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The Intersection of Christianity and Ancient Cultures

To hear the podcast click here.

George Kalantzis  

Hi. I am George Kalantzis, and I teach theology at Wheaton College, where I also direct the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies.

David Capes  

Dr George Kalantizis, welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast. It’s a great pleasure to be with you. We are here at the Lanier Theological Library. You’re going to be teaching a class on early church history beginning tonight for our certificate program. I have to tell you, there’s been a lot of excitement around this class.

George Kalantzis  

Thank you. It’s a great opportunity to try to do 500 years in five hours!

David Capes  

That’s all we’ve given you for 500 years? I don’t know what that boils down to per decade or per century, but maybe just one hour per century. It’s going to be coming pretty fast. You’re working on some other projects as well. What are you working on now? 

George Kalantzis  

I’m finishing a book right now on seven questions that framed and shaped the Christological discussions in the first six centuries. Basically, how did the answer, any answer to Jesus’s question, “who do you say that I am”, frames and brings further questions that need further clarity. And in that process, how the church developed a grammar and a lexicon on how to understand and how to speak of the one we worship. 

The other project is on the theology of refugees. It’s not a theology for refugees, but it’s a theology of refugees. I’ve been working with the International Association for Refugees for almost a dozen years now. Refugee work in southeast and the eastern part of Africa, hearing the voices of our brothers and sisters who have been displaced. Who have been forcibly displaced, seeking refuge. How do they see God? How do they hear God? Who does God reveal himself to be to them? It’s the same God we worship. Based on our location where we are as we speak of God and expect to hear God in particular ways. They hear God differently. Their emphasis, for example, is a lot more on the Old Testament. The emphasis is on the prophets and the messages of the prophet, the emphasis on the liberation from oppression.

David Capes  

That’s what they know, that’s what they’re experiencing. 

George Kalantzis  

That’s their experience. God is a lot more, can I use the word tangible, to them than perhaps the God of the universe is to us.

David Capes  

A lot of times, people think of God in a far-off way. As in, I’m going to God one day when I die. But they have to begin to see God working in their lives, working in history.

George Kalantzis  

Yes, even in relationships.

David Capes  

Yes, which is very scary, because they have been, as you said, forcibly displaced. They’re not there in Khartoum or some other place because they want to be. They’ve been forced there by some power, some political power.

George Kalantzis  

Political, economic, health. They’re fleeing cholera. They’re fleeing famine. They’re fleeing civil war. They’re fleeing militias. Ten or twelve years ago I remember a question from Pastor Steven, a Presbyterian pastor of South Sudanese. When he spoke, he lifted his left arm, half of it was missing because he was cut off by a machete in an attack. And when we asked him, what do you expect from the next week that we’re going to be together. 

He raised his hand and said, by the end of the week, I want to be able to forget. Forget that I had to dig with my hands a shallow grave to bury my wife as we were fleeing the conflict. He never stopped being a pastor. He never stopped being a man of God, and now he’s one of the leaders of the Christian movement in refugee camps. But that relationship is a very different relationship with God and certainty of God than perhaps I have in the suburbs of Chicago.

David Capes  

Living in easy circumstances. I can’t wait to see that book. Eerdmans is publishing that. Today we’re going to turn our attention to the history of the Christian faith and discuss briefly, the first 500 year period of the early church. From the time roughly toward the end of the first century, into the fourth, and fifth centuries. What are you going to be talking about in that class?

George Kalantzis  

All stories begin with Alexander the Great.

David Capes  

You say that because you were born in Athens!

George Kalantzis  

You don’t have a middle name of “the” for nothing! We’re going to work through five movements, some of the five key developments in the story of Christianity. And it’s not just simply church history; it’s history of Christianity. In other words, more broadly as a movement than just simply ecclesial. The first one is the break with Judaism. How do the two faith traditions, by the end of the first century, beginning into the middle of the second century, start moving away from one another?

David Capes  

Yes, because they’ve been mostly one [people].

George Kalantzis  

They have been. It sometimes surprises people when I remind them, Jesus was a Jew. So, we’re all the apostles.

David Capes  

Yes, everybody that wrote the New Testament.

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. But then we have varying discussions, especially in the second century, as Christianity moves beyond the Judea centered experience into the diaspora experience. That’s where we have interactions with Hellenistic or diaspora Jews and Hellenistic Christians or pagans converted to Christianity. To whom do the scriptures belong? And by that, they mean the Hebrew Bible. What happens with the law? Do we keep the law? Who are the true people of God? That has can be seen perhaps as a bit theoretical. But the lived experience of these people is not just simply theoretical. Because being a Jew, or of the genus of the Jew, as the Romans would recognize them, the religion of the Jews carried with it legal standing. Being a Christian did not carry that.

David Capes  

It was a new thing, a new religion [as far as the Romans are concerned].

George Kalantzis  

It was a superstition. We had no legal standing. So, do Christians claim the status of the Jew? Do the Jews claim the Christians as their team? How does that work? Fundamental break with Judaism that happens both in theology, but also in legal standing and in outlook. 

The second is the movement of interacting with the world around them, because now we’re moving from a Jewish environment such as Palestinian, Judea, Samaria, Benjamine to a much broader environment that is Hellenistic, with its culture, with its philosophy. And we have a variety of Hellenistic Judaism, but also Philo in Alexandria, in Ephesus. But also we have middle Platonism. We have middle philosophical systems that are operative, about God, about ontology, about metaphysics, about morality. So how do Christians adopt, adapt, and interact with those philosophical systems? In the beginning was the logos.

David Capes  

You’ve got a pretty important Greek term there.

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. What do you want to do with that? We’re going to bring that all the way up to the second, end of the second century, beginning of the third with Tertullian of Carthage, the first great Latin theologian who gave us words and concepts like trinitas, trinity to describe what is “three in one” God. Sacraments, etc. 

So how does Christian movement interact with, adopt and adapt aspects of Greco-Roman culture and philosophy. Because not only did they take them in, but they changed them again. In the beginning was the word. That’s not a Jewish concept; that’s a Greek concept.  John continues in 1:14 and the Word became flesh. Well, his name was Jesus, right? We adopt and we adapt. 

The third would be what is this thing? We call it the church, the ecclesia. Great. How do we organize ourselves? When do we worship? To whom do we pray? How do we pray? Do we baptize? How do we baptize? What is this like? How does it function? So, church organization within that context. And what we’re going to see is that sometimes we think that the earliest church starts with a set organizational system, including worship.

David Capes  

Just like what I do every week. People think the same way as I do. They do exactly what we do every week.

George Kalantzis  

And from there, it diversifies. In actuality, it’s exactly the opposite. There is so much diversity in the earliest generations, and slowly, slowly, it takes us a few 100 years to standardize, sometimes per region, other times per language, etc, our worship and structure. The Eastern Church and the Western Church don’t have the same structure and organization. The fourth one is going to be what do we actually believe? Who is this Jesus? And if we confess with our mother church and tribe that “Hear O Israel, the Lord, your God, the Lord is one”, but now you have two or three. How do you do that? 

David Capes  

Really looking at the idea of the Trinity that has developed, that it’s already around. It’s not that it just is birthed in that century. But there’s not really been a system that puts it all together.

George Kalantzis  

We don’t have the grammar yet. Pliny, the younger, the famous governor of Bithynia in the second century, in 111 AD said “they pray to Christ as if to a God”. Already from the third generation [of Christians] in Bithynia, up in Pontus and Bithynia, Christians pray to Jesus as if to a God. In other words, praying to Jesus as God is the earliest that Christians do, from very early on. Okay, that’s great, but how do you not have two gods? So, you need to develop language to talk about it.

David Capes  

To talk about it, about the oneness of God. At the same time, have a trinity.

George Kalantzis  

So what is one? What is three? How do they relate? Does God the Father have a son, produce a son? That’s not a novel idea for the Greeks and the Romans. All their gods are born. They have mothers and fathers. So is that who he is? And if the father birthed the son, who’s the mother? Of course, here we have to talk about Mary. So that basic doctrinal definition, when we come and say, I want to be part of the community, and we say, great, this is what we believe. This is what we believe, and this is what you’re going to be baptized into. “I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible”. What does that mean? And if all things have been created by him, by the father, then what about Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. So basic definitions, that’s going to preoccupy the bulk of our time on the second day.

The same person who came over and said, I want to be part of this community, we say this is what we believe? But we don’t stop there. We also say, and this is how we live our life, which is the fifth part. Which is what are the patterns of spiritual and moral life that Christians had in the same letter, letter 96, Pliny to the Emperor Trajan. 

Pliny says this is the total sum of their worship. Remember, this is a pagan speaking right, trying to get it right. But he’s a pagan. He has no idea who the Christians are. It’s the first time he meets Christians. He says they gather on a specific day, early in the morning, they pray antiphonally with one another, in other words, back and forth, back and forth from the Psalms, basically. Then they take an oath with one another, to not commit adultery, to not commit murder, do not commit theft, to return a deposit. Then they go away, and at the end of the day, they gather together again for a common, ordinary meal. Can you imagine if our Sunday services ended with an oath? You turn to your neighbor and you take an oath. Like, this week, this is how I’m going to live my life.

David Capes  

I’m not going to murder.

George Kalantzis  

I’m not going to commit adultery. We will be having a different kind of discussion. 

David Capes

It’d be a different kind of service.

George Kalantzis  

So how do these patterns develop? How many times a day do you pray as Christians? What days do you fast? Why do Christians fast on Wednesday and Friday? Good question. Because we’re not Jews who fast on Monday and Thursday. It’s community formative. Rituals are community formative.

David Capes  

These are the things that we do that set us apart from other people.

George Kalantzis  

A simple thing that Christians did from early on, was to cross themselves. You make the sign of the cross. We don’t do it, or at least Protestants don’t do it. But Christians did because they marked themselves in public. You cross yourself in view of others, right across yourself. Others see you.

David Capes  

It’s not something you do in private. 

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. You don’t do it in private only. You do it in public and people see you. And that has consequence in the late third century. 

So we’ll come all the way up to there and see the transformation. We’ll close with the transformation of the Roman world from a pagan world to a Christian world.

David Capes  

Where Christianity does become legal at that point.

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. It becomes tolerated. It becomes legal, and it becomes the only within the span of 120 years.

David Capes  

Which, in historical terms, is very fast. Now, persecution seems to have been an important part of the history. You’re going to be addressing throughout.

George Kalantzis  

That’s in the break with Judaism, the response to the Roman world. There are reasons for the persecution. Persecution is not “because I don’t like you”. They are accusations. Christians are accused of being seditious traitors because they don’t take an oath. They don’t pledge allegiance to the Roman state and to the Roman emperor, pure military state, like the Romans are. How do you respond to people who do not pledge allegiance to the Caesar.

David Capes  

Or do they want to serve in a military? That became a problem as well. 

George Kalantzis  

That became a problem, especially when Christians are recognized or claimed to not be Jews. Because Jews were exempted from military service for religious reasons. But that was almost 200 years before. It has a long tradition in the Roman world. But you, your group, your people, say you’re not Jews, so you’re not covered by the exemptions of the Jews.

David Capes  

History is just messy, the birth of the Christian church in Palestine in the first century, and then its growth in the next 500 years. It’s just really phenomenal to see the expansion of it but also the things that have to take place in order for it to become a religion that is tolerated and then eventually favored, in the Roman world.

George Kalantzis  

Christianity, did not grow by leaps and bounds. For the first almost 250 years, Christianity was roughly around 2% [of the population of the Roman empire].

David Capes  

Of the Roman of the Roman population. 

George Kalantzis  

Yes. And then it starts reaching into the sociologically important 10% and then by the end of the third century, it reaches roughly in the mid 20%.

David Capes  

By then, they’re formidable.

George Kalantzis  

They’re a formidable group politically. Because if a group that is 2% or less of the population, you don’t know anyone in that group. 2% of 100 people that you meet on the street.

David Capes  

Maybe 2 in 100.

George Kalantzis  

Maybe two, yes. And how do you recognize them? But at10% you think wait a minute. I know some of these people.

David Capes  

Yes, I’ve met them. I think I work with one or two of them. 

George Kalantzis  

When they reach 25%, they live in your neighborhood. So now you pay attention. So how does that work? The other accusation was that they were atheists, and that is not just simply that Zeus in your heart. For the Romans, the relationship with the gods is sacred and pragmatic. It matters if the gods are turning against you as a person, as a city, as a province, as an empire. You’re done for.

David Capes  

Calamity is coming.

George Kalantzis  

Calamity is coming. Now flip the equation. When calamity comes. Why does it come? And everybody’s thoughts turn.

David Capes  

We have 10% of the people who are Christians, and they’re really messing all of us up. 

George Kalantzis  

That’s right. So, their atheism puts all of us in danger.

David Capes  

But the word atheos doesn’t mean what we mean by it.

George Kalantzis  

It means that they don’t worship our gods. They don’t give honor to our gods. Romans don’t care if Jesus is in your heart, or Zeus is in your heart, or nobody’s in your heart. They just don’t care. What they care is that each one of us acts in public according to the rituals of Roman religion.

David Capes  

And that ensures the safety of the city and all the people. I’m really fascinated by what we’re going to be doing tonight. I appreciate you coming all this way and sharing with us a little of what, what you know.

George Kalantzis  

We’re basically doing 16 weeks in five hours.

David Capes  

Okay, let’s see how quickly you can talk and we can listen to George Kalantzis, thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast.

George Kalantzis  

My pleasure. Thank you.

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A Dissident Rabbi

As reformation is fomenting in Europe, there is a Jewish fellow who proclaimed himself Messiah and developed a huge following in the Ottoman Empire and parts of Europe.  According to him, the redemption of the world was at hand.  His name was Sabbetai Zevi.  The year is 1665. 9780691183572

His followers set aside their traditional Jewish beliefs and practices for new standards set by Zevi.  But there was a naysayer in the bunch, a dissident rabbi who warned his countrymen that Zevi was not the Messiah after all.  So they should abandon their enthusiasm for this man and return to their traditional practices.  His name was Jacob Sasportas.  A new book, written by Yaacob Dweck, provides a biography of this Separdic rabbi who stood up to Zevi.  It is published by Princeton University Press.

As it turned out, this “messiah” converted to Islam at the behest of the Ottoman sultan.  It’s was a wild and crazy century for Europe and the Ottoman Empire.  This book tells a fascinating story.   For more click here.

 

 

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Did Jesus Keep Kosher?

 

Many interpreters regard the Gospels as primary evidence that Jesus had a major break with the Jewish religion. This makes sense in some ways because later the followers of Jesus broke with Judaism completely so that today they are two separate religions.  Ironically, it is the Gospels that present Jesus as thoroughly Jewish. Jewish Gospels

The episode I’d like to consider is found in Mark 7:

 Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, 2 they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3 (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4 and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) 5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,

‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
7 in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’

8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

9 Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! 10 For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ 11 But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God)— 12 then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, 13 thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”

14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15 there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

17 When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, 19 since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. 21 For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22 adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Mark shows Jesus in controversy with Judeans (better than “the Jews”) from the party of the Pharisees over the traditions of the elders, that is, the extent and authority of the oral tradition.  The Pharisees had a particular way of washing their hands prior to eating a meal.  They accused Jesus of eating with defiled hands and urging his followers to do the same.

For many the critical point is Mark’s parenthetical remark: “(Thus he declared all foods clean.)”

This statement has been taken by many interpreters as the moment when the followers of Jesus thought he had done away with the distinction between kosher and non-kosher food.  In other words, it was OK for Jesus and his Jewish followers to eat pig among other non-kosher foods (Leviticus 11). This reading, however, misses the point entirely. Jesus himself kept kosher. He did not abrogate Jewish law (cf. Matthew 5:17-20).  The controversy was over how to observe God’s law, not whether to observe it.

The Pharisees who challenged Jesus represented a Jewish reform focused on purity.  These particular Pharisees had traveled to Galilee from Jerusalem. Pharisees sought to convert other Jews to their way of thinking, even those who lived way up north.

Jesus’ unique form of Judaism was a conservative reaction against radical innovations in the law brought about by Pharisees and scribes in Judaism.  The GMark reflects these stresses and strains. Jesus was not fighting against Judaism but within it.

Interpreters say Jesus didn’t keep kosher and permitted all foods to be eaten in clear violation of Torah.  Therefore, Mark 7 represents the beginning of the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity.

Yet when the text says he declared all foods “clean”, this does not mean he permitted the eating of all foods.

There are a separate rules that define when a food is pure or impure, depending on how the food is handled and what it has come in contact with.  Food becomes impure as a result of being touched by a person who is in a state of impurity.

This system of purity and impurity is different from kosher laws.  No Jew is to eat pork.  That is not the issue.  Mark and Jesus know the difference even if interpreters do not.  A part of the problem is the translation into English of “clean” and “unclean.”

Kosher is what can and cannot be eaten.  Purity and impurity involve a separate category having to do with touching dead things, having skin diseases, some sort of bodily emission or menstrual impurity.  Contact with an impure person can render food impure.  Even kosher food that becomes impure must not be consumed by priests or any Jew who intends to enter the temple.  No one wanted to enter the temple in a ritually impure state. Could food make a person impure?

Pharisees instituted a practice of ritual hand purification by pouring water over the hands before eating bread so the hands would not make bread impure.

Jesus challenges the Pharisaic practice and launches into a general attack against his opponents for missing the essential meaning of the law: foods that go into the body don’t make the body impure; only things coming out of us have the power to contaminate. So he rejects the Pharisees’ rules about purity not the Torah’s teachings on what foods were kosher and which were not.

The body is made impure not by taking in impure foods but through various substances that come out of the body.  So Jesus challenges the Pharisees for the way they changed the rules of Torah (he relates this to how they changed the rules about caring for aging parents).  Torah says only what comes out of the body contaminates, not the foods that you take in.

The traditions of the elders and other aspects of oral Torah followed by the Pharisees are man-made rules, human precepts taught as doctrine.  The written Law on the other hand comes from God.

When Jesus is said by GMark to declare all foods clean, it does not mean he permitted all foods to be eaten by his followers.  Essentially, he rejects the laws of defiled foods created by the Pharisees.

In the end Jesus did not sanction his Jewish followers to have bacon and eggs or a pepperoni pizza with extra cheese.  He permitted the eating of bread without washing of hands (remember this has nothing to do with hygiene but purity).  These are different matters entirely.

Nothing Jesus says should be taken as abrogating kosher law. Galileans as a rule had antipathy toward outsiders from Judea coming up and insisting they follower their innovations.

In my understanding of Mark 7 I have greatly benefited from reading Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012).  For more detail on this passage than I’ve been able to go into, see Boyarin.

 

 

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Paul Straddled Four Worlds

There is a place in the western part of America where a person can straddle four states .  It is often referred to as the “four corners” region because four US states come together at one spot: Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.  You can see it on any map.  Theoretically, it would be possible for a person to stand with his right foot planted firmly in New Mexico, his left foot in Arizona, and reaching to the north his right hand would be in Colorado and his left would be in Utah.

When we think about it, all of us straddle different worlds.  Some in my business straddle academic and church life in America.  Then, to make things more complicated, they go home to family that speaks Spanish and has little formal education.  We all have to make our way through a complicated maze of worlds.St. Paul

This was Paul’s story too.  Paul straddled four different worlds.  The first happened to be the world and culture of his birth.  His right foot was firmly planted in the world of second temple Judaism.  It was a world shaped in large measure by what Christians call the Old Testament or what someone like Paul would have called the law, the prophets and the writings (the Tanakh).   The Hebrew Scriptures boldly declared the existence of One, True God who created all things and had made covenants with Abraham and Israel at Sinai.  Israel’s God stood in sharp contrast to the many gods and lords worshiped by the nations.  Second temple Jews lived with a sturdy expectation that God’s Kingdom would come one day to right all the wrongs and make Jerusalem the center of the world instead of an occupied city on the outskirts of the Roman empire.

This brings me to the second world Paul occupied: the world ruled by Rome.  According to Acts, Paul was a Roman citizen and used it to his advantage when it suited him.  Though Paul makes no direct mention of this in his letters, it is not unlikely that someone like Paul enjoyed its favored status.  Paul’s Jewish heritage would have placed him at odds with many aspects of Roman empire, particularly their ultimate religious claims about their gods and a growing cult devoted to Caesar.  The empire’s political claim to provide peace and security were laughable for Jews who lived everywhere—but especially in Judea–under the heel of Rome.  In some ways Rome provides the perfect foil for Paul to rail against. Pagan sacrifices were not neutral; they were offerings to demons  (1 Cor 10:20).  As many NT scholars have noted: if Jesus is the true Lord and king and king of the world, then Caesar is not.

A third world Paul straddled was Greek.  Though Paul was certainly multilingual, the letters we have from him are all written in Greek.  Greek had become the lingua franca of most places Paul traveled, even though he would have encountered dozens of different local languages and dialects.  Language is only one thing but it is a big thing because with language goes literature, poetry, education and ideas which slowly but inevitably permeate society.  When Paul quoted the OT in his letters, more often than not he quoted from some Greek translation of the OT.  It’s possible he made up his own translations on the fly, of course. But since his quotations appear so similar to translations we know today, its more likely he drew from some standard version available to him.  Furthermore, Paul’s letters and accounts about him in Acts reflect a knowledge not only of Greek language but Greek oratory, literature, and rhetoric.  In Martin Hengel’s massive volumes translated into English as Judaism and Hellenism (1974), he argued that Jesus’ homeland, the land of Palestine, had been Hellenized by the middle of the 3rd century BC.  Judaism had not escaped the hellenizing edge of Alexander’s sword.

The fourth and final world Paul occupied was relatively new.  In fact, by the time he entered it and became one of its greatest advocates it had only been around a few years.  Saul the Pharisee became a Christ-follower probably only 3-5 years after Jesus’ execution.  But already there were traditions, practices, and beliefs which were beginning to mark out this first century Jesus movement.  We don’t have access historically to any material and literary evidence that come prior to Paul’s conversion. His letters contain a few hints here and there of the kinds of things early Christians may have been saying.  For example, the Philippian hymn (Phil 2:6-11) may have been sung, chanted, or recited in Christian gatherings before Paul came to faith.  What seems more likely is that Jesus’ death and resurrection are already seen as the fulfillment of God’s plan.  To put it another way, they are the climax of God’s covenant promises to Abraham, Moses and Israel.  In 1 Corinthians 15:3ff Paul writes:

3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Paul says he “hands on” what he “had received.” The apostle to the Gentiles employs the language of tradition to let us in on some of the content of the church’s message before Paul.  Already the death of Jesus the Messiah was being understood as an atoning sacrifice.  Already the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus were seen as complementary to the Scriptures.  Not only do these crucial events not contradict what God had said previously through the prophets; they fulfill them.  Already, Cephas (namely, Peter) and the twelve had gained prominence as some of the first witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection.

Paul not only straddled these four worlds, but as destiny would have it, he would go on to shape them as well.  It is hard to imagine what Christianity today would be like without Paul.  He is credited with having written nearly 1/2 the books of the New Testament. The  Protestant Reformation of the 16th century found in Paul its inspiration. And what of Judaism? As my friend Alan Segal often said, Christianity and rabbinic Judaism were like Rebekah’s children; both religions were very different twins formed in the womb of second temple Judaism. And what of Greece and Rome? Well, Rome soaked up much of the best of Greek culture.  Then after centuries of persecution, Christianity would go on to become the dominant religion of the empire.  In the end the many gods and lords of Rome would yield to the One God in three Persons.  Or as the apostle would put it (1 Cor 8:6):

5 Indeed, even though there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as in fact there are many gods and many lords— 6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

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Professor N. T. Wright to Lecture at HBU–March 19-20, 2014

Tom WrightProfessor N. T. Wright has agreed to give two lectures at Houston Baptist University March 19-20, 2014 as part of a conference entitled “Paul and Judaism.”  Professors Beverly Gaventa (Baylor University) and Ross Wagner (Duke University) will be presenting major addresses as well.  The university will issue a call for papers soon to allow scholars an opportunity to join us for this two day event.  For more information contact Dr. Ben Blackwell at 281.649.3000.

Professor Wright will also be on hand Friday, March 21, 2014,  to lecture for the Lanier Theological Library in Houston. 

Professor Wright has recently completed a new book entitled Paul and the Faithfulness of God.  All of his lectures during this series will deal with Paul.

Recently Professor Michael Bird sat down with Wright to discuss his new book (approximately 25 minutes).   This interview offers a good summary of Wright’s approach.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/2013/09/interview-with-n-t-wright-on-paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god/