Jesus’ Preserving and Destroying saying may play off two different senses of the noun נֶפֶשׁ (nefesh, “soul”).
Lesson of Lot’s Wife
Lot’s wife serves as a warning that overattachment to possessions can come at the cost of one’s life.
Days of the Son of Man
In Jesus’ saying, the Son of Man does not function as the agent of destruction, any more than Noah did in the time of the flood or Lot did in the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Sign-Seeking Generation
What was “the sign of Jonah”? This LOY segment offers a new and surprising answer.
Innocent Blood
How well-read was Jesus? The LOY segment entitled Innocent Blood probes the possibility that Jesus read and quoted a no-longer-extant Second Temple-period Jewish literary work that warned against violent religious extremism.
Generations That Repented Long Ago
Did Jesus condemn his contemporaries for failing to recognize him as the Messiah or for something more insidious?
Woes on Three Villages
The Woes on Three Villages express Jesus’ sorrow that Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum had not responded to his warning not to get sucked into the black hole of violent religious nationalism.
Sending the Twelve: Conduct in Town
David N. Bivin and Joshua N. Tilton suggest a Hebrew reconstruction of Jesus’ instructions about how the twelve apostles were to behave when they entered a town. In this pericope we learn about the giving and receiving of hospitality among Jesus’ earliest followers. We also learn what may be wrong about the popular view that shaking the dust from the apostles’ feet was a symbolic action meant to signal to Jews who rejected Jesus that they were henceforth to be considered as Gentiles.
A Body, Vultures and the Son of Man (Luke 17:37)
“Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together” (Luke 17:37; KJV), is certainly one of the most enigmatic of Jesus’ sayings.