Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today

The reason for our confusion is that we usually read the Bible as a series of disconnected stories, each with a “moral” for how we should live our lives. It is not. Rather, it comprises a single story, telling us how the human race got into its present condition, and how God through Jesus Christ has come and will come to put things right.

I had stumbled, without realizing it, on a weak spot in the general structure of Christian faith as it has come to be expressed in today’s world—and, I suspect, for a lot longer than we might imagine. Here is all this material in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Why? What are we supposed to make of it all?

First, what are we talking about in discussing first-century Jewish hopes? It has commonly been assumed, at least since Weiss and Schweitzer, that Jesus and many of his contemporaries expected the imminent end of the present space-time order altogether, the winding up of history and the ushering in of a new age in radical discontinuity with the pre

This will be a theme of my book: modern theologies of the New Testament were failures from a Christian point of view precisely because what they ended up offering was bad history, bad theology, or both.