The Hermeneutic of Inversion

  • The Way, the Church of God

    The word appears exactly three times in the entire New Testament, and not once in circumstances suggesting the people it names chose it for themselves. The first occurrence is in Acts 11:26, at Antioch, where the disciples were first called… Continue reading

    The Way, the Church of God
  • The Founder Who Arrived Late: Antioch and the Same Problem Twice

    The first two posts[1] in this run stayed in Jerusalem: the apostles untouched while the Stephen circle bled, the church of God in Galatians 1:13 identified with the persecuted rather than the protected, the naming order at the Jerusalem conference… Continue reading

    The Founder Who Arrived Late: Antioch and the Same Problem Twice
  • Which Church, Exactly: Stephen’s Circle and the Limits of Matthew 16:18

    In my post The Church Paul Persecuted Was Not Peter’s, from June 13, 2026, I pointed out something the standard account glides past. When persecution breaks out in Jerusalem after Stephen’s stoning, Acts says the believers scattered through Judea and… Continue reading

    Which Church, Exactly: Stephen’s Circle and the Limits of Matthew 16:18
  • Why Didn’t Anyone Recognize Him?

    The oldest manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel end mid-sentence. The women run from the tomb, frightened out of their minds, and say nothing to anyone, for they were afraid (Mark 16:8). That’s it. No appearance of the risen Jesus, no commissioning… Continue reading

    Why Didn’t Anyone Recognize Him?
  • The Damascus Road That Never Happened

    Paul’s conversion is the hinge Christian history turns on. His authority, his claim to apostleship, his argument that the gospel came to him directly from God rather than filtering down through a chain of human teachers, all of it traces… Continue reading

    The Damascus Road That Never Happened
  • The Church Paul Persecuted Was Not Peter’s

    If Peter was the head of the church Paul persecuted, why was Peter the one person left standing when everyone else fled? That’s a question buried inside the standard account of Christian origins that most people never think to ask,… Continue reading

    The Church Paul Persecuted Was Not Peter’s
  • The Word That Changed Everything

    How Paradidōmi Became “Betray” And What The Hebrew Bible Says It Actually Was There is a word in the Greek New Testament that has been mistranslated for two thousand years, and the mistranslation built a villain. The word is paradidōmi.… Continue reading

    The Word That Changed Everything
  • WHY MARY IS NOT HIS MOTHER: The Woman at Cana and the Woman at the Cross

    Woman, Never Mother: The Address John Never Explains There is a detail in the Gospel of John so consistent, so deliberate, and so stubbornly resistant to the explanation two thousand years of commentary has offered for it, that its consistency… Continue reading

    WHY MARY IS NOT HIS MOTHER: The Woman at Cana and the Woman at the Cross
  • CHUZA’S CHOICE: The Parable Behind the Parable

    Luke mentions Joanna almost in passing. She appears in a list of women who traveled with Jesus and supported his movement financially, tucked between Mary Magdalene and a woman named Susanna: “Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager” (Luke… Continue reading

    CHUZA’S CHOICE: The Parable Behind the Parable
  • The Kiss That Cannot Exist

    The Gospel Of Judas And The Theology Of Disappearance Mark gives the kiss without apology. Judas arrives in Gethsemane leading the arresting party, approaches Jesus directly, and executes what he has arranged. “Now the betrayer had given them a sign,… Continue reading

    The Kiss That Cannot Exist