Sublime

My interest, however, is in reading the Bible like an ancient Israelite,2 what is often called reading the Bible from a historical-critical perspective.

God has a special relationship to Israel yet ultimately remains the Lord of all the vast universe, the Lord of Lords. Therefore, the covenant is not restricted to Jews. The covenant was offered before there were Jews in the world.

this general thrust, of a very Jewish Jesus who was nevertheless opposed to some high-profile features of first-century Judaism, seems to me the most viable one if we are to do justice, not just to the evidence of the synoptic gospels (they, after all, are easy game for any critic who wants to avoid their implications) but more particularly to the

we would run a strong risk of being misled if we simply opened a history book and believed everything we read there.

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.