News, Quotes and other Stuff

It is with great sadness that I report that John Piper has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The full story is available at Christianity Today. Piper has a very influential ministry that focuses on the glory of God in the life of the believer.

Here is also a quote from Mark Allan Powell that many of us should take to heart lest our exegesis, our theologicizing and even our biblioblogging become too cerebral:

We cannot have a relationship with our christology - we can have a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Our soteriology cannot save us from our sins - our Saviour can.
Our ecclesiology does not make us one - the Lord of the Church does.
Our eschatology will not transform this flawed universe - Jesus the King of kings and Prince of Peace will do that.
And, no matter how much we love theology - it will never love us back.

Bauckham has a volume coming out on eyewitnesses to the Jesus tradition. This reminds me of a quote from John P. Meier, Marginal Jew, vol. 1, pp. 169-70:

All too often the oral tradition of the early Church is depicted as a game of “anything goes,” with charismatic prophets uttering anything or everything as the words of the Lord Jesus and storytellers creating accounts of miracles and exorcisms according to Jewish and pagan models. The evangelists would simply have crowned this wildly creative process by moulding the oral tradition according to their own redactional theology. One would get the impression that throughout the first Christian generation there were no eyewitnesses to act as a check on fertile imaginations, no original-disciples-now-become-leaders who might exercise some control over the developing traditions, and no striking deeds and sayings of Jesus that stuck willy-nilly in people’s memories.

A good journal worth checking out is Mishkan which has good articles on Jewish Christianity by scholars such as Craig A. Evans, Richard Bauckham and others. On the site is also an advertisement for Oskar Skarsaune's new volume We Have Found the Messiah! Jewish believers in Jesus in antiquity. I hope to get a copy myself.

Last night I was reading over Othello and came across one of my favourite quotes that reminds me of my wife:

"That my youth suffer'd. My story being done. She gave me for my pains a world of sighs".

Finally, I've attached a link to the latest issue of Novum Testamentum that has some good articles to read over.