As you’ve heard, James Cameron, director of the blockbuster movie “Titanic,” is out to sink an even bigger ship—Christianity. He claims that Jesus’ bones and those of his mother, brothers, wife, and child named Jude, were found in ossuaries (bone boxes) in a Jerusalem tomb.

On Larry King Live, Cameron and his collaborator Simcha Jacobovici claimed that they produced a TV documentary (to air on March 4 on the Discovery Channel) simply in an effort to “report the news” so that people can draw their own conclusion. Yet according to Ben Witherington, Simcha is a practicing, orthodox Jew. Are we really to believe that the “revelation” that Jesus’ bones have been found—hence no resurrection—are of no religious concern to this man? To me, at least, this one has the almighty dollar sign written all over it.

Let me list just some of the most egregious problems with the way in which this find (in the 1980s!) is being interpreted by Cameron and Simcha:

• the claim that Mary Magdalene’s bones were found in one of the ossuaries on the basis that the name “Mariamne” (Mary) is inscribed on it is bogus; the connection drawn here is pulled completely out of thin air
• the highly suspect use of statistics and DNA “evidence” to support their case; Jesus, Joseph, and Mary were among the most popular names in first-century Palestine, and, of course, people buried in the same family tomb would for the most part be related; as Witherington rightly points out, we “would need an independent control sample from some member of Jesus’ family to confirm that these were members of Jesus’ family”—but, of course, we have no such thing
• all the earliest accounts of Jesus’ death and burial indicate that Jesus’ body could not be found and had not been moved; there is no ancient evidence at all for Jesus’ family tomb whatsoever
• why would this family tomb have been in Jerusalem? Jesus was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth
• there is no historical evidence for Jesus having a son named Jude; there is no credible historical evidence that Jesus was married, to Mary Magdalene or anyone else (plus see the first point above)
• if Jesus died and a year later his bones were transferred to an ossuary, and this ossuary was placed in a Jerusalem family tomb, this would mean that all the early Christian martyrs, including the apostles, knowingly died for a fraudulent religion; this is highly implausible
• if you had been Jesus and (for argument’s sake) had had a son, would you have named him Judas (same as Judah or Jude), like the man who betrayed you?

It is hard to know whether one should dignify this kind of warmed-up sensationalist commercial ploy with a serious rebuttal. Why would an orthodox Jew and an unbelieving Hollywood producer time the release of a television documentary denying Jesus’ resurrection just prior to Easter? Because of serious scholarship or maximum personal profit?

Simcha says we Christians should be open to the evidence he presents. I agree; if Jesus’ bones were in that box, Christianity is based on a false premise—the resurrection of Jesus (see the Gospel resurrection narratives; the apostles’ preaching in the Book of Acts; and Paul’s summary of the gospel in 1 Cor. 15:3–4). The problem with Simcha’s “evidence,” however, is that he is connecting the dots far too quickly to arrive at his desired conclusion. Surely it will take better evidence to overturn the well-attested fact of Jesus’ resurrection.

See also Ben Witherington’s excellent response as well as Darrell Bock’s reaction to Cameron’s newest work. Charles Quarles’ initial impressions can be found here. The New York Times has also released a story on the documentary.

Technorati Tags: Jesus, tomb, Christianity, James Cameron, Ben Witherington

This week I am writing to let you know about two new resources from Biblical Foundations. The first is a new website, www.biblicalfoundations.com. Under the new arrangement, www.biblicalfoundations.com features postings of, or links to, most of my publications, while www.biblicalfoundations.org continues to be the site featuring my weekly blog and other materials and resources. So, please go to www.biblicalfoundations.com some time and check out the new site!

The second new resource is a 12-week discipleship series I am currently teaching at Richland Creek Community Church in Wake Forest, North Carolina. This series is based on my book God, Marriage & Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundations and features one-hour lessons and discussions of various topics related to marriage and the family. Please join us on a weekly basis by accessing the following link: http://www.richlandcreek.com/godmarriagefamily.htm. To whet your appetite, here is a brief excerpt from the first session.

“As we argue in our book God, Marriage, and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation, at the root the current crisis surrounding marriage is a spiritual, not merely cultural, crisis. Now if the root of the problem is spiritual, the solution must be spiritual, too—agreed? I submit to you, therefore, that the solution to our current cultural malaise surrounding marriage and the family is a return to the biblical foundation. To adapt Paul, no foundation can be laid other than the one laid by God himself in his Word.

But when we look, say, at the marriage and family section in our local general or Christian bookstore (there is surprisingly little difference between the two), what do we find? Do we find the thorough, spiritually nurturing treatments of marriage and family that will help us put God first in our marriages? Last night as I was preparing for our class I took a moment to browse through the “Relationship” shelf at the Barnes and Noble, and here are some of the titles that I found:

• Love Smart by Dr. Phil
• Chicken Soup for the Romantic Soul
• Find a Husband after 35
• The Manipulative Man
• How to Succeed with Women
• Be Happy or I’ll Scream!
• The Getting the Love You Want Workbook
• The 7 Best Things (Happy) Couples Do
• The Commitment Cure
• Loving Him without Losing You
• “Honey, Are You Listening?” Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder & Your Marriage
• The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Perfect Marriage
• The Single Girl’s Manifesto
• . . . and the list goes on and on!

Obviously, this is not going to get the job done. Remember, no one when they get married plans to have a divorce. We don’t lack good intentions. We don’t even lack resources, or romantic ideas, or more education, as if that were the cure for our relational problems. What we lack is a commitment to seek God and his kingdom first in this crucial area of our lives. Marriage is not man’s idea—it’s God’s idea. Marriage is a divine institution, not merely a human convention. So if we want to have a God-honoring marriage, we need to go to Scripture where God has revealed that purpose to us.”

Technorati Tags: love, marriage, divorce, God, family

The Latin phrase Quo vadis? means, “Where are you going?” The most famous occurrence of the expression is found in John 13:36 (cf. 16:5) where Peter asks Jesus this question prior to the crucifixion. This reference is later picked up and further developed in the apocryphal Acts of Peter. More recently, Quo Vadis? has been the title of a novel, written by Henry Sienkiewicz and set at the time of Roman Emperor Nero in A.D. 64, in which Marcus Vinicius, a Roman patrician, falls in love with a young Christian woman, Lygia. Since it came out in 1896, the book has been translated into over 50 languages, and its author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905. Famously, Hollywood made the book into an epic movie in 1951 (MGM).

In case you haven’t seen the movie, or read the book, I will not spoil your enjoyment by telling you the ending. In any case, my primary concern is not with the movie, or the book Quo Vadis?, or even Peter’s original question to Jesus. I believe that once again, in our day, the question is appropriate to ask of the evangelical movement at large: “Where are you going, evangelicals?” There are some who stress doctrinal fidelity, including biblical inerrancy, defined in terms of a literalism that insists on us having the ipsissima verba (“exact words”) of Jesus in every instance in the New Testament. There are others who insist that “evangelical” can mean just about anything. In between, there is a large variety of definitions and understandings. In fact, there seem to be almost as many views on what it means to be evangelical as there are evangelicals.

I am currently working on a project tentatively titled, Quo Vadis, Evangelicals? (due out with Crossway Books at the end of the year) which poses this question in search for informed, even prophetic, answers. The book takes its point of departure from the 50^th anniversary of publication of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society which I edit and surveys 9 selected presidential addresses over its publication history from 3 major periods. In my introduction I seek to weave together a metanarrative of these guiding visions in order to document the quest of the leaders of the Evangelical Theological Society (which is admittedly only a part of evangelicalism at large) to develop an evangelical identity in the last half-century.

I believe the volume will be highly instructive, and it is my hope that the book will serve as a guiding light as evangelicals continue to pursue God’s calling in today’s world to be both salt and light and to preach the one pure gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

As part of my role as Director of Ph.D. Studies at Southeastern Seminary, I am teaching an Integrative Seminar on various topics relevant for first-year doctoral students. This afternoon our guest professor will be Dr. Richard Hays from Duke University. The following remarks will be designed to set the stage for the seminar, in which 21 students will give presentations on three Pauline passages, 1 Corinthians 10:1–22; 2 Corinthians 3:1–18; and Romans 9:30–10:13, in order to discuss Paul’s role as interpreter of Israel’s Scripture. My comments are reproduced below as I intend to give them.

We are honored to have Dr. Hays with us today. Dr. Hays is a prolific scholar in the field of NT studies, Jesus studies, Pauline studies, and Christian ethics, to name but a few. Dr. Hays is widely known for his book The Moral Vision of the New Testament, in my view the finest book on the subject, and for his two works on the topic we will be discussing today, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989) and The Conversion of the Imagination (2005). We are very grateful that you are able to join us today and to lead this session of the Integrative Seminar, Dr. Hays. Welcome!

I am not a Pauline expert, and I know my limitations, and so I will very shortly cede the floor to Dr. Hays. But if you permit me just a few personal remarks: A few years ago I participated in a symposium on the topic of the use of the OT in the NT at McMaster University convened under the auspices of Stanley Porter. The revised seminar papers have now been published by Eerdmans under the title Hearing the Old Testament in the New Testament (2006). At that conference, presenters read papers on the various authors of the NT and their use of the OT. I had the unenviable and impossible assignment to respond to each of these presentations.

For our present purposes, I will restrict my remarks to the paper on Paul at that conference, which was given by James Aageson, professor of Biblical Studies at Concordia College. Aageson wrote a book that argues, innocently enough, that Paul’s words (including his use of the OT) were “written also for our sake” (an allusion to 1 Cor 10). In his conference paper he elaborated on this thesis. The first thing Aageson did is pit the Paul of Acts against the Paul of the Epistles, saying that in Acts Paul is shown to prove from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ (e.g. 17:2–3; 28:23) while in the Epistles Paul, according to Aageson, rarely cites Scripture to establish his Christology. My response to this was that even if for argument’s sake we concede Aageson’s point, the difference very probably lies in the fact that in Acts Paul is shown to engage in missionary preaching (hence his effort to show from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ) while his letters are by and large addressed to believers. If so, there does not seem to be any incongruity between the two “Pauls.”

Second, Aageson raised the question whether or not we should seek to reproduce Paul’s hermeneutic or scriptural exegesis in our day. Aageson’s answer: not only is this impossible because of our different contexts, it is not even desirable because it would be “a violation of our own responsibility to come to the texts of Scripture, Paul’s letters included, as interpretive agents who take our contexts as seriously as Paul took his own.” So what Aageson does here is pit Paul’s context against the context of the contemporary interpreter, and then proceeds to affirm the priority of the contemporary context over against Paul’s.

He goes on to say that “scriptural interpretation ought not (perhaps cannot) be reduced to a mere task of trying to discover meaning in the texts of Scripture. . . . Rather, it is a generative and creative task that is invariably open-ended.” My response to this collapsing of the two horizons of biblical interpretation is, “Why not first try to identify Paul’s meaning and then determine the significance of his message for the contemporary reader?” In the end, the problem looming for Aageson here is that of a vacuum of authority, if that authority is wrested away from the biblical author (Paul) and transferred to the contemporary reader(s). He seems to sense this when he speaks of “the risk of entering into a post-modern interpretive house of mirrors,” but he is undaunted, adding that just as “Paul’s reading of Scripture added yet one more element to the rich tradition of post-biblical interpretation” [i.e. the interpretation of the OT], so “our readings of Scripture will do similarly.”

In my response to Aageson, I registered my astonishment at this statement. Is there really no difference between Paul and you and me? What about Paul’s regular assertion of his apostleship at the outset of his letters? Aageson objected that a traditional approach in interpreting Paul’s use of the OT (of which I apparently am guilty) results in “render[ing] the texts mechanical, archaic, and lifeless.” He does say “may,” but does it have to? Later in his paper Aageson took his position one step further, arguing that the church ought not merely to repeat Paul’s thinking on a given issue but rather understand that “Paul invites each theological generation into the question anew.” To which I replied: —and come to conclusions different than Paul?

This seems to be the implication of Aageson’s statement, and, indeed, he proceeds to state that “Paul did not pronounce the final word” on the subject of Israel and the church in Romans 9–11 but rather “prompted and contributed to the church’s ongoing conversation on the subject.” So, Paul got the conversation started and made his contribution, but we must not feel bound by his conclusions and pronouncements. This seems to be a surprisingly low view of Paul and a surprisingly high view of Aageson himself and of you and I as interpreters today.

If that were not enough, Aageson presses on, saying that in our reading today, Paul’s apostleship will “be fulfilled once again in our time.” Not merely did Paul have “rough edges” and “conceptual gaps” in his use of Scripture, but Aageson detects “even misreading” of Scripture on Paul’s part (though Aageson does not elaborate on this point). Reading Paul’s letters, one does not get the impression that Paul saw himself merely as starting the conversation and as voicing his own humble opinion. Rather, his writings by and large exude the confidence that, by the grace of God and owing to his apostolic commission, Paul settled certain controversial issues, such as Gentile participation in the church on equal terms with Jews, once and for all.

It is one thing to say that Paul wrestled with difficult issues that defied easy resolution or that he humbly acknowledged his own limitations in understanding divine mysteries, as he does in Rom 11:33–36, and quite another to maintain that Paul misread Scripture and that we must find theological solutions on our own. Thus I submit that there are other, better, ways to conceive of Scripture having been written “also for our sake” than to substitute our own reading of Scripture for that of Paul and the biblical writers. Again, Dr. Hays, welcome, and please take it away.

For Further Study: For a helpful critique of Hays’s hermeneutic, see the Preface to the Second Edition of Richard N. Longenecker’s Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), especially pages xiv–xxii and xxxiv–xxxix.

[tags]Exegesis, New Testament, Biblical Theology[\tags]

Tomorrow, Saturday, February 3, 2007, I will be delivering a presentation on “Christ, Marriage, and the Church” at Southeastern’s 20/20 Collegiate Conference. The presentation will summarize some of the material in my book God, Marriage, and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation. To adapt Paul, clearly, no foundation can be laid other than the one laid by God himself in his Word. For those who won’t be able to join us, please find below the outline for my presentation.

1. The Divinely Revealed Purpose of Marriage (Genesis 1–2)

• Equality in essence
• Distinct roles
• Partnership
• Joint dominion
• Fruitfulness

2. The Consequences of the Fall on Marriage (Genesis 3)

• Loss of innocence
• Labor
• Relational tension
• Struggle for control

3. The Redemption of Marriage in Christ (Ephesians)

• Sacrificial love of husband
• Voluntary submission of wife
• Part of restoration of all things under headship of Christ
• Spirit-filled
• Putting on the full armor of God

How exciting that marriage and the family are included in God’s redemptive purposes in Christ! The biblical message is that marriage is not an end in itself but a means toward the end of glorifying God in Christ. You will notice that I find in Genesis 1–2 indications of both equality in essence and distinct male-female roles. Correspondingly, Paul urges even Christian women—those redeemed by Christ—to submit to their husbands as the church submits to Christ.

A truly God-honoring marriage, however, will be possible only for spouses who are Spirit-filled (Eph 5:18) and who affirm Christ’s lordship over all their lives (Eph 1:10). As all believers, husbands and wives—and their children, too!—must unite in putting on the full armor of God, so that they can stand firm against the devil’s schemes, who is intent to thwart God’s plan at every turn (Eph 6:10–18)—marriage must be lived by faith, not sight.

Do you and I want to have a successful marriage? Or do we desire a God-honoring marriage?

Success defines marriage in the world’s terms: it is works-oriented and prides itself in human accomplishment and human means toward attaining it. Bringing glory to God orients the purpose for marriage in the only one who is truly worthy. We depend on God and acknowledge our need for him. And we can be successful even when we fail, because our failure puts the spotlight where it properly belongs: the never-failing love of God, and his all-sufficient grace.

Technorati Tags: Southeastern Seminary, Marriage, Family, Jesus Christ