the University of the Highlands and Islands Millennium…
New Testament Canon
In his second plenary address at the eastern regional meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society last spring, Stephen Chapman, Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Duke Divinity School, suggested some ways to navigate some of the pitfalls of current canon debates. In his closing remarks, Chapman emphasized the statement of the First Vatican Council (1868)…
James Dunn on Faith and Scholarship
To complement the current series on faith and scholarship over at Café Apocalypsis, we might note some interesting comments from James Dunn’s Jesus Remembered. Dunn favorably mentions Gadamer’s alliance with “those who want to maintain that faith is not in principle at odds with the hermeneutical process in its application to the study of the…
Jesus and History
In his Jesus Remembered, James Dunn makes the following, insightful observations about the interplay between the study of Jesus and the study of history: For those within the Christian tradition of faith, the issue [of Jesus’ relationship to history] is even more important. Christian belief in the incarnation, in the events of long ago in…