Tag: Kingdom of God
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What a Tangled Web …
Around the year 30, in a provincial backwater in the Roman Empire called Judea, on the banks of the Jordan, a young man appeared. He came under the spell of the fiery preaching of John the Baptiser, threw in his lot with him, and was immersed in the river. It wasn’t long before he became […]
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Rethinking Jesus (06) His Core Message
According to Mark, (the earliest Gospel), after his baptism and self-questioning in the wilderness, and “after John (the Baptist) had been put into prison”, Jesus launched an evangelistic mission in Galilee, but there’s a complication here. In John’s gospel, Jesus, “in the province of Judea, spent some time with his disciples and baptised”, and, “The […]
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Rethinking Jesus (05) Apocalypse Now
If we’re to understand Jesus the Jew, in the context of first century Palestine, we have to give attention to the appearance of Apocalypses, from around 200 BCE to 200 CE. During that time, there were Jewish apocalypses, supposedly written by Enoch, Zephaniah, Ezra and Baruch etc. Apocalyptic writings were also included in the Dead […]
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Rethinking Jesus (03) and John the Baptist
Let’s return to that day in the late 20s CE, when a 30 year old Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, appeared on the banks of the river Jordan, where a charismatic preacher was baptising people in its waters. Since Jesus was obviously attracted by what he was seeing and hearing, even to the extent of casting […]
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Jesus the Messiah?
‘Messiah’ comes from Hebrew ‘mashiach’, referring to someone ‘anointed’ with oil, as a sign of being set apart for God’s service. It’s worth noting that the Hebrew Bible makes no reference to ‘the Messiah’. There are many ‘messiahs’, principally the Jewish Kings in the line of David who, like him, were anointed at their coronations. […]
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Jesus and the Church
Did Jesus intend to be the founder of a “Christian Church”, which would first ‘supersede’, and then separate itself from, his own Jewish religion? To answer this, it seems to me that we must strip away 2,000 years of exegesis and christology, and try to recapture the religious views of a 1st century Palestinian Jew, […]
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The Gospels (3) ‘Jesus as Apocalyptic Preacher’
Ccontinung this series of posts, I’m writing about the Gospels as literature, and as religious ‘tracts’ designed to confirm to believers, and to persuade non-believers, that Jesus is the Son of God, Messiah of Israel and Saviour of the World, and that their contents should be understood as having been selected and shaped with that […]
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“There isn’t any there there” …
The ‘past’ doesn’t exist, except in our minds now. The ‘future’ doesn’t exist, except in our minds now. But ‘now’ has already gone by the time the word is said. SO, when you get ‘there’, there isn’t any ‘there’ there. ‘There’ is ‘here’, and life is ‘here’, or it’s nowhere. The picture and words are […]
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Because Jesus was a Jew …
At some point, possibly in the 27 CE, beside the river Jordan, in a part of the world known to its Roman overlords as Palestine, a charismatic preacher, John by name, was holding forth to all who would listen to him. He was also baptising those who found themselves agreeing with his message, some of […]
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Paul and the Bath Water
Like Jesus of Nazareth, Paul was a 1st century, ‘middle-eastern’, Jew. We can expect him to have different ways of seeing things from ours, and he doesn’t disappoint us. We have information, in the New Testament, about what’s said to have happened to him during his action-packed life. We shouldn’t forget, however, that Paul himself […]
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