Sunday Morning Greek Blog

December 21, 2022

SMGB Indices

Filed under: Greek — Scott Stocking @ 7:26 am
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This is a “Site Map” of sorts for my more popular posts.

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2025 Summary

The year of our Lord 2025 was a great year for the Sunday Morning Greek Blog. Views continue to increase year over year, so I’m grateful for that. While my viral math post views have dropped significantly this year, readers more than compensated for that by viewing more Bible posts. My message “Jesus the Good Shepherd” from 2022 showed up repeatedly as source in some search engines’ AI summaries of the topic, which boosted views on that article enough to put it in the top 10 posts for 2025.

Toward the end of the year, I signed up for the Google Console to try to learn more about how you are finding my material. However, I also noticed a significant dip in traffic around the same time. I’m thinking that may have been a mistake. If anyone out there has experience with that, let me know. Ostensibly I did that so I could increase traffic, but I think it may be downgrading me on the searches, even though I think my SEO skills are pretty good. My church used my posts on John’s gospel for its church-wide small-group Bible studies this past fall. Romans is up next for this spring, and I’ve been invited to kick off that study to the small groups in February.

Peace to all and Happy New Year! Thank you for reading.

PS: Look for a couple posts in the near future about our family trip to Poland and Prague over the Christmas holiday.

Romans

Gospel of John

Top 10 Bible Posts 2025

  1. Speaking in Tongues (γλῶσσα glōssa, 1 Corinthians 12–14)
  2. “Bones” in the Bible: Why I Do NOT Want to Be Cremated at Death
  3. Helmet of Salvation (Isaiah 59:17, Ephesians 6:17)
  4. “Falling Away” (παραπίπτω parapiptō) in Hebrews 6:6
  5. The Temple of Artemis of the Ephesians as Background for Understanding 1 Timothy 2
  6. “Seer” in Old Testament: A Hebrew Word Study
  7. Indignant Jesus: The Variant Reading of Mark 1:41 (NIV & TNIV)
  8. “I Am the Way and the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6)
  9. Take Heart! (θαρσέω tharseō, Matthew 9:2, 22)
  10. Jesus, the Good Shepherd (John 10:22–30)

Trending Up in 2025

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In late April 2023, I published a post on a non-Bible topic analyzing an oft-debated viral equation that is poorly understood. At the end of June of that year, the post went viral and has continued to dominate the top spot representing about half the views to my blog in the past two years. It is my most-viewed post of all time in the blog’s 14-year history. I have written several other blog posts on the subject and have made three videos for the Rumble platform. I list all the articles and videos here in reverse chronological order along with the dates they were published.

Top Non-Bible Topic Posts

  1. Stocking’s Order: 2(2 + 2) as a Singular Semantic Element July 5, 2025
  2. 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1: End the Ambiguity! Make a Rule!
  3. 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1: A Discussion with ChatGPT on the Implications of Juxtaposition in Mathematics March 23, 2025
  4. Stocking’s Order: Juxtapositional Grouping Is Foundational (Rumble Video) March 7, 2025
  5. Stocking’s Order: Implicit Constructions Correct the Misapplication of Order of Operations February 23, 2025
  6. Stocking’s Order; or Why 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1 (Rumble Video) Late December 2024
  7. The correct way to solve viral math expressions. (Rumble Video) Early December 2024.
  8. The PEMDAS Chronicles: Confronting Social Media Ignorance of PEMDAS’s Theoretical Foundation April 1, 2024
  9. 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1, Part 2: A Defense of the Linguistic Argument March 16, 2024
  10. Toward an “Active” PEMDAS: Strengthening Its Theoretical Foundation May 29, 2023
  11. 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = 1: Why PEMDAS Alone Is Not Enough April 28, 2023

Other All-Time Top Posts

Baptism and Forgiveness

Intersection With Cultural Issues

August 4, 2026

Podcast Episode: Baptism And Christian Life (Romans Podcast Part 4)

Filed under: Christology,Faith, Faithfulness,Greek,Immersion/Baptism,Repentance,Romans,Soteriology — Scott Stocking @ 9:45 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog, where the footnotes go six layers deep and the baptismal theology is somehow more soaking wet than you’d expect.

Mara: Scott Stocking has been doing a deep dive into Romans, and what surfaces is a case that baptism and the call to be a living sacrifice are more tightly connected than most readings let on. That’s the territory we’re covering today.

Pip: Let’s start with that connection — baptism as theology, not ceremony.

Baptism as Living Sacrifice: Romans 6 and 12:1

Mara: The central claim here is that Romans 6 and Romans 12:1 are not two separate ideas — they are one continuous argument, and baptism is the hinge between them.

Pip: And the evidence for that hinge is a single Greek word that shows up five times in Romans 6 and then reappears exactly when Paul says what he means by a living sacrifice.

Mara: Right — the word is paristēmi, translated “offer.” It appears throughout Romans 6 as Paul urges believers to offer themselves to God and then surfaces again in 12:1: “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship.”

Pip: So the living sacrifice of chapter 12 is not a new instruction — it is a callback to what baptism already accomplished.

Mara: Exactly. And to understand why, you have to follow Paul’s logic from the earlier part of Romans 6. The setup is verses 3 through 5: “Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

Mara: What that means in practice is that baptism is not primarily a public declaration — it is the moment of union with Christ’s death and resurrection. The believer does not merely symbolize something; they participate in it.

Pip: Which reframes the famous last verse of Romans 6 considerably. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” — usually read as a warning — is actually, on this reading, an affirmation for people who have already come through baptism.

Mara: That is precisely the argument. Because Christ paid the wages of sin on the cross, and because baptism unites the believer with that crucifixion, the verse functions as a confirmation of what has already happened, not a threat about what might.

Pip: The obedience Paul keeps returning to — his stated theme from Romans 1:5 all the way to 16:26 — is not a checklist. It is what life in Christ’s presence actually looks like after baptism.

Mara: And that reading is reinforced in the earlier post on the mystery of immersion, which makes a closely related case: that immersion is “the glue that ties the two pillars of the faith — Christ’s death and his subsequent resurrection — together.” That post works through the benefits linked to each pillar separately, from justification and reconciliation on the death side, to bearing fruit and victory over death on the resurrection side.

Pip: Both posts land in the same place — baptism is not peripheral, not merely a work of the flesh, not optional color commentary on the real theology happening elsewhere.

Mara: The phrase from the immersion post is worth sitting with: immersion is “a near-complete picture of who we are and what we have in Christ.”

Pip: Romans as a unified argument, baptism as the hinge, and the living sacrifice not as a new ask but as a return to the starting point.

Mara: There is more in Romans to surface. We will be back when the next posts land.

August 3, 2026

Podcast Episode: Faithfulness And Righteousness in Christ (Romans Podcast Part 3)

Filed under: Christology,Christology,Ecclesiology,Evangelism,Faith, Faithfulness,Greek,Matthew Gospel of,Righteousness,Romans — Scott Stocking @ 9:40 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog, where the word “therefore” is never just a transition — it’s a theological event horizon.

Mara: Scott Stocking brings us two sermons this episode, both circling the same gravitational center: how Christ’s faithfulness, not just our own, is what justification actually rests on. We move from Romans 5 to the temptation in the desert and back again.

Pip: Let’s start with what Paul is actually arguing in Romans 5 and why the word “faith” might be doing double duty.

Justified by Christ’s Faithfulness

Mara: The post works through Romans 5:1–12 as part of a longer Romans study, and the central question it raises is whether “faith” in Paul’s letters refers only to our belief — or also to Christ’s own faithfulness to his mission.

Pip: And the answer, apparently, is both, which changes the weight of the whole argument considerably. The post frames it this way, reading from Romans 1:17: “For in the gospel the Righteousness of God is revealed — from faithfulness into faithfulness, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faithfulness.'”

Mara: What this means in practice is that the “Righteousness of God” Paul invokes isn’t an abstract moral standard — it refers to Jesus himself. Jesus is the Righteousness of God, and his faithfulness to the cross is what makes our justification possible in the first place.

Pip: So when Paul writes “justified through faith” in 5:1 and then pivots to “justified by his blood” in 5:9, he isn’t contradicting himself — he’s showing the two sides of one coin. Christ’s faithfulness is the foundation; our trust is the response.

Mara: The post also tracks a structural shift in Romans that’s easy to miss as a casual reader. In chapters 1 through 4, Paul uses words for faith or faithfulness 27 times and words for life only twice. In chapters 5 through 8, those numbers nearly reverse — 25 occurrences of life and live, and only 2 for faith.

Pip: That’s a deliberate rhetorical gear change, not an accident.

Mara: Exactly — and it lands hardest in verse 8, which the post calls “somewhat profound”: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” No prior cleanup required.

Pip: The historical context sharpens that. Paul is writing to a Roman congregation where Jewish believers had been expelled and were only now returning to find Gentile house churches still thriving — so the unity argument isn’t abstract theology, it’s pastoral triage.

Mara: And perseverance under that pressure is precisely what builds the character and hope Paul describes in verses 3 through 5. That thread connects directly to what Jesus himself modeled when his own faithfulness was put to the test.

Walking in Jesus’s Righteousness

Mara: The second sermon takes up Matthew 4:1–11 alongside Romans 5:12–19, and the framing question is pointed: where Adam failed under temptation, what did Jesus actually do differently, and what does that mean for everyone who comes after?

Pip: The post opens with a comparison most sermons wouldn’t lead with — that Satanism is an oxymoron — but it earns the setup, because the whole argument depends on understanding what Satan is actually after.

Mara: The key move comes in Romans 5:19, quoted directly: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”

Pip: So the upshot is that Jesus’s obedience isn’t just a moral example — it’s the structural reversal of Adam’s failure. One act of faithful obedience undoes what one act of disobedience broke.

Mara: The post draws a careful parallel: Satan used the same three categories against Jesus in the desert — appetite, spectacle, and power — that he used against Eve in the garden. Jesus refused each one by knowing exactly what God had actually promised, not the distorted version Satan offered.

Pip: And the post makes the point that what made the crucifixion uniquely effective wasn’t only perfect legal obedience to the Law — it was love. Bulls and goats couldn’t love anyone. Jesus could and did.

Mara: Which is why the post lands where it does: believers are “in Christ” in a concrete sense, baptized into his death, freed from the law’s demands, and called to walk in the righteousness he earned and extends to them.

Pip: Two sermons, one through-line — Christ’s faithfulness is prior to ours, and that sequence matters for everything that follows.

Mara: Romans keeps pulling the thread. There’s still the second half of Romans 6 ahead, so this conversation isn’t finished.

Pip: Neither, apparently, is Paul’s.

August 2, 2026

Podcast Episode: Faithfulness In Romans (Part 2)

Filed under: Christology,Ecclesiology,Faith, Faithfulness,forgiveness,Grace,Greek,Righteousness,Romans,Soteriology — Scott Stocking @ 3:28 pm
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Part 1 of the Romans podcast series may be found here.

Pip: Welcome to Sunday Morning Greek Blog, where the coffee is hot and the participles are passive — and sometimes that’s the whole point.

Mara: Scott Stocking is our guide this episode, working through Romans with a close eye on the Greek text — what words like pistis and dikaiosyne actually mean, and why the translation choices matter for how we understand salvation.

Pip: Let’s start with the Romans Road and what happens when you read it in the original language.

Romans 3:23–24 and the Faithfulness That Saves

Pip: The post on Romans 3:23–24 opens a question most readers skip right past: when Paul says we are justified by faith, whose faith is he actually talking about — ours, or Christ’s?

Mara: The post frames it this way: “For all who are being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came through Messiah Jesus sinned and are lacking the glory of God.” That rearrangement of word order is deliberate — the participle dikaioumenoi, meaning “who are being justified,” attaches directly to “all,” making justification an ongoing process, not a completed event.

Pip: So the grammar itself is doing theological work. Being justified is present tense, active right now, not a box you checked at conversion.

Mara: Exactly. And that present-tense framing connects to a comparison with Ephesians 2:8, where the parallel construction swaps “through the redemption in Christ Jesus” for “through faithfulness, and this not from yourselves.” The argument is that the faithfulness in view is Christ’s — his obedience to the cross — not a quantity of belief we have to produce on our own.

Pip: Which dissolves a question that has quietly tormented a lot of Christians: do I have enough faith to be saved? If the faithfulness is Christ’s, the answer is structurally irrelevant to us.

Mara: The post makes that point directly. If salvation rests on our faith, it becomes relative — how much is enough? But if it rests on Christ’s faithfulness, the statement becomes absolute. Our own trust in Jesus is, as the post puts it, “not so much for the purpose of being saved but the result of being saved.”

Pip: That’s a quiet but significant inversion of how the passage usually gets preached.

Mara: The companion piece on pistis across Romans 1–5 develops this at length. It argues that the phrase pisteos Iesou Christou — “the faithfulness of Jesus Christ” — in Romans 3:22 is a subjective genitive: Christ is the one being faithful, not merely the object of our faith. The post traces that reading through the whole arc of Romans 1–5, from God’s wrath under the Law in chapters 1 through 3, to Abraham’s faithfulness in chapter 4, to the application in chapter 5.

Mara: The inclusio that brackets the entire letter is telling: the phrase eis hypakoēn pisteōs — “into obedience of faithfulness” — appears in both 1:5 and 16:26, the first and last occurrences of pistis in Romans. That structural frame suggests Paul’s whole argument is about faithful obedience, not faith as a discrete interior event.

Pip: So Romans is less a manual for how to believe and more a demonstration that Christ already did the believing on our behalf — and we walk in the wake of that.

Mara: With the caveat that our own faithfulness still matters — the post is careful to say this doesn’t imply universalism or unconditional security, but rather a call to trust more deeply because God has already demonstrated his reliability. Works, confession, and obedience all follow from that trust.

Pip: From the mechanics of justification to the question of who the righteous one actually is — that thread runs all the way back to Romans 1:17, which is where the deeper argument begins.

Mara: The thread connecting both posts is really one question: what kind of faithfulness is Romans built on, and does the Greek text change the answer?

Pip: Turns out the grammar has opinions. Next time, we’ll see where else those opinions show up.

August 1, 2026

Podcast Episode: Spiritual Warfare in Ephesians

Filed under: Ecclesiology,Ephesians,Eschatology,Greek,Pneumatology,Spiritual Warfare — Scott Stocking @ 6:46 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog — where the armor of God comes with footnotes, a chiastic structure, and Walter Wink citations. Scott Stocking has been thinking hard about Ephesians, and the result is not a quiet devotional.

Mara: That’s right. Today we’re digging into Ephesians — its architecture, its theology of power, and what spiritual warfare actually looks like when you take the text seriously. Let’s start with what Paul was building.

Spiritual Warfare in Ephesians

Pip: Ephesians has a reputation as Paul’s most polished letter, but the post here argues it’s also one of his most structurally deliberate — a chiastic architecture with spiritual warfare running through it as a subtheme, not a footnote.

Mara: The phrase that anchors it all is “in the heavenly realms” — used five times in Ephesians. And chapter 6 makes the stakes plain: “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Pip: So the heavenly realms aren’t simply heaven. They span good and evil — which raises the obvious question of who exactly is living there.

Mara: That’s where Walter Wink comes in. His framework, drawn from his Powers trilogy and condensed in The Powers That Be, describes these entities as created by God to steward human institutions — families, corporations, governments — but subject to corruption by the people inside them.

Pip: Created good, fallen, and in need of redemption. Which is, frankly, a description that fits most institutions I’ve encountered.

Mara: The post works through concrete examples — Enron as a case of institutional corruption feeding on itself, Tylenol’s 1980s recall as a case of a corporation doing the right thing and sending a message that reverberated through the corporate world.

Pip: And then it turns personal. Westboro Baptist gets named as a case study in what spiritual warfare is not — protests that fuel the violence of the powers rather than redeeming them.

Mara: The alternative the post argues for is love as the primary instrument. Not tolerance of wrongdoing, but direct relational engagement — and prayer underneath all of it. Wink is quoted again: “Prayer is never a private inner act disconnected from day-to-day realities. It is, rather, the interior battlefield where the decisive victory is won before any engagement in the outer world is even possible.”

Pip: So action without prayer is self-justifying good works. Prayer without action is incomplete. The post holds both together — and lands on love, not protest, as the mode.

Mara: Exactly. And that framing — what we do in visible institutions reflects and shapes invisible powers — is what makes the Ephesians structure matter beyond the outline.

Pip: The architecture of the letter and the theology of the powers turn out to be the same argument.

Mara: What stays with me is that “in the heavenly realms” doing so much work — from blessing in chapter one to spiritual combat in chapter six.

Pip: Same letter, same phrase, completely different register. That’s worth sitting with until next time.

July 31, 2026

Podcast Episode: The Meaning of Baptism

Filed under: 1 Peter,forgiveness,Greek,Immersion/Baptism,John Gospel of,Luke Gospel of,Mark Gospel of,Matthew Gospel of,Romans,Soteriology — Scott Stocking @ 8:23 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog — where the Greek is original and the theology is anything but shallow.

Mara: Scott Stocking has been working through one of the more contested questions in New Testament theology: what immersion actually does, what Peter and Paul meant by it, and whether the word itself carries more weight than most translations let on.

Pip: Let’s start with the text that says it most plainly — 1 Peter 3.

Baptism as Event, Not Ritual

Mara: The question driving these posts is deceptively simple: does immersion save, and if so, how does it work — what gives the water any power at all?

Pip: First Peter 3:21 is the sharpest answer in the New Testament, and the post on that passage offers a translation that cuts through the usual hedging: “This immersion now saves you through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, not the body-dirt removal immersion, but the clear-conscience-pledge to God immersion.”

Mara: So the power is not in the water itself. The resurrection is the qualifier — it is what carries the person through immersion the way the floodwater carried the ark. Without that phrase at the end of the verse, the whole thing collapses into ritual.

Pip: And the Greek grammar backs that reading up. The relative pronoun at the start of verse 21 is neuter, which means it points back to water, not to the ark — Peter is saying the flood water corresponds to immersion, not that the ark does.

Mara: The post on The Mystery of Immersion picks up that thread and pushes it further, asking whether ascribing salvific power to immersion while calling the Lord’s Table a mere symbol is a theological inconsistency — either both carry mysterious power, or both are symbols.

Pip: That is a genuinely uncomfortable corner to be argued into.

Mara: Mystery of Immersion, Part Two lands the argument more firmly. It reads Romans 6 as the centerpiece of Paul’s entire theological argument in chapters 1 through 11, with immersion as the event that binds Christ’s death and resurrection together in a single act.

Pip: So immersion is not a footnote to salvation — it is, in Paul’s architecture, the load-bearing joint.

Mara: The Part Two post puts it this way: immersion is “the glue that ties the two pillars of the faith together.” United with Christ’s death, the believer receives justification, reconciliation, and a cleansed conscience. United with the resurrection, they bear fruit and share the victory over death.

Mara: And across all three posts, one consistent boundary holds: a purely outward act, the “dunk and ditch” version, accomplishes nothing — the pledge of a clear conscience is what makes the event real.

Pip: From water as typology to Romans as architecture — the question underneath all of it is what it means to be all-in for Christ.

Pip: Three posts, one through-line: immersion is not where the journey ends — it is where it starts in earnest.

Mara: The Greek keeps pulling that thread. More to come.

Podcast Episode: Romans And Faithful Obedience

Filed under: Christology,Faith, Faithfulness,Greek,Immersion/Baptism,Righteousness,Romans,Soteriology,Textual Criticism — Scott Stocking @ 5:50 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog is back, and if you thought Paul’s letter to the Romans was just a greatest-hits playlist of salvation verses, Scott Stocking is here to walk you through the whole road — construction specs included.

Mara: Scott Stocking covers two connected territories this episode: what righteousness actually means in Romans, and how the phrase “obedience of faithfulness” functions as the letter’s spine from opening greeting to closing benediction.

Pip: Let’s start with righteousness — and what it costs to define it carefully.

Righteousness as Foundation

Mara: The central question in this segment is what Paul means by “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 — and whether it’s something God hands over to believers, or something embodied in a person.

Pip: The answer lands hard. The post sets up Romans 1:17 carefully, then offers this reading: “The righteousness of God then isn’t an object to be given. It is embodied in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the righteousness of God.”

Mara: The upshot is that righteousness isn’t a transaction — it’s a participation. Because Jesus fulfilled every requirement of the law, he alone is called righteous, and believers share in that only by being “in Christ.”

Pip: Which reframes the familiar Romans Road considerably. The post uses a road-construction metaphor that actually earns its keep: righteousness is the substructure — the rebar, the compacted earth, the dowel bars — and Jesus’s faithfulness is the surface we walk on.

Mara: Romans 1:17 gets parsed as “from faithfulness into faithfulness” — Jesus’s perfect obedience to the law moving into his faithfulness unto death on the cross. The post ties that directly to Philippians 2:8: “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross.”

Pip: So “obedience of faithfulness” in Romans 1:5 isn’t just a theological motto. It points, specifically, to the crucifixion.

Mara: Romans 2 extends this. Paul warns both Jews and Gentiles against hypocrisy — knowing the law isn’t the same as following it. The post notes that circumcision and baptism function as parallel initiation rites in Paul’s argument, and reads Romans 2:25–29 as groundwork for the baptism discussion coming in chapter 6.

Pip: The small-group kickoff context matters here — this is a congregation being asked to read Romans one chapter at a time, and the post is honest that chapters 1 and 2 alone carry enough freight to slow anyone down.

Mara: That honesty is part of the argument. The post closes the Romans 1 and 2 discussion with a summary worth quoting directly: if we remain faithful to living in the righteousness of Christ, then as Romans 2:13 says, “we’ll be declared righteous when we stand before our maker.”

Pip: Which brings us to the phrase that holds all of this together — and how it functions across the whole letter.

The Obedience of Faithfulness

Mara: The question the second post takes up is whether “obedience of faithfulness” is a throwaway greeting formula or the actual organizing theme of Romans — and the answer is the latter.

Pip: The post on “Obedience of Faithfulness: A Walk On the Romans Road” opens with personal testimony but arrives at a precise textual claim. Paul, it argues, “told us what he was going to say, he said it, and he told us he said it” — the phrase appears in Romans 1:5 and again, word for word, in the closing benediction of Romans 16.

Mara: That’s not a coincidence. The Greek is only two words, and the post explains that the structure implies the terms define each other: “obedience is faithfulness, and faithfulness is obedience.” Faith, in this reading, is never purely intellectual — it always carries action with it.

Pip: The post traces this through baptism in Romans 6, reading immersion as the believer’s own enactment of the pattern — buried with Christ, raised to new life. That’s the “obedience of faithfulness” made physical.

Mara: And Romans 12:1–2 closes the arc: “Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” and “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The post is careful to note these are promises for life now, not only for life after death.

Pip: Two posts, one through-line — the road Paul built was always meant to be walked.

Mara: Righteousness as foundation, faithfulness as the road you actually travel — that’s the frame Romans keeps returning to.

Pip: Next time, we’ll see where else on the blog that road leads.

July 30, 2026

Podcast Episode: Does the Structure of Exodus 21:1–27 Tell the Patriarchs’ Story?

Filed under: Exodus,forgiveness,Greek,Hebrew,Moses,Righteousness,Ten Commandments (Decalogue) — Scott Stocking @ 8:19 pm
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Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog — where the laws of ancient Israel turn out to be hiding a family scandal the whole time.

Mara: Today we’re following Scott Stocking into the structural heart of Exodus 21, where a chiasm built around slavery, parents, and kidnapping turns out to be pointing directly at the patriarchs.

Pip: Let’s start with the structure itself and what it reveals.

Does Exodus 21 Hide the Patriarchs’ Story?

Mara: The post opens with a seminary assignment — Exodus 21:12–27 — but when the Hebrew text revealed that verses 1–27 formed a complete paragraph, the scope expanded, and so did the discovery.

Pip: And what the expanded passage reveals is a chiasm — ideas presented in one order, then mirrored in reverse, with the most important element locked at the center.

Mara: The center, in this case, is kidnapping. And the post explains why that placement matters: “Kidnapping was the ultimate form of mistreatment of another person. That is why it was at the center of the passage.”

Pip: So the architecture of the law is doing theological work — the center of the structure is the center of the argument, not just a formatting choice.

Mara: Right, and the Hebrew confirms it. The word translated “kidnap” is the phrase meaning “the one stealing a man,” using the same root — ganav — as “steal” in the Ten Commandments. Same word, much higher stakes.

Pip: Stealing a man means removing him from his covenant community and erasing the life he had planned. That is not a footnote crime.

Mara: Which is why it sits flanked by laws about striking or cursing parents, and by the Hebrew slave provisions that open and close the passage — all of them potentially capital offenses, all gathered under the shadow of the lex talionis.

Pip: And then the historical context lands, and the whole structure suddenly reads like an indictment.

Mara: Exactly. Joseph’s brothers kidnapped him, sold him into slavery, and lied to their father — which the post calls equivalent to a curse. The first law code after the Ten Commandments is a direct mirror of what Israel did to its own.

Pip: The message being: you are the case study. The law you just received describes crimes you already committed.

Mara: The post frames it plainly — even though God intended it for good, that cannot become an excuse. Structure and context together make the passage a warning, not just a statute.

Pip: Moses built a legal code that doubles as a confession. That is a long way from a seminary homework assignment.

Mara: The deeper point is that how a text is arranged is part of what it means — structure carries argument.

Pip: Which means reading carefully is not optional. It’s the whole job.

July 29, 2026

Podcast Episode: The Temple of Artemis of the Ephesians as Background for Understanding 1 Timothy

Filed under: Greek — Scott Stocking @ 6:35 pm
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Be sure to click the links in the transcript to the full articles.

Pip: Welcome to Sunday Morning Greek Blog — where the ancient world has opinions about your church bylaws, and those opinions come with footnotes.

Mara: Scott Stocking is back with a deep dive into one of the most contested passages in the New Testament — first Timothy chapter 2, and what the Temple of Artemis has to do with reading it honestly.

Pip: Let’s start with the goddess in the room.

The Temple of Artemis and What Paul Was Actually Addressing

Mara: The central question here is whether Paul’s instructions to women in first Timothy 2 reflect timeless prohibitions or something far more specific — a particular city, a particular cult, and a particular moment in early church history.

Pip: The post opens with Ephesus as a major trade city in western Asia Minor, home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. And the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary describes the goddess Artemis as portrayed as “a more mature woman. Her robe is draped in such a way as to expose her bosom, which is covered with multiple breasts, depicting her gift of fertility and nurture.”

Mara: So the upshot is that the women Paul is addressing were living in the shadow of a major fertility cult — and some may have been former priestesses themselves, transitioning out of temple service into married Christian life.

Pip: Which reframes verses 9 through 12 considerably. Paul’s instructions about modest dress, braided hair, gold, and pearls aren’t random modesty rules — one search for images of Artemis priestesses confirms those were exactly the markers of pagan religious status.

Mara: And the Greek text supports a less restrictive reading than the surface suggests. The word translated “silence” — hēsychia — is better rendered “in an orderly manner.” It appears earlier in chapter two describing the kind of peaceful, ordered lives Paul wants for everyone, not a command for women to be mute.

Pip: The post also unpacks the adverb hōsautōs — “in the same way” — which links Paul’s expectations for women directly to his expectations for men, and those same character traits appear again in chapter three for overseers.

Mara: On the verse about women being “saved through childbearing,” the argument is that this was pastoral reassurance: former virgin priestesses, whose holiness had been defined by celibacy, needed to hear that marriage and motherhood still made them full members of the body of Christ.

Pip: The Artemis connection runs deeper still — an additional note in the post cites Apollodorus on the legend that Artemis herself served as midwife at Apollo’s birth, which is why women in labor called on her. Paul may have been redirecting that devotion entirely.

Mara: The companion piece, Qualifications of Male and Female Leaders in the Church, extends this reading into first Timothy 3, where the same Greek terms for propriety and self-discipline that describe women in chapter two are applied directly to overseers.

Pip: Context, it turns out, does a lot of heavy lifting.

Mara: What holds all of this together is the insistence that a text written to a specific city, in a specific cultural moment, cannot be read as if it dropped from the sky without an address.

Pip: The Temple of Artemis is rubble now, but apparently it still has things to teach us about first Timothy. More Greek next time.

July 28, 2026

One-Eyed Kings

Filed under: Eschatology,Government — Scott Stocking @ 9:12 pm
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I have a two-week break from preaching, so I’m trying to clean up some files that are starting to overcrowd my now limited hard-drive space. I came across a “Writings” folder I haven’t used in forever that has old homework assignments, church newsletter articles I had written, and copies of old blog posts from HarvestNet, where I had an ongoing debate with a guy named “SpeaksinTongues” about that particular spiritual gift. The following is an article I had evidently written for the church newsletter, although I never remember that church publishing a regular newsletter. It’s still as relevant today as it was in 2007, so I offer it here.

As I was editing a book recently, I serendipitously encountered a profound proverb in Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary: au pays des aveugles les borgnes sont rois. I could barely pronounce this French saying, but fortunately the meaning was not lost in the English translation that accompanied it: “in the country of the blind the one-eyed men are kings.”

Immediately I recalled Frank Peretti’s second book on spiritual warfare, Piercing the Darkness. Early in that story, a television news crew is covering a story about a controversy at a Christian school; Peretti’s narrative is astounding: “The cameraman set the camera on his shoulder and started watching the news with one eye.”

I could jump up on my soapbox and complain about how most network news is biased against Christian principles and morality, but most of us already know that. Less than seven percent of television, motion picture, and news media elite attend church on a weekly basis according to a 1990’s survey by The Center for the Study of Social and Political Change at Smith College, so it is easy to see why they have a bias. The one-eyed media monster has set itself up as the judge of right and wrong in our society. Many times their judgments are contrary to Scripture, because most do not know what the Scriptures really say.

But I am more concerned about the first part of the French proverb cited above. Have Christians, myself included, turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the cultural decay around us? Do the problems that plague our society overwhelm us to the point that we do not think we can make a difference? I for one have grown tired of hearing of the almost daily assault on Christian values and principles. Tyrannical judges (and the media who praise them) say, for example, that constitutional amendments affirming the Christian view of marriage, approved by the majority of voters in a state (e.g., Nebraska, 2005), are unconstitutional. How can this be?

I hope that Christians will, like Ezekiel’s watchman, keep both eyes open to counter the influence of the media Cyclopes [plural of Cyclops], in order to reclaim and proclaim God’s truth to a world that is seeking a moral compass.

My opinions are my own

Pastor Scott Stocking, M.Div.

July 27, 2026

Podcast Episode: Creation “What Ifs…?”: Part I (Genesis 1)

Filed under: Greek — Scott Stocking @ 8:10 pm
Tags: , , , ,

Pip: Sunday Morning Greek Blog is where you go when you want your Genesis commentary to casually brush up against particle physics — and somehow it works.

Mara: Scott Stocking’s latest post opens a series asking what the creation narrative in Genesis 1 might look like if you take both the biblical text and the natural sciences seriously at the same time. Let’s start with those creation “what-ifs.”

Creation “What Ifs…?”: Reading Genesis 1 with Open Questions

Pip: The tension this post sets up is a real one — if you hold to a literal six-day creation and also believe matter is eternal, those two commitments are going to bump into each other eventually. The question is whether that collision is a problem or a starting point.

Mara: The post frames it as a starting point. On the age of the earth and what Genesis 1:1–2 actually implies, the argument opens here: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

Pip: So verse 2 is doing more work than it usually gets credit for. The earth and its waters are already present before Day 1 even begins — which raises the question of how long they had been there.

Mara: That is exactly the pivot the post makes. The argument is that “In the beginning” may function less as a timestamp and more as a preface — covering whatever preparatory work preceded Genesis 1:3. The suggestion is that God may have allowed the physical laws he created to operate over a long span of time before the six days of creative work began.

Pip: Which is not the same as deism — the post is careful about that. God initiating the Big Bang with natural laws already in place is not the same as God walking away from the carnival ride.

Mara: Right. And that distinction matters for how the waters in verse 2 are read. If the earth already had liquid water before Day 1, it was not a cold, dead rock. The post raises the possibility that prebiotic processes — microcellular life, the basic infrastructure of the circle of life — may have been part of that pre-Day-1 preparation, even if Genesis doesn’t name them explicitly.

Pip: Genesis being written for people who couldn’t peer through a microscope is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but it’s a fair point.

Mara: There is also a theological turn near the end. The Spirit of God hovering over the waters in verse 2 becomes a typological image — the Holy Spirit as the unseen sustainer, supporting life the way prebiotic processes support physical existence. The post notes that the Holy Spirit is the least visually described member of the Trinity, and finds that absence meaningful rather than incidental.

Pip: The flood narrative and what geologists and Intelligent Design researchers make of it are coming in Part II — which means the most geologically contentious questions are still ahead.

Mara: What stays with me is the core move — treating the gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:3 as theologically significant space rather than a problem to explain away.

Pip: Formless, empty, and full of open questions. Part II should be interesting.

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