When

Why (2:24)

When interviewing, Piers Morgan apparently splutters out lots of Ws, 'What, when, why, who, where?'. I've not ever really followed anything he does, though I hear his COVID reporting has rather improved his image, but I believe he has been known as a bit of a Mr Nasty at times, and the aggressive machine-gunning of questions would fit that image. The Pharisees are likewise not asking in a spirit of discovery. They want to catch Jesus out, and are happy to use any means. 

I think it might be worth asking ourselves if we are prone to the same thing. Do we approach the stories in the Bible in a spirit of discovery or are we trying to catch them out? I've been reading Kitchen's The Bible in its World. It is very clear that most Old Testament scholarship of the last 100 years has been in the spirit of the Pharisees, trying to catch the text out. Kitchen, by contrast, treats the evidence in a spirit of discovery and something very different emerges. The ancient stories, that have been in the past so attacked by scholarship as relatively modern imagination, are riddled with ancient authenticity, from style to language, from legal forms to political structures, they all reek of the early second millennium BC, and are completely out of place, indeed could not have been written, in the middle first century BC. Now there's an encouragement. The Bible can be trusted, in all its parts.




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