AFRICANUS JOURNAL Vol. 14 No. 1 | April 2022 africanus journal vol. 14, no. 1 April 2022 Contents 2 Goals of the Journal 2 Life of Africanus 2 Other Front Matter 4 Does Jesus Communicate as an Artist? William David Spencer 22 The God Who is Jealous and True Worship in the Asian Immigrant Church Lance Pan 30 Overcoming Evil with Good: Applying the Missing Step to Kant's Ideal and Non-Ideal Theories of Addressing Moral Dilemmas Xuan Joshua Yang 43 Review of If Jesus Is Lord: Loving Our Enemies in an Age of Violence Rodney L. Petersen 47 Review of Christian Egalitarian Leadership: Empowering the Whole Church according to the Scriptures Olga Soler 51 Review of When Did Eve Sin? The Fall and Biblical Historiography C. J. Gossage 53 Review of Seven Transforming Gifts of Menopause Jean Risley 56 Review of The Progressive Church: A Dangerous Movement Has Begun Jeanne DeFazio 1 Goals of the Africanus Journal The Africanus Journal is an award-winning interdisciplinary biblical, theological, and practical journal of the Campus for Urban Ministerial Education (CUME). Its goals are to promote: a. the mission and work of the members and mentors of the Africanus Guild Ph.D. Research Program of Gordon- Conwell Theological Seminary, Boston; b. the principles of the Africanus Guild (evangelical orthodox Christian men and women who are multicultural, multiracial, urban-oriented, studying a Bible without error in a cooperative way); c. Christian scholarship that reflects an evangelical perspective, as an affiliate of GCTS-Boston. This is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes high quality articles in areas such as biblical studies, theology, church history, religious research, case studies, and studies related to practical issues in urban ministry. Special issues are organized according to themes or topics that take seriously the contextual nature of ministry situated in the cultural, political, social, economic, and spiritual realities in the urban context. Scholarly papers may be submitted normally by those who have or are in (or are reviewed by a professor in) a Th.M., D.Min., Ed.D., Th.D., ST.D., Ph.D., or equivalent degree program. Two issues normally are published per year. https://www.gordonconwell.edu/cume/africanus-journal/ © 2022 by the Africanus Guild Life of Julius Africanus Julius Africanus was probably born in Jerusalem, many scholars think around a.d. 200. Africanus was considered by the ancients as a man of consummate learning and sharpest judgment (Ante-Nicene Fathers 6:128). He was a pupil of Heracles, distinguished for philosophy and other Greek learning, in Alexandria, Egypt around a.d. 231–233. In a.d. 220/226, he performed some duty in behalf of Nicopolis (formerly Emmaus) in Palestine. Later he likely became bishop of Emmaus (Eusebius, History, VI.xxxi.2). Origen calls him “a beloved brother in God the Father, through Jesus Christ, His holy Child” (Letter from Origen to Africanus 1). Fellow historian Eusebius distinguishes him as “no ordinary historian” (History, I. vi.2). Eusebius describes the five books of Chronologies as a “monument of labor and accuracy” and cites extensively from his harmony of the evangelists’ genealogies (History, VI. xxxi. 1–3). Africanus was a careful historian who sought to defend the truth of the Bible. He is an ancient example of meticulous, detailed scholarship which is historical, biblical, truthful, and devout. Even though Eusebius describes Africanus as the author of the Kestoi, Jerome makes no mention of this (ANF 6:124). The author of Kestoi is surnamed Sextus, probably a Libyan philosopher who arranged a library in the Pantheon at Rome for the Emperor. The Kestoi was probably written toward the end of the 200s. It was not written by a Christian since it contains magical incantations (Oxyrhynchus Papyri III.412). The Greek text of Africanus’ writings may be found in Martinus Josephus Routh, Reliquiae sacrae II (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974 [1846]), 225–309, and Martin Wallraff, Umberto Roberto, Karl Pinggéra, eds., William Adler, trans., Iulius Africanus Chronographiae: The Extant Fragments, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schrifsteller 15 (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007). The extant writings of Julius Africanus may be found in vol. 1, no 1, April 2009 edition of the Africanus Journal. Other Front Matter Editorial Team for the issue: Cassidy Jay Gossage, Ruth Martin, J. Saemi Kim, Seong Park, Nicole Rim, John Runyon, Aída Besançon Spencer, William David Spencer Resources: Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary faculty publications only and hard copies of this journal may be ordered by emailing [email protected], [email protected], or telephoning the CUME library at 617-427- 7293. Each author is solely legally responsible for the content and the accuracy of facts, citations, references, and quotations rendered and properly attributed in the article appearing under his or her name. Neither Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, the Africanus Guild, nor the editorial team is responsible or legally liable for any content or any statements made by any author, but the legal responsibility is solely that author’s once an article appears in print in the Africanus Journal. Summary of Content: Several articles on theological, biblical, and philosophical topics on the nature of God and art, worship, and moral choices. The book reviews discuss theology, applied theology and non-violence, Christian leadership, the fall, life cycles, and dangerous ecclesial movements. 2 the africanus guild L to R: Quonekuia Day, Mark Chuanhang Shan, Jennifer Creamer “If not for the Africanus Guild, I would not even think of getting a Ph.D. and would not have had the chance to teach my own course at Gordon-Conwell, and be trained to be a Bible teacher, and for this I am most grateful.” –Benjamin Fung Benjamin Fung’s Ph.D. was received from North-West University in South Africa 2017 Quonekuia Day and Mark Shan are Ph.D. candidates with London School of Theology. Jennifer Creamer received her Ph.D. from North-West University in 2016. The Africanus Guild is a support program set up to assist selective, underrepresented constituencies to pursue research Ph.D.s from North-West University and London School of Theology. The Guild is especially oriented to the multicul- tural, multiracial urban scene. Accepted students are mentored by a Gordon-Conwell faculty member. Candidates may complete the Th.M. at the Boston campus and then apply to the Guild. 1 3 Does Jesus Communicate as an Artist?1 William David Spencer Did you ever notice that Jesus came at questions at an angle? Even point-blank ones he would often parry with a story or an epigram or an analogy. This is why Christians today are still echoing the disciples’ question: “Why do you speak in parables?”2 To understand why Jesus used artistic means to convey truth is to glimpse something about the mission and nature of the Christ. Jesus Is Creator and Artist John tells us clearly in his gospel that the Person of the Godhead who incarnated as Jesus Christ worked with the Father and Holy Spirit to create the whole world, literally “all things through him came, and without him came not one thing” (John 1:3). That Jesus created the world is not up to question. Everyone calling herself or himself Christian agrees – or ought to agree – with that statement. But, since the word “art” is drawn from the word “artifice,” meaning a copy or representation of something that exists, we might conclude that, at the beginning, as a co-equal, co- eternal Person of the triune Godhead, the One who took on humanity to become “Jesus” (savior) “Christ” (anointed one) was hardly an “artist” copying what exists. Instead, the entire Godhead was involved in the initial crafting of the universe. God created what now exists and, according to John 1:3, the One who would incarnate in earth’s creation to provide the means for humans to be recreated in a spiritual second birth was particularly active in the first birthing of our world. “Art” would only be able to follow that primal crafting of worlds – since it is reshaping matter, or, “imi- tate, represent, portray” (mimeomai)3 already existing matter. Therefore, asking if Jesus were both Creator and an artist at the creation might be irrelevant when we are talking about God, since there was nothing artificial, no artifice at all about the origi- nal creation. Clearly, at the beginning, the One who would be born into our world as Jesus Christ was hardly an artist. This full Person of the Trinity was the Originator of the material that is shaped into art: the Master Crafter. But, now, when we come to the next phase of the divine drama, his part in the Godhead’s search and rescue operation, rescuing humanity from its great tragic plight – its fall – we come up with a different answer entirely for Jesus Christ, as a human among humans. The Originator has now taken on human flesh and has entered our world as one of us: a human (Rom. 1:2-3, 8:3; Heb. 2:14-18). Jesus Christ has become part of God’s own creation; God-Among-Us has taken on human flesh, human gender, human limitations. God’s great cosmic opponent, Satan, the evil one, certainly realizes this, so it tempts Jesus to change the rules: to turn bread into stone at its command (see Matt. 4:3). But Jesus does not suc- cumb to that temptation. If he is going to be truly human, he will not manipulate what he has cre- ated for his own benefit. Of course, Jesus Christ demonstrates the power to change substances to benefit other humans and to teach a lesson about his mission on earth. packing these demonstrations with significance, revealing who he actually is. So, for example, he turns water into wine to help out a harried host who has prematurely run out at a wedding feast, but his action is more than just making up for the fact that the wine gave out after Jesus’s mob arrived at the scene. His act was providing a symbol of the blood he will pour out and the communion meal he will institute to commemorate that great 1 This article is an adapted excerpt from Three in One: Analogies for the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2022), ch. 3. 2 In this section, I culled these passages from the gospel parallels in Robert L. Thomas and Stanley N. Gundry’s, A Harmony of the Gospels (Chicago: Moody, 1978), or its revision, as noted. 3 Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 1134. (LSJ) 4 cosmic act of redemption (see John 2:1-11). The same kind of action/reflection component can be seen when Jesus uses his power to feed the throngs who have sacrificed their opportunity to secure nourishment in order to listen to his message [see Mark 6:32-44 and 8:1-9]. The astonishing luncheon that he hosts demonstrates that people can rely on him to provide if they will risk sacrificing their comfort to follow him, just as it harkens back to God’s provision of manna (God’s “bread”) in the wilderness for an entire nation that is stepping out on faith (Exod. 16). At the same time, however, he will not make his ministry into a charade, where he keeps a ce- lestial helicopter ticket in the back of his robe, so as to say, so he can take off if this mission gets too tough. Jesus has jettisoned that celestial equivalent along with all his other divine powers, hence his answer to the evil one’s second temptation. He will not compromise his mission by calling in angels to cushion his landing. If he leaps from the highest point of the temple, he will die as surely as did his half-brother James many years later, when James is thrown from the temple’s heights.4 All the divine perks he had before, when he retained his powers as God, he had placed into his heavenly Father’s hands as he emptied himself and, thus, entered our world empty-handed as all of us do (Phil. 2:5-8). The Father supplies power as Jesus needs it during his mission, so he can heal and raise the dead and even walk on water to overtake his sailing disciples, in order to underscore his message to them, but, as far as a quick fix to alleviate the vicissitudes of his own life on earth, or to kowtow to the challenges of the evil one, he’s not asking and the Father’s not supplying. Jesus is basically working with the same limitations the rest of us experience when it comes to his own wellbeing. He is just as tired from the long days of ministry, just as sore from the miles on the road, just as weary and sleep-deprived from the endless demands of those who want help, and, ultimately, just as pain-riddled from the onslaught of death. Jesus lived by the same rules we do – his life was not a play, simulating human experience; it was real. He lived the full experience himself. Therefore, in his pre-incarnational state, Jesus Christ may have created us all and, therefore, he may hold a prior claim on us, but, when he arrives as recognizably human, he gets just as rebuffed as we often do when attempting to communicate God’s truth to a competitive, self-promoting world (John 1:11). If he is going to make an impact explaining the healing signs of his mission, he is going to have to do it by developing skills to get his points across to a crowd as fickle and attention-span challenged as are our throngs today: For him, too, the response was the equivalent of “Okay, you healed the blind man – cool! – you got anything more up your sleeve, or is that it for now? If that’s it, well, Herod’s got a new aqueduct we all wanna check out. See ya, Pal!” So, our initial question is posed again: despite being the original Creator, does Jesus, once incar- nated, now work as an artist, using the material of the world he created, but this time to recreate or sub-create a means to reach people with his message? To answer this, we need to agree on what we mean by “Art,” since this word can be defined in many different ways, depending on one’s perspective and the context of the discussion. In God through the Looking Glass, our book on the arts, we define art as “a type of communication through something arranged or created to represent what the artist perceives in the subjunctive (what could, would, or might happen) to be life or truth and that someone presents as art because of its perceived form and beauty.”5 Herein, you notice, are the qualities of being arranged, repre- senting, and communicating. For this discussion, I am condensing these elements into a definition of art as craft that speaks beyond itself. Was Jesus a maker of craft that speaks beyond itself? Or, another way to put it is: was the Master Crafter, when God-Among-Us, also a sub-crafter, an artist? Bringing this question to the four gospels, we discover that it answers easily: art presages, sur- 4 Eusebius, Church History, 2.23. 5 William David Spencer and Aida Besançon, eds., God through the Looking Glass: Glimpses from the Arts (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 17. 5 rounds, and even flows from Jesus’s nature, as we see it herald Jesus’s entry into our world, convey his message to our world, demonstrate his message before our world. Jesus Is Artfully Introduced Prehistoric glimpses in John 1 and Colossians 1, in conjunction with John 8, etc., help us glimpse a fuller understanding of Jesus’s identity. John 1:3 tells us that Jesus is the Master Crafter. Verse 10 of John 1 adds: “the world was made through him.” Verse 4 tells us humanity itself is a creation, whom Jesus himself animated. Colossians 1:16 corroborates: “All things through him and in him were created.”6 Since all the Godhead’s productive creative activity was done through Jesus, appropriately, his advent was greeted creatively. His mother, who was obviously a poet, responded to the news that she had been elected to bear him with a burst of poetry, or an actual song, which today we know as “The Magnificat” (Luke 1:46-55), a piece that has inspired composers down through the ages to create musical settings for it. His earthly relative Zechariah, when his tongue is loosed, also bursts forth in poetic song, when Jesus’s herald, John the Baptist, is born (Luke 1:67-79). John the Baptist himself will soon be proclaiming and fulfilling Isaiah 40:3-5’s poetic prophecy: A voice shouting in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, Make straight his paths. Every ravine will be filled up, And every mountain and hill will be leveled; And the crooked will be straightened, And the rough [or uneven] into smooth roads; And all flesh will see the salvation of God” (Luke 3: 4-6; see also Matt. 3:3; Mark 1:2- 3). When John the Baptist introduces Jesus, he turns to rich metaphors drawn from Old Testament sacrificial imagery to depict the uniqueness of Jesus’s coming: “Behold, the Lamb of God, the one removing the sin of the world!” (John 1:29, 36). John also describes Jesus as “the bridegroom” and himself as a friend of the wedding party (John 3:29). Jesus will use this same imagery, explaining the contrast between John’s fasting disciples and his feasting ones (Matt. 9:14-15; Mark 2:18-20; Luke 5:33-35; cf. 12:35-38). Eventually, Jesus will return the tribute, responding to John the Bap- tizer’s death by comparing him to “a lamp” that illuminated those around him (John 5:35). Jesus, himself, the Apostle John tells us, is the Giver of Light, who bestows the light of life on every hu- man coming into the world (John 1:4, 9). John the Baptist, of course was not that light, John the Apostle hastens to add (1:8), but a witness to that light, perhaps, as a searchlight may be contrasted with the sun. Both of them give light. The searchlight can pinpoint and highlight a particular target, as John did singling out candidates for repentance. But the sun illuminates everything with life and health and plenty of vitamin D. When, like John the Baptist, we reflect Jesus, our testimony can speak into someone’s life, “Let there be light!” even if ours is only 100 watts. John’s preaching certainly shimmers with luminescent, poignant, searing, definitive imagery. He censures his opponents with a metaphor: “You offspring of snakes!” (Matt. 3:7; Luke 3:7), effec- tive in silencing them and illustrating his opinion of them to the watching crowds. We wonder at his choice of words. Was that selection really intended to win over his critics with sarcasm? Maybe not. John’s mission was announcing the coming of Jesus, who, John proclaims, will baptize with “fire” (Matt. 3:11). In that sense, John was already striking a match to symbolize the conflagration 6 All translations unless otherwise indicated, are by the author, literally rendered, to manifest clearly figurative language in the original Greek. 6 to come with the One whose heavenly Parent cuts off those who will not receive Jesus, just as a gardener prunes off dead branches and heaves them into the fire (John 15:1-6). “Therefore, produce the holy fruit of repentance,” John the Baptizer warns, “but now the axe is at the root of the trees” (Matt. 3:8-10, Luke 3:9) and the “winnowing shovel is in his hand” (Matt. 3:12, Luke 3:17). And, after that thorough bit of landscaping, God can raise substitute children out of the very stones to replace those branches God destroys (Matt. 3:9, Luke 3:8). John’s graphic depictions of Jesus and the eloquent setting of his preparatory words are actu- ally most appropriate, since even the moment of Jesus’ advent was graced with melodic beauty, as none less than the angels of heaven chant when they proclaim Christ’s birth (Luke 2:13-14). Jesus Continues His Ascent on the Wings of Art From the moment Jesus begins his public ministry, he fulfills the promises of the Old Testament poetry that prophesies his mission. Robert Thomas and Stanley Gundry point out how many scrip- tural prophetic composites are fulfilled in each of Jesus’s symbolic utterances or actions, for ex- ample, his teaching on the end times in Matthew 24:29 and Mark 13:24-25: “the sun will be dark- ened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky [or heaven].” They cite references Isaiah 13:10; 34:4.7 The pageantry of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Matt. 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11; Luke 19:29-44; John 12:12-19) fulfills such prophetic verses as Isaiah 62:11, Zecha- riah 9:9, and Psalm 118:26-27.8 Even on the way to his death, the suffering savior Jesus is quoting Hosea 10:8’s use of personification: “Say to the mountains, ‘Fall upon us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’” (Luke 23:30). Jesus is conscious of the role he will contribute to the great passion play of re- demption. But, his employment of the arts is not simply limited to this role of a lifetime. His affinity for things artistic runs through all Jesus’s interactions. When reproving his con- temporaries’ lack of godly cooperation with John the Baptist or with himself, Jesus depicts them as children, complaining to would-be playmates: “We played the flute to you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not lament” (Matt. 11:16-17; Luke 7: 31-32). He and John are like musicians, a heavenly band playing to an unappreciative audience. “Tough crowd” about sums it up. The famous account in John 7:53-8:11, which first appears in the Greek and Latin fifth cen- tury codex Bezae (a manuscript of the Bible that gathered up early traditions),9 tells how Jesus may 7 Robert L. Thomas and Stanley N. Gundry, The NIV Harmony of the Gospels: with Explanations and Essays (New York, HarperCollins, 1988), 190-91. Also see Ezek. 32:7; Joel 2:10, 31; 3:15, where the imagery more presages Jesus bringing the sword rather than peace (Matt. 10:34). Interesting to note is that Thomas and Gundry’s A Harmony of the Gospels first appeared from Chicago’s Moody Press in 1978, using the New American Standard. A decade later when it was republished by HarperCollins, it had switched to the New International Version, 199, and, with a decade of success, more certitude, substituting “The” for “A” in the title. 8 Thomas and Gundry, NIV Harmony, 1988, 169-72. 9 Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71. The beloved story of Jesus’s mercy to the woman caught in adultery is not found in any papyri or earliest authoritative codices or early translation of the New Testament. Nevertheless, an account of a woman dragged before Jesus was already extant in the second century. Papias (c. 60-130) mentions this account concerned “a woman falsely accused before the Lord of many sins.” It was included in the apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews, which many believe was an Ebionite document (Montague Rhodes James, trans., The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses [Oxford: Clarendon, 1924], 2, 4, 8-10). Papias, along with Polycarp, is said to have been a disciple of John, but Papias does not in the fragments we have of his writings attribute the account he mentions to John (Eusebius, Church History 3.39). Whether it is a variation of the same account as the woman caught in adultery is unclear. What is clear is that the majority of textual scholars do not think it belongs in John’s Gospel. It is not canonical. Bruce M. Metzger concludes the account is a “piece of oral tradition which circulated in certain parts of the Western church” (A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2d ed. [Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2002), 187-89). At the same time, A. T. Robertson believes, “It is probably a true story for it is like Jesus, but it does not belong to John’s Gospel” (Word Pictures in the New Testament: Vol. 5, The Fourth Gospel, The Epistle to the Hebrews [Nashville: Broadman, 1932], 135–36). Leon Morris notes, “If we cannot feel that this is part of John’s Gospel we can feel that the story is true to the character of Jesus. Throughout the history of the church it has been held that, whoever wrote it, this little story is authentic. It rings true” (The Gospel According to John [Grand Rapids: 7 have even turned to pictorial art when rescuing a woman in jeopardy. Dragged before Jesus on her way to execution, the woman trembles, as her abusive accusers accost Jesus, attempting to use her to trap him as a scofflaw, should he choose to intervene and take her part. Jesus, however, ap- pears calm, even unperturbed, choosing instead to give a type of mimed performance rather than answer in verbal argument. The report tells us he stooped down to the ground while listening to the charges being brought against this woman caught in adultery. In classical Greek, the noun related to katagraphõ, the verb employed to describe what Jesus did then (8:6), is used for “drawing , delinea- tion,” “drawing of maps,” a “diagram, figure,” “delineation in profile,” as “in bas-relief,” “marking out,” “engraving of an inscription.”10 By New Testament times, the verb meant to “write” or “draw figures.”11 Was Jesus doodling, as he thought it over, or buying time as he prayed for guidance? Was he sketching the angry crowd, so they could see themselves as he saw them, or, as the original silent Jesus film classic The King of Kings (1927) depicts, writing in the sandy dirt the sins of each of her accusers?12 Whatever the function of his drawing was, when he stood up, his answer confounded them. Then he went back to drawing in the dirt. When he stood up a second time, they had slunk away. The audience of accusers was gone. No one knows if this tradition is suggesting Jesus was a pictorial artist as well, but we do know he was a carpenter, which might suggest he was adept in fine cabinet making and carving designs and engravings as he sculpted in wood, possibly along with the usual gang work in throwing up structures or even making rough crosses that some scholars and filmmakers have supposed. One of the few light scenes in Mel Gibson’s heartrending The Passion of the Christ (2004) shows Jesus taking delight in showing his mother his model for a futuristic-style chair. It underscores his primal identity as the Master Crafter and his role now as creative artist. One of the marvelous scenes in the silent The King of Kings depicts a group of children request- ing that, since Jesus can heal limbs, he fix a broken doll. In response, the divine crafter fashions a dowel to reattach the limb and “heal” the doll to the delight of the children. It is a tender and beau- tiful depiction of Jesus as creative woodworker by the great character actor H.B. Warner and the iconic director Cecil B. DeMille. Jesus the Master OratOr What we do know for certain is that Jesus focused his artistic power on his consummate use of the oral arts: he was a master orator, a crafter of the spoken word. So renowned was Jesus’s love of metaphor, that, when the Syrophoenician woman wanted to appeal to him, she cleverly answers him in metaphor. He states, “It is not good to take the bread of the children and throw it to the house dogs.” She answers, “Yes, Lord, and then the dogs eat from the fallen crumbs from the table of their master.” Jesus is so pleased at her respectful and artful re- sponse, he praises her faith and grants her wish (Matt. 15:22-28; Mark 7:25-30). Jesus Uses Puns Like all literary speakers, Jesus employs an entire rhetorical arsenal to fire at his hearers. He de- lights in puns from the very beginning of his ministry, setting Simon up for the eventual “rock” pun, as he renames him “stone” (John 1:42; Mark 3:16; Luke 6:14). A.T. Robertson, an astute expositor, Eerdmans, 1971], 883). And Bruce Metzger agrees, “The story of the woman taken in adultery, for example, has many earmarks of historical veracity; no ascetically minded monk would have invented a narrative that closes with what seems to be only a mild rebuke on Jesus’ part” (The Text of the New Testament, 319). These commentators, all of notable scholarly stature, agree that this account fits as a true tradition within John’s category of recordings of the “many things Jesus did,” that, if written down, all the books in the world could not contain them (John 21:25). 10 Katagraphē, LSJ, 887. 11 Frederick William Danker, Walter Bauer, W. F. Arndt, F. W. Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature, 3d ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 516 (BDAG). 12 “Trace, draw” is the translation choice of Max Zerwick and Mary Grosvenor in A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament, 5th ed. (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1996), 310. 8 points out that this Greek word petros is “usually” used for “a smaller detachment of the massive ledge” (Matt. 16:18). So I might read this as Jesus making a word-play contrasting himself as the ledge and Peter as one of the stones of the ledge on which the church will rest. A.T. Robertson does caution us, however, that “too much must not be made of this point since Jesus probably spoke Aramaic to Peter which draws no such distinction.” 13 But, even given that warning, we can see that Jesus is engaged in a high level of playing with words, as, for example, when he intrigues the Samaritan woman at the well with the lure of a “water” that she won’t have to draw by parlaying his request for a drink of well water into a contrasting image of the continual spiritually refreshing draft of good news he can give her (John 4:10-15). These are but two of many lighter moments in the Bible that escape most of us when we read the text. God is certainly serious about our welfare and the divine plans for the world. But it does not follow that God has no sense of humor or that God does not take delight in this world God has created. That enjoyment is seen clearly before the fall as God creates and then strolls through that creation in the balmy breezes of the late afternoon into the early twilight (Gen. 3:8). God-Among-Us continues that delight, inventing pet nicknames for some of his disciples, as he dubs James and John the “sons of thunder” (Mark 3:17), and calls Simon “the Zealot” (Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15). Jesus Uses Personification Jesus also enjoyed playing with personification, for example, counseling the crowds not to let their right hands know what their left hands are doing (Matt. 6:3), as if hands could keep secrets from one another. In his word pictures, flowers and grass wear clothing much finer than Solomon’s (Matt. 6:28-30). The earth has a heart (Matt. 12:40). A day worries about itself (Matt. 6:34). Jeru- salem is a city that has daughters and children, kills the prophets, has its house left desolate, and must bless Jesus’s name to see him again (Matt. 23:37-39; Luke 13:34-35). Jesus Uses Hyperbole The images Jesus uses are sharp and poignant and they arrest one’s attention and make one pause and think. That is the point of one of Jesus’s favorite devices: hyperbole, the extreme state- ment for shock effect. His sermons are filled with examples. Anger and insults are equivalent to murder, thunders Jesus, and lust equals adultery (Matt. 5:21-22, 27-28). If your right eye or right hand causes you to sin – gouge out and amputate! (Matt. 5:29-30; see also Matt. 18:8-9; Mark 9:43-47.) In danger of misleading a child? Best to go drown yourself! (Matt. 18:6; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2) Do not resist any evil, he recommends, in fact, invite someone who slaps you to hit you again; if they sue the shirt off your back, toss in your coat as well. Did the army draft you into forced ser- vitude? Do double the work! (Matt 5:39-42; Luke 6:29-30). Other instances of hyperbole include Jesus’s warning that we overlook sins the size of planks in our own eye (Matt 7:3-5; Luke 6:41-42) and that giving good teaching to the unworthy is tossing jewels to pigs (Matt. 7:6). Peter becomes “the devil,” when he tries to dissuade Jesus from fulfilling his mission to die for humanity’s sins (Matt. 16:22-23; Mark 8:32-33). Jesus also employs the exact phrasing that his cousin John the Baptist used toward the good but self-righteous Pharisees, when he calls them snakes and offspring of snakes (compare Matt. 3:7 and 23:33). Everyone doing sin is a “slave of sin” (John 8:34), child of the devil (John 8:44), whitewashed tomb (Matt. 23:27), unmarked grave (Luke 11:44). They de- vour widow’s houses (Mark 12:40; Luke 20:47), straining at gnats and swallowing camels (Matt. 23:24). Those who pause to care for their parents, rather than follow Jesus, are dead people burying dead people (Matt. 8:21-22; Luke 9:59-60). In fact, he orders his followers to call no one on earth “father” or “leaders” (Matt 23:9-10). Rich people trying to enter heaven are like a camel trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle (Matt. 19:24; Mark 10:25; Luke 18:25). His audience responds as did John the Baptist’s hostile hearers: they determine to kill him. Artists that deal in truth don’t always receive the acclaim their skills merit. 13 A. T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament, vol. 1 (Nashville: Broadman, 1930), 131. 9