Gerald R. McDermott (PhD, University of Iowa) is Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. Before joining Beeson, he was the Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion at Roanoke College. He is also associate pastor at Christ the King...
Origen
Paul’s Use of Genesis 15:5 in Romans 4:18 in Light of Early Jewish Deification Traditions: Part 6: Origen’s Commentary on Romans 4 and the Reception of the Qualitative Interpretation
This is the final installment of David Burnett’s guest series. This reading of Genesis 15:5 may appear novel yet it has an ancient antecedent in one of the earliest commentaries on Romans. Origen believed that in Romans 4, Paul did in fact understand the...
Naked Bible 93: The Book of Enoch in the Early Church
The book we know as 1 Enoch was well known to early Christians. Its importance produced an understandable question among some influential early Christian writers and, one may presume, Christians in general: Should 1 Enoch be considered inspired and thus “Scripture” in...
The Divine Council and Early Christian Writers
Readers familiar with me and my work know that I think our theology needs to derive from the text, not tradition. This applies pointedly to the Old Testament — the three-quarters of our Bible upon which our New Testament theology ought to be erected to have any...
Biblical Anthropology and the Mind-Body Debate, Part 1
We now come to one of the primary points of application for the data of biblical anthropology, the mind-body problem. Before sketching the various views for you, let’s review the salient data from the biblical text. Review 1. That terms like ruach, nephesh,...