Here is a new promo from Logos. They are giving away free books in exchange for reviews of their apps. They want an “honest rating and review” for the apps for iOS and Android. This is an interesting way to generate app store reviews, and is not really all that painful.
The first book was The Life of Charles Hodge by Archibald A. Hodge, and today they hit 2500 reviews and started giving away Luther’s Commentary on Galatians. Both books have been widely available as a ebook since Al Gore first invented the Internet, but it is nice to have them in the Logos format. In addition to the older free book, they are discounting another book by 50%. So far it is Fee and Stuart’s How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth and How to Read the Bible Book by Book. Both are worth having although they are widely available in print for a few dollars. Still, if you are looking for some basic Bible introductory material, these are both worth reading.
I read books with several apps (Kindle, Google Books (Play), GoodReader, Kobo, Goodreads, even Stanza occasionally), and I find that the Logos reader is the best of all. They were the first to use real page numbering, the footnote system is the best by far, and the highlighting is amazing. Notes sync between the desktop and the mobile device, so any changes I make are made on either platform.
Logos books can be read with the Logos App, the Vyrso App, or the Faithlife Study Bible.
The promo lasts through October 19, so do your part to help out the team and review Logos in the app store of your choice. More books will be “unlocked” as the numbers grow. While I am hoping for a Free International Critical Commentary set, I do not think that is going to happen.
When Paul started the church at Thessalonica he was opposed by the Jewish community as well as the secular authorities (Acts 17:1-8). The Jews were reacting to Paul’s message that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies, and the Roman city of Thessalonica reacted against Paul’s rejection of Caesar as Lord. As a result, he was forced to leave the city before he had fully prepared the church, and certainly before he wanted to leave.
He describes his sudden departure from the church as being “torn” from them. The verb ἀπορφανίζω has the sense of a child that is orphaned, but also a parent who has lost a child. It is to be separated under great emotional distress. Paul did not want to leave, he was forced to leave under threat from the local officials. Notice the verb is aorist passive: Paul did not cause his own departure, he was the victim of circumstances beyond his control.
It has only been a short time since he has been gone, but he things of the church often. The introduction to the book indicates that Paul prayed for the church each day, here he says that he thinks of the church often. Even though Paul’s desire was to return it is possible his enemies were slandering him by saying he never intended to revisit the church. Paul had taken all he could from the church and left them on their own to face a persecution Paul caused!
Paul says that he had a strong desire to return. The word for this desire is one of the strongest words for desire available to Paul, it means to “crave” something, usually in an especially inordinate way. In other places the word ἐπιθυμία is translated “lust.” This strong desire makes him make an effort to return. The verb σπουδάζω is not a light or a token effort, but rather doing “something with intense effort and motivation. Elsewhere the word is translated as “be eager to….” (Gal 2:10, Eph 4:3).
He made every effort to return, but Satan stopped him. The word“hinder” (ἐγκόπτω) has the sense of“tearing up the road.” If an army wanted to hinder another army from pursuing them they would tear up the road, burn the bridges, etc. Paul sees Satan’s operation as making any progress Paul might make very difficult. We are not told in Acts what Satan did to hinder him, it is possible that this was the threat of further persecution at the hands of the Jews and civil authorities in Thessalonica. On the other hand, Paul does not usually avoid ministry because of the threat of persecution.
This hindrance may have been more subtle, Paul’s efforts to travel back to the city were slowed by what might have seemed coincidental problems (travel plans fell through, etc.) The important thing to see here is that the source of Paul inability to return is Satan. The church is not suffering because of the civil authorities in Thessalonica, nor are they suffering because of jealousy from the synagogue, they suffer because they are engaged in spiritual warfare. As he says in Ephesians 6:10, the struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual powers of darkness.
Tim Bulkeley over at Sansblogue has posted the September Carnival. He includes a nice selection of links on a wide range of topics, and including a number of podcasts. Tim has done an excellent job rounding up the more significant posts on the Coptic fragment which implied Jesus had a wife. From the original announcement the blogosphere burning brightly, occasionally popping up in traditional media sites.
Another big deal this month was the start of The Jesus Blog, written by Anthony Le Donne and Chris Keith. So far this has been an excellent resource written by high quality scholars. I am expected even greater things from the blog future. Le Donne and Keith have a book and are involved in an upcoming seminar, “Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity,” sponsored by United Theological Seminary and the University of Dayton, October 3-4, 2012.
I am now the “keeper of the Carnival List.” If you want to host a Carnival, please contact me. I am looking for a November host, and hosts for 2013. Carnivals are a great way to attract attention to your site if you are new blogger, but more importantly it gives you a chance to highlight the best and the brightest in the world of bibliblogs.
When we study Jesus’ understanding of “kingdom” in the Gospels there are two competing themes. In some texts, Jesus seems to say that the Kingdom of God is present in his ministry. For example, Mark describes Jesus preaching that the Kingdom of God is “near” at the very beginning of his ministry (Mark 1:15, Luke 8:1). In Jesus says that if demons are cast out by the hand of God, then the kingdom of God has come (Luke 11:20). Jesus also says that the reason he teaches in parables was to reveal the secrets of the Kingdom to his disciples (Luke 8:10).
Yet in other texts he seems to say that the Kingdom is has not yet come and that his disciples ought to be prepared for a wait before the Kingdom finally comes. The parables in Matthew 25, for example, indicate that Jesus will go away for a long time before returning. The Ten Virgins (25:1-12) indicates that the disciple will have to prepare for a long wait before the “wedding banquet” begins, and the Parable of the Talents (25:14-30) tells the disciples that they will have to give an account for how they use the time before the coming of the king. The Parable of the Minas in Luke 19 is told specifically to defuse the crowd’s expectation that Jesus was about to establish a kingdom in Jerusalem at that moment.
How do we account for this apparently conflicting data? One common way is to emphasize either one or the other aspect. C. H. Dodd famously stressed the presence of the kingdom, arguing that the kingdom was “fully realized” in Jesus’ ministry. This means that there is no real future kingdom, the present Church fulfills Jesus’ vision for a kingdom. This means that there is no future restoration of Israel, the promises of the Hebrew prophets are fulfilled in the Church. One potential problem with a fully realized eschatology is that the parables warning of a long delay must be taken as creations of the church to explain the non-return of Jesus.
On the other hand, it is possible to stress only the future aspect of the kingdom. Someone like Schweitzer, for example, thought Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who expected a messianic kingdom promised by the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. While Schweitzer thought Jesus was wrong, other streams of theology (such as classic dispensationalism) understands Jesus as teaching a future kingdom, literally fulfilling the promises of the Hebrew Bible, including a restoration of the kingdom to the Jewish people. But a wholly future kingdom does not really do justice to Jesus’ claim that the kingdom is present in his ministry.
A third option is to see Jesus’s ministry as a present kingdom, but a kingdom which does not exhaust the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible. This has the advantage of taking Jesus seriously when he says that his miracles are establishing some sort of kingdom, but also the warnings of a lengthy interim between the establishment of the kingdom and the consummation of the kingdom in the (now distant) future.
The catch-phrase “Already / Not Yet” is perhaps so overused that it has lost all rhetorical value, but it remains a fairly good way of understanding the kingdom in the gospels. Some elements of the kingdom expected by the prophets is present in Jesus’ ministry, but others remain unfulfilled until a future time. This means we live “between the ages,” after the “already” but before the “not yet.” We look back to the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also forward to the future consummation of the ages.
What are some ways this “already/not yet” strategy helps read the message of Jesus? Or to put it another way, what elements are “present” and what are “future”?
A couple of days ago Sam asked about the reason we would look at Jewish messianic expectations from the Second Temple Period as background for understanding the Kingdom of God. His point was that the Jews misunderstood Jesus completely, so “…why would we look to their understanding of what the Kingdom of God was supposed to be about? Wouldn’t it be likely that they missed on that, too? Jesus’ life and mission turned on its head everything they were looking for in Messiah. Why would it be different with ‘the Kingdom of God’”?
I found this an intriguing question especially since reading N. T. Wright one might get the impression that the Jewish leaders had a great many things correct and only slightly misunderstood Jesus announcement that he was the Messiah.
One possible way to answer this objection is to properly understand Judaism in the first century. Like modern Christianity, there were less things that “all Jews agree on” that might be expected, and hopes for a future Kingdom and the role of the Messiah in that kingdom were quite varied. I often hear people say things like, “all Jews thought that the messiah would be a military leader who would attack Rome.” I suppose that is true for some Jews, but not all. At Qumran the Essenes appear to have expected a “military messiah,” but also a priestly messiah who would be like Aaron. This view was not “normative” for all Jews, but probably a minority position.
Pharisees seem to have expected a Messiah, certainly they are the most interested in Jesus’ talk about the Kingdom in the Gospels. It is likely that the Psalms of Solomon reflect the view of the Pharisees. Psalm 17 serves as an indication of messianic expectations which were current only shortly before the time of Jesus. Rome is viewed as a foreign invader who will be removed when the messiah comes. If these sorts of messianic expectations were popular in Galilee in the 20’s A.D. then we have good reason to read Jesus’ teaching as intentionally messianic and we are able to understand some of the confusion and disappointment among the Jews who heard him teach.
I might even speculate that the ideas in PsSol. 17 are the motive behind Judas’s betrayal of Jesus. If Judas was thinking something like what we read in PsSol. 17 then it is possible he was trying to “force Messiah’s hand” into striking out against Rome and the Temple establishment. Jesus seemed to be claiming to be the Messiah, but he did not seem to be the davidic messiah expected in Psalm 17.
On the other end of the scale would be the Sadducees, a group that (as far as we know) had no messianic expectations. The fact that they limited their canon to the Torah also limited their expectations of a future restoration of the Davidic kingdom. What would a Sadducee think when Jesus announced “the kingdom of God is near”? Perhaps that was enough to identify him as Pharisee or an Essene, and therefore not very interesting. (I would guess that the Herodians were even less interested in a coming kingdom, since any Jewish messiah would probably start their judgment with a thorough smiting of Herod and his family.)
This is all to say that there was a wide range of belief about Messiah, Kingdom, restoration of David’s rule, or a future reign of God in the Judaism of the Second Temple Period. Sam is right to wonder about the use of this material, but I think it serves to show that Jesus did not fit neatly into any first century conception of Messiah or Kingdom, which is exactly why audience struggled to understand him, both disciples and enemies.
I really am not sure he fits very neatly into contemporary theological categories either.
Here is a new promo from Logos. They are giving away free books in exchange for reviews of their apps. They want an “honest rating and review” for the apps for iOS and Android. This is an interesting way to generate app store reviews, and is not really all that painful.
