Tag Archives: biblical interpretation

Daniel Daddeh and the Lord’s Prayer: From “Thy” to “My”

Daniel Daddeh’s reading of the Lord’s Prayer is rhetorically clever, but spiritually false. What begins in the Gospels with “Thy” — thy name, thy kingdom, thy will — is quietly transformed into “My”: my desired state, my manifestation, my fulfilment. The result is not a recovery of Christian prayer, but a modern spirituality of acquisition dressed in biblical language.

On Prayer

Prayer is often understood as asking for things, but in the Gospels it appears as something quite different. It is not a means of control, but a moment of release — a stepping back from the self and a return to what is real. In prayer, one lets go, sees more clearly, and, however briefly, is set in the right direction.

The Gospels Before Doctrine: Memory, Psychology, and the Loss of the Inward Way

A reflection on the psychological genius of the Gospel writers — not as supernatural scribes, but as master interpreters of Jewish symbolism and human interior life. This essay explores how living insight hardened into doctrine, how resurrection reshaped Christianity’s centre of gravity, and why the Gospels still endure as a call to inward transformation rather than metaphysical certainty.

The Good Sense in Paul

Paul is often read as a theologian of sin, salvation, and cosmic order. Read instead as a moral psychologist and community ethicist, a different Paul emerges: perceptive about fear, ego, judgement, and love. This essay argues that his most enduring insights lie not in cosmology, but in his understanding of how fragile human communities survive — or fail.

When the Gospels Became Government: How Texts Turned into Law

Christianity began as fluid storytelling, not as a system of rules. Yet within four centuries, oral traditions hardened into authoritative texts used to define doctrine, regulate behaviour, and support imperial power. This essay traces how the Gospels moved from living memories of Jesus to instruments of governance, shaping the Church and the civilisation built around it.

The Teacher Who Defied His Own Legend: Expectation, Misfire, and the Authentic Voice of Jesus

Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on a donkey was not a triumph but a misfired symbol—an ironic gesture the crowds misunderstood and ultimately rejected. Beneath the Gospels’ later sanitising lies a teacher who defied the messianic expectations imposed on him, and whose authentic voice survives most clearly in his startling, poetic moral teaching.

What Paul Talks About Most—and What He Means by “Christ”

A fresh reading of Paul reveals a profound shift: the apostle transforms the concrete, moral Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels into a cosmic and interior reality. By blending word-frequency analysis with the meanings of Christos and Paul’s near-Gnostic metaphysics, this essay explores how the “Jesus event” became reinterpreted as a universal, communal mystery — far beyond its original first-century context.