god

  • 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
  • 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
  • The Conjunction That Should Not Be There

    Jesus Christ and Him Crucified: A Redundancy That Was Never an Accident A three-word phrase in Paul’s first letter to Corinth has stayed in view for two thousand years without anyone asking the one question that actually unlocks it. Scholars… Continue reading

    The Conjunction That Should Not Be There
  • NOT YET FIFTY: The Debate That Preserved the Elder Jesus

    During one of the Temple debates, Jesus’s opponents tell him directly that his claim about Abraham cannot be true because of his visible age: “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” (John 8:57). Modern readers… Continue reading

    NOT YET FIFTY: The Debate That Preserved the Elder Jesus
  • On Reading Structure and Concealment

    Some books never really speak in statements, or not mostly in statements. What they communicate comes through arrangement, through emphasis, through small hesitations buried inside the writing that go unnoticed until the day you read the passage again, years later,… Continue reading

    On Reading Structure and Concealment