Like many other Jews of his day, Saul of Tarsus, thinking as a Jew while taking on board the theories of the wider world, would reflect on the similarity and dissimilarity between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of Israel.

We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen.

It is of course possible to produce apparent 'parallels' to almost anything. There is after all only a limited range of things that one can say in any 'religion', and some statements, taken cold and out of context, will look a bit like other statements whose own setting would actually indicate significant differences.

Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic. That

Rules of faith and creeds are like the guard rails on the side of the highway, which prevent you from skidding off into the path of oncoming traffic. They do not themselves tell you everything you need to know about your journey and destination, nor do they put fresh gas in your tank. Only the scriptural message about God's kingdom in Jesus Christ will do that.

Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretative strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one's presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones.

God and his love, and of multiple layers of human folly, which rings true at all kinds of levels of human knowledge and experience.

late modernity has tried to squeeze more and more areas of human discourse into the first type of "truth," making a "fact" out of everything and thereby trying to put everything into the kind of box which can be weighed, measured, and verified as if it were an experiment in the hard sciences like chemistry, or even an equation in mathematics. But this attempt has overreached itself, not least in areas like history and sociology.

This uncertainty in turn, of course, begets a new and anxious eagerness for certainty: hence the appeal of fundamentalism, which in today's world is not so much a return to a premodern worldview but precisely to one form of modernism (reading the Bible within the grid of a quasi-or pseudoscientific quest for "objective truth

science takes things apart to see how they work, but religion puts things together to see what they mean.

This is where the Platonizing of our eschatology has led not only to bad atonement-theology but to the twin dangers of rationalism (imagining that being Christian is a matter of figuring out and then believing a true set of ideas) and romanticism (supposing that being a Christian is about people [122] having their hearts strangely warmed).

I am, of course, aware that for over two hundred years scholars have laboured to keep history and theology, or history and faith, at arm's length from one another. There is a good intention behind this move: each of these disciplines has its own proper shape and logic, and cannot simply be turned into a branch of the other.