Through A Glass, Dimly

Dan Phillips had a very interesting post over at the Pyromaniacs blog. It involves this verse:

When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?”
(John 5:6)

Dan looks at the issue, “Doesn’t that look like a dumb question? Isn’t it obvious the guy would want to be healed?” He comes up with an interesting possibility for why Jesus asked the question. And whether he’s right about that or not, I thought his observations were very insightful, edifying, and convicting. It involves asking, “Are you really willing for God to change you? Do you want to become healthy, or are you too attached to the way you are?”

 

 
Meanwhile, I got a compliment from a well-known scholar today! At the Parchment and Pen blog, Dan Wallace posted an entry on textual criticism–the study of places where the New Testament manuscripts differ from one another. Dan Wallace is a big-name Greek scholar. He wrote a major Greek grammar textbook, Greek Grammar Beyond The Basics, and he’s one of the top 10 scholars in textual criticism. (I think there are 11 in the world. 🙂 ) He wrote a good review of Bart Ehrman’s book, Misquoting Jesus, a NYT best-seller that tries to argue that we can’t have confidence that our Bible is the same as the original. He also cowrote a book as a response, called Reinventing Jesus.

Anyway, Wallace has been writing a series of posts to introduce people to textual criticism and talk about various issues. I posted some comments in today’s entry with the username “Jugulum”, replying to some questions that someone asked. Then later, Wallace posted his own answer. And when he did, he also said, “BTW, Jugulum has given excellent responses to your questions. I don’t know who he or she is, but I like what s/he has to say!”

Cool. I love the internet. 🙂