Dr Paul Allen

When Jesus goes to Nazareth, the crowds are amazed by his learning. “Isn’t he the carpenter?” they ask in the NIV translation. The Greek word is tekton, which means artisan or craftsman, and if you look online, you find plenty of people asserting that it should really be translated as mason or stonemason. A colleague asked me about this, and I expressed my opinion that it was much more likely to be a carpenter. There is a lot of scholarship on this, including an excellent piece by Matthew K. Robinson, “‘Is This Not the Τέκτων?’: Revisiting Jesus’s Vocation in Mark 6:3,” in Neotestamentica 55, 2 (2021): 431-445. Robinson concludes, reasonably, that the word was used in various ways with and without qualification, and we can’t really be sure beyond connecting Jesus to the building trades. That is fair enough. But suppose I want to do my own analysis. What do I do, not as a piece of serious academic research, but out of interest? Here are a couple of resources to check immediately. I’ll f...

X can mean so many things.   For example, when we want to denote an unknown quantity, we use the symbol X. It can refer to an obscene level of films, something that is X-rated. People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ's name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, "Put Christ back into Christmas" as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ. There’s No X in Christmas First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ. We don't see people protesting the use of the Greek lett...

The bloke across from me had a tattoo that caught my eye—it was ancient Greek: ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ. And suddenly, the meaning of a famous saying of Jesus became clear. You’ve probably seen ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ before on a bumper sticker. Probably on a truck featuring gun racks, if I may be permitted one stereotype. It’s a gun style rallying cry!  The phrase comes from the words the Spartan king Leonidas used to respond to the invading Persian king Xerxes in 480 B.C. Xerxes demanded that Leonidas surrender his weapons, and Leonidas replied, “Come and take them.” LET'S DO SOME GREEK! The first word is a participle, so literally what Leonidas said was, “Coming . . . ,” or “Having come, take.” That is all true. You’re right. The first word, μολών molōn (“having come”) is the aorist active participle (masculine, nominative, singular) of the Greek verb βλώσκω blōskō “to come.”  The aorist stem is μολ - (the present stem in βλώ- being a regular contraction of μλώ-, from a verb...

English: Ananias restoring the sight of Saint Paul (Photo credit: Wikipedia )  A biblical justification for bible college might be made from a number of passages, from Matthew 28:19 (and its emphasis on teaching disciples) to 2 Timothy 2:2 (and its emphasis on leadership training) to Titus 1:9 (and its emphasis on elders being equipped to articulate and defend the faith). But there is a short passage in Acts that, I believe, provides a biblical precedent for seminary education in a particularly insightful way. These verses, which at first glance may not seem overly significant, show the apostle Paul starting a theological training school in the city of Ephesus . As one commentator explains: “In Ephesus, Paul opened a school of theology to train future leaders for the developing church in the province of Asia” ( Simon J. Kistemaker ,  Acts , NTC , 684). I doubt Paul called it Ephesus Theological Seminary (not to be confused with the modern ETS), but in essence that is ...

Philippians 1:1 “Paul and Timothy , servants of Christ Jesus , To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi , with the overseers and deacons” ( v. 1 ). There is much similarity between the English term for the assembly of God ’s people and the terms for the same concept in other languages. Church in English, kirke in Dutch, and kirche in German all sound alike and are even, in some ways, spelled alike with the hard k or ch sound at the beginning and the r in the middle. The reason for this is that all of these words find their origin in kuriake, which is itself Greek in origin. Literally, kuriake means “belonging to the Lord” and is a derivation of the Greek word for “Lord,” kurios. It makes perfect sense that English would look to kuriake as the root for the word church because, after all, what is the church if it is not that group of people who belong to the Lord Jesus Christ ? Kurios in the Greek language can also refer to the master of slaves or servants. This exp...

oil on wood panel (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) We are to give ourselves to God as living sacrifices. This means we are to give our time, our energy, and our very selves to Him as acts of worship and gratitude. But we must always be aware that God has given us these and all things . Biblical giving, therefore, is done in the context of stewardship , our management of the good things the Father showers upon us. We are to give ourselves to God as living sacrifices The concept of stewardship begins with creation. Creation is celebrated not only in Genesis but throughout Scripture, especially in the Psalms , where God's ownership of the universe is declared: "The earth is the Lord's , and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein" (Ps. 24:1). God is the author of all things, the Creator of all things, and the owner of all things. Whatever God makes, He owns. What  we  own, we own as  stewards  who have been given gifts from God Himself. God has the ...

Holy Spirit College (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Paul was always careful lest by overemphasizing a truth he would have caused people to go in the wrong direction. The Gentiles were indeed free from the Law. But this must be balanced by the fact that they were free, not for self-indulgence, but for life in the Spirit. They were not to “use [their] freedom to indulge the sinful nature [to allow the desires and impulses of the sinful nature to take over].” Rather, they were to “serve one another in love” ( Galatians 5:13). This means having the same self-discipline that Jesus showed when He, the Lord of glory, humbled himself and was among us “as one who serves” (Luke 22:27—see vv. 25–27; Philippians 2:5 –8). In some passages Paul used the Greek word sarx to mean the physical body ( 2 Corinthians 4:10, 11), but in Galatians 5 he meant the evil tendencies within us that lead to selfish indulgence and strife: the sinful nature. Thus, the desires that come from the sinful nature in th...

St Paul's Cathedral (Photo credit: J.Salmoral ) There are four reasons why I think Hebrews should be left in anonymity: No one signed it. 1. Paul begins all thirteen of his letters with the same word — “Paul.” Every time . Without exception. Hebrews is the exception you say? This is possible, but I find it even more noteworthy that Paul explicitly states that he wrote all of his letters in the same way, so as to weed out any impostors ( 2 Thes. 3:17). If Paul wrote Hebrews, it seems likely that the evidence from the early church would be as overwhelming as it is for his other letters, but alas, it is not. In fact, some argue that Pauline authorship was only ascribed to Hebrews to make sure it was included in the canon of Scripture (It was not included in the Muratorion canon, 170 A.D.). 2. Hebrews 2:3-4 is inconsistent with Paul’s apostolic argumentation. The author of Hebrews places himself apart from those who received the gospel directly from Jesus and does not i...

English: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. Česky: Jákob zápasící s andělem. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Judges 2:1-5. Yahweh speaks because the people inquired of him (1:1, which we shall call oracular divine speech ). But now Yahweh speaks, via his intermediary, on his own initiative (which we shall call non-oracular divine speech, and which occurs again in Judges only in 2:20–21; 6:7–10; 10:11–14). As with other passages of Scripture, Yahweh and his angel/messenger are interchangeable: “Now the angel of the Lord … said, ‘I brought you up from Egypt .’ ” Compare, for example, the story of the angel/messenger finding Hagar in the wilderness (Gen. 16:7), the conversation that follows between the two (Gen. 16:8–12), and Hagar’s words, “So she named the Lord who spoke to her” (Gen. 16:13). Here is a case where God himself appeared in the form of a human being, one who could be seen by a mortal. One instance of oscillation between Yahweh and his angel/intermediary that includes an a...