First Blog - Enns review of Beale in BBR

In an effort to start writing regularly, I have entered the blog world. Enough banal chit-chat, let's begin...

I've just now read Enns’s review of Beale on Inerrancy, in the Bulletin for Biblical Research 19.4:

Enns is repeatedly smug and condescending in his his tone, though in an extremely slick way, to make himself sound gracious. E.g. He writes: "I do not seem to have been successful in my previous responses to convince Beale that further scholarly dialogue is needed." I'm quite sure that Beale has communicated this exactly - "No, we don't need to be scholarly about this!" Me thinks not, Enns.

Concerning the ‘natural way’ of understanding the Scriptures which Beale advocates and Enns evidently opposes: one would think that Jesus' audience, in order to understand Him properly, (and remember, keeping the original audience in mind is the golden rule of interpretation, especially for Enns/Wright type theologians) they would have to have a PhD in not only Biblical studies, but also be conversant with archaeology, ANE religion & cultural backgrounds, and textual criticism. What the issues break down into are these: Was Jesus wrong that Isaiah penned the Old Testament book bearing him name, or not? Would Jesus have expected his audience to have known all of the above, to grasp what he was saying? If the issues are that complex and Isaiah was penned by several authors (and you would need to know all of the above to understand Jesus), then why didn't Jesus simply say: "As Isaiah, et al say....."

After a mere one hour of cruising around on the blogosphere, it seems that so many young, increasingly-disillusioned, Reformed types who want to have Jesus in one hand and intellectual respectability (in the eyes of the pagan world) in the other - are very quick to say that they can't stand Beale-type obscurantists....while writers on the other said (in this case, Enns) are doing the exact same thing.