Course components include HD video lectures by experienced scholars, screencast videos that focus  on how Logos could be used to validate a professor’s claim or show the basis on which a claim is made, directed links into the library that target the best articles or paragraphs on a given subject covered in lectures, and our own private social networking platform (Faithlife) for interaction with others working through the same course. There are also links that perform searches for students on various points of the lecture material, syllabi, custom graphics, and self-assessment tools. Videos are searchable at the word level within the software (for Logos users, basically every element of a course works like a Logos book does within the software). Video content is also delivered in short segments (5-7 minutes is the norm). Everything is platform agnostic and can be watched on handheld devices. In short, while there is video content in any given Mobile Ed course, these are much more than video courses of some guy standing at the back of a classroom.

I’m not sure which courses will ship first or in what order. We’re still making those decisions. We’ve already had ten professors from around the country contribute video content (some for more than one course). I’ve also been videoed for five different courses.¹ We have another half dozen scholars booked to film courses this summer. It’s a good start on what we hope will be a revolution in the way people learn about the Bible and theology. If you’re interested, read the launch post and follow the discussion. We’ll be blogging more at the Logos blog about what Mobile Ed is and isn’t, as well as the rationale of the approach we’re taking.

Technorati Tags: courses, distance, education, Logos, Mobile, video

Ancient Near Eastern Studies

• This bundle has several titles that are just the thing for those who love OT and archaeological research. I’ve used the volumes by Richard and Dever in print, and both are excellent resources.

Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic

• Don’t let the bundle title fool you. This is a seven volume bundle that contains several volumes that are indispensible if you’re working in Hebrew and care to work in Ugaritic. They include:
  • A Manual of Ugaritic by Pierre Bordreuil and Dennis Pardee. This is the premier reference grammar in Ugaritic
  • Phonology and Morphology of Biblical Hebrew: An Introduction by Joshua Blau. In my opinion, there’s no better reference manual for understanding Hebrew morphology.
  • Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb: The Expression of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Biblical Hebrew by John A. Cook. John and I went through the UW-Madison doctoral program together. This work is drawn from his dissertation, which was on the Hebrew verbal system. For those who know biblical Hebrew (and if you don’t, you should take it through my MEMRA online Institute), this is the best work on how Hebrew verbs work and should be understood.
  • Biblical Hebrew Grammar Visualized by Francis I. Andersen and A. Dean Forbes. If you use Logos for Hebrew Bible research, you (should) know about the Andersen-Forbes syntax database of the Hebrew Bible. The two men behind that database have since produced this visualized grammar, which illustrates their discussion throughout using screenshots and searches from their database. In short: this book will help you understand their database and their method.

Texts and Studies on Ancient Judaism

• I hate the title on this bundle. It obscures the fact that one of the three volumes in this set is Stuckenbruck’s critical edition of the Book of the Giants from Qumran. (Yes, it’s scholarly Enochian stuff).  If you can handle Hebrew and Aramaic (and even if you can’t – the discussion of the results of the textual reconstruction of the book’s content is fascinating)
• The other two works are on the Essene problem related to Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Samaritan Pentateuch.

Technorati Tags: archaeology, book, giants, grammar, hebrew, Old Testament, Qumran, samaritan, Ugaritic, verb, verbal

“Poverty and Poor: New Testament” from Anchor Bible Dictionary

“Rich and Poor” from the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels

My criticisms of the first of these essays focused mostly on mis-defining the gospel, an unfortunate error that colored other parts of the essay. We also saw that, at least in that essay, we didn’t get any information that would contradict the conclusions we reached after looking at the OT material on poverty, the poor, and just treatment of the poor. In simplified language, those conclusions were:

1. The poor are mostly said to be poor without a description as to how they became poor. There were some exceptions (war, laziness), but by and large, explanations were absent.

2. God was not pleased when the poor were exploited and mistreated. Some passages do describe both private wealthy individuals and wealthy state officials exploiting the poor, but there is no scriptural warrant for concluding that wealth is some sort of inherent corrupter of persons that invariably prompts them to oppress the poor, or that always peripherally leads to the oppression of the poor.

3. A biblical theology of poverty is focused on the individual being compassionate to the poor. There is no sense of handing this responsibility off to an impersonal state. A welfare state should consequently be viewed as a sign of the failure of the Church, not as a clever and useful creation of the human state so the Church can move on to more “spiritual” pursuits.

4. If the question is what is a biblical theology of the care for poor, the answer is the individual, or individuals operating as a like-minded group, under the guidance of biblical revelation from a God who hates poverty and injustice. The answer is not the empowerment of a corruptible state. That is the secular God-less answer.

More NT Theology of Poverty and the Poor

In this installment, I want to turn to the second essay listed above (“Rich and Poor”) and make some observations about it’s content. I found it more helpful and less politicized than the ABD essay. For the most part, the essay’s subject headings provide convenient touchpoints for following what I’m referencing.

1. Neither the OT, NT, or 1st Century Judaism viewed wealth as inherently evil.

The essay does a good job parsing this issue. Wealth was not inherently evil, but it was certainly viewed as a spiritual danger. I think most readers would have no trouble parsing this distinction. The rich have little inclination to seek God, as they see no lack in their lives, or assume any problem can be solved via their wealth. Material prosperity moves one’s trust to that prosperity. People seek God when they know they need to seek him. Wealth impedes this perception.

2. Personal wealth creates more opportunity to abuse the poor but there is no axiomatic cause and effect relationship between wealth and exploitation.

The NT, like the OT, contains examples of the rich exploiting the poor, but it also includes examples of people who discerned the scriptural truth that care for the poor is a spiritually healthy use of wealth, motivated by the decision to trust God more than one’s wealth. Regardless of the era, that’s a radical decision. It points to the “impossibility” of the wealthy entering the kingdom of God (apart from divine intervention: “with God all things are possible”). In effect, the decision comes down to where one puts one’s faith for the future: one’s own wealth and ability to get wealth, or God? But choosing God does not mean wealth cannot be held. It means it must not displace faith. And the best way to ensure that is to use wealth to help people.

The context for all this, of course, is not a modern economy. As the essay points out, there was very little in the way of what we’d call a middle-class in 1st century Judea. The major classes were the rich and poor (“people of the land”). In a modern capitalist economy (and I;m not talking crony capitalism here – that’s different), wealth can be – and must be, for business survival and health – used to expand markets and therefore to create jobs and provide material prosperity for more people. This is a ripple that will extend well beyond the people in your own employ. Investment of wealth to effectively create livelihoods for more people and raise their standard of living – which means more of their wealth goes to others, by purchase or charity – is exponentially more successful than just giving wealth away. And so there are many ways today that wealth can be a tool to caring for the outright poor or those who aren’t poor, but certainly aren’t rich, either. For today’s Christian, the choice is not between giving everything away or turning from Jesus. That is a modern either-or fallacy that misunderstands the poor can be substantially helped in more ways than one. But the spiritual issues are still the same: are you working for mammon or not? Translation: where is your trust? That is easily discerned by the next question: Where is your industry? Your effort? Are you hard at work protecting your assets and endeavors to increase your own wealth, or are you hard at work coming up with strategies to help more people knowing that God is pleased and will honor that use of wealth?

3. God’s “special interest” in the poor” isn’t an idea that exists in a theological vaccuum.

Many NT scholars and social justice activists point out that Jesus saw wealth as a hindrance to entering the kingdom of God and blessed the poor who were seeking God. This makes sense, but usually not for the reasons assumed by social justice advocates. Put simply, when people are prospering they are rarely focused on their needs, including spiritual ones, assuming that they are captains of their own fate. When someone thinks they have it all together or have won life’s lottery, it’s fairly axiomatic that the last thing they want to hear is how needy they are in God’s eyes or about the next life — they’re too busy enjoying this one. So what Jesus says makes good sense.

But let’s ask a question. When Jesus blesses the poor who are seeking the kingdom does he bless them because they are poor or because they are seeking — because they are giving him a hearing? I think it’s obviously the latter. Being poor is no more a mark of God’s favor (!) than being rich. Being poor also doesn’t mean one is more spiritual. A poor person might even be more concerned about the “cares of this life” (for obvious reasons) than someone who had enough or who was wealthy. There is no cause-and-effect relationship between poverty and walking with God. Social justice advocates often assume such a relationship, but there is no social science data (or scriptural evidence) to support it. The homeless are not more averse to crime than other people, though the types and levels of crime may differ. Why would we expect that they spend more time in prayer? Devote themselves more to serving others? Spend more time studying Scripture? None of this is intended to malign the poor; rather, it is intended to malign poor thinking.

What Jesus says isn’t hard to parse. The poor listened to Jesus because they had needs, because he did not avoid them or threaten them, because he was kind, and because the thought of an escape from their circumstances was comforting. We know from the gospel accounts that some listened only because the odds were better Jesus would miraculously feed them than they could feed themselves, but it would be hermeneutically malicious to assume that all the poor listened only because of what they could get. In more charitable terms we might say they knew life was tenuous and short, and so talk of a kingdom and life that transcended the one they were living had appeal. Hence they were more interested in what was being said.

4. “Eternal reward” shouldn’t be thought of as earned salvation, and so the idea that care for the poor results in reward from God doesn’t mean the NT teaches that giving to the poor washes one’s sins away.

This is another error of the social gospel that I think is adequately addressed in the essay. The context for this idea (divine reward) is a radical faith decision – choosing not to trust in wealth, being willing to lose it all or give it all away in favor of the kingdom of God. It’s an issue of the heart. John 3:16 doesn’t say that “whosoever gives his wealth away shall have everlasting life.” Jesus said he came to give his life as a ransom for sinners, not that sinners should just give away their wealth and they’d be forgiven. The path to the cross was not an unfortunate necessity after it was evident that not enough rich people would give away their wealth so as to usher in the kingdom of heaven. The nature of the gospel shouldn’t be this obtuse to anyone who reads the NT, but that’s no longer a given.

All the above is also consistent with the OT theology that care for the poor is an individual responsibility, especially for the believer. It is not a responsibility to be passed to bureaucratic overlords or a (nearly) all-powerful state. Preferring the state handle this is an abdication of the gospel (and OT) ethic about care for the poor.

Next up . . . the early church “having all things in common.”

Technorati Tags: Jesus, New Testament, poor, poverty, social justice, state, wealth

Scholars have actually addressed this issue in academic journals several times, most famously James Barr’s essay in the Journal of Theological Studies (“Abba Isn’t ‘Daddy’,” vol 39, 1988). Barr’s essay isn’t available online, but the one below is, and I recommend it to readers:

Sigve Tonstad, “The Revisionary Potential of ‘Abba! Father!’ in the Letters of Paul,” Andrews University Seminary Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (2007): 5-18.

Basically, scholars have demonstrated that (a) the Aramaic term abba was not exclusively used by children, but frequently by adults in adult discourse, and (b) reducing the term to childish (though affectionate) prattle guts it of important interpretive nuances. Tonstad’s article demonstrates this nicely.

Be warned — this is a scholarly article, and so it’s long and can get technical. The “Daddy” discussion is only a page or so at the end (pp. 17-18 of the PDF). And you divine council fans will appreciate that there’s (again) another touchpoint with the divine council worldview in this issue, brought out nicely by Tonstad when he comments on the “elemental rulers” in the essay (though Tonstad doesn’t appear to be thinking about the divine council when he writes — normal for a NT specialist).

Technorati Tags: abba, Aramaic, daddy, translation

As many of you know, I have three blogs. As far as a five-year track record for this blog, here are some stats:

Number of Posts: 583

Word Count: 299,337

Technorati Tags: Aquinas, Calvin, Christianity, Genesis 6, Luther, nephilim, sons of God

It’s cool, but also a bit creepy. I still care about not living in a Google bubble.

Technorati Tags: earth, Google, Jerusalem, street, tour, view, virtual

Review of Earlier Part 6

It’s been a while since I posted Part 6 of this study/discussion. Hopefully by now many of you have read the two items I linked to in Part 6:

“Poverty and Poor: New Testament” from Anchor Bible Dictionary

“Rich and Poor” from the dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels

In Part 6 I had summarized the findings of Parts 1-5 (our look at OT words and teaching about the poor, poverty, and a “welfare state”). Here were the conclusions we reached for the OT mindset:

(1) The poor can be described as poor because of their own laziness, lack of wisdom, or other self-induced circumstance.

(2) Some passages do involve both private wealthy individuals and wealthy state officials exploiting the poor.

(3) There is no scriptural justification for presuming that wealth is some sort of inherent corrupter of persons that invariably prompts them to oppress the poor or that always peripherally leads to the oppression of the poor.

(4) Biblical thoughts on poverty and economics were linked to the covenant relationship between Yahweh and each Israelite. Each Israelite is responsible for the poor individually. Consequently, a biblical theology of poverty is focused on the individual being compassionate to the poor. There is no sense of handing this responsibility off to an impersonal state. Also consequently, this responsibility should not be usurped by the state for its own manipulation and power, such as creating dependency on itself.

(5) A welfare state should (for the Bible-believer) be viewed as a sign of the failure of the Church, not as a clever and useful creation of the human state so the Church can move on to more “spiritual” pursuits.

(6) The question therefore becomes, What should Christians strive for and support when it comes to alleviating poverty? What is “biblical social justice”? The answer is not the act of blessing the operation and growth of the welfare state as a solution to poverty. Rather, it is the a response of individuals, motivated by compassion and a desire to obey the commands of God to take care of the poor.

(7) If the question is what is a biblical theology of the care for poor, the answer is the individual, or individuals operating as a like-minded group, under the guidance of biblical revelation from a God who hates poverty and injustice. The answer is not the empowerment of a corruptible state. That is the secular God-less answer. We ought not baptize the secular answer to make it appear biblical; that is a deceit.

(8) Lastly, it is quite inconsistent for activists, politicians, or anyone else to proof-text biblical material to prop up any view of social justice or of a welfare state and then simultaneously reject biblical statements (which have the same theopolitical context) on other points of morality and social responsibility. That’s just hermeneutical hypocrisy.

Shifting to the New Testament

So what about the NT Mindset? I had asked you to read through the two items noted above with a goal toward evaluating the content — Was what the writer said consistent with the above conclusions and the OT data on which those conclusions are based?

In what follows, I’ll be pointing to some parts of the readings that I think are a bit misguided. As so often happens in scholarly (and generally religious) discussion about poverty and “social justice,” there is often a propensity to having passages say too much (i.e., overstating the case) and to make what is said sound like a political system or statement.I think you’ll understand what I mean here as we proceed.

First, I think the articles do a godo job surveying the relevant NT Greek terms: ptōchós (“poor, oppressed,” lit. “beggar”; the most common NT term); pénēs (used once in the NT: 2 Cor 8:9); penichrós (“poor”); endeḗs (“needy”); and chreia (“need”). The author summarized the word usage by concluding that the terms “generally designate persons and groups lacking (totally or in some degree) the necessities of life: food, drink, clothing, shelter, health, land/employment, freedom, dignity and honor.” That seems a fair and defensible summary.

I was less satisfied with some of the overstatements and theologizing that extended from the summary. For example:

The author writers that “James is the NT writing that stands closest to the OT prophets in its perspective on poverty and oppression ” and then follows with “James never blames the victims (for sloth, vice, genetic inferiority, etc.); rather he focuses on oppression as the basic cause of poverty.” As we’ve seen in surveying the OT material, that isn’t true. Proverbs, for example, does blame poverty on laziness or sloth. It’s more accurate to say that most of the OT commentary doesn’t say anything about how a person became poor. This is not to exclude the idea that other people (the wealthy, foreign armies) cause poverty and engage in victimization. It’s just to point out an overstatement, and one that can be used for political-speak via the material.

I have a bigger problem with the connection of help for the poor to the gospel. This is typical of modern social justice talk. For instance, the author writes that (apparently) articulating the gospel in terms of doctrine “may fail to recognize that the prophetic denunciation of oppression is an essential part of evangelism, conceived as the proclamation of good news—preferentially—to the poor.” This is followed by “[James'] understanding of justification (cf. “condemnation,” 2:12–13; 3:8–9; 4:11–12; 5:6) dignifies the poor, focusing on the paired examples of Abraham, an immigrant (like James’ recipients), and Rahab, the woman who showed hospitality to Israel’s migrant ancestors.”

It takes little thought to show the miguided nature of this sort of analysis, which unfortunately infects the data in places. The gospel is not preferentially presented to the poor in the NT. It is clearly for all who will believe (John 3:16) and the book of Acts has Paul and others taking the gospel — a theological message about the work of Jesus on the cross — to the rich and powerful as well as the poor (e.g., Cornelius, Festus, Agrippa, synagogue leaders, etc.). God is not more positively predisposed to the poor, as though he has more compassion for them, or that there is less of a spiritual gulf between Him and them. In Acts 16 when the Philippian jailor asks Paul and Silas “What must I do to be saved?” the answer is not “feed the poor” or “alleviate poverty.” It is the clear “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Likewise, this is Paul’s clear understanding in many instances in his letters (e.g., Rom 10:9-10). The example of Abraham is an awkwardly edited one — Abraham was an immigrant (let’s set aside the modern connotation of that term) but he was exceedingly wealthy. Rahab is also a poor example, as her faith statement wasn’t “I’m protecting you because you’re members of an oppressed class” but “For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you devoted to destruction. And as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no spirit left in any man because of you, for the Lord your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath” (Josh 2:10-11).

Overlooked in the connection between bringing the truth of the OT God or of Jesus to the poor is a more obvious rationale (at least to me). The point of the deliberate inclusion and even focus on the poor with respect to the good news is not some sort of notion that the poor are special objects of salvation — but that they are included. Ancient Near Eastern religions were elite-focused. The gods installed the kings and priests; “theology” was dispensed through the elite classes to the masses to manipulative ends. That the poor were explicitly stated to also be in covenant relationship to Yahweh (OT thinking) and genuine targets of God’s love through the cross (NT thinking) would have been startling concepts. The point was not that God loved the poor more, or that the poor were somehow on the road to heaven because they were poor, or that Jesus died more for the poor than the rich — it is that the salvation plan of God is no respecter of persons. The focus on the non-elite audiences of the gospels is also a mode designed to highlight the unbelief of the priestly class — the very people who should have understood, but valued their power and prestige more than truth — to the point of plotting the death of the messiah. This emphasis is a “focus alert” not a definition of what humanity must do to be saved or what the gospel is.

More generally, it ought to be obvious that the NT shows deep concern for the poor, as the OT focus on that concern is transparent. I think the articles do a good job of showing that consistency, despite the sort of thinking noted above. But just as wealth did nothing when it came to salvation, so a poverty status does nothing with respect to salvation. OT and NT salvation are very consistent. There is no human merit. It’s about where one’s faith/loyalty is: the God of Israel and Jesus Christ.

Anyway, to cut the length here, these are my initial thoughts. I’ll return to the articles in the next installment. Hope several of you weigh in.

Technorati Tags: Bible, gospel, New Testament, Old Testament, poor, poverty, social justice

There are few resources I’d say are so valuable that I’d eat Ramen noodles for a few weeks to cover it. One is DDD (Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible). Another just hit pre-pub at Logos. It’s something we’ve talked about internally for years that I never thought I’d see. New Testament scholars have asked us many times to produce it, but it was a daunting task. I’m still a little surprised it’s actually taking shape.

I’m talking about the six-volume Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (“Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and the Midrash”) by Hermann Strack and Paul Billerbeck. You’re probably thinking, “Really, Mike? A six-volume commentary in German?” Yep. Now here’s the kicker: Logos has paid to have it professionally translated into English.

This set is in a league of its own — sort of a holy grail for NT studies. It is a massive collection of material from the Talmud and Midrash material applied to the contents of the New Testament in commentary form. Strack and Billerbeck how these ancient Jewish sources intelligently inform our reading of the New Testament in its Jewish religious context. Though a lot of scholarship has been done on Second-Temple Judaism since Strack and Billerbeck published their work, nothing has come close to replacing it.

Here’s how one scholar, Wayne Grudem, summed it up:

This reference work is unique in the entire world. It is the only work that has ever compiled, verse by verse, such extensive background quotations from Jewish literature around the time of Christ for every passage in the New Testament. But until now, it was only available in German.

With this resource in English, we no longer have to depend on commentators who confidently claim (sometimes incorrectly), “The rabbis at the time of Christ taught this or that,” because now all the relevant quotations from this vast and diverse rabbinic literature can be quickly found here in one place—and in English rather than the original Hebrew.

And in digital, searchable, indexed form, I might add.

For anyone interested in New Testament research, it’s time to start boiling the water. Get it on pre-pub while you can.

Technorati Tags: billerbeck, commentary, judaism, midrash, New Testament, strack, Talmud