Sublime

theologians have been saying for a long time that we should conceive of Christian faith more as a way of life than as assent to a list of propositional assertions.

Jesus must be understood as a comprehensible and yet, so to speak, crucifiable first-century Jew, whatever the theological or hermeneutical consequences.

Healing, forgiveness, renewal, the twelve, the new family and its new defining characteristics, open commensality, the promise of blessing for the Gentiles, feasts replacing fasts, the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple: all declared, in the powerful language of symbol, that Israel’s exile was over, that Jesus was himself in some way

That is, Paul opposed the idea that anyone can perform the works of the law (as given by God to Moses)—and by extension any other rule-based system—in order to establish or confirm righteousness before God.

To the second point: the creator God is in the business of remaking the original creation, not abandoning it. This principle, so deeply woven into the New Testament, has often been obscured by the legacies of different types of dualism, which have had this in common, that they have seen salvation in terms of humans (perhaps “souls”) being rescued

Luke is clear that the events involving Jesus are the events in which all of Israel’s previous history has been summed up and brought to its divinely appointed goal.

this general thrust, of a very Jewish Jesus who was nevertheless opposed to some high-profile features of first-century Judaism, seems to me the most viable one if we are to do justice, not just to the evidence of the synoptic gospels (they, after all, are easy game for any critic who wants to avoid their implications) but more particularly to the