If there is one thing everyone should realize about the Trump presidency, it is this: There never is any down time. Everything is at fever pitch, all the time, constantly…every second of every day. In fact, part of me wonders if anyone has even breathed in the past three years. Just in the past three…
We now come to Part 8 in my series on how the New Testament writers use the Old Testament. In my last post, I looked at the opening verses of the Gospel of Mark. In this post, though, I’m going to look at Mark’s account regarding John the Baptist’s baptism of Jesus in the Jordan…
Here in my next post in my series on the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament, I’m going to focus on the prologue of Mark, particularly his account of John the Baptist. Since Matthew and Luke cover the account of John the Baptist in a similar manner with pretty much the same Old Testament…
We now come to the final example of the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament that is found in Matthew’s infancy narrative. Up to this point, we’ve looked at Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7:14 (Immanuel), Micah 5:2 (Out of Bethlehem will come a prince), Hosea 11:1 (“Out of Egypt, I called my son”), and…
As we make our way into Part 5 of my ongoing series on how the New Testament uses the Old Testament, we now come to a couple of Old Testament quotations in the infancy narrative of Matthew 2: Matthew 2:15’s quote of Hosea 11:1 and Matthew 2:18’s quote of Jeremiah 31:15. Both quotes are in…
Last month, a friend of mine brought to my attention an October 17th blog post by Ken Ham in which he commented on an article by Religion News Service about new children’s books written by progressive Christians. I proceeded to read Ham’s post, as well as the article in question, and realized that when it…
It has been over a month since my last post in my series regarding the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament. At that time, I looked at the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 and argued that in its original context, Isaiah 53 is about the purified remnant of Israel and that by quoting from…
A few weeks ago, I got into a somewhat heated discussion on Twitter over the issue of the dating of the birth of Jesus. In all honesty, although I knew about the basic problem, it had never been an issue that I had spent considerable time on. In any case, in the weeks following that…
In my previous post, I began to argue that the Suffering Servant in of Isaiah 53, when read within the context of the larger section of Isaiah 40-55, is clearly to be identified with Israel. The “blind and deaf Servant” in passages like Isaiah 42:19 is idolatrous Israel before the exile. That’s why they got…
Perhaps one of the most well-known, and I would argue most misunderstood, Old Testament prophecy quoted in the gospels is Isaiah 53, or more properly Isaiah 52:13-53:12. It is quoted numerous times throughout the New Testament: Matthew 8:17 (the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law); Luke 22:37 (in Jesus’ instructions to his disciples); John 12:37-38 (in John’s…