Tag: Kingdom of God
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The Gospels as Literature
Looking at the Gospels as works of literature, for me, diminishes neither their intellectual and emotional impact, nor their spiritual and cultural value. Myth, legend and folktale; imagination, symbol and metaphor, deepen rather than detract from meaning and significance. The crucifixion I regard as historical fact. The reason for Jesus’ execution was pinned to his…
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Questions about Jesus (iii)
In this series of blogs, I’ve been asking firstly why Jesus was crucified, and secondly why not his followers who, instead, were allowed to publicly proclaim him, in the very city in which he’d recently been arrested and crucified – the punishment reserved for insurrectionists against the Roman Empire. Jesus was, arguably, the wrong person,…
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Questions about Jesus (ii)
In this series of blogs, I’m asking firstly why Jesus was crucified, and secondly why not his followers who, instead, were allowed to publicly proclaim him, in the very city in which he’d recently been arrested and crucified – the punishment reserved for insurrectionists against the Roman Empire. The first Gospel, called Mark, appeared around…
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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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