To Those Seeming

In applying Galatians 2:6: "And from those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)--those, I say, who seemed influential added nothing to me", Peter Oakes writes:

A God who does not regard reputation is good news for most Christians, then and now. Belief in such a God also relieves the pressure to expend energy in seeking status and reputation....Galatians 2:6 suggests that there is something wrong with their vision of God if members of a church do not interact with one another as equals, if they do not resist carrying across into church life either the status ranking endemic in society or the new status ranking that easily grows up within a group that meets over a long period, such as a church. In the first century, this required avoiding both carrying Greco-Roman household hierarchies into assembly life and also inventing new hierarchies... [Galatians, Paideia Commentaries on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), p. 74.]

Historiography: A Purposeful Presentation

"Historiography is not the mere statement of facts but the shaping of these facts for a particular purpose. To put it another way, historiography is an attempt to relay to someone the significance of history....All historiography is a literary product, which means it is about people writing down (or transmitting orally) their version of that history. In other words, historiography is by definition an interpretive exercise....Anyone who communicates historical events must be very selective about what is communicated. You simply can't say everything, nor would you want to. You say only those things that are important to the point you want to get across. Also, you will say those things in such a way that will drive your point home. In other words, this presentation, this literary product, looks the way it does because the author has a purpose in mind for why those events should be reported. The presentation is not divorced from the events, but it is a purposeful representation of those events." Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evengelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, second edition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), pp. 48-50.