Tag: Hermeneutics
Sacred Texts and Paradigmatic Revolutions
The latest Bloomsbury Highlights notes the newly available volume 16 in the T&T Clark Jewish and Christian Texts Series. The volume is a revision of my 2011 dissertation at Southeastern Seminary and primarily explores paradigmatic, or presuppositional, aspects of the hermeneutics at play in Romans and some of the Qumran sectarian texts. Bloomsbury presently has the…
Gospel and Testimony
In his 2006 Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham suggests: that we need to recover the sense in which the Gospels are testimony. This does not mean that they are testimony rather than history. It means that the kind of historiography they are is testimony. An irreducible feature of testimony as a form of human utterance is that…
Review of Biblical Literature Newsletter (March 16, 2013)
The latest reviews from the Review of Biblical Literature include: Jewish Scriptures and Cognate Studies Keith Bodner, Jeroboam’s Royal Drama, reviewed by Mark McEntire Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Israel in the Persian Period: The Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.E., reviewed by John Engle Edwin M. Good, Genesis 1–11: Tales of the Earliest World, reviewed by Brian D. Russell Michelle J. Levine, Nahmanides…
Augustine on Varro on the Naming of Athens
Citing Varro as “a most learned man among the [pagans], and [a man] of the weightiest authority” on paganism (Civ. 4.1 [NPNF1 2:64]), Augustine summarizes Varro’s account of the naming of Athens (Civ. 18.9 [NPNF1 2:365]): Athens certainly derived its name from Minerva, who in Greek is called ᾽Αθηνη [Athena], and Varro points out the…
Et tu, Brute . . . Facts
In the introduction to the second edition of Cornelius Van Til’s Christian Apologetics, Bill Edgar helpfully summarizes Van Til’s perspective on “brute facts”: For Van Til . . . there could never be isolated self-evident arguments or brute facts, because everything comes in a framework. That is why he calls his approach the “indirect method.”…