Aaron Mead
Slavery in the New Testament, Part 3: Glimmers of Justice
Five problematic New Testament passages tell slaves to obey masters but also contain surprising glimmers of justice.
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Aaron Mead
- Jan 20
- 7 min
Slavery in the New Testament, Part 2: Seeds of Abolition
Bible readers rightly worry over Paul's view of slavery. However, the emancipatory passages in his writings complicate the story.
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Aaron Mead
- Nov 18, 2022
- 10 min
Backstory to Philemon: The Fugitive Slave Theory
What circumstance gave rise to the New Testament letter to Philemon? Was Onesimus a fugitive slave?
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Aaron Mead
- Dec 28, 2021
- 5 min
Slavery in the New Testament, Part 1: Expect Liberation
The story goes that Martin Luther King Jr. used to carry around a copy of Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited everywhere he went....
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Aaron Mead
- Jan 20, 2019
- 5 min
Mind the Gap: The Gospels and Oral Transmission
In recent posts (e.g., here and here), I’ve been writing about the authorship of the Gospels, and the degree to which Gospel content may...
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Aaron Mead
- Dec 2, 2018
- 6 min
Advent and the Gospel
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what, exactly, the message of the gospel is. Of course, the term ‘gospel’ means “good news.” The puzzle...
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Aaron Mead
- Jul 23, 2018
- 6 min
How to Write a Gospel: Borrow + Edit = Scripture
Do the four Gospels of the New Testament accurately represent the historical ministry of Jesus? The case that they do would seem more...
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Aaron Mead
- Jun 26, 2018
- 8 min
Who Wrote the Gospel according to Mark?
According to the traditional view, the four Gospels in the New Testament—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (the “canonical” Gospels)—were...
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Aaron Mead
- May 29, 2018
- 4 min
The Historicity of the Gospels: Bart Ehrman’s Skeptical View
In Chapter 3 of How Jesus Became God, Bart Ehrman begins with a story from his days as a student at Moody Bible Institute in the 1970s....
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Aaron Mead
- Apr 22, 2018
- 8 min
…and then the apostle Paul sent the slave back to his master
During the struggle for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the New Testament letter...
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Aaron Mead
- Dec 12, 2017
- 8 min
Pope Francis on the Lord’s Prayer: Leading Us into Temptation
Like the rest of the New Testament, the Lord’s Prayer was originally written in Koine Greek (though Jesus likely spoke it in Aramaic)....
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Aaron Mead
- Oct 1, 2017
- 4 min
Aquinas on the Virtues: Wisdom
The book of Proverbs tells us, “Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice” (1:20). She cries out that people...
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Aaron Mead
- Sep 24, 2017
- 4 min
Aquinas on the Virtues: Understanding
Today I begin a series of posts on Thomas Aquinas’s view of the virtues. Most of my focus in this series will be on what are often called...
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Aaron Mead
- Aug 20, 2017
- 3 min
“Have to” or “Want to”?
At the beginning of last school year my daughter made a friend who has had an especially hard childhood. As the year wore on, she learned...
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Aaron Mead
- Jul 16, 2017
- 4 min
Obedience, Submission, and “Slave Morality”
According to Orlando Patterson, the Roman mime-writer Publilius Syrus wrote, “The height of misery is to live at another’s will”...
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Aaron Mead
- Jul 9, 2017
- 4 min
Aquinas on Christian Joy
I have often felt a tension in my theology when it comes to the concept of joy. On the one hand, in Galatians (5:22) Paul counts joy...
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