One of the more important books I have ever read is R. Kendall Soulen. The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. In this book he discusses the place of Israel in Christian theology. When I made a survey over so-called Systematic Theologies (Protestant and Catholic), I recognised that that place almost [...]
To explore the roots of theological anti-Semitism is an important project, far from finished. In a comment to an earlier blogpost, Kevin Edgecomb has made some important comments not so much to my own writing, as to David Robles’ comment (see Anti-Semitism in Eastern and Western theology). I have no special insights into the question [...]
A quite common misunderstanding among some Protestant Christians is that first there was a New Testament, then, after a few hundred years doctrine was construed to meet resistance against the truth. However, the opposite seems to be the case. Early Christianity read the Jewish Bible as its own, and I am fascinated by Birger Gerhardsson’s [...]
Rom 11:17, rendered correctly, is a key for understanding Romans, and especially Romans 9–11. But of course this ‘verse’ (Paul never wrote a single verse—they were created much later) is a part of the whole. A letter like Romans truly is as fabric, with a warp of ideas and thoughts, and then the weft, containing [...]
The Revised Standard Version (also International Standard Version and God’s Word Translation), when it came regarded as a liberal translation, has this fatal mistranslation of Rom 11:17: But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree [...]
David Robles put an important question in a comment, and I make an own post about it. He asks: I have a question, please. In your book “Roots of Theological anti-Semitism”, do you approach the subject of anti-Semitism in the Orthodox Church, particularly in Russia and Greece? Is the charge of anti-semitism against such as [...]
Before the Holocaust, only few exegetes did serious work on the Jewish background to the New Testament. I have discussed this in my book, Roots of theological anti-Semitism. A rare example of a ‘modern’ scholar is Johannes Weiß, who is foreboding the Jewish turn in exegesis which is beginning to develop in the 1950’s. Another [...]
What started as a study group, in 1979 became a budding, and then flourishing, scholarly organisation, Collegium Patristicum Lundense. We were four or five in the first board, me being the youngest . Over the years CPL has grown into a great organisation in connection with many Nordic and international scholars. Several doctoral dissertations have [...]
Last Friday I had the privilege of interviewing Professor Birger Gerhardsson in Lund. An elderly academic gentleman, he still is active in reading and reflection. Our topic was the so-called Uppsala School, which was of major importance in the exegetical debate in the middle of the last century. There were two ‘Uppsala schools’, one Old [...]
Since the Swedisch daily Aftonbladet’s publication of an article about harvesting of human organs by the IDF, Our sons are plundered of their organs, a hot debate has erupted. In a few articles in different media, I have argued that Boström here is playing on age-old anti-Semitic myths of blood libels, let be ina new [...]