Join The Underlines // The Best Of What I Read
A batch of the best highlights from what Joshua's read, .
For other religious movements of the day, such as Mithraism or the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus, for example, there are the remains of numerous shrines and dedicatory inscriptions but no texts.46 For early Christianity, however, there are no known church structures or inscriptions prior to sometime in the third century AD, but there is this huge catalogue of texts. This is yet another indication that early Christianity was different from at least most other religious groups of the time.
Destroyer of the Gods
Larry W. Hurtado
In the book of Jeremiah, God proclaims, “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls” (Jeremiah 6:16 ESV). God invites us to follow the ancient paths. A path is not a Killer App. It is a process.
Disappearing Church
Mark Sayers
The first word, psychikos, does not in any case mean anything like “physical” in our sense. For Greek speakers of Paul’s day, the psychē, from which the word derives, means the soul, not the body. But the deeper, underlying point is that adjectives of this type, Greek adjectives ending in-ikos, describe not the material out of which things are made but the power or energy that animates them. It is the difference between asking, on the one hand, “Is this a wooden ship or an iron ship?” (the material from which it is made) and asking, on the other, “Is this a steamship or a sailing ship?” (the energy that powers it). Paul is talking about the present body, which is animated by the normal human psychē (the life force we all possess here and now, which gets us through the present life but is ultimately powerless against illness, injury, decay, and death), and the future body, which is animated by God’s pneuma, God’s breath of new life, the energizing power of God’s new creation.
Surprised by Hope
N. T. Wright
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