Five Things (22 December 2025)

This will hopefully be the first of many “Five Things” posts. I plan to use them to highlight interesting things that I’ve read or reckoned with over the preceding week. Without further preamble, my first two things belong to a similar category: the sort of biblical scholarship (my favorite sort, really) that compellingly says “you keep using that word; it does not mean what I think you think it means”.

First up is David Westfall on Romans 3:21–25: “Accordingly, we should not understand Paul’s retrieval of [glory] language in 3.23 simply as describing the loss of an innately human attribute (e.g. ‘the glory of Adam’), and still less of their failure to measure up to some kind of divine moral standard (implied in most translations' preference for ‘fall short’ as a rendering of ὑστεροῦνται). Rather, ‘lacking the glory of God’ denotes the condition of those who have forfeited the presence of God himself through sin and idolatry, and are thus deprived of the perceptible mark of that presence: glory”.1 This strikes me as eminently plausible; lexically, his rendering is simpler and makes significantly more historical sense of Paul’s mingling of the terms hilasterion and doxa in Romans 3. The takeaway: In Christ, God becomes present to his people, analogous to his local and temporary presence at the mercy seat (which was often described in the LXX as doxa). In Christ, though, this presence becomes a global and eternal reality through his death and resurrection and the pneumatic transformation of his people.

Second, Kyu Seop Kim argues that the first occurrence of διαθήκην in Gal 3:15 would be better translated as “will” (as opposed to “covenant”), and that the accompanying verb (κεκυρωμένην), appearing as it does in the perfect tense in proximity to talk of a will, would be better translated as “executed” (as opposed to “ratified”). There’s a distinction between ratification and execution of a will. After ratification, wills were subject to alteration; once the will had been executed (i.e. the property at issue in the will had been distributed to heirs), it was inalterable and irrevocable.2 As such Gal 3:15 and 17 should be rendered: “Brothers, I am speaking in a human way: like an executed human will, no one annuls it or adds to it…the law [which came] 430 years later does not revoke a covenant executed by God so as to nullify the promise”. In short, like a will, the covenant between God and Abraham has already been executed (note the perfect tense) when God gave Abraham the land. All the promises of that covenant are thus settled and irrevocable like a will that has already been executed.3

Third: “Now, sir Thomas, return back to those that sent you, and tell them from me, not to send again for me this day, or expect that I shall come; let what will happen, as long as my son has life, and say, that I command them to let the boy win his spurs”.4 I came across this fabulous quote in The Rest Is History’s series on the Hundred Years' War. It’s one of those quotes that’s so good that Edward III must have said it. I’ve been thinking about it, along with this blog post at First Things and Lewis’s excellent essay “The Necessity of Chivalry”, all of which offer a contrast to the current preference for a docile and compliant masculinity.

Fourth, I want to highlight more biblical studies scholarship, but of a different kind: Courtney J. P. Friesen, in her article “Hagar on Sinai: The Choice of Heracles, Mountain Women, and Pauline Allegory in Galatians” argues that Paul deploys a philosophical trope in his association of women with abstractions and mountains that has its origins in a mythic story, the Choice of Heracles, or Heracles at the Crossroads, recorded in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (2.1.21–33).5 Friesen demonstrates that this trope was relatively common in antiquity, and significantly both Dio Chrysostom and (more importantly) Philo alter and re-use the Choice of Heracles for their own purposes. A decent literary comparison for this troublesome allegory is a godsend. Friesen has convinced me that Paul is likely dependent on some version of this trope, knowingly or not. I don’t love some of the conclusions she draws thereafter, mainly because I think she’s still stuck in some reified assumptions about the law, faith, and gentiles in Paul’s letters. But this does not detract from the magnitude of the primary argument here.

Finally, an essay surfaced to me by the Verge’s weekly Installer newsletter: “Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps”. The latter half moves beyond the scope of my interest/capability, but I reckon what amounts to the statement of facts is a dead-on diagnosis of the current attitude around technology among the thoughtless: “it comes from over there, and they made it to fix problems; ergo, the things it fixes must be my problems”. If that is one’s attitude toward tools, tools are going to shape him or her in problematic ways. The example of the experienced doctor who has to fill in every box with whether it matters or not to the current patient is a really visceral one. I do think they’re a little dismissive of extensibility, but I love the work they’re doing and the way they’re thinking about software.

  1. David M. Westfall, “The Mercy Seat of the Risen Christ: Atonement and the Glory of God in Romans 3.21–26,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 48, no. 1 (2025): 180. ↩︎

  2. Kyu Seop Kim, “The Concept of Διαθήκη in Galatians 3:15–18,” Journal of Biblical Literature 143, no. 2 (2024): 357, and esp. 361. ↩︎

  3. Kim, “The Concept of Διαθήκη in Galatians 3,” 271. ↩︎

  4. Jean Frossairt, Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and the Adjoining Countries, trans. Thomas Johnes (H.G. Bohn, 1857), 167, emphasis mine. ↩︎

  5. Courtney J. P. Friesen, “Hagar on Sinai: The Choice of Heracles, Mountain Women, and Pauline Allegory in Galatians,” Journal of Biblical Literature 144, no. 3 (2025): 535–555. ↩︎

reading