Mark in its entirity

As i was sitting down doing my complete read through of Mark it made me realize a lot of things. I read the book completely different now. There are so many things that i fill in the blanks or little things that i know now that help me read it differently. Little facts about the cities they travelled through what the disciples were possibly thinking. Even down to why Jesus was trying to keep the miracles a secret at first and later revealed them. It is a whole new book to me and is much more intriging of a read now.

Subjective Jesus

It seems that the search for the historical Jesus is tougher than the original proponents could have imagined. The subjectivity of it all is what really gets me. Even in the Gospels, the writers depict Christ as a different character according to their focus. Matthew depicts him as a rabbi because that was his focus in writing—Jesus’ teaching and connection to the Old Testament law. Mark depicts him as a sarcastic leader—probably, as a first-hand witness, he was able to gather personality traits himself; whatever wasn’t his own experience with the incarnate Christ came from witnesses like Peter who likely felt quite inferior and intimidated by him. (Even this lends to more subjectivity.) It amazes me that with all the witnesses of Jesus everyone saw him in a different way.

The modern quests for the historical Jesus really just make me laugh. There is so much assumption made about Jesus based on writers’ personal ideas that he ends up sounding like them. Even in light of all the eyewitnesses, Jesus still remains a mystery to the whole of humanity. Will there ever be a true depiction of the historical Jesus?

Zach Pyron

Jesus, Jesus how I trust him

I knew some day it would happen. One day the two would come to heavy disagreement; one day they would find themselves at odds. One would feel betrayed by the other; one would try to usurp the other. It could not be avoided. The two close friends had too many differences. One was bound to betray the other. And now, the mighty clash occurs...and it all took place because they tried to take Jesus apart... Rise Religion Majors! The history department seeks to steal our Precious Lord! (Yelled in a battle cry voice, like a Braveheart kinda deal. You may have to read it over a couple times out loud to get the right effect.)
I always thought it interesting that the Bible was not see as a historically dependable book. I understand that the purpose of its canonization was for religious rather than academic reasons, but the Gospel writings themselves, and Acts...I do not see why they are placed under such heavy doubt. Well, nevermind, I know why, but I still think that, although they are primarily seen as theological writings, they should be trusted as historically sound. Maybe I'm letting my religion cloud my judgement on this matter, but the Gospels. particularly the synoptics, are, for the most part, in agreement with each other and written at different times by different people for different audiences. How such agreement can take place- agreement that even contains subtle differences and variations, which I believes support their validity- without being seen as valid by any group outside the Christian church...I don't get it.
This is not the point I originally going to make, but since my first supporting point was rather lengthy...I digress.

Alex H.

Jesus, Jesus how I trust him

I knew some day it would happen. One day the two would come to heavy disagreement; one day they would find themselves at odds. One would feel betrayed by the other; one would try to usurp the other. It could not be avoided. The two close friends had too many differences. One was bound to betray the other. And now, the mighty clash occurs...and it all took place because they tried to take Jesus apart... Rise Religion Majors! The history department seeks to steal our Precious Lord! (Yelled in a battle cry voice, like a Braveheart kinda deal. You may have to read it over a couple times out loud to get the right effect.)
I always thought it interesting that the Bible was not see as a historically dependable book. I understand that the purpose of its canonization was for religious rather than academic reasons, but the Gospel writings themselves, and Acts...I do not see why they are placed under such heavy doubt. Well, nevermind, I know why, but I still think that, although they are primarily seen as theological writings, they should be trusted as historically sound. Maybe I'm letting my religion cloud my judgement on this matter, but the Gospels. particularly the synoptics, are, for the most part, in agreement with each other and written at different times by different people for different audiences. How such agreement can take place- agreement that even contains subtle differences and variations, which I believes support their validity- without being seen as valid by any group outside the Christian church...I don't get it.
This is not the point I originally going to make, but since my first supporting point was rather lengthy...I digress.

Alex H.

Beginnings

I've been thinking about the beginning of each of the gospels, and how each different beginning to each account sets the tone for things to come. I think that my favorite gospel beginning is that of Luke's. Luke gives us background information that is very interesting, and quite interesting. Dr. Foster is going over Luke in church on Wednesdays and that is what really got me thinking about the differences in the beginnings of the gospels. I had yet to read Luke this semester, so reading that first chapter was new to me, because I actually don't remember ever reading it. I think of how I used to think all the gospels were the same identical thing, word for word. Obviously, that was before I read the gospels. To hear four "different" accounts of the gospel that interweave together so beautifully is an amazing thing.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

I am going to see the Dead Sea Scrolls this weekend and I know it has been a while since we have discussed them in class, but I wanted to find out some more. As Foster said the scrolls include copies of every book in the Hebrew Bible, save Ester, and date over a millennium older than the 10th century text of the Hebrew Bible. Hows that for helping source criticism? The scrolls have answered questions of authorship and date. However, for every answered question, there was a new one. Some passages and Psalms are grouped differently than other manuscripts, and others have new psalms or passages. There is even evidence that the 3rd division of the cannon was sill in process at the time many of these scrolls were written.
Concerning the Gospels, there is a text that discusses a series of legal disagreements with the temple authority. This gives us, according to the dictionary, the only other resource besides the Bible that shows insight to what was happening in the temple in Jesus' day! This is just biblical text alone. There are hundreds of other non-biblical manuscripts discovered that give insight to culture and history of the time.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were an incredible find, to say the least, and translation work is till being done. I can't read them, but I am so excited to see these amazing manuscripts that are evidence to what I believe, and look forward to see what else they can teach us.

In my readings of L.T. Johnson, i have been somewhat, or at least i feel, enlightended on the subbject of the historical non-supernatural Jesus and the Jesus seminar. In this first part of the Journey i have been challenged to reflect on my faith and my beliefs in light of this so called quest.
in doing so i have decided that to simply believe in a higher being, that being GOD, it takes faith and the belief in the supernatural of some kind. so it is just not a stretch for me or my faith to believe in a supernatural birth or anything supernatural about what Jesus did or still does in peoples lives.
So weather or not the church throughout the ages has implemeted doctrines and had any kind of secret ambition, i don't care or believe, but i do know that we have writtings of works a hundred years old and we also have people who do biographies on people more than a hundred years old and we believe them, so after finding the dead sea scrolls, couldn't we view them in light of how we do stuff today, luke, though he may have gathered stories about Jesus or mark who even probably knew Jesus, wrote things after he died, it is safe to say that their sources are as good as the ones we use today to write a biogaraphy of a dead person. why cant what they say be literal of Jesus...

life of christ

i think back to January. Before the beginning of the class. I knew a lot about Jesus. I knew what I had learned in Sunday School, devotions and a couple classes here had taught me. Never before was I taught about the large controversry over finding the historical facts about who Jesus was, how he was and so on. The fact some people believe Jesus only said a minority of what is in our Gospels seems outrageous. Though I am not completely educated in the terms of form criticism, source criticism, and redaction criticism, I do have faith that Jesus did speak these things...except maybe then longer ending of Mark which I would be able to figure out if I had a knowledge of Greek New Testament writings. My own personal opinion of this matter of the Jesus Seminar is that Jesus did say these things, probably not word for word as the evangelicals have them, but then again with the power of the Holy Spirit it would be possible right? Well that's going back to defaulting to power of the Holy Spirit. Anyway, my opinion is that Jesus said these things and much more. Probably so much more was taught by him. I do believe what we have of Jesus sayings is sufficient for me to live a life that honors God...once Jesus took away my sin that is.

Coptic

In class we've briefly discussed an ancient gnostic text which was written in Coptic. Coptic is a language that I'm not very familiar with. I remember last year when the Gospel of Judas became a very big deal. A single copy of a shattered manuscript covered in so much controversy or at least that's what the commercials wanted you to believe. That was also written in Coptic. I was reading in the DJG about the Languages of Palestine and Coptic was not mentioned, that does not mean that it wasn't spoken there but it was not one of the primary languages from what I was able to gather. Coptic is an evolved written form of the Egyptian language from what I understand "Coptic was used from its Christian beginnings in the late second century AD. till the time of the Great persecution of Diocletian in the early 4th century AD. predominantly as a translational tool from Greek to Egyptian. "(Quote taken from THE ST. SHENOUDA THE ARCHIMANDRITE COPTIC SOCIETY's website which was written by Hany N. Takla who has delivered many lectures at colleges and universities such as UCLA) I'm wondering if these gnostic gospels were originally written in Coptic and if they were then how is it explained that they were written over 150 years after the Resurrection of Christ and more accurate than the Gospels we have. I have not done any extensive research on these manuscripts origins but they have become of an interest to me as well as a want for a better knowledge of the Coptic language.

Misguided Scholars

It is amazing to hear what many scholars have to say about Jesus and the sources of the scriptures. Some are right on the money, others are full of hot air--to put it a nice way. I will not give away the content of The Real Jesus, but after reading about the Jesus Seminar, I really wish someone would beat them over the head with one of their Bibles. Everything in the Bible does not have a clear explanation, and many times it is better NOT to try to explain everything. Just because thing about Jesus in the Bible does not live up to the way WE believe it should, that is not an excuse to thrown it out. The gospels are no less true with what seem to be inconsistences. We must remember that they are four DIFFERENT accounts of Jesus, apparent inconsistences lend to their truth, and do not detract from it. Christ's follows did a lot better putting the stories on "paper" than we do in the modern game of telephone!

A new way of thinking

I had always heard the words Source Criticism, Form Criticism and Redaction Criticism but never really knew what they were. I knew they had something to do with the Gospels and the way the text was formed, but beyond that I was pretty much ignorant. Monday's lecture opened my eyes to a whole new idea of how the text was constructed. When I was in middle school and even high school I always thought that God sat the biblical writers down and said "hey write this down," and 2000 years later we have the Bible. I had never really thought of the other possible factors (Mark used as an outline, Q, M, L).

Personally, as long as we remember that these ideas are not facts (hince the hypothesis title) I think that we can and should discuss the possibility of Source Criticism. During the entire lecture Monday I couldn't help but wonder as to what role the personalities of the writers (evangelists) and their audiences plays in the whole debate. For instance, are the things that are found only in Matthew (M) present because the letter was written primarily to Jews? Could the fact that Mark is smaller than Matthew and Luke not give evidence to the idea of Mark as an outline, but simply that Matthew and Luke had more to say than did Mark? Perhaps they had more to say because they were writing to a different group of people (see above argument on the intended audience of the gospel). I know that John had his own thing going on, but where does he fit into the whole picture? His gospel was written later than the others, maybe he had access to the prior three while writing. Since Luke also wrote Acts as a sort of continuation of his gospel, why should we not call the Book of Acts L? The actions of the Apostles are not present in the Gospels.

I think that we should all remember something that we learned relatively early in Bib-Interp. The Bible is written FOR us, but not originally TO us.

-Steven

Where do these ideas come from?

In reading the book for the in class book review and what we have been studying in class groups such as the Jesus Seminar have seemed to come up with some pretty crazy ideas. The belief that only about 15 % of what Jesus in the bible is what Jesus really said , and things such as how Jesus never really died on the cross. I just can not wrap my mind around those ideas it seems that they draw alot of their ideas and assumptions from thin air sometimes. Either I am not smart enough to come up with ideas or study enough to think or I actually put my faith in what the Bible says and what God meant it to be. I just can't figure out some of these things that they have come up with in their studies they just seem so crazy.

Humanity of Christ

I wrote my Christian Doctrine paper on the Humanity of Christ. This fell in line nicely with the quest for the historical Jesus. Most of my sources were more modern but most of them would refer back to ideas of Schweitzer and Bultman. I know in class we were really staying on the parameters of subjects but I hope in the next few classes that we get into the meat of who Jesus was as a man. I have never been so intrigued by Jesus as I was when I was studying Jesus the man. We really do forget his humanity. The quest for a historical Jesus is the quest for a man that really lived. He laughed, cried, got angry, made friends, ate food, traveled. He was fully God but also fully man. We looked at this matter in Doctrine but I am not sure you can have a Life of Christ class without looking at the fact that he was a physically alive man. The stories of Jesus that we have do have a theological slant to them but at least they something to go on. They do show Jesus having emotion and being a human man, so that is step one on the quest for some histoy on Jesus.

What's Historical About Jesus

What can we actually know, prove, or otherwise confirm about the historical person of Jesus? My thought is very little, yet I am left wanting to gain some insight into what he would of been like as a child or other "historical" facts about His everyday life. The historical reality of Jesus is, however, clear. There is no doubt, as Bultman confirmed, that Jesus was. For the person of Jesus to simply be some kind of mystical sage or some other kind of delusional prophet the world would not of been changed because of his death, burial, and resurrection. This is the message of the Gospel that is confirmed by the apostle Paul and other leaders of the early church. Does it really matter, or shake the foundations of Christian faith if what is recorded in the Gospels is not some kind of word for word account of the event. Of course the writers had a theological agenda rather than a historical one. Faith is not built on proof, but rather the substance of things hoped for and evidence of things unseen.

The Mystery Q

Well somehow with everything going on in my classes I still managed to stay tuned into Dr. Foster's lecture today. Perhaps it was the changing of rooms, why can't we always be in that one, it's beaut. So the lecture basically divided into three section entitled Source Criticism, Red-action Criticism and The Quest for the Historical Jesus. It was all interesting to me however the first section was wild. So we have this imaginery book called Q that Matthew and Luke supposedly have drawn from as well as Mark's gospel. Why couldn't they have just wrote about the stories that they had seen or heard and ofcourse what they saw in Mark's gospel. What is the majority of believe behind another document. I certaintly can't see a connection between Matthew and Luke that is not contained in Mark. Then we add M and L documentation to the mixture. Oh boy, what fun. Streeter are you serious about this Four Source hypothesis?

In our culture, as it seems in most women have been considered to not be as apt in certian leadership positions, and maybe in some cases that is true, in spiritual leadership i don't think it is the case. I know women personally who can better understand and teach the word then some preacher as well as women who are more motivated to serve than deacons.
So i wonder, why the big deal with women leadership within the church. I see it personally as a veiwing the situation in accordance to ephesians where pauls speaks of the family and how it relates to the church. wives submission to men, under the love of the Husband. I believe in love comes consideration and undrstanding where the voice and ministry of women can be heard and listened to in true consideration and even through authority from the Word of God.

Luke 15...huh?

Ever sense I took Bib-Interp I always thought that I understood what the parables in Luke 15 meant: Jesus was talking to Pharisees and he was preaching to them the importance of a soul. Yea, well, kindof. I especially like that in a sense I have been freed to use allegory to try to understand the parables. I definately agree that too much allegory is a wrong, and I suppose no allegory is better than too much, however some is needed. I also am avery interested in the fact that there is three subjects to the prodigal son (father, older son and prodigal) rather than the one that I had always though of (the older son). I think that we need to undestand this in order to understand what Jesus was saying in these parables. I also believe that his initial conversation with the Pharisees in the beginning of Luke 15 is iomportant to the overall understanding of the parables.

Women

I was really impressed with the class discussion on Luke's treatment of women. So many Baptist churches seem to view women as inferior. I found it fascinating to know that in New Testament times, women may have even been church leaders. I by no means think women should rule the roast, but the are valuable in more places in the church besides the nursery. God gives and calls women and men. Luke's gospel is unique because he actually speaks of the women in the life of Jesus, and the women in the church.

It is sad that, so often, passages in the Bible regarding women are taken so out of context that people believe they would always sit silently, humbly, never speaking or teaching. Luke's writings refutes such views.

Still Stuck on the Law

Like the Jewish Christians I seem to be stuck on the concept of the law and how that pretains to Christians. Is it now obsilete? But Jesus followed the law so should we do likewise? but we are free of the law so is the law bad? The audience of Luke/Acts seems to struggle with this concept too. According to the Dictionay, some scholars view Luke's approach to the law as conservative. Others say he is of two minds: Jews should keep it, whereas Christians are free of it. And others even say Luke understands the law is of the old era, but understands that the Jews are gonna take a while to get used to this whole "freedom" thing.
Luke basically shows that the traditions and customs are not required but Jewish Christians can follow them if they wish, as long as they don't drag the Gentile Christians along with them. Luke says that unity is more impotaint than these things, so do and accpet what you must (within the confins of reason) in order to mantain unity.
If the early church was ordered to be unified as a racially diverse community over an issue concerning their doctrine, how much more are we expected to be unified over an issue concerning the carpet color.

Luke and Acts are so interrelated through this portion of the class it almost is like the they were written by the same author. O wait a minute, they were. I find that to be so amazing because growing up in church all my life i have never been so taught that these books went together. i find that there is such need to go back and forth between the two books so that clear understanding of Luke's motivation and how the events in the book of Acts are comprised. Not that I had not learned that Luke wrote both books, but that learning Luke's representation of the life of Christ even through the book of Acts as well.