Pursuing Veritas

Reflections by Jacob J. Prahlow
  • Spectrums of Scripture: Stream of Thought

    This post is part of an ongoing series formulating a methodology for tracking and understanding the variety of ways in which early Christians received and utilized Scripture. The third level of authoritative correspondence includes “stream of thought” and “somewhere” references. These citations cast their source texts as implicitly authoritative: not so important that they bear…

  • Spectrums of Scripture: Formal Authority and Name Dropping

    This post is part of an ongoing series formulating a methodology for tracking and understanding the variety of ways in which early Christians received and utilized Scripture. What then are the various forms of authoritative correspondence? On one end of the authoritative spectrum are formal quotations, commentaries, and translations. Formal quotations denote the highest level…

  • Spectrums of Scripture: Authoritative Correspondence

    This post is part of an ongoing series formulating a methodology for tracking and understanding the variety of ways in which early Christians received and utilized Scripture. The authoritative correspondence spectrum constitutes the third and final method of tracking how texts were received by other ancient texts. This spectrum ranges from obviously high attributions of…

  • Spectrums of Scripture: Thematic Echoes

    This post is part of an ongoing series formulating a methodology for tracking and understanding the variety of ways in which early Christians received and utilized Scripture. The most amorphous and difficult to trace form of thematic correspondence is the thematic echo, where certain words or short phrases used in one text appear in another.[1]…

  • Spectrums of Scripture: Typology

    This post is part of an ongoing series formulating a methodology for tracking and understanding the variety of ways in which early Christians received and utilized Scripture. Typology involves an ancient author’s building upon a specific concept, idea, or symbol found in another text.[1] This is among the most common thematic correspondences, where a writer…

  • The Resurrection

    But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two…

  • Recommended Reading: April 15

    If you engage one thing this week, watch the Resurrection Roundtable via the Center for the Study of Christian Origins. For those of you with additional reading time this Holy Saturday, check out the following suggestions. Think I missed sharing something, let me know in the comments section below. Happy reading!

  • Spectrums of Scripture: Rewriting

    This post is part of an ongoing series formulating a methodology for tracking and understanding the variety of ways in which early Christians received and utilized Scripture. Brugge’s final category—rewriting—is far and away the most discussed method of thematic explication, in no small part due to Geza Vermes’s creation of the category of “Rewritten Bible”…

  • Ep27: Is God Dead?

    In this episode of the Church Debates series, we look at modern theology, postmodernism, and the problem of evil.

  • Spectrums of Scripture: Thematic Correspondence

    This post is part of an ongoing series formulating a methodology for tracking and understanding the variety of ways in which early Christians received and utilized Scripture. The second axis on the three dimensional plane is thematic correspondence, where topics, tropes, and themes serve as the basis for determining the use of one text in…