Ultimate Concerns

People in popular media tend to discuss the Bible in one of two ways. Either they focus on new research that challenges traditional Jewish and Christian historical claims or they offer selective quotes to prove a theological or political point. Literary interpretations that pay attention to the whole of a biblical book and the agenda of its author, in contrast, are less common. I argue, drawing on my interview with Jocelyn McWhirter, that this kind of interpretation is hard to do, but it is important and can be persuasive in a way that the two methods just mentioned (historical criticism and proof-texting) usually cannot. I interview McWhirter about her book, Rejected Prophets: Jesus and His Witnesses in Luke-Acts. She argues that Luke presents Jesus and his disciples as rejected prophets to address several developments that were surprising to first-century Christians. First, the Messiah was supposed to overthrow the enemies of the Jews, but Jesus didn’t do that. Second, most mainstream Jews were rejecting Je