Years ago I used to scratch my head at Jesus’ response to the question “What is the greatest commandment?” in Mark 12:28. Why does he start with the line “Hear O Israel, the Lord is Your God, the Lord alone” before stating the command: “Love the Lord your God…”? Why state a fact before giving [...]
Some months ago, pastor-blogger Trevin Wax posted an article called “Urban Legends: The Preacher’s Edition.” There he lists several “urban legends” that he’s heard floating around lately in sermons. Like Internet rumors that people forward on ad infinitum, these preaching illustrations don’t have much grounding in fact. One potential fallacy on his list caught my [...]
On a bus in Jerusalem, I encountered the passionate Middle Eastern attitude that colored Jesus’ parables and his attitude toward prayer.
If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell. Matthew 18:9 Some of the sayings of Jesus are so strong that we wonder if Jesus really [...]
(Excerpt from Walking in the Dust of Rabbi Jesus, Zondervan, 2012) In 1945, Rabbi Eliezer Silver headed up the search for thousands of displaced Jewish children across Europe. They had been hidden from the clutches of the Nazis on farms, convents, and monasteries, and now he sought to return them to their families if at [...]
The Jewish prayers of Jesus and Paul were very different than how we do today. Discovering how they “blessed” the Lord can enrich our faith.
Jesus used elegant rabbinic reasoning to rule that healing was permissible on the Sabbath
Is it appropriate to call Jesus “rabbi”? Or did he reject the title? A look at how the word was used in the first century.
How much can we really know about the Jewishness of Jesus? That’s a pretty fundamental question, since the goal of this website is to understand the Jewish background of Christianity. I’ve found some pretty important news in my recent reading, and wanted to share it here. A common approach to studying Jesus is to use [...]
Using the Advent season to reconsider the reality that Jesus entered two thousand years ago