Sublime

However, this story is not the same as the gospel. The gospel fits into this story, but it is not the story. Further, the gospel only makes sense in that story. Now a very important claim: without that story there is no gospel. This leads to a second claim: if we ignore that story, the gospel gets distorted, and that is just what has happened in sa

If one of our canonical sources itself quotes, apparently as “scripture,” a text we do not take as canon, that should make us wary of a too heavy theological dependence on the category of canon.

Pietism supposes that, in Mark 13, Jesus was predicting his own coming at the end of time, a prediction still to be fulfilled; Weiss, Schweitzer, and their successors have thought that Jesus here predicted the imminent end of the world, and that he was proved wrong. I suggest that both traditions, the old pietist one and the more recent scholarly o

of Jesus Christ).

How is it that you simply treat them as somewhat random illustrative material for the thing you obviously want to focus on, the saving death and resurrection of the divine Savior?”

together. Jesus risked his reputation and the credibility of his story by tying them to how his followers live and care for one another in community (John 17:20-23).

There’s an old saying in biblical studies (I first heard it from Ben Witherington III) that a text without a context is just a pretext for making it say anything one wants.

Finally, it is similarly unlikely that all modern interpreters are totally wrong; we cannot simply discount serious debates and go back to the sources as though nothing of value had been said in the last hundred years or so.

If we understand Jesus’ action in the Temple in the way I have suggested, we achieve the very great historical benefit of coherence, at this point, between a good many words and deeds which were most characteristic of Jesus during his itinerant ministry, and the deeds and words which, in Jerusalem, brought that whole prophetic career to its climax.