Bible in 90 Days–the end!

We did it, friends!  Tonight, we discuss the end of the canon, over cake of course.  And to celebrate, here are photos of many of the places we’ve read about…enjoy!

 

Bible in 90 Days: Day 75

BiND:  Day 75

 

Today we cross a strange line in our reading.  We finish Luke’s gospel, but instead of going directly to its sequel (Acts), we hop over into John, whose writing and focus and context are very different. 

In the end of Luke we see Jesus again as very human, showing emotions such as sadness, anxiety, and compassion.  We also hear him say, in the face of violence, “no more!”  And then, after the resurrection, we read the stories that in many ways characterize the church today, especially the Emmaus Road story.  The disciples don’t know what’s just happened, and they don’t recognize Jesus when he comes to walk beside them, but at the table they get just a little glimpse before he’s gone—and that glimpse is enough for them to rush back and testify to what they have seen and heard.  Isn’t that just how we are?  We don’t always recognize Jesus even when he’s walking alongside us, but at the communion table we get a glimpse of Christ and of the kingdom of God, and that little taste is enough to empower us to share the story. 

 

And then we turn the page and find ourselves reading John.  Again, “John” is a name that was attached later to an anonymous writing, and tradition holds to be the name of the “beloved disciple” who is mentioned a couple of times (though never named, and always written about in the third person).  Just as Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote from and to their own contexts, so does John.  We talked about sources:  the vast majority of scholars agree that Mark was written first, then used as a source by both Matthew and Luke, along with a source scholars call “Q”—material found in both Matthew and Luke but not Mark (implying that there must have been a document or a body of work from which they could both draw, since they are often word-for-word the same).  Then both Matthew and Luke had their own sources as well, generally called “M” and “L” (how original).  John, however, is different.  He does not appear to have had any of these sources, and his writing about Jesus overlaps very little with the synoptic gospels.  (synoptic comes from two Greek words that mean “seeing together.”)  So John reads very differently from the first three, and he portrays Jesus differently as well.  John is concerned with refuting Gnosticism (the idea that special secret knowledge is the key to salvation), though in the process he often sounds like a Gnostic himself.  He writes mainly theology, not history.  He presents a Jesus who works few miracles and tells few parables, but spends a lot of time in extended theological discourse.  John is also the most “greek” of the gospel writers—his language use is easy to understand yet sophisticated, his writing style is similar to that of the greek philosophers, and he is pretty clearly writing in the late 1^st century to a community of probably mostly gentile Christians.  He also presents a very high “Christology”—understanding of Jesus—which is primarily about Jesus’ divinity, whereas we saw, for instance, in Mark, a lot of humanity.  This is one of the reasons having all four gospels, all four portraits of Jesus, is important:  we get a balance, a variety of perspectives and vantage points, a variety of understandings, all of which capture part of the story but, because God can’t be captured in words, not all of it.  There are other gospels, mostly written much later, that didn’t make the canonical cut—if you’re interested in reading some, I have a collection in my office, so just ask!

 

John opens with a beautiful rhetorical move that is beloved by many:  “in the beginning was the Word”—the logos, the divine word/logic.  God’s logic has come into the world.  God’s Word (with a Capital W), has been made flesh.  In the beginning of Genesis, we see God creating with a word, and now the Word is living among us, re-creating.  It’s one of the most beautiful expressions of who Jesus is that we have in our tradition.

 

You may have noticed that one of the first things Jesus does is have a Temple Tantrum—right at the beginning of his ministry.  In John, Jesus is out and about for three years, whereas in the synoptic gospels he’s out for just one year.  So we have a clue about how John views Jesus, right in the opening pages.  In the other three gospels, the Temple tantrum is the last straw that leads to Jesus’ arrest.  In John, though, it’s just the beginning—an announcement of who he is and what he’s come to do.  (Important note:  Throughout John the phrase “the Jews” comes up over and over.  This has often been used to create and foster anti-semitism, and it’s important to remember that Jesus and his followers were all Jews.  “the Jewish religious leaders” is a better translation in the context of the greek and the socio-political-religious situation of the day.) 

 

What else did you notice as you finished Luke and started on John today?

photos are:  a 2000+ year old olive tree in the garden of Gethsemane; some friends standing in the “Upper Room” in Jerusalem, wondering if Jesus and the disciples really celebrated Passover in a neo-gothic room built of cement on the second floor of a large building; a page of John from the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest known manuscript of the Bible–this page is the only one remaining at St. Katherine’s monastery at Mt. Sinai (for which the codex is named) because the others have been taken by the British Museum and promised back but never returned; and a scale model of the Temple, part of a scale model of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, just outside the Jerusalem city limits.

bible in 90 days: thanks!

Friends, I love being in class with you all.  I may have played Buffy Quote Hangman during New Testament Survey in seminary (I read, and I listened…I just also multitasked) but you all keep me thinking and engaged and I love it!  Thank you for being such interesting and engaging people, willing to grapple with tough issues and to be vulnerable about what you think, feel, and believe.  It’s not easy to put out there some of the stuff we talk about, but you do it.  Thanks.

(I loved class tonight, can you tell?  I’m definitely in the midst of an adrenaline rush right now!!)

Jerusalem on the 3rd century mosaic map of the holy land at St. George’s church in Madaba, Jordan (famous for mosaics!).  Notice the Greco-Roman style colonnade down the center–a perfectly straight street running through the city.  cool!  photo by TCP

Bible in 90 Days: day 74

BiND:  Day 74

 

Well, today we got some of Luke’s best known writing—the teachings of Jesus.  Luke is really interested in the things Jesus said, and he reports several parables and teachings that we don’t find in the other gospels.  The best known examples of this are the parable of the prodigal and the parable of the good Samaritan.

 

So…what is a parable, anyway?  The word parable has to do with “setting alongside”—in a story form, a parable sets alongside each other two things in order to make a point.  So, “who is my neighbor” leads to a story setting the question of “neighbor” alongside three examples.  “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed” is, if not obvious, at least an obvious expression of “setting alongside.”  Though often interpreted as allegories, Jesus’ parables are not all necessarily allegories.  In other words, they do not have to be interpreted with God and Jesus and us as the characters.  It’s possible for them to have other meanings, though the allegorical meaning is often the most obvious or most common interpretation.  We often like this form of interpretation for parables because we tend to be intent on figuring out what the story has to do with us, personally, and the easiest way to do that is to put ourselves in the story.  So next time you’re reading a parable, try putting yourself in as different characters, not always the same one (how often have you heard that God is like the father and we are the “prodigal son” who wanders off and has to come begging home, only to be forgiven?  Try thinking of yourself as the older brother.  What does the parable say then?  What if you’re the father?  etc…).

 

Many of Jesus’ parables are still as confusing to us today as they were to the disciples who, you may have noticed, are constantly asking, “umm, was that for us?  ‘cuz if so, we didn’t get it……”  The beautiful thing about teaching via story is that there is always something new to learn.  The hard (yet still beautiful) thing about teaching via story is that you’re never able to tell what’s the “right” way to interpret it or the “one big thing” to learn from it.  Luke has Jesus telling more parables than any of the other gospels, and I wonder if Luke’s emphasis on drawing God’s circle wider than we expect has to do with that?  What do you all think?  And what did you notice as you read today?

photo is of the Sea of Galilee, taken by TCP

Bible in 90 Days: Day 73

BiND:  Day 73

 

Hmm, by the third time through the stories start to sound pretty similar, don’t they?  “Didn’t I just read this??”  Well, yes and no.  Luke of course puts his own twist on the good news, the story of Jesus’ life and teaching, etc!  Luke was likely written near the end of the 1^st century, but the location of the writer and/or his community is unknown.  What we do know is that Luke writes very elegantly and that his story is in two volumes, the second volume being the book of Acts.  And it starts right at the beginning—he says to “Theophilus” (both a common name and a word meaning “god-lover”) that he knows there are other gospels, other stories, floating around, and he’s decided it’s time for a carefully researched historiography. This is a Hellenistic literary form that involves telling “history” in such a way that it makes a point—in this case, to teach and to inform people’s identity in terms of Christ’s identity as long-awaited Messiah.  Since in antiquity (and to a certain extent still today, in some cases) “older is better” Luke needs to make the case that Jesus (and therefore the Christian community to which he writes) is part of a line extending back to the beginning of time, all the way to God.  Which he does, in his genealogy tracing Jesus, through Joseph, all the way back to Adam and then to God.

After establishing in his dedication what he’s setting out to do, Luke sets up the story carefully, beginning with the parents of John the Baptist (who were likely well off and of high social standing), then cutting to Mary (of no social standing), then back to JTB and then back to Jesus…and in the process he tells us the story that we are used to hearing at Advent and Christmas—angels, shepherds, glorias, songs, prophets, the whole nine yards.  Then nothing until the infamous precocious-12-year-old incident, which is reported only by Luke and at least gives us a little comic relief in the midst of the story.  The 12 year old Jesus gets left behind after Passover and is eventually found hanging out with the teachers in the Temple

 (which, by the way, is still a common form of education in the Middle East—teachers sit in the porticoes of mosques and synagogues and students sit around them in a circle and they have Q-and-A sessions).  His mother, frantic with worry, chastises him.  He, being 12, sasses his mother.  Then he appears to feel bad about it and goes home with them and “was obedient to them.”  uh huh.  Like all 12 year olds, I’m sure.

One of the characteristics of Luke is that he says “and Jesus went around Galilee doing stuff” and then gives examples—the examples aren’t necessarily in chronological order, and if you plot them on a map they don’t necessarily make itinerary sense, but they give the listener an idea of some of the things Jesus said and did.  Luke’s primary goal seems to be to show Jesus crossing boundaries and drawing the circle of God’s people ever wider—he’s sometimes called the “gentile” gospel for this reason.  Jesus constantly flouts purity laws and teaches that the righteousness so oft extolled may in fact not involve any right relationships at all (“right relationship” is the definition of “righteousness” in biblical language).  He also is more directly justice-oriented than some of the other gospel writers—so for example, Luke’s beatitudes are very direct:  

blessed are you who are poor, who are hungry, who weep, when people hate and exclude you.  Woe to you who are rich, who are full, who are laughing, when all speak well of you.  A great reversal is going to happen and there will be equity in God’s kingdom, not like today’s kingdom.  Also, have you noticed yet the number of women in Jesus’ circle?  Matthew included women in his genealogy (and some scandalous ones, too!) but Luke includes women in Jesus’ ministry.  Women are part of the traveling cohort, are healed, are restored to community, are raised from the dead.  It’s quite shocking, actually!

 

Speaking of healing…we’re going to talk about that in class.  :-)

 

What did you notice as you read the beginning of Luke (which, incidentally, is basically in 3 acts and today was Act 1.)??

photos are:  artwork from a church at the Shepherd’s Field just outside Bethlehem; the manger in the crypt under the Church of the Nativity (visiting that was the first time I realized that mangers would have been hewn out of stone, not made of wood the way we always depict them in Christmas pageants); women studying at al-Azhar Mosque, center of Islamic learning, in Cairo; and the floor and altar at Tabgha, the traditional place of the feeding of the 5,000. Tradition says that Jesus broke the loaves and fishes on that rock, the one with the cup of oil on it.  Churches have been built on basically every single potentially holy place in all of the Holy Land–you can’t turn around without running into one.  Many thanks to Helena, mother of Constantine, for scouting out the places important in Jesus’ life, so we could visit them even 2000 years later!  photos all by TCP.

Bible in 90 Days: Day 71

BiND:  Day 71

 

The gospel according to Mark is my favorite gospel.  I love its breathless pace, its never-ending “and immediately”s, its drama, its shocking detail.  I also love its relatively simple structure—in basically two acts, Mark (probably not the author’s name—this name as, as with Matthew, attached later to a text that was primarily intended for reading aloud…hence the great story!) tells us what Jesus said and did, what makes him so special compared to those other healers, those other teachers, those other messiahs who were always wandering around.  In the first act, Jesus teaches and heals in Galilee.  In the second act he heads for Jerusalem, toward conflict and crucifixion.  The turning point between the two acts?  Peter’s declaration that Jesus is the Son of God.  Mark knows how to tell a story!

 

In light of the fact that we spend only two days on my favorite New Testament book, I’ve decided to blog it in the two acts rather than in the division laid out in the reading schedule.  I hope you don’t mind.

 

In Act 1 (up to chapter 8:27), we have Jesus calling disciples, teaching people, feeding thousands with only a little bread (and remember, these aren’t loaves of bread like we think of a loaf of bread—re-imagine bread as pita and you’ll be closer to the real deal), healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, breaking the Sabbath…it’s an exciting section!  Mark constantly says “and immediately…” leaving you gasping for air at the end of each chapter as you run all around Galilee.  Mark also uses a surprising amount of detail—when there’s a storm on the lake, everyone is panicking except Jesus, who is asleep on a cushion.  He’s using a pillow, and THAT’S the relevant detail in a near-death experience?  When there are 5,000 hungry men hanging on Jesus’ every word (we don’t know if there were women and children there or not) and the disciples are, again, panicking about how to feed them, Jesus says to sit everyone down in groups on the green grass.  What?  I mean, sure, there is green grass, especially on the hills near the Sea of Galilee and elsewhere along the river, but for the most part Palestine is brown brown brown.  When Jesus meets a deaf/mute man, he touches him, spits, and sighs.  Sighs?  That’s what we’ve got for a healing story?  Can you see why I love Mark so much?

 

Mark Act 1 is broken into a few basic sections of teaching and healing, each begun by the calling and teaching of the disciples.  Interestingly, each also involves a story of Jesus giving sight to a blind person, even as the disciples become more and more dense and lacking in insight.  I often wonder if the juxtaposition is intended to remind us that sight is more than what we do with our eyes. 

 

Act 1 ends with Jesus asking what people are saying about him, and then very pointedly asking “and who do YOU say that I am?”  Peter responds with his one big moment, the one time he gets it right, his flash of insight:  “you are the Messiah.”  And from that moment, the moment when a human being, not just a demon possessing a person, when a disciple! finally gets it, Jesus enters Act 2 begins to teach them the hard stuff.

 

What did you notice as you read Mark, Act 1?

photos are from Galilee–ruins of first century Capernaum, ruins of a church built on Peter’s house (marked as a holy site by an octagonal church around the time Mark was written–the site of the friends who lowered the paralyzed man through the roof to reach Jesus!), the pasture/hill/tomb area of Gerasa/Gadara, where Jesus met the demon legion and put him into a herd of pigs who rushed into the lake and drowned, and the view of Capernaum from a boat on the Sea of Galilee.  All photos taken by TCP.

BiND: Days 68-70

BiND:  The New Testament!  (Day 68-70)

 

Well friends, we’ve made it into the New Testament.  For some of us, this may be more familiar territory, and for some of us we may think it’s more familiar territory and end up surprised.  I encourage you to keep your eyes, ears, and heart open as you read, even if this looks like stuff you know.  Sometimes we can be surprised by what we thought it said!

 

Since we’ve started on the gospels, first a few things about these first four books.  A “Gospel” as a genre is a subset of the biography genre.  In ancient times, biographies were written with the intent of encouraging people to follow the example of the person being written about.  Thus the four gospels as we have them now are not biographies the way we think of biographies, and are not history or storybooks either, nor are they entirely hagiography (saint’s biographies designed to prove saintliness).  They are a combination of all these things, written to encourage particular communities in a particular way of life exemplified by Jesus.  The first three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called the “synoptic” gospels and they have much in common.  Mark was written first, right around 70AD, and is the main source of material for Matthew and Luke.  All three write both from and to their particular context.  John is, well, different.  We’ll get to him later (umm, in about a week!)

 

Matthew’s gospel was likely written sometime around 80-ish, about 50 years after Jesus’ death/resurrection.  It’s unlikely that it was written by Matthew the tax-collector mentioned in chapter 9.  The name wasn’t even attached to the gospel until 100 years after it was written!  Scholars speculate that Matthew was the leader community of Jewish Christians, probably in the northern part of Israel, maybe even as far north as Antioch (which is now in Turkey, though many in Syria still claim it as theirs).  It seems likely that Matthew’s community is one that had tried to share the good news of Jesus with their synagogue, but it had gone badly and they’d had to withdraw and form their own community.  Thus Matthew is interested in showing that Jesus is a fulfillment of Jewish hopes, dreams, and prophecy, and also in showing that the Jewish/synagogue establishment is hostile to the message.  Matthew, just like any other author, writes both from and to his own context.

 

So…a few things I noticed on this read-through of Matthew’s Gospel…

–You may have noticed that Matthew’s Christmas story isn’t quite the one we’re used to.  Often on Christmas Eve we read a combination of Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the story.  Matthew’s is a little sparser and focuses on Joseph—not unusual since he would be the one “in charge” in the patriarchal system.

–Matthew is pretty thoroughly Jewish and also pretty thoroughly interested in showing that Jesus has brought God’s empire to earth, to directly compete with the Roman empire AND with the religious establishment.

–I always love the the Sermon on the Mount.  There’s a lot of really good stuff in there.  It’s 3 chapters (chapters 5-7) of teaching, from the beatitudes to “you are the light of the world” to “love your enemies” to the Lord’s Prayer.

–Matthew often explains things Jesus said or did in a way that makes me wonder if Jesus really would have explained it that way?  For example, when parables get explained, they sound so simplistic and literalistic, so unlike the parables themselves.  Particularly given that Jesus crosses boundaries all over the place in this gospel, the way the parables (like the parable of the weeds and wheat) are explained seem, as Richard once put it, “flat footed.”  What do you think?

–I love Matthew’s resurrection story:  the women are first to see and to tell (to give testimony), but also the guards are so afraid that they “become like dead men”—but when they snap out of it, they run to the priests (the religious establishment) who devise a plan to buy the soldiers’ silence and tell a silly story about grave robbing.  And then Matthew says (remember his context!):  “And this story is still told among the Jews to this day.”  wow.

 

What did you notice as you read Matthew?

photos are:  from the top of the Mt. of Beatitudes, looking through the garden of the convent located there and toward the Sea of Galilee at the bottom; and a 1st century tomb in Palestine (not the tomb of Jesus, though there are a couple sites that claim to be that they don’t have the stone still in front).  Both photos taken by TCP.

BiND: We finished the Old Testament!

BiND:  Reflections on the Old Testament

 

Reading the OT with you all has been really interesting and wonderful.  I’ve loved our conversations.  One of the things we talked about over and over is the importance of context—when I was in seminary we heard “context, context, context!” so many times that for part of our senior prank we covered the seminary campus in the word (in sidewalk chalk, of course).  The importance of context simply cannot be overlooked—both the context in which the books were written, the context in which they were originally heard or read, and how they apply to our own context.  That third is particularly difficult, because the worldview of ancient near-eastern people is so different from ours, especially in the area of causality.  We recognize a number of causes behind events, but they only knew one:  God.  Anything that happened happened because God made it happen—no exceptions.  We sometimes still do this (it might be human nature)—when something bad happens, especially, we say things like “why did God do this?” and occasionally when good things happen we acknowledge “we’ve been so blessed.”  Having said that, in our current worldview we often recognize secondary and even tertiary causality and that changes our view of God and our views of covenant, community, and religion.  Even the prophets, whose view of the world and of God is so much wider than the average persons (hence their difficult lives and often unpleasant ends), still recognize only one cause.  If we are going to say (as I often do) that Scripture is a record of God’s people and their interactions with God, their reactions to God, and the ways they have attempted to live as covenant people, then we have to recognize that there is a limitation to Scripture.  It’s words, and though God can inspire the writing, God still can’t be contained in words.  God is beyond human language, and the Bible is one attempt to explain something of that mystery. 

 

I love the prophets because they give us a glimpse of how God might see the world—they have a vision to share, and that vision includes justice and peace and compassion, it includes those on the margin, it includes, period.  God’s vision for covenant community may be wider than we can imagine, and I love that.  And then it’s over, and we turn the page and find ourselves reading about a time 250 years or so after the last book of prophecy was written down, and as many as 400 after the times that have been written about.  The world changes significantly during this time—the Temple becomes more functional, the synagogue system becomes entrenched, a new Empire comes into town, new systems of religion and economics come into play.  With Rome will come new taxes and also new infrastructure, new amenities and also new oppression.  And that means new ways of figuring out how to be God’s people in hostile territory.  And new ways of sharing of God’s vision!

awesome

Scotland is awesome.

So are the prophets.  I hope y’all are still reading!  If you have things you want to note about the readings, the comments here would be a good place to do it.

See you in another week….  :-)

~TCP

Bible in 90 Days: Day 45 (II) – 47

BiND:  Day 45 (II) – 47

 

Well, we’ve reached Proverbs!  We’re halfway through, friends!  I hope you’re enjoying this Scripture adventure—I know I am.

 

Proverbs is one of three wisdom books in the Bible (the others being Job and Ecclesiastes).  Some of the psalms also are considered wisdom literature, but these three books are the big ones.  Wisdom literature is designed to teach and to reflect on how we experience and interpret life and how we are to act in light of what we learn from God and from the world.

 

Proverbs is an interesting book in that a large chunk of it is said to be written by Solomon, to whom God gave the gift of great wisdom.  There are over 3,000 pithy proverbs attributed to Solomon.  Have you ever tried to write a proverb?  It’s hard!

 

One of the most common phrases in Proverbs (and one we’ve heard before, in Job) is “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”  We don’t like to talk about “fear” of the Lord—we’re not into fear that much and many of us have enough baggage from being afraid of God in our faith journey.  We know that all through scripture we have God and God’s messengers saying “Do not be afraid”—which implies that “afraid of God” and “fear of the Lord are not the same thing.  So what is the “fear of the Lord”????

 

Well, I suspect it something more like awe and humility, and less like being afraid.  Knowing that God is great and good, and knowing that often we fall short of that, being in awe…in contrast to pride and arrogance in ourselves.  When we think about this kind of “fear” then I think we begin to get at what Proverbs is talking about.  “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction” (perhaps because they think they don’t need it?).  It’s interesting to think about what we mean by “wisdom” and “knowledge”—what does it mean to be wise?  There’s worldly wisdom and there’s wisdom in God’s ways—can they be the same?  Proverbs suggests that the more attached we are to worldly things, the harder it will be to attain God’s wisdom.  Proverbs also says throughout that practicing the ways of wisdom is one of the only ways to attain it.  We don’t just “get” it, we have to live it and eventually we live into it.  And that is wisdom.