Outside the Mainstream

jesus

  • 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

  • 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

  • THE THEOLOGY OF SILENCE

    How Paul Translated the Politically Dangerous Into the Theologically Universal  There is a common misreading of Paul’s letters that has been absorbed so thoroughly into the tradition that it no longer looks like a misreading. It looks like common sense.… Continue reading

    THE THEOLOGY OF SILENCE

  • 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

  • A Commentary on Matthew 2:1-18

    Matthew 2:1-2 Matthew opens with a scene that looks simple on the surface, and gets stranger the closer you read it. “When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, behold, magi from the east… Continue reading

    A Commentary on Matthew 2:1-18

  • The Strangeness of the Transformed Resurrection Body

    There is something truly strange about the idea of the resurrection body, and not just strange in the ordinary religious sense of mysterious, but strange in a deeper, almost unsettling way. The longer you dwell on it, the harder it… Continue reading

    The Strangeness of the Transformed Resurrection Body