Category: New Testament

The reactions Jesus generated (Blog Tour of Theology of Luke and Acts, by Bock)

Luke and Acts, Darrell L. Bock says, is “a very Trinitarian story.” Indeed. The two volumes taken together go a long way to instruct the reader in the mutual relationship God shares as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They also detail the founding of the early church and show how it continued Jesus’ ministry and mission.

The above video is from Zondervan, in promotion of their blog tour of Bock’s new book, A Theology of Luke and Acts. Blog tour participants each select a chapter on which to focus their review, i.e., a major theological theme. (Posts from Round 1 of the tour are all here.)

I focus my review on chapter 16, “How Response to Jesus Divides: The Opponents, the Crowds, and Rome as Observer of Events in Luke-Acts.” Having last semester taken an exegesis course on Mark, I had already become interested in how groups of people could have such radically different responses to the same person and message.

But first, the book more generally.

A Theology of Luke and Acts consists of three parts. Part One briefly addresses introductory matters (context, unity of Luke-Acts, extensive book outlines, etc.). Part Two covers the theology of Luke-Acts. (For the Contents and a sample chapter, see the pdf here.) Part Three then briefly concludes with Luke-Acts’s place in and contribution to the New Testament canon.

Bock makes the case right away for why study of Luke and Acts is important:

The biblical material from Luke-Acts is probably the largest and most neglected portion of the NT. Of the 7,947 verses in the NT, Luke-Acts comprises 2,157 verses, or 27.1 percent. …In addition, only Luke-Acts tells the story of Jesus Christ from his birth through the beginning of the church into the ministry of Paul. This linkage is important, for it gives perspective to the sequence of these events. …So thinking biblically, it is important to keep Luke and Acts together and tell the story of Acts with an eye on Luke.

Bock has spent the last 30 years in Luke and Acts. Many (myself included) consider his Baker commentaries on each book (Luke here; Acts here) to be the standard among recent evangelical Luke-Acts commentaries. Bock writes that this new volume “has allowed me to put together in one place many things I have said before in many distinct volumes.”

The author balances in-depth scholarship (extensive footnotes and a 16-page bibliography give the reader more to explore) with winsome, practical insight into the Biblical text. Of “discipleship and ethics in the new community” (chapter 15), for example, he writes,

Discipleship is both demanding and rewarding. According to Luke, it is people-focused, showing love for God and then treating others with love that parallels the love of the Father. In Acts, one sees little of the church serving itself and much of the church reaching out to those who need the Lord. For Luke, the people in the highly effective early church look outward.

For the preacher, teacher, or student working his or her way through Luke and Acts, this is a book to have at hand.

Chapter 16 addresses “How Response to Jesus Divides: The Opponents, the Crowds, and Rome as Observer of Events in Luke-Acts.” Bock notes that in his pre-Jerusalem ministry, “it is the Pharisees and teachers of the law who interact the most with Jesus among representatives of official Judaism,” often occurring together in Luke as a pair: “Pharisees and teachers of the law” (οἱ γραμματεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι).  The Pharisees, who ridicule, question, and oppose Jesus, are “the key foil for Jesus until he gets to Jerusalem.” At that point, says Bock, “the chief priests and teachers of the law take over that role with much more hostility. …Their opposition is part of the picture of a divided Israel for Luke.” Jesus’ “new way” and claims of authority “brought reaction from those who liked the old wine.”

“Crowds” (ὄχλος), by contrast, “often note Jesus’ presence or press upon him in his ministry” in a non-oppositional way. Noting the blind man’s cry from the crowd of “Son of David” (“a messianic confession of great significance”), Bock says that those “on the fringe” or margins of the crowd are “often more sensitive” to the mission and message of Jesus. Jesus interacts with the crowd, Bock says, as teacher and healer, and yet “the crowd as a group thinks of him only as a prophet (Luke 9:18).” In Acts, the crowds are more easily swayed, “being incited or worked up to oppose the new movement.”

Rome is a mixed bag. “After Jesus, her actions protect the Christians from the hostile desires of Jewish leadership, but do so with an injustice that will not recognize their rights or release them.” And yet they are still for Luke “the unseen agent of providence in their acts,” even though they may not be aware of it.

It is easy to imagine Bock’s chapter on varied reactions to Jesus aiding the preacher or teacher, especially one who wants to elaborate on the famous “Who do you say that I am?” question of Jesus. Bock guides the reader through key texts in Luke and Acts to survey various Jewish, crowd, and Roman reactions to Jesus, whose coming, if nothing else, “generated a reaction.”

I can also easily envision someone referring to other similar chapters for a quick yet thorough overview of how Luke treats other theological themes: women and the poor (chapter 17), Israel (chapter 12), salvation (chapters 10 and 11), and so on. A Theology of Luke and Acts is worthy of Bock’s other work on those two texts, and serves as a useful reference guide.

See more about the book at Zondervan here. It is available for purchase through Amazon here.

As a blog tour participant, I received a free review copy of the book from Zondervan, but without obligation to write a positive review. The blog tour continues through the end of this week. You can follow it here.

“How do I get more out of my Bible reading?”

“How do I get more out of my Bible reading? What was going on during the gap between the Old and New Testaments? How do all the books of the Bible fit together as a whole?”

It is the aim of Understanding the Picture of the Bible: A Guide to Reading the Bible Well to answer those questions and put “clear, readable Bible study aids at your fingertips.” (All quotes from back cover and also found here.) Here I review the book for another installment of Magnificent Monograph Mondays.

The book begins with “An Overview of the Bible’s Storyline,” then continues with three parts, one for the Old Testament (subdivided into OT Theology, Pentateuch, Historical Books, Poetry/Wisdom Literature, and Prophets), one for New Testament background (intertestamental history and literature), and one for the New Testament (NT Theology, Gospels/Acts, Epistles, and Revelation). Each author gives a thorough yet concise overview of the section of the Bible he (all authors are male) treats. Each also discusses themes within a given section of the Bible and how they connect with the larger Biblical narrative.

What first stands out in Understanding the Big Picture of the Bible is that almost every author has a knack for simply explaining important concepts and terms. The summary overviews of sections of the Bible provide the reader with a firm foundation for better understanding the purpose and scope of that section. For example, Paul House’s excellent chapter on the prophetic books has an excursus on “pronouns in the prophets.” He begins: “As prepositions are to the letters of Paul, so pronouns are to the oracles of the prophets: crucial for meaning, but often puzzling” (72). In the five following pages he does much for the reader to make prophetic pronouns (and how they often shift person and gender) easier to understand. Other highlights are Gordon Wenham’s chapter on the Pentateuch and Dennis Johnson’s essay on Revelation.

Timelines and charts throughout are a great feature. In addition to timelines in the back of the book covering all of Biblical history (including intertestamental times), there are charts throughout the book that aid the reader. Thomas Schreiner lists all the Epistles, their authors, dates, place of writing, and recipients. Johnson uses nine separate figures to visually (and clearly) display the differences in how Christians interpret Revelation. And House has a table that lines up the prophets with the kings during whose time they prophesied. (A couple of similarly simple and clear maps could be a great addition to future editions of this book.) Here’s an example (taken from a pdf sample of the book):

And then there’s the middle section, part two of Understanding the Big Picture of the Bible. That section alone makes this book worth more than its purchase price. It contains the following:

  • “The Time between the Testaments,” by J. Julius Scott Jr.
  • “The Roman Empire and the Greco-Roman World at the Time of the New Testament,” by David Chapman
  • “Jewish Groups at the Time of the New Testament,” by John Delhousaye

Take just this short quotation from Chapman as an example:

Amid this history, Jesus Christ launched his ministry in a Galilee governed by a Roman client king, a Judea under Roman procurators, and a Judaism tinged with Hellenism. After his crucifixion by the Romans and his resurrection, his gospel was carried by the apostles directly into the heart of Greek culture and Roman power. (94)

Having this background in mind when approaching the New Testament will greatly advance the efforts of any Bible reader. Most Bible overview guides that I’ve seen go right from Old Testament to New Testament. But what about all that time in between? I’ve written more here about why that time period is essential to NT understanding. This book really gets that, and covers that period well. Someone with no knowledge of NT background would find this section easy to follow, and even a budding scholar would appreciate the clarity of the historical overview.

While it’s hard to discern what is the work of the editors (this book has three: Wayne Grudem, C. John Collins, and Schreiner) and what is the work of the writers, this book could have benefitted from a little more careful editorial oversight. There are a few little typos scattered throughout the book (tehillah instead of tefillah for Hebrew prayer, e.g.). I found the use of the sex-specific “man” to refer to all of humanity–even when not quoting the ESV–distracting (although this may not bother other readers).

But there is a bigger editorial oversight. While the book excellently helps the reader to better understand the “big picture” of the Bible, it never directly answers the question it seeks to answer of “How do I get more out of my Bible reading?” The authors present all the necessary information to better understand the background (context) and foreground (content) of the Bible, yes. But understanding context and content is only necessary and not sufficient for “reading the Bible well.” I wish the editors would have made sure the book gave more attention to how one can read the Bible, for example, devotionally… or for transformation rather than just the receiving of information. In other words, I wanted this book, based on its title, to answer: How can I grow closer to God as I read the Bible? How can I allow the Bible to convict me of my sin? What about the importance of reading Scripture in community and corporate worship? David Reimer’s essay gets closest to this when he says, “[T]he art and craft of the Bible’s poems offers an invitation to read slowly, to have one’s vision broadened, once’s perception deepened… to see literary reflection in the service of worship and godly living” (54). I wanted to hear more about this. The key question for me is: Is overview knowledge of the Bible’s context and content sufficient to read the Bible well? Necessary, yes. Sufficient, no.

However, even if the book doesn’t execute its aim listed in the subtitle, it is still a valuable work to have in hand while reading through the Bible. Its unique contribution to works of this kind is in the middle section. I’d imagine this book sitting well on someone’s shelf next to his/her Bible and notebook. (It has on mine these last few weeks!) It would benefit a serious Bible reader to read, say, Darrell Bock’s essay on the Gospels and Acts before reading those Biblical books through.

Thank you to Crossway who provided me with a review copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. You can find Understanding the Bible Picture of the Bible at Amazon here.

Jared Wilson (from Gospel Coalition “colonizes” and “conquers” post) apologizes

I wrote about (rather, against) the use of “colonizing” language to describe the sex act here and here, reacting to a recent Gospel Coalition post.

Just now Jared Wilson, author of the original post, has issued an apology. He’s even taken down the original offending post. Read his apology here.

Sex as colonization? A reply to my comment, and my reply back

I linked yesterday morning to a Gospel Coalition piece that has gathered a lot of attention on the Internet recently. I wrote my reply to the piece here.

Yesterday Jared Wilson, author of the original post, wrote this reply as a follow up to the first post and its many critics. I asked Jared for clarification of a few things in the comments here, and he posted a reply, if anyone wants to see it. Just click here, then search for “Abram” in the comments (as of the time of writing this I’m the seventh comment down).

UPDATE: Here’s my reply to Jared’s reply, printed in full below (left as a comment at his site). The Douglas Wilson article he mentions (to which I respond below) is here.

Jared, thanks very much for your reply.

I read and re-read and re-read again Doug Wilson’s follow up piece. I get a little bit more where he’s coming from.

However, “colonizes” still gets me. He spent one sentence in his post explaining that particular choice of words, in which he quoted Song of Solomon 4:12 (“A garden locked is my sister, my bride”) as an example of Scripture having to do with “colonizes” (if I’m reading him right).

But reading through the following verses in Song of Solomon… “SHE” (ESV) replies, “Blow upon my garden… let my beloved come to his garden.” (“come to” ESV=Hebrew “come into” for intercourse) Then “HE” says, “I came [in]to my garden, my sister, my bride.”

That’s it. Just “came into.” The Hebrew word there is the common way of referring to intercourse (lit., “he went into her”=English “he had sex with her”). Wilson quotes the “locked garden” verse as implying, “My garden is locked… therefore come colonize me.” But that’s neither what she says nor what he does after that verse in response to her locked garden.

“Colonizes” is *really* exegetically difficult to pull out of that passage both based on Hebrew word meaning *and* the full context of the passage in which it occurs (which, as you’ve rightly pointed out, context is a key determiner of meaning). All this holds true, too, by the way, of his explanation of his use of the verb “conquer,” based on Song 4:4. It’s not in there and it’s not what the passage seems to mean.

So if “colonizes” cannot come from the place Wilson mentions, does he find it elsewhere in Scripture to be an appropriate description of the male-female sex act? It not, that’s a continuing concern to me….

Greek Vocabulary Guide: Another Book Giveaway by Zondervan

Head over to Koinonia, Zondervan Academic’s blog, for another Wednesday giveaway. Now they are giving away Complete Vocabulary Guide to the Greek New Testament. Details are here.

Koinonia is accepting submissions until Thursday midnight.

The book is available on Amazon here.

Sex as colonization?

This morning I followed a friend’s Facebook link to a Gospel Coalition blog post. Here is the post I read. It’s hard to summarize, but the basic topic is the “good, God-honoring, and body-protecting authority and submission between husbands and wives.” That part sounds not so bad, but the blog post quotes a guy named Douglas Wilson who says:

In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage.

You can go to the post to read the quote in a bit of a fuller context, but I was still amazed to read this at a site that is usually as exegetically careful as the Gospel Coalition. Once you’ve read the initial blog post, I’ve reproduced the comment I left at that site here:

…

This, of course, is the most difficult part of the initial quote:

In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.

A key concept of discourse analysis (Steve Runge talks about this with reference to the Greek New Testament) is that “choice implies meaning.” So instead of the Biblical Hebrew “goes into,” Wilson chose “penetrates.” Instead of “establishes/builds,” he chose “colonizes,” etc. It’s his prerogative as an author to choose those words, whether one likes them or not.

The problem is, each of those words has meanings associated with them, whether we want them to or not. This is true whether or not a word *should* mean a certain thing. (I’m thinking of Jared’s comment, “It is difficult to understand, I’m sure, when they are defined with violence in mind. In this isolated passage Wilson has ruled that out.”)

I don’t agree that Wilson has sufficiently ruled that out (that last paragraph when he speaks against “devours” is too short to do that, but maybe the rest of Wilson’s work does?). But even if he has ruled out violence, his *choice* to use especially *colonizes* is confusing. As the immense and growing field of post-colonial literature attests, colonization has left untold trauma in its wake. And, yes, colonization was all too often violent. Rape often occurred as part of colonization, so that choice of word (remember, choice implies meaning) in this context (speaking about rape–even if against it) was particularly surprising and probably did not help the author’s case at all.

Also, Wilson’s saying “the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party” is just bizarre. Besides seeming like an unwarranted barb against egalitarians, what seems to be implied (with that sentence contextualizing the next two) is that there is no way (“cannot”) for *both* parties (“egalitarian”) to be *pleasured* (“pleasuring party”) all the time, since one is busy “penetrat[ing]” (with pleasure) and the other (merely) “receives” and “surrenders” (implied: even if she doesn’t receive pleasure from it?). You can see how it’s not a far leap in the reader’s mind from there to rape imagery, whether Wilson means this or not. I’m certainly not accusing him of anything. But it was, at best, a bad choice of words.

Is it egalitarianism that he is speaking against? Or is it against the idea of man and woman both having pleasure in sex? In other words, would Wilson approve of a “complementarian pleasuring party where the man penetrates and the woman receives, both receive pleasure, and if one does not, per I Cor 7:4-5, both stop out of mutual love for each other?” I’d assume he would, based on these comments above.

But “surrenders” in this context, especially when used unidirectionally and paired with “colonizes”–IF Wilson means to apply them specifically to the sex act, which it seems he does–is an unfortunate choice of words. If/when there is any “surrendering” in sex, it goes both ways, as the apostle Paul points out. (I know Paul is talking about *not* having sex, but his larger principle from I Cor 7:4 surely applies to having sex, too.) Neither has authority over his/her own body, but yields it to the other. “Colonizes” and “surrenders” are pretty difficult to square with this.

UPDATE: A reply and my reply to the reply here.

Free Book! Ephesians commentary by Arnold (Zondervan)

I am giving away a book at Words on the Word this weekend. It’s a commentary on Ephesians by Clinton E. Arnold, from Zondervan’s Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament series.

Last weekend I reviewed Luke from that same series. You can read that review to find out more about the structure and layout of each book in the series. Anyone who is preaching, teaching, or just studying their own way through Ephesians will find this book illuminating. Those who know even a little Greek will benefit most from this book, but Arnold translates everything, so those who know no Greek will benefit, too.

I will choose a winner at random. To enter the drawing, comment on this blog post with your answer to the question, “If you had a chance to sit down for a cup of coffee or tea with the apostle Paul today, what is the first thing you would ask him?” (I know what I would ask!)

Then if you link to this post on your Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc., come back here to tell me in the comments section that you did, and you’ll receive a second entry. I will announce the winner on the blog first thing Monday morning.

If you want to skip the giveaway contest and just buy the book for yourself, you can find it here.

Zondervan Book Giveaway

Head over to Koinonia, Zondervan Academic’s blog, for another Wednesday giveaway. This time they are giving away the forthcoming Four Views on the Apostle Paul. Details are here.

I’m especially grateful to Zondervan for their featuring one of my reviews on their blog recently.

Koinonia is accepting submissions until Thursday midnight.

More on Junia

Thanks to a blog I’ve just discovered, I keep learning more about Junia.

Here‘s a post about Junia in some ancient manuscripts of Romans. And here is a post about another Junia in ancient Corinth.

Actually, the blog (BLT) has a ton of stuff about Junia, including a multi-post series called “The Junia Evidence.” Check out more here.

Luke (Zondervan ECNT), reviewed

The last few weeks I’ve been spending time with David Garland’s Luke volume in Zondervan’s Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (ZECNT) series.

Garland’s commentary is more than 1,000 pages, but this should not be a surprise, since Luke is the longest Gospel. Like the rest of the ZECNT series, it is “designed for the pastor and Bible teacher.” Garland assumes a basic knowledge of Greek, but Greek is not required to understand his commentary. For each passage the commentary gives the broader literary context, the main idea (great for preachers!), an original translation of the Greek and its graphical layout, the structure, an outline, explanation, and “theology in application” section.

The graphical layout of each passage is a unique contribution that Garland’s Luke makes to Luke studies. Even though a narrative book like Luke is easier to follow than some of Paul’s detailed arguments, seeing main clauses in bold with subordinate clauses indented under them (plus how they relate back to the main clause) gives the reader a quick, visual grasp of the entire passage at hand. Garland does this well, too. Pages 50 and 62-63 of the commentary in this sample pdf give you a taste.

Luke has the full Greek text of Luke, verse by verse, and full English translation by Garland (passage by passage in the graphical layout, then again verse by verse next to the Greek). A value for me in using reference works is not having to pull five more reference works off the shelf to use the first reference work! This is about as portable as exegesis of Luke gets. Garland’s English translation is a bit wooden at times–just about every καὶ in the opening narrative of 1:5-25 receives the translation “and,” which it shouldn’t always. ὁ δὲ ἀποκριθεὶς εἶπεν in 10:27 becomes “He answered and said,” where just “He said,” would be preferred.

Garland’s intro is short, but covers what it needs to. He attributes authorship to Luke and holds to Luke-Acts unity, as many scholars do. (“[Luke] is writing not simply about the life of Jesus but what Jesus inaugurated that continued in the deeds of his followers (Acts 1:1-8)” (27).) He understands Luke-Acts as fitting into the genre of “Hellenistic historiography.” He treats Luke’s potential sources, date of writing, readers, location, purpose, and structural outline. There is an additional “theology of Luke” section at the back of the commentary that complements the introduction. It doesn’t cover all the theological themes in Luke (healing/exorcism, for example, is absent), but it doesn’t claim to, either.

Where Garland really shines in this commentary is in his treatment of the Greek words and phrases that comprise the Luke text. He attends to the lexical meaning of given words, how they function in context, and their use in other parts of Scripture. This is helpful especially for parts of Luke where the Greek vocabulary is more obscure or difficult.

Teachers and preachers especially will appreciate the “Theology in Application” section that concludes each passage. To the pastor wondering how to preach on something like Luke’s prologue, Garland writes:

The purpose of the gospel is not to give information but certainty that will change lives. Erudition about Jesus is not the same as insight into Jesus. The history of Jesus is not to be divorced from the proclamation about Jesus, as if the two were somehow incompatible. (58)

This comes after a detailed exegesis of the first four verses. As someone with preaching experience, I can say this combination of thorough attention to the Greek text with contemporary application is pure gold.

Inevitably no commentary can say everything about every word in the text, but there are parts of Luke that I thought deserved more attention. For example, in Luke 8:31 the demons known as Legion beg Jesus not to cast them into the Abyss (Greek ἄβυσσος). Garland just offers, “The Abyss is the place of punishment for evil spirits” (358). Although he infers that this verse shows the “eschatological dimension” to exorcisms, nothing more is given about ἄβυσσος. For a word that appears just once in the Gospels yet multiple times in the Old Testament and Apocrypha, more background on this term would have been useful to the reader. This could, of course, merely reflect a space limitation in the commentary.

On the other hand, Garland’s commentary on the Good Samaritan parable (“merciful” as Garland has it) leaves out just about nothing. To provide needed historical context to the passage, Garland draws on what Josephus said about priests, what Sirach said about helping those in need, and includes an excursus on the “adversarial history” of Jews and Samaritans. Garland compellingly concludes from the parable:

The original Jewish audience must enter the ditch and accept a Samaritan as a savior, helper, and healer. They must experience being touched by this unclean enemy who treats a wounded man as a compatriot. (446)

Garland seeks to prove right the series claim that “all who strive to understand and teach the New Testament will find these books beneficial,” and he succeeds in this. Preachers or students of Luke will want to supplement Garland’s work with other works on Luke (Bock’s two volume set remains the standard), but the graphical layout of each passage and the theology in application sections alone are enough to warrant careful consideration of this volume.

(I am grateful to Zondervan for the free review copy of this commentary, which was offered to me in exchange for an unbiased review. You can find the book on Amazon here.)

UPDATE: Enter to win a free book giveaway of Ephesians from this same series.