Jesus’ Preserving and Destroying saying may play off two different senses of the noun נֶפֶשׁ (nefesh, “soul”).
Lesson of Lot’s Wife
Lot’s wife serves as a warning that overattachment to possessions can come at the cost of one’s life.
Days of the Son of Man
In Jesus’ saying, the Son of Man does not function as the agent of destruction, any more than Noah did in the time of the flood or Lot did in the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Sign-Seeking Generation
What was “the sign of Jonah”? This LOY segment offers a new and surprising answer.
Innocent Blood
How well-read was Jesus? The LOY segment entitled Innocent Blood probes the possibility that Jesus read and quoted a no-longer-extant Second Temple-period Jewish literary work that warned against violent religious extremism.
Generations That Repented Long Ago
Did Jesus condemn his contemporaries for failing to recognize him as the Messiah or for something more insidious?
Woes on Three Villages
The Woes on Three Villages express Jesus’ sorrow that Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum had not responded to his warning not to get sucked into the black hole of violent religious nationalism.
LOY Excursus: Sources of the “Strings of Pearls” in Luke’s Gospel
The “strings of pearls” (Luke 8:16-18; 9:23-27; 16:16-18; 17:1-6) offer an example of the outsized influence of the First Reconstruction on the synoptic tradition.
Cumulative Life of Yeshua Greek Reconstructions
The reconstructed Greek text of the Anthology (thus far completed) with accompanying English translation.
Yeshua’s Immersion
The words of the heavenly voice that spoke at Jesus’ immersion foreshadowed the trajectory of Jesus’ career.
Yohanan the Immerser’s Execution
The story of John the Baptist’s martyrdom was rich with allusions to stories from the Hebrew Scriptures.
Yohanan the Immerser’s Eschatological Discourse
John the Baptist anticipated the coming of an Elijah-like priestly messiah who would purify the Temple on an eschatological Day of Atonement.
Yohanan the Immerser’s Exhortations
In Yohanan the Immerser’s Exhortations John the Baptist instructs his audience how they are to behave in order to bear the fruits of repentance.
Yohanan the Immerser Demands Repentance
In Yohanan the Immerser Demands Repentance John the Baptist challenges his audience, which had gone through all the trouble of going out to the Jordan River to receive his baptism, to accept his even more important advice: to repent of their evil deeds and imitate the faithfulness of Abraham their father.
“Destruction and Redemption” complex
A reconstruction of Jesus’ prophecy of the coming destruction of the Temple and future redemption of Jerusalem.
A Voice Crying
An examination of the Jewish setting of John the Baptist’s proclamation of an immersion of repentance for the release of Israel’s sin indebtedness.