Sublime

Ecclesiology-so often scoffed at by those who see it as merely "horizontal" rather than the really important thing, the "vertical" dimension of soteriology-is non-negotiable. In Christ there is no vertical and horizontal. Paul was not a Platonist.

all the references to the same event elsewhere in the gospels—even where it stares one in the face, as in Luke 13:1–5—have been read as general warnings of hellfire in an afterlife, rather than the literal and physical divine-judgment-through-Roman-judgment that we have seen to be characteristic of Jesus’ story.

So, sharpening up these issues into our five main questions: How does Jesus fit into the Judaism of his day? What were his aims? Why did he die? How did the early church come into being, and why did it take the shape it did? and Why are the gospels what they are?28 The sixth question is something of a joker in the pack, though every writer on Jesus

(1) Jesus fits believably into first-century Judaism, retelling its stories in new but thoroughly comprehensible ways. He speaks and acts, and is perceived to be speaking and acting, prophetically, challenging his hearers to recognize that in him the new thing for which they have longed is, however paradoxically, coming to pass. (2) He believes him

Taken as a whole, the church clearly can’t live without the Bible, but it doesn’t seem to have much idea of how to live with it. Almost all Christian churches say something in their formularies about how important the Bible is. Almost all of them have devised ways, some subtle, some less so, of ostentatiously highlighting some parts of the Bible an

My anxiety, rather, is this: in grasping the way in which Jesus’ programme cut against the normal social expectations of Mediterranean peasant culture, Crossan, like Mack (though not so blatantly), has radically and consistently underplayed the specifically Jewish dimension both of the culture itself and of Jesus’ agenda for it.

Rather, they fit remarkably well into the complete picture of Jesus’ ministry. There is no dividing line, enabling us to bracket off different aspects, isolating the mighty works, so as then, perhaps, to declare them later accretions.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were used to support points you might get out of Paul, but their actual message had not been glimpsed, let alone integrated into the larger biblical theology in which they claimed to belong. This, I remember saying, was heavily ironic in a tradition (to which he and I both belonged) that prided itself on being “biblica