Some Recent Books

The past few months of reading have contained some especially good books so I thought I’d take the time to put down a few of them here.

Lamb of the Free by Andrew R. Rillera (Wipf and Stock, 2024)

This book is absolutely fantastic. It is, to my knowledge, the first monograph length treatment of Jesus’ death that seriously utilizes recent scholarship on Israelite cult, im/purity, and sacrifice. Surprisingly, most scholars who write about Jesus’ death make very little use of Israelite cult as an interpretive framework. For example, Fleming Rutledge’s seminal tome on Jesus’ death The Crucifixtion, utilizes absolutely no work from the leading scholars in the field of cult and sacrifice (e.g. Jacob Milgrom, Roy Gane, Jonathan Klawans).

This lacuna in scholarship on Jesus’ death and atonement in the New Testament has led to major interpretive mistakes. Through careful and thorough examination of sacrifice in the Old Testament Rillera demonstrates that no Hebrew sacrifice was ever understood as substitutionary and thus neither can Jesus’ death possibly be understood as substitutionary, atonement (kipper) only purges the temple and never humans, sacrifice is NOT about killing or death, and most of the imagery used in the New Testament for Jesus’ death is not even sacrificial at all.

That does not mean Rillera thinks that Jesus death had no salvific value but only that its salvific value was not as a substitutionary, suffering sacrifice nor even as a sacrifice at all.

This book, more than any other I’ve ever read on the atonement, attempts to read Jesus’ death in the context of Hebrew cult and sacrifice without the distorting accretions and assumptions of later theology. This is a must read for anyone interested in the meaning of Jesus’ death.

Paul and the Language of Faith by Nijay K. Gupta (Eerdmans, 2020)

The word translated into English as “faith” or “belief” is the word Greek word pistis. Most Greek lexicons, such as Liddell-Scott, give its meaning as “trust,” “faith,” or “confidence” in someone or something. So far, so simple. But the lexical definition may not be telling us the whole story. Recently, numerous scholars have argued that that the Greek word pistis and its cognates are better translated by the English word fidelity or allegiance, which more fully capture of the nuances of the Greek.

This is precisely the argument that Gupta makes here. The ramifications of Gupta’s study are significant. Perhaps most importantly it undoes a lot of the damage done by centuries of “faith” vs. “works” debates and contextualizes Paul’s gospel in its appropriate ancient setting. Seen in this Jewish and Greco-Roman context Paul’s language of faith is a far cry of Evangelical “easy-beleivism.”

The Invention of the Inspired Text by John C. Poirier (T&T Clark, 2020)

This book is an analysis of the claim that Scripture is theopneustic, especially in 2 Timothy 3:16 which is typically translated, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”

This is a perfectly fine translation. The problem is what “breathed out by God” actually means. Most readers have taken it to mean something like “inspired by God” and it has therefore been used a cornerstone text for the doctrine of biblical inspiration. Indeed the idea that the Bible is “the Word of God” is basic to Christian theology despite the fact that the phrase never appears as a reference to scripture itself. Such appellation is largely based on verses like 2 Tim. 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:19-21.

Poirier questions these interpretations and, through a highly detailed philological study of the extant ancient literature, shows that these texts are not about "Divine inspiration” but about vivification, the “life-giving” quality of the Gospel.

This book is weaker on the ramifications of this point for Christian theology, but it nevertheless presents a much needed correction to a potent and highly influential misreading of 2 Timothy 3:16 and similar texts.