We're back! This is the Sunday morning talk that I would have given in church this morning, if we weren't all locked down trying to squash what's left of COVID-19 in Scotland. My wife and I prepared this together, and the subject - how do we connect with God? - has been on our minds for quite some time now. When a young friend posed the eponymous question we really just went off.
When the gospel texts converge and diverge in their retellings of the Jesus story, it can be tempting to gloss over what makes each gospel text unique. Nathan Kitchen takes us through some examples to help us read the details better. As well as nerding out on synoptic studies, we also had a great conversation about sacred time and space, and what psalms fatigue means for our (lack of) appreciation for the Psalter.
I got started on this week's episode... and I didn't finish it. But the Leviticus segment, sparked by a note in the Jewish Study Bible, was too interesting to leave in the archives. So this minicast is a look at the tum'ah - the uncleanness - of Leviticus 12-15, from a different perspective than the one usually taken in both Jewish and Christian commentary. The JPS Torah commentary volume on Leviticus also helps to place the text's concept of contagion within its ancient Near Eastern origin.
None of this is to say that the contagious miasma posited by some modern Jewish scholars is (or was) actually a phenomenon in the real world: only that this may have been the original concept behind these tum'ah texts. Re-framed with the language of ritual impurity rather than physical aura, the texts remain relevant even as Jewish thought moves on to re-read re-interpret them: because it's the theology of the text that gives it enduring significance.
What do Christians do with Leviticus? That's what Kameron Mazurek and I are talking about this week, and it mostly involves paying closer attention to Jewish interpretation and tradition. Jesus lived near the end of an era in Jewish history, and it's that time period that we're looking to for wisdom.
So many of our reading skills depend on our cultural background: the memes, metaphors, and idioms that make up our literary vernacular. This week, Jo Kitchen and I take on 1 Corinthians 6, which turns out to be particularly densely packed and full of rhetorical flair.
