The Gospel That Would Go Throughout The World

Tertullian acknowledged that people were justified apart from baptism during Jesus' public ministry. But in response to critics of baptismal regeneration, he wrote, "in days gone by, there was salvation by means of bare faith, before the passion and resurrection of the Lord", whereas now "the law of baptizing has been imposed" (On Baptism 13).

The Deity Of The Holy Spirit, Especially In The Old Testament

Than Christopoulos just posted a good video on the subject.

Resurrection Implied By The Trajectory Of Scripture

"it is much more likely (particularly in a time of nationalistic fervour and a desire for independence [as in the late B.C. era]) that the seedbed for personal resurrection is to be found in Israel's traditional faith rather than in ideas and concepts imported from surrounding cultures. For instance, if the first major problem that unfolds in the Torah is death (as implied in Gen. 2, 3 and 5), one might reasonably infer that the solution will be its ultimate reversal. Even though not firmly grasped by many ancient Israelites, this is certainly implied by the trajectory of Scripture as a whole." (Paul Williamson, Death And The Afterlife [Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2017], n. 68 on 82)

The Widespread Absence Of A Papacy

One of the reasons for rejecting the papacy is the lack of justification for it. There are apparent contradictions of the concept of the papacy in some New Testament documents and other early sources, but the lack of evidence for the office would be enough reason to not accept it, even if such contradictions didn't exist.

However, Protestants often focus on too narrow a range of contexts in which the papacy is absent in the early sources. A lot of attention is given to passages about Peter in the gospels and Acts and material about church government in the early sources, for example, but we ought to think more broadly about where a papacy could have been mentioned if it existed. A papacy wouldn't have to be mentioned at every conceivable opportunity. But the larger the number and variety of contexts in which a papacy could have been mentioned, but wasn't, the more likely it is that the office didn't exist. What I want to do in this post is provide a few examples of contexts that are often neglected.

The apostles sometimes discussed their upcoming death, what was being done to preserve their teachings, and how Christians should conduct themselves going forward (e.g., Acts 20:17-38, 2 Timothy 3:10-4:8, 2 Peter 1:12-21). If the papacy was considered the foundation of the church, the infallible center of Christian unity throughout church history, the absence of any mention of such a resource in passages like these is significant.

Another group of relevant contexts is the imagery used to refer to relevant entities, such as what imagery is used to refer to the apostles or the church. We get twelve thrones without Peter's throne being differentiated (Matthew 19:28), three pillars without Peter's being differentiated (Galatians 2:9), twelve foundation stones without Peter's being differentiated (Ephesians 2:20, Revelation 21:14), etc.

The early Christians often interact with the objections of their opponents. The gospels respond to the charge that Jesus performed miracles by the power of Satan, Paul responds to his critics in his letters, Justin Martyr wrote a response to Jewish arguments against Christianity, Origen wrote a response to Celsus' anti-Christian treatise, and so on. See here regarding the lack of reference to a papacy in such contexts.

It's important for Protestants (and other opponents of the papacy) to bring up considerations like these, since the absence of early references to a papacy becomes more significant when the absence occurs across a broader range of contexts. If only two pages of early Christian literature were extant, the absence of a papacy (or whatever other concept) would be much less significant than its absence across two million pages. The number of pages matters (assuming the usual diversity of topics you'd get with an increase in such a page number).

One of the reasons why it's become so popular for Catholics to argue for the papacy by an appeal to something like typology or Old Testament precedent is that there's such a lack of evidence in the New Testament and the early patristic literature. So, there's a turn to other sources to try to find what isn't present where we'd most expect to see it.

Jiang interviews Poythress

"Vern Poythress on the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, and Revelation with Chinese Subtitles"

Dividing Genesis

Genesis is one book, but if you needed to split Hebrew Genesis into two scrolls, you could do so at Genesis 25:11. Here’s why. https://t.co/xUUAFb2WyK

— Peter J. Williams (@DrPJWilliams) May 30, 2020

Is the Exodus History? A Conversation with Dr. Titus Kennedy

I double-dare ya!

@RandalRauser

Christians often defend the offering of Isaac in Genesis 22 by noting that God never intended for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Fair enough, but the text still presents a massive moral problem. Imagine, by analogy, that you order Smith to rape his own daughter or be executed.

You never intend for Smith to carry out the action. You only want to test him to see if he is willing. It turns out that he is, and you stop the act from occurring. No harm no foul? Not at all. 

We cannot begin to envision the unimaginable, destructive emotional impact on both Jones and his daughter as they carry the knowledge that he was preparing to rape her. Imagine the impact on Isaac of his father's willingness to sacrifice him.

https://twitter.com/RandalRauser/status/1253322385190580227

1. To the extent that this poses a dilemma, the dilemma is whether to be an atheist or a Christian. Apostate Randal Rauser constantly straddles the fence, attacking the Bible like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, while pretending to be a Christian. His position isn't consistently Christian or secular, but just a willful mishmash. 

2. It's revealing that Rauser is unable to attack the binding of Isaac directly. While there's nothing necessarily wrong with drawing analogies, it betrays a weakness of his position that he can't show what's wrong with the binding of Isaac on its own grounds, so he must swap it out for a supposedly comparable situation. But why should we shift focus on his bait-n-switch? It's just a diversionary tactic. The onus lies on him to show that that his comparison is relevantly analogous. Why take the bait? 

3. He got the names confused, but presumably Smith/Jones are the same individual (father) in the illustration.

4. In Gen 22, Isaac has no advance knowledge that he's the designated sacrificial victims. He only finds out at the very last minute. So there's no brooding emotional buildup or escalating psychological tension on his part. 

5. As as often been noted, Abraham is an old man while Isaac is a teenager. So Isaac voluntarily submits to the sacrifice even though it's within his ability to overpower his elderly father and flee the scene. He's a willing victim. 

6. Unless Rauser is an open theist, the point of the ordeal is not for Yahweh to find out the limits of Abraham's faith. If anything, it's Abraham who learns something about Yahweh when Yahweh calls it off at the last minute. And it's ultimately for the benefit of the unseen reader. 

7. One problem with Rauser's comparison is his failure to appreciate stereotypical differences between male and female psychology. As a feminist, Rauser can't make allowance for the fact that in some crucial respects, male and female are wired differently. What is unbearably traumatic for a female may not be for a male. This issue crops up in debates over women in combat, where many women wash out because they can't cope with the inhuman stress. 

To take another example, consider a sleepover where the 5th-grade boys watch Aliens. The boys take it in stride:

https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/watching-aliens-for-the-first-time-again-with-a-bunch-of-kids

Imagine showing Aliens to a group of 5th-grade girls. Boys and girls naturally have a different psychological makeup for scary things. There are exceptions on both sides, but that's the norm. Many boys go out of their way to seek out scary things to see and do. They double-dare each other. 

OT slavery

(I've updated my post with a round 2 and a round 3.)

Fasta Parian:

Leviticus 25 44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

Yep. The bible has no issue with slavery.

My response:

How God Operates

I’m not an expert in Old Testament. But I want to relate some thoughts from the Prophet of Isaiah, as I understand them from our Sunday School teacher, who is a Cambridge guy and head of the Old Testament department at Grove City (PCA) College here in western Pennsylvania.

The commentator Alec Motyer calls the first 2/3 (chapters 1-37) of Isaiah “The Book of the King”. My Sunday School teacher suggests it can be related as “a tale of two kings”: Ahaz and Hezekiah, who were successive kings of Judah, the Southern kingdom. Ahaz was king of Judah (the Southern Kingdom) from 735 BC to 715 BC; Hezekiah, his son, was king from 715 BC to 686 BC.

These individuals and events are confirmed by sources outside of Scripture, by the way. As Kenneth Kitchen relates in his masterful “On the Reliability of the Old Testament”:

Nature of the Sources: The sources themselves show clear affinities in the kind of records used. Ancient kingdoms (large and small) did maintain running records (daybooks, etc.), exactly as were the annals (or daybooks) of Israel and Judah that are regularly cited as references by Kings and Chronicles. … What has survived in the rest of the ancient Near East, as in Kings and Chronicles, is a series of special interest works that have drawn upon the running records… (and he lists them, pg 63, emphasis in original).

During those days, the middle east was a cauldron of anxiety, as kingdoms made war on other kingdoms, and kings made alliances based on who they thought was going to be “the winner” in the various struggles over time. Of course, all of these changed over time, and the records of these kings and their emissaries is long and complicated.

The message of Isaiah to these kings of Judah was, “who are you going to trust? Are you going to trust in foreign kings and alliances? Or are you going to trust me?”

Here is how Ahaz handled things:

A Proof of Exodus

https://a15b40df-7210-4c2a-bc68-852e76a7c6b7.filesusr.com/ugd/a91655_560a07ef86b54ae692674756a576c013.pdf

Boiling a kid in its mother's milk

Some OT laws are easy to ridicule because at this distance they seem arbitrary and preposterous. A classic example is the prohibition against boiling a kid [goat] in its mother's milk. 

Interestingly, this is not an incidental reference but is explicitly repeated three times in the Mosaic law (Exod 23:19; 34:26; Deut 14:21), with another allusion in Amos 6:4. 

The passage has baffled rabbis as well as modern-day OT scholars. What's the rationale? We lost the key.

So we can only speculate. But hypothetically speaking, there's nothing intrinsically ludicrous about the prohibition. Perhaps that's a forbidden activity because it had associations with pagan rituals in the ancient Near East. 

To take a comparison, suppose I ware a swastika armband into a synagogue. That would certainly send a message. 

Now the swastika has no intrinsic meaning. It's an arbitrary emblem. The symbolism is culturally assigned. That doesn't change the fact that its historical associations with the Final Solution would make it outrageous or even sacrilegious to wear in a synagogue or yeshivah, although it would be appropriate for an actor to wear a swastika if he plays a Nazi soldier in a WWII movie. 

Rape in the OT

Rapists often come to sticky ends in biblical narratives.

Ammon rapes Tamar (2 Sam 13) and so gets murdered by his half-brother.

Shechem rapes Dinah (or does abduction marriage, Gen 34). Consequence: tricked into circumcision & killed while his offending body part is in pain.

— Peter J. Williams (@DrPJWilliams) December 8, 2018

Men of Gibeah rape the concubine (Judges 19:25) and their entire city is destroyed.

Lot foolishly offered his daughters for non-consensual sex (Genesis 19:8). No act is carried out, but he's repayed by non-consensual sex with them in Genesis 19:31-35.

— Peter J. Williams (@DrPJWilliams) December 8, 2018

Conclusion: even though biblical narratives usually do not directly comment on the morality of actions, they often emphasize poetic justice in ways that we miss.

— Peter J. Williams (@DrPJWilliams) December 8, 2018

When the Bible rubs us the wrong way

1. The Bible contains some teachings that rub modern readers the wrong way, including Christian readers. Including devout Christian readers. How should we respond?

I've been a Christian for 44 years. I became a Christian when I was 16. For as long as I can remember, I've always taken the position that Christianity (shorthand for biblical Christianity) is a package deal. Take it or leave it. To be a Christian at all involves prior commitment to certain things. That's the buy-in. You know what you're getting going in. The Bible isn't classified. Certain things are priced-in. That's the nature of a revealed religion. If you're not prepared to accept it, then the alternative isn't to reinvent Christianity, but to drop the pose and admit that you don't think it's true. Don't try to change it. 

2. When the Bible teaches something that rubs us the wrong way, that's an opportunity to think hard and find the wisdom in something that we'd ordinarily reject without giving it a second thought. One of the problems with "progressive Christianity," apart from incoherence, is that it has no capacity to learn anything from the Bible because it rejects out of hand anything in scripture that challenges its prejudices. 

3. There's nothing necessarily wrong with finding certain biblical teachings disturbing or bothersome. The opposite of progressive Christianity is a passive unthinking piety that's afraid to wrestle with these issues for fear it will result in loss of faith.

But it's good to grapple with these issues, from a standpoint of faith, because probing the rationale for biblical teachings that we may find shocking or unnerving may force us to achieve a better understanding of the wisdom behind biblical teaching. Don't push it away. Sometimes hard truths have the greatest potential for enlightenment. To revolutionize our superficial assumptions. 

4. Take OT ethics. Many readers find certain OT teachings repugnant. And they never get beyond their repugnance. They wince and turn the page. At best the file it away as something incomprehensible. 

People who object to OT ethics are apt to be intellectually frivolous. They lack the intellectual patience to seriously explore and work through the issues. They're just dismissive. They don't think there's anything true or good to be understood in such teachings. They don't find anything worthwhile because they don't expect anything worthwhile and they're not looking for anything worthwhile. So I can't say that I'm terribly sympathetic to their lazy reaction. I understand what they find objectionable, but they don't make a good-faith effort to go beyond that snap judgment. 

5. As I've said before, even if you don't believe in the Bible, it would be prudent for atheists to approach the OT from the standpoint of a cultural anthropologist. An academic field archeologist who lives with a tribe or people-group to understand their society from the inside out. He brings critical sympathy to the task. He may initially find some of their customs baffling, barbaric, and irrational. But he makes a good-faith effort to learn what motivates the customs. Perhaps, on closer examination, the customs are understandable adaptations to their circumstances. They may not be great customs, but if they were living under better circumstances, they'd have better customs. They've been thrust into a particular situation, and it isn't easy to cope. 

6. Now I'm not a cultural relativist. I'm not suggesting that we should be nonjudgmental. After immersive study, the anthropologist might well be justified in concluding that some of the customs are willfully stupid and wantonly cruel. 

But we need to understand things before we're in a position to render an informed judgment. In particular, an atheist is in no position to just assume that his provincial social conditioning is automatically superior to mine. That's arbitrary and lacks a capacity for critical self-awareness. Village atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens revel in lampooning OT ethics, but from the standpoint of a cultural anthropologist, their knee-jerk reaction is hidebound, ethnocentric, and question-begging. The same applies to "progressive Christians". 

7. In that regard, this is an interesting and provocative lecture on OT ethics by a noted scholar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7RfNe00NEg

To summarize, paraphrase, and expand on his explanation:

i) OT law is not utopian. It's not first and foremost about the promotion of virtue.

Rather, it's about damage control. What to do when things go wrong. Where to go from there. Given a bad situation, what are the realistic options? 

This is, after all, a penal code. A criminal law code. Something has already gone wrong. 

It's like pulling the pin on a live grenade. The options after you pull the firing pin are very different from the options before you pull it. Once you pull the pin, it's too late to go back to kinder gentler alternatives. 

ii) OT law has practical aims. It settles for limited, obtainable goods rather than ultimate, unobtainable goods. Curtailing evil.  Fixing what can be fixed. Regulating what can't be abolished. Preventing things from getting even worse. 

iii) Lawmakers are constrained by what's possible. That's why they forbid theft but they don't command generosity. God has chosen to place himself under such constraints. To some degree, God accommodates himself to our wickedness. OT law is a necessary compromise or concession to our fallenness. Not part of God's ultimate plan for human beings, but about how to God negotiates with this group at a particular time and place (OT Jews) to survive, relatively faithful and civilized long enough for the promise to come to fulfillment.

iv) The purity codes existed to differentiate Jews and heathen Gentiles. That's defunct. Christians properly distinguish which laws are just for OT Jews and which for God's people in general. 

8. In general, I think Provan's analysis is insightful and sound. Many unbelievers who blindly rail against OT ethics would benefit from taking these rudimentary distinctions into account. Problem is, many unbelievers don't seek understanding. They are lazy. They just want to feel superior. 

9. Having said that, I have some disagreements with Provan. He's an egalitarian, I'm a complementation. So he has a different take on Gen 1 and OT legislation for women than I do.

10. In addition, he seems  to be a freewill theist who believes that God must operate under the same constraints as human lawmakers. God is stymied by what is feasible, given the autonomy of human agents to thwart his will. 

That's not my own explanation, so I'd reframe the issue. There are constraints on God's field of action, but in a different way. God has different world histories at his disposal. I'm the end-product of a particular past. I exist because I have a particular set of linear ancestors. If God changed certain variables in the past, that would change the future, including my future. I don't exist in that future. So there are tradeoffs. 

God made a world designed for second-order goods. Eliminating certain evils has the side-effect of eliminating the compensatory goods. Goods that only exist as a result of prior evils. God didn't create a perfect world, a utopian world, but a world with redeemed losers like me. The ideal lies at the end of the process, not the beginning. 

Like a sports team where the coach doesn't pick the best players. These aren't the most talented players. His primary goal isn't about winning every game, but cultivating masculine virtues. Camaraderie, loyalty, and brotherly love. He prefers to work with losers. To reclaim losers. Rescue the lost. Give them a second chance.  

11. Finally, it's good to study how to be faithful in trying times. Life is rough. If a remnant of OT Jews could stay faithful despite harsh circumstances, that sets an example for Christians.  

OT apocrypha

Catholics argue the deuterocanonical books should be included in the canon of Scripture. However that has significant flaws:

1. The Jews didn't consider these books on par with Scripture. The Hebrew canon doesn't include the deuterocanonical books.

Some argue the Jews only canonized the Hebrew Bible at the Council of Yavneh. However, from what I've read, that's hotly disputed by scholars. It's far from established fact.

However, even if it were true, the question parallels questions over the NT as canon. For instance, did the Jews/church decide what should be canonical or did the Jews/church recognize what was already recognized as canonical? For another, why would pious Jews/Christians need an authority (e.g. council) to decide what they could already know from studying the Scriptures and using their own God-given reason?

2. There are fragments and portions of some deuterocanonical books in the Dead Sea scrolls (DSS), but the DSS contain plenty of literature that even Catholics wouldn't consider inspired (e.g. the War scroll, Pesher Habakkuk). So the inclusion of some deuterocanonical books in the DSS doesn't imply anything one way or the other about the deuterocanonical books in general.

Similarly, Codex Sinaiticus contains the deuterocanonical books, but it also contains the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. Catholics don't accept these latter works as canonical.

3. The deuterocanonical books themselves suggest prophecies had ceased in their day. For example, 1 Macc 4:41-46 records:

Then Judas detailed men to fight against those in the citadel until he had cleansed the sanctuary. He chose blameless priests devoted to the law, and they cleansed the sanctuary and removed the defiled stones to an unclean place. They deliberated what to do about the altar of burnt offering, which had been profaned. And they thought it best to tear it down, so that it would not be a lasting shame to them that the Gentiles had defiled it. So they tore down the altar, and stored the stones in a convenient place on the temple hill until a prophet should come to tell what to do with them.

In addition, the Prologue to Sirach suggests its author doesn't even consider Sirach to be Scripture inasmuch as he draws a distinction between the two.

4. If the deuterocanonical books should be part of the biblical canon, which deuterocanonical books? Whose version? The Eastern Orthodox differ from Catholics (e.g. Psalm 151, 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh). Likewise, what about the deuterocanonical books of the Oriental Orthodox churches? What about the deuterocanonical of the Assyrian churches?

5. If we accept the OT apocrypha, then why not accept the NT apocrypha - at least some of the books? Couldn't one argue some of the apocryphal gospels deserve inclusion in the biblical canon?

6. To my knowledge, Catholics didn't officially include the deuterocanonical books in the biblical canon until the Council of Trent. However, wasn't this decided by a plurality vote with many Catholic bishops on the council either dissenting or abstaining from voting? If the deuterocanonical books are Scripture, then why would so many Catholic bishops fail to see that? And what about Catholic bishops who weren't in attendance?

Also, if it's possible for the deuterocanonical books not to have been officially recognized as part of the biblical canon until Trent, even though the deuterocanonical books had always been part of the canon, then why would Trent be needed in the first place? Just to rubber stamp it? Yet how many Christians throughout church history until Trent even thought all the deuterocanonical books were inspired and on par with Scripture?

7. Perhaps Catholics would respond there is a long history of church fathers who thought so. Church tradition has established it to be the case. Church fathers like Clement of Alexandra, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Augustine believed the deuterocanonical books were inspired. For one thing, there's nothing necessarily sacrosanct about church fathers and church tradition. Church fathers have made plenty of mistakes. For example, some church fathers quote the Sibylline oracles, but that hardly means the sibyls were inspired by God.

8. At best, the church fathers who held the position that the deuterocanonical books are Scripture held it because they were following the Septuagint (LXX). Of course, this should be offset by the evidence of and from the Hebrew canon.

Moreover, consider Peter Williams' lecture "Why I don't believe in the Septuagint". As Williams points out, there's not a single homogeneous LXX. A first century Jew or Christian wouldn't have necessarily considered the LXX a single unified body of work. Rather, they might've just regarded them as disparate Greek translations of this or that book of the Hebrew Bible.

Perhaps like how we might see there are various English translations of the Bible (e.g. ESV, NIV, CSB, KJV, RSV, Phillips' NT, Lattimore's NT, NASB, NRSV, NLT, CEV, NET, Geneva Bible, Tyndale, Wycliffe, Douay-Rheims, NAB, NJB, JPS), but we wouldn't necessarily categorize all these translations under a single monolithic category called "The English Translation" (TET).

The Trinity in the OT

There are different views regarding the revelation of the Trinity in the OT:

1. At one extreme are Catholics and unitarians who don't think the Trinity is in the OT because they don't think the Trinity is NT. If it's not even in the NT, it can hardly be in the OT! Rather, they think the Nicene Fathers and Nicene/post-Nicene councils invented the Trinity.

2. At the other end of the spectrum are Christians who suppose you can directly prooftext the Trinity from passages like Gen 1:26 and Isa 6:3. I think traditional prooftexts like that should be retired. On the other hand, some traditional prooftexts are strong, as far as they go. 

3. Retiring a few traditional prooftexts doesn't mean we have less to work with. A problem with bad prooftexts is how they get in the way of developing better exegetical arguments. Some Christians just park on those prooftexts. That's where they stop.

Retiring a few traditional prooftexts frees up room to bring in neglected lines of evidence. The traditional methodology appealed to pinpoint prooftexts. While some individual texts are strong, modern evangelical scholars often take a diachronic approach where they trace messianic motifs as they unfold through a series of OT books. 

Other important developments involve the two-Yahweh doctrine in Second Temple Judaism and the phenomenon  of illeism in the OT and its NT counterparts. 

4. There's also some ambiguity in what it means to say we can find the Trinity in the OT. Does that mean we can find individual texts where it's all put together? Or does that mean the OT has the parts without the instruction sheet, and the NT provides the instructions on how to assemble the parts?

5. To take another example, some Christians think the Angel of the Lord is a theophany while others think that's a Christophany. Those aren't mutually exclusive interpretations: it could be a theophanic Christophany. The point, though, is that the Christophanic identification is more specific than the merely theophanic identification. 

5. Another issue is whether it's illicit to interpret OT statements in light of NT revelation. Here's another way to frame the issue? Is the Trinity recognizable in the OT if that's all you have to go by? Or does the NT create the shock of recognition? 

6. Apropos (5), let's take a comparison: 

i) In many stories (plays, novels, movies, TV dramas), some characters are related to each other while others are not. In some of these stories, the related characters are explicitly identified, viz. mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters. 

ii) In real life, there are certain clues that people are related, even if the relationship isn't explicitly identified. That includes visual clues. The most obvious is family resemblance in the case of close blood relatives. Or there can be subtler clues, like having the same idiosyncratic accent. 

Or, when you see two people together, there's a particular dynamic if they're related. That's not something you could discern in isolation.

iii) But in plays, movies, and TV dramas, actors who play blood relatives are usually unrelated in real life. Yet the audience is expected to suspend disbelief. It's a necessary convention. 

iv) In some cases the relationships are explicitly stated. It is, however, possible to have a story in which their identity is left unstated. Where it's up to the reader or audience to tease that out.

And that's more dramatically interesting. You start out knowing nothing about the characters. But as the story unfolds, especially in extended narratives like novels and TV dramas, the attentive viewer or reader will pick up on certain suggestive clues that particular characters are relatives, even if they're never explicitly identified as such. They behave around each other in ways typical of family members. They take certain liberties with each other, freely entering one another's personal space. 

That may be inconclusive, but there's a sorting process where it dawns on the audience that the characters interact with each other in ways that make a lot of sense if they belong to the same family, but make less sense if they're unrelated. 

And if, as the story progresses, the relationships are made explicit, that confirms what the audience suspected. The characters were recognizably related to each other, and when the relationships are named, everything falls into place. The story began as a riddle in that regard, but a telltale pattern emerges as the narration continues. 

How do details in the Old Testament confirm its historicity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIwGpLFFYG0

Suicide bombers in the Bible?

Philip Jenkins argues that Samson's suicide in the temple -- "down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived." (Judges 16:30) is an ANE equivalent of the contemporary suicide bomber. Do you agree?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 15, 2019

At a generic level there's some analogy between Samson and suicide bombers. That, however, is a deceptive comparison. "Suicide bomber" has very specific connotations in modern usage. The stereotypical suicide bomber is:

• A Muslim jihadist
• Casts himself in the role of a martyr
• Expects his death will seal his entrance into Paradise, with a harem of nubile virgins eagerly awaiting his arrival
• Is protesting Israel's "occupation" of "Palestinian" land.
• Is killing Jewish civilians indiscriminately

By contrast, Samson is targeting the Philistine ruling class, thereby decimating their ability to threaten Israel. While he may be motivated by personal revenge, he's playing his divinely-appointed role as a guardian of Israel.

A more accurate analogy would be the plot to assassinate Hitler, which targeted the Führer and his war cabinet.

The Old Covenant Is Over. The Old Testament Is Authoritative.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/old-covenant-response-andy-stanley/

Why We Can’t Unhitch from the Old Testament

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/irresistible-andy-stanley/