About

New Testament slash History is Story, Chronology & Classical Context.

Story: Christian scripture is a sourcebook for exploring our heritage and envisioning our future. Christian heritage is an endless saga, but its various episodes each have a beginning, middle and end.  Christian vision is least mature when monolithic, and most dynamic when four-dimensional. Whether developing innovative new projects or continually revitalizing spiritual traditions, every church must write its own story within its own time, as did each of the earliest churches. Thus, NT/History makes good narrative fertilizer.

Chronology: The bedrock of history is chronology, which requires both sequence and timing. Whether one's view of History leans toward causation and influence or interdependence and chaos, events never take place in a vacuum. History is development, growth, change, stimulus, response, adaptation & innovation. The context of the scripture is the world and the time to which it refers. The events of the New Testament are only "historical" to the extent that they can be related to one another, sequentially.

Classical Context: Background is helpful. Connection is far better. Integration beats all. The posts on this site explore, tentatively, ways in which so-called "New Testament Backgrounds" might be woven together more cohesively with the purported narratives of the NT itself. The Jesus movement impacted the world of the Herods and Caesars but remained bounded within it. The Christ of scripture, and his original churches, deserve to be fully respected, as they were in that context, before we appropriate them into ours.




Bill Heroman is about 6'3" and about forty-ish; a retired Math teacher, amateur christian historian and freelance logistics savant; the world's friendliest introvert, a radical conservative independent, profoundly challenged olfactory-wise, and occasionally hysterical on facebook. Religiously, Bill is post-episcopalian, post-evangelical, post-'house church'er, and post dumb about politics. He hopes to exhaust this obsession with historical study sometime before Jesus returns... which really ought to be any century now.