Earliest Christology and the Value of Biblical Eyewitness Testimony

Journal of Biblical Literature, 2008

2018

T HE present study is intended to be an entirely objective examination of the origin of what may be called the "Son Christologies" in the NT-Son of David, Son of God, the Son-as seen against the background of the OT. These Christologies are of the greater interest in that they are held by some to have originated in the mind of the founder of Christianity himself. How far this may be true, and in what sense, it is the purpose of this paper to re-examine. The Son of Man, while not the subject of special and separate study here, belongs to another category of what may be called "intercessory" or "sacrificial" Christologies-the Servant of the Lord, the High Priest-and it serves as the focus of the Christologies to be discussed in this paper.

Faculty Publications and Presentations, 2001

Church History, 1999

The purpose of this research is to examine the sources of authority employed by Marcion, Clement of Rome, and Ignatius of Antioch as they navigated competing theologies during the post-Apostolic period of the early Christian church. Combining textual analysis and historical reconstruction, this study draws upon both the extant works of these early writers and the modern treatments of authority in early Christianity, finding that these authors navigated multiple forms of textual and non-textual authority in constructing their theological programs. Determining the function of the specifically Christian writings which now comprise the New Testament in their pre-canonical employment constitutes an important aspect of the current project. This study concludes that these three writers created a hermeneutic for defining and utilizing all potentially useful sources through their appeals to the central authority found in the person and event of Jesus of Nazareth.

Religious Studies Review, 2006

Responding to objections raised against the parousia, the author of 2 Peter seeks to defend the validity of Jesus’ return by pointing to the experience of the apostles at the Transfiguration (1.16–18) and to prophetic scripture (1.19–21). But how these two proofs relate to one another has been a matter of dispute since the earliest days of critical scholarship. Standing behind this disagreement is a difficult grammatical construction involving the comparative adjective βεβαιότερον (2 Pet. 1.19a). This article seeks to bring resolution to the debate through a comprehensive assessment of the force and function of this key term.

Pre-pub version of Chapter 9 in in Characters and characterization in the gospel of John. Edited by Christopher W. Skinner. Library of New Testament Studies. London: T & T Clark, 2013. ‘No character in a book is a real person. Not even if he is in a history book and his name is Ulysses S. Grant ’ (Robert Scholes, Elements of Fiction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 17.) or she is in a history book and her name is Margaret Thatcher. It is, however, clear that some characters are pure fiction, some are quite accurate representations of reality and others still are somewhere in between. This essay examines the contributions that theories of character and characterisation and the work of psychologists on eyewitness testimony and human memory make to our understanding of where along this continuum the characters in the Gospel according to John might fall.

Irish Theological Quarterly, 2011