Sublime

There is, of course, no such thing as uninterpreted historical narrative; Crossan knows that as well as anyone. But if the sign of interpretative activity is the give-away clue that the history has been invented, how then can there ever be any history at all?

His basic hermeneutic for understanding the Bible was to ask the question of every passage: Is this law, or is this gospel?

In a very real sense, Western Christianity is Augustinian Christianity.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were used to support points you might get out of Paul, but their actual message had not been glimpsed, let alone integrated into the larger biblical theology in which they claimed to belong. This, I remember saying, was heavily ironic in a tradition (to which he and I both belonged) that prided itself on being “biblica

that he