Theologia et Vita

Jerome's Latin, written around 392–393, says Jesus was believed to be the Christ ( credebatur esse Christus ).¹ Michael the Syrian's twelfth-century Chronicle says he was thought to be the Messiah, and the tenth-century Arabic of Agapius of Hierapolis softens the clause further, to "perhaps."² Three languages, one direction. Every extant Greek manuscript reads "he was the Christ" ( ho christos houtos ēn ), and every one descends from a text already in Christian hands by the fourth century. Two different projects meet at that pattern. T. C. Schmidt's Josephus and Jesus (Oxford University Press, May 2025, now freely downloadable ) defends the Greek paragraph as Josephus's own, with a single emendation at the messianic clause, which his translation prints as "He was [thought to be] the Christ."³ The brackets mark the words he restores from the Syriac line. Jesús Fernández-Pedrera Correa, an independent researcher, posted a preprint to Zenodo ...

  How many “wills” does God have? Classical Latin theology spoke of voluntas decreti (will of decree), voluntas praecepti (will of precept), voluntas arcana (secret or hidden will), voluntas revelata (revealed will), voluntas beneplaciti (will of good pleasure), voluntas signi (will of sign), voluntas efficax (efficacious will), and voluntas permissiva (permissive will). These aren't necessarily eight separate categories, because several are overlapping ways of describing the same fundamental distinction and their precise meanings vary somewhat among theological traditions. But the multiplicity of distinctions potentially muddies the water and suggests multiple wills in God. Reformation and post-Reformation systematic theology often made the distinction between God's “perfect will” and “permissive will.” Properly conceived this is fine, but it also potentially leads to the misconception that God has two competing wills. Earlier, that very charge had been leveled against Jo...

“What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about.” ~ G.K. Chesterton For a good stretch of its history, "heresy" didn't sound like an accusation at all. The Greek hairesis meant a choice, an opinion, a school you had opted into. Luke uses it of the Sadducees (Acts 5:17) and the Pharisees (15:5; 26:5), and Josephus did the same, adding the Essenes for good measure.[1] When Paul's accusers call the Christians a hairesis in Acts 24, Paul all but shrugs at the word: he serves the God of his fat...

  Here's a fascinating little episode from the history of the Eastern Church. In 1629, Cyril Lucaris (1572–1638), Patriarch of Constantinople and known as the “Orthodox Boogeyman” in popular online discussions, published a confession of faith that sounded remarkably Reformed. Indeed, his articulation of Scripture's authority could have come straight from Geneva! Consider his declaration in Chapter II of the Confessio Fidei : "Credimus Scripturam sacram esse theodidacton, hoc est, a Deo traditam... Huius auctoritatem supra Ecclesiae auctoritatem esse credimus: multum enim interest inter Spiritum Sanctum et hominem: Spiritus enim Sanctus Deus est, neque errare, neque fallere potest; Ecclesia vero... falli et fallere potest." "We believe that the Holy Scripture is God-given, that is, handed down from God... We believe its authority to be above the authority of the Church; for there is a great difference between the Holy Spirit and man: the Holy Spirit is God, who ca...

Making the Case for Cases: Five Endings, Eight Labels, and a World of Exegesis J. Neil Daniels One of the first things a student of New Testament Greek discovers is that nouns refuse to sit still. Just when you think you have learned a word, its ending changes, and suddenly you're wondering what happened to the vocabulary you memorized yesterday. But there is a method to the madness. Greek is an inflected language, meaning that the forms of words communicate grammatical relationships that English ordinarily expresses through word order and prepositions. This brings us to the concept of case, which identifies the grammatical function of a noun, pronoun, adjective, or other declined word within a sentence. The nominative ordinarily identifies the subject; the genitive expresses various relationships, including possession, description, and source; the dative commonly indicates interest, location, or means; the accusative ordinarily identifies the direct object; and the vocative is use...

Saul falls in with a band of ecstatic prophets and starts prophesying himself, transformed on the spot into someone else entirely (1 Sam. 10:1-13). Samson tears a lion apart bare-handed when the Spirit rushes on him (Judg. 14:6). These are the images most people carry of the Spirit in the Old Testament: sudden, overwhelming, a little frightening. They are not wrong, but they are a small slice of something much larger. Of the 389 occurrences of ruach in the Hebrew Bible, only 107 refer to the divine Spirit at all, and John Levison notes that of those, only a smattering thrum with untrammeled impulse.¹ Lee Roy Martin, surveying the same material, gives up trying to force it into one category and instead reads it through five: Yahweh's Spirit as savior, sanctifier, empowerer, healer, and the one who rests on Israel's coming king.² The real portrait is stranger and more interesting than Saul on the ground or Samson with a jawbone in his hand. Start where the canon starts. "The...