Tag: New Testament
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Food for Thought (ii)
Rather than being dismissive because of disbelief in ‘miracles’, my previous post suggested understanding gospel accounts, like the feeding of the 5000, as ‘story-parables’ rather than historical facts. But if this is a story, where might the idea originally have come from? The early followers of Jesus, being Jews, were well versed in the Hebrew…
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Food for Thought
It troubles me that some people have no interest in reading the Gospels because they can’t take seriously some of the things they read there. An example is the “feeding of the five thousand” from five loaves and two fish. As it happens, this is an instance of occasional patriarchal prejudice. According to Matthew 14:21,…
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Jonah – A Good-Fun Read (iii)
We lost sight of Jonah when, on our hero’s uncompromising insistence, the good-hearted sailors very reluctantly tossed him into the sea. At once the inestimable power of Jonah’s God was demonstrated, in the immediate and complete calming of what had been an overwhelmingly tempestuous sea. No great surprise then, that in the New Testament, Jesus…
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Rethinking Jesus (02) The Sources
At the time of Jesus, it’s been estimated that at least 90% of Palestine’s population was more or less illiterate. In the beginning, therefore, stories about what Jesus said and did, would have been oral, not written. They’d have been carried (and translated), by word of mouth, from Aramaic Palestine to Greek speaking cities in…
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Rethinking Jesus (01) In the Beginning …
As a follow-on from my series about God, I want to explore what I currently think and feel about Jesus of Nazareth. If I regard ‘God’ as not so much a person as a process, as transcendental ‘Ground-of-Being-Itself’, what implications does this have for how I see Jesus? Let’s forget what 20 succeeding centuries have…
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