When I try to explain to people why we need to recover patristic interpretation, the biggest obstacle I face is the desire of my interlocutors to establish the one, true meaning of the text. When I assert that there is no such thing, I provoke raised eyebrows: I must be playing fast and loose with . . . . Continue Reading »
Jesus’s burden is different in kind from those of the scribes and Pharisees. With Jesus, the one giving us the yoke is himself the yoke. Continue Reading »
This journal’s editor has given us a book that is at once timely and important and that invites Christian biblical studies and theology to reengage each other in a task of uncommon urgency. For me as a biblical scholar, it is an honor to be invited to that dialogue in these pages. Biblical . . . . Continue Reading »
By turning water to wine, Jesus reveals that he comes to transform the old order, with its purity rules, into a new order of joyful celebration. Continue Reading »
My students are afraid to preach—not all of them, but more and more, it seems. And it is often the brightest and most eloquent, those who are least justified in parroting Moses’s excuse—“I am slow of speech and of tongue”—who lack the confidence to open the Scriptures for the . . . . Continue Reading »