Matthias Konradt, "The Commandment of Love for Enemies in Matt 5.43-48 and Its Early Jewish Context," translated by Wayne Coppins, Accessible German New Testament Scholarship 1 (2025), 36. Matthew has removed the Golden Rule from the direct context of love for enemies and placed it at the end of the body of the Sermon on the Mount in 7.12. The connection to love for enemies is not, however, eliminated with this rearrangement.

Michael J. Kok, Four Evangelists and a Heresy Hunter: Investigating the Traditions about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (self published, 2025), 103. The historical books of the Hebrew Bible are anonymous. The authors or editors behind the texts are not in the spotlight. The focus is on the narratives about how God was working among the covenant people of Israel throughout their history.

Kyle R. Greenwood and David B. Schreiner, Ahab's House of Horrors: A Historiographic Study of the Military Campaigns of the House of Omri (Lexham Press, 2023), 126. The inscription praises the important role of Chemosh, who sanctioned the oppression and the rebellion of the Moabites. In addition, Chemosh is the direct recipient of military honor, which is clarified not only by his stated ownership of Ataroth (line 12) but also his receipt of the plunder of Nebo.

Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019), 1:xlix. The Torah is manifestly a composite construction, but there is abundant evidence throughout the Hebrew Bible that composite work was fundamental to the very conception of what literature was, that a process akin to collage was assumed to be one of the chief ways in which literary texts were put together.

Michael Kochenash, "Better Call Paul 'Saul': Literary Models and a Lukan Innovation," JBL 138, no. 2 (2019), 441. Although Luke’s presentation of Saul appears to be modeled on King Saul, the influence of this imitation extends only to Saul’s name, his belligerent disposition, and his persecution of the Son of David. Luke supplements this characterization with language that recalls Pentheus’s persecution of Dionysus in the Bacchae.

Michael J. Kok, Four Evangelists and a Heresy Hunter: Investigating the Traditions about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (self published, 2025), 15. The editorial choices behind the writing of the Gospel of Mark seem puzzling if its author aimed to produce a shortened, harmonized version of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The latter Gospels' accounts of Jesus's miraculous birth and appearances to his disciples after rising from the grave, and many aphorisms, parables, and ethical imperatives that they attribute to Jesus, are not reproduced in Mark's Gospel.

"Since the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history are intricately connected, we cannot tell with certainty where one begins and the other ends. And we are always dealing with ancient subjective testimonies from a past and culture we can only access imperfectly." - Mitzi J. Smith, "Born of a Doulē," in The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus…

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-six of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Elizabeth Shively’s ‘Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,’ part 10.”1 We have come to the end of our series looking at Elizabeth Shively’s 2020 piece “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark.”

"The main reason so many conservative Christians today so publicly and so belligerently condemn homosexuality and wave their Bible around as their authorization (even as they reject and abandon other elements of the Bible's sexual ethics) is precisely because that condemnation has become a central identity marker. This is particularly true for conservative Christians seeking to structure power, values, and boundaries in favor of their right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation." …

Maurice Ryan, "Creating Judas Iscariot: Critical Questions for Presenting the Betrayer of Jesus," Journal of Religious Education 67 no. 3 (October 2019), 31. Matthew’s account of Judas’ actions after handing over Jesus demonstrates an aspect of Matthew’s theological agenda: Judas, the betrayer immediately recognises the innocence of Jesus and the injustice of his deed. A similar theme will play out in Matthew when Pontius Pilate, after interrogating Jesus, likewise can see no fault in Jesus and absolves himself of any responsibility: “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves” (Matthew 27:24).

"There is no difficulty in principle with including oral tradition in discussions of gospel interrelations, but the use of it as a default position at every step can mask evidence of literary links. The problem with the appeal to oral tradition is not what it affirms but what it denies." - Mark Goodacre, The Fourth Synoptic Gospel: John's Knowledge of Matthew, Mark, and Luke…

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-five of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Elizabeth Shively’s ‘Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,’ part 9.”1 In her 2020 piece “Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,”

"If there is anyone who is sure that he can cope entirely on his own with every eventuality, I might agree that for him knowledge of the past is unnecessary. It would still be a good thing for such a person, but not necessary. But no mortal man is so rash as to make such a claim. Whether he is acting as a private individual or as a public official, even if things are currently going well, no one of any sense takes that as a reliable harbinger of what will happen in the future.

Brandon R. Grafius, Reading the Bible with Horror, Horror and Scripture (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020), 45-46. The book of Job also reveals connections to horror narratives in the vision of the world that it presents. As the book begins, Job's life is calm, predictable, and pleasant; he is fenced in by God's protection. But this world is revealed as incomplete, first through the calamities that puncture Job's hermetically sealed universe, and then in the mind-expanding tour of the cosmos on which YHWH takes Job.

"[D]emographics can be deceptive; they tend to sacrifice gritty human realities in favor of assembled portraits, and when studying past peoples whose lives and habits are dramatically different from our own, minutiae matter." - Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (Picador, 2018), 48. I was perusing Novum Testamentum 67 no. 3 and saw a couple of interesting articles that are open access: "

James F. McGrath, The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know That Everyone Else Should Too (Eerdmans, 2023), 66-67. Once again we have to ask whether Matthew missed the original context and misunderstood the text, deliberately misrepresented it, or something else. It is hard to be certain, but here it is much harder to find an excuse or explanation for what Matthew did...On the whole, however, we can definitely say that Matthew interpreted the Jewish scriptures in ways that were perfectly acceptable in his time.

"When someone cites Strong's Concordance, it's a dead giveaway that they have no training in Greek or Hebrew and don't have the first clue what they're talking about." - Dan McClellan, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues (St. Martin's, 2025), 115-116. The full trailer for the upcoming Nicolas Cage movie…

Esther J. Hamori, God's Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures, and Divine Hitmen of the Bible (Broadleaf Books, 2023), 207. God has a tumultuous relationship with the sea monster. In a number of texts they fight to the death (God wins), though s we'll see, that's not all there is to their complicated dynamic. This cosmic showdown of god versus sea monster has roots deep beneath the biblical texts.

"If we can move aside the veils of later ecclesiastical tradition, if we can see past the images of Paul the ex-Jew and of Paul the anti-Jew, if we can imagine ourselves back into the full-hearted eschatological conviction of this movement's founding generation - which thought that it was history's final generation - it is this other Paul whom we will more clearly see.

"God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yolk for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

Hey, everyone! I’m Ben - the Amateur Exegete, and this is episode seventy-four of Bible Study for Amateurs. Today’s episode is, “Elizabeth Shively’s ‘Purification of the Body and the Reign of God in the Gospel of Mark,’ part 8.”1 In Mark 1:40-45, Jesus encounters a man with λέπρa (lepra) and, per v. 41, “stretched out his hand and touched him.”

Nathanael Vette, "The Son of Man and the Sea: Hydromachy and Conquest in Mark's Sea Voyages," JSNT (2024), 18. By conquering the ‘country of the Gerasenes’, Mark’s Jesus appears to be fulfilling long-held Jewish hopes for the region by reclaiming the land for Israel. But unlike the Manassites and Hasmonaeans, who had failed to purge Gilead of its foreign elements, Jesus makes good on his conquest by cleansing the country of its impurities, thereby liberating its inhabitants – symbolised by the restored demoniac, who unlike the woman from Syrophoenicia (Mk 7.26) is not explicitly marked as a gentile but is presented as a native of the country, perhaps a Gileadite who had been polluted by non-Jewish elements in the region.

Michael J. Kok, Four Evangelists and a Heresy Hunter: Investigating the Traditions about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Self-published, 2025. Pp. 111. Paperback. $7.00. ISBN 9798310427082. INTRODUCTION1 Four zones of the world and four winds blowing over them and therefore, reasoned Irenaeus, four Gospels (Haer. 3.11.8.). But which four and why? The traditional authorship of the Gospels, championed by that bishop of Lyon at the end of the second century CE, is the subject of Michael Kok’s latest book…