A Fresh Perspective

A pastor I know tells about a Bible study group in a church that he served a number of years ago that decided to study the book of Jonah. Well, this group got hung up on the whale scene. They read the story not as a parable, but as a historical narrative. And they concluded that Jonah must have been swallowed by a sea grouper because a whale’s mouth is not large enough to ingest a human. They were so excited about their discovery they even asked their pastor to make an announcement to the church about their findings. Well, the pastor was able to get around it by telling them that he didn’t want to take credit for their research, and they should find some other way to share their conclusions. I have no doubt those folks probably missed the whole point of the story. I don’t know why some religious folks have such a hard time accepting that fiction and parable and metaphorical narratives are better conveyers of spiritual truth than history. What I am about to say I hope will not soun...

My article for Baptist News Global this month focused on the importance of reading the Bible critically as well as spiritually, and I used this text as an example. The reason it’s so important to read a text critically is that it helps to prevent us from spiritually misusing and misapplying the text. The stories and teachings of Jesus in the Gospels and the stories about Jesus in the Gospels did not drop down out of heaven on the wings of angels. Before these stories were ever written down by a   Gospel writer they were told and retold and retold. Scholars call this the oral tradition. These stories were passed down by word of mouth decades before they written. I’m sure you can imagine how these stories were altered and changed in the process of retelling them. Some details would have been omitted while others would have been added. And then the Gospel writers themselves who brought these stories together in a cohesive narrative around the framework of Jesus’ ministry also made ch...

Though Paul wrote his letters two or three decades before the written Gospels appear, Paul, nevertheless, would have had access to some of the teachings of Jesus and stories about Jesus being circulated in the oral tradition, that is, being told and retold and retold by word of mouth. Here, in this text, Paul puts the emphasis where Jesus places   the emphasis. Twice in the first paragraph of our text, at the beginning and at the end, Paul says that love is the fulfilling of the law. I suspect Paul was aware of the teaching of Jesus where Jesus says that all the law and prophets hang on two commands: loving God and loving neighbor. In fact, we love God by loving neighbor. It is by loving our neighbor that we express our love for God. Paul says basically the same thing, but words it differently. He says that love is the fulfilling of the law. Paul is not saying that every single law in the Torah is fulfilled through love, but rather, what he is saying is that the real intent an...

Paul gives a number of admonitions all under the heading, “Let love be genuine.” Everything that follows from that opening statement is a description of what genuine love looks like. In the second paragragh beginning in v.14 Paul focuses on how we should respond to violence, echoing the teaching of Jesus about loving our enemies. Jesus’ teaching on the subject can be found in Matthew 5 and its parallel version in Luke 6. Paul, of course, is not quoting either Matthew or Luke, because Matthew and Luke were not written until two or three decades after Paul wrote his letters. Other than maybe the book of James, Paul’s letters are the earliest New Testament documents we have, most likely written in the 50’s of the C.E. So Paul would not have had access to the written Gospels. However, he would have had access to the teachings of Jesus and the stories about Jesus that had been circulating in the oral tradition, that is, teachings and stories that were being told and retold and passed on by...