Hitzonim | Outsiders

Catching up on older episodes of the New Testament Review podcast

Often my posts are a little dense—or I’m a little dense? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I thought I’d mix it up with a different style of media today to engage readers who may not prefer 2,000 word essays for every post! To those who do, don’t fret, The Sunday Post, as usual, will engage with the assigned gospel reading! But for today, something a little different.

I’ve been slowly working my way through the New Testament Review podcast, hosted by PhD candidates at Duke University. In this episode from June 2018, hosts present a recorded open-forum conversation between two emeritus professors (weeks away from retirement when this conversation was recorded) from Duke Divinity School: Joel Marcus and Richard Hays.

Within minutes of the discussion I thought this was a conversation perfect for sharing on this newsletter. The scholars engage the Greek Scriptures through complementary interpretive frames: literary analysis and historical analysis. The professors share about their decades of friendship and scholarly dialogue, and they respectfully frame their views as complementary, not competitive. What I think is especially salient for readers of this Substack, Marcus and Hays both work from their confessional perspectives as Christians. In this newsletter, I sometimes eschew the confessional and other times I lean into it. A similar tension exists in this conversation.

Maybe you’ll pop this on during your lunch break or walking the dog after work. It’s short of an hour, and I think you’ll find the discussion similar to those we’re having here.

Other notable quotes that I jotted down include the following that I section into those from Marcus and those from Hays. I repeat these here, but like we say on Twitter, “Retweet is not endorsement”! I think these are provocative and useful insights, but I wouldn’t agree with each. At any rate, agreement isn’t necessarily the end goal; dialogue, learning, and examination of our beliefs are greater virtues than agreement! Or so I say.

• From Joel Marcus:

  • Quoting a colleague who asks to remain anonymous, “Jesus didn’t think he was God, but he was wrong about that.”

  • On the prima facie anti-Jewish rhetoric of the fourth gospel (paraphrase for length and clarity): “John wrote about the Jesus of 30 AD, but shaped by the Johannine community experience of the end of the first century, and we shouldn’t forget this when we read it today.”

• From Richard Hays:

  • “The gospels are narrative presentations intended to bear witness to theological claims about Jesus—not documentary films.”

  • “Whatever we say about Jesus, we must be consistent with the history of Israel, not over and against it.”

Happy listening, and I’d love to hear what notable quotes struck you! Leave a comment or email me to let me know! Usually comments are a perk of paid subscriptions, but I opened it up to everyone for this post!