Associate Professor of New Testament, Tyndale Seminary
Every term, not long before final papers are due, my students in the NT survey course are thrown a curve ball. We come to the letter to the Ephesians and the so-called Pastoral Letters (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus). Most of my students discover for the first time how many scholars doubt these letters…
Read More
For many Christian students, the first exposure to academic biblical studies comes as a shock. Our faith was formed and nurtured with a simple view of the Bible. It seemed clear and we could trust it. We want to dig deeper, so we enroll in a course at seminary or university. But instead of just…
Read More
The Problem of the Law One of the greatest tensions in the New Testament surrounds the Old Testament law, also called torah. On the one hand we read Matthew’s Gospel and hear Jesus make the solemn declaration: “For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of…
Read More
The Greek tenses can really be confusing at first. The key, really, is to understand that they don’t mean what English tenses mean. Both the present and the aorist aren’t really indicating the time of the action. They’re indicating the way the speaker is viewing the action, the speaker’s focus in looking at the action.…
Read More
The key point with the middle voice in Greek is that we don’t have anything equivalent in English. English lumps together actions that are active in Greek with actions that are middle in Greek and generally expresses those actions with the English active voice. This is why we find the middle so hard to wrap…
Read MoreTraditional Christianity has always taught that God is a Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But this can often seem like an abstract idea that does not have much to do with my life. Here are my reflections on how the Trinity can be experienced, originally shared at St. Paul’s-on-the-Hill Anglican Church in June 2017.
Read MoreMany of my blog posts begin life as answers to my students’ questions. This one is no different. A student asked a good question about how we know Mark wasn’t written much earlier than AD 65 or so. Here is my (lightly edited) reply. The starting point for dating Mark is that our earliest church…
Read MoreSometimes we can start thinking we know the limits of God’s mercy, who can and cannot be shown God’s grace. The story of Jesus’ conversation with the Syrophoenician woman reminds us that sometimes God can break his own rules.
Read MoreHave you ever felt like your life is too ordinary to mean very much? Here are the thoughts I shared at St. Paul’s-on-the-Hill Anglican Church back in October 2017.
Read MoreHere on this blog I’ve provided some lists of good commentaries, journals, and reference works. But how do you find these and other good sources? In particular, how do you go beyond the listed volumes to find other relevant books and journal articles? There are three basic tools to use. (Note that these tips focus…
Read More