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Matthew 13 is a series of long and short parables,  which furnishes us with a good opportunity to talk about parables in general, followed by a few specific comments. Continue reading

Each lesson covers a good number of stories. Today covers Mark 1-2, among others. Mark is generally thought to be the earliest gospel, though not the earliest NT book. Paul’s letters were all written before the Gospels, with Galatians probably being the earliest book written. (NB: That’s the date of composition, not the date of the events described nor the date of our earliest manuscripts.) Mark’s gospel also uses rougher Greek, and a gospel of action. Note how many times “straightway” and “immediately” appear in Mark, both translating euthus. Of the 50x euthus appears in the Gospels, Mark has 41 of them, creating a sense of action and immediacy.

 Jesus at Home

I love the story in Mark 2:1-12. Jesus is “at home” in Capernaum. That is where Peter’s house was, where Jesus heals Peter’s mother (Matthew 8:14). Jesus preached in the synagogue there, partially built with the financial support of the centurion (Luke 7:1, 4-5) whose servant he heals.

Most people don’t realize that this was probably Jesus’ own house. He had moved to Capernaum from Nazareth; the point of the first two verses is that when Jesus returned from his short preaching trip around the neighbouring villages, he found crowds pressing around the door as though he were a movie star or well-known footballer. Jesus himself was the unlucky householder who had his roof ruined that day.- Tom Wright, Mark for Everyone, 16.

I’m not sure how to reconcile the idea of Jesus having a house in Capernaum with Jesus as the wandering preacher, with “nowhere to lay his head.” (Matt 8:20, Luke 9:58). Perhaps he established a home earlier as any Jewish man would do, and then sold it to support himself going about preaching? Or is it more likely that he stayed with Peter and Andrew so much in Capernaum that their house was “home” to him?

In any case, there at home, surrounded by a large crowd, four people come with their paralyzed friend, on his “bed.” (Beds were typically just mats.) They can’t get through the crowd, so they go up on the roof of the house. (Roofs were typically flat, and houses often had a stairway on the outside to get up to it.) Then, the KJV says they “uncovered the roof… and broke it up.” They “deroof the roof” and then “dig it up”, due to the probable mud/thatch roof layers. (Luke 5:19 mentions “tiles”, however.)

They lower him down, and Jesus, totally unfazed by people having just made a human-size hole in his roof, says “your sins are forgiven.” Some of the crowd does not appreciate this blasphemy, since God alone can forgive sins. I imagine that Jesus had a wry grin at times such as this.

‘Answer me this,’ [Jesus] went on. ‘Is it easier to say to this cripple “Your sins are forgiven”, or to say, “Get up, pick up your stretcher, and walk”? ‘You want to know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins?’ He turned to the paralytic. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘Get up, take your stretcher, and go home.’ 12 He got up, picked up the stretcher in a flash, and went out before them all.- Tom Wright, Mark for Everyone, 16.

Anyone can say anything they want, of course. It’s just as easy to say one thing as another. But to speak and change the nature of reality?

“Everyone was astonished, and they praised God. ‘We’ve never seen anything like this!’ they said.”

And that was exactly the point. Jesus could both forgive sins and heal the sick with a word. Even after they vandalized his house.

Tidbits:

• On Mark 1:4 and “the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins”-
  

  A much more expansive translation that conveys the meaning admirably is the twenty-two English words that Cassirer used to render Mark’s five words in Greek, baptisma metanoias eis aphesin hamartion (1:4): “a baptism which was to have its source in repentance and which was to result in people having their sins forgiven them.” Metzger, Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions, 145.

• Peter’s house has been located, with a good probability of being correct. See this article with pictures.

Lastly, as always, you can support this site and my research by making Amazon purchases through this link, or the Support My Research links at the bottom of the About page. You can get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader.

This week’s assigned readings are something of a potpourri of miracle stories: healings, exorcisms, nature miracles, and two resuscitations, that of the son of the widow of Nain and the daughter of Jarius. Since this is one of the first lessons to take significant material from the Second Gospel, I begin there. The first reading is from Mark 1:14-15

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My focus today is on a passage from Luke 4. In his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus gets up to read in the synagogue, and cites Isaiah 61 as being fulfilled. This goes over like a lead balloon as his once friends and neighbors “filled with rage…drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill… so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” (Luk 4:29 NRSV)

Jesus remarks that “no prophet is accepted in his own country” (KJV) or “no prophet is welcome in his home town” (NASB). The parallels in the other gospels read slightly differently- “A prophet is not without honor except in his home town, and in his own household.” (Mat 13:57 NASB), “A prophet is not without honor except in his home town, and in his own household.” (Mat 13:57 NASB)

Why should this be so, even, apparently, for Jesus? He was not a mysterious figure to them. They knew his family, his parents, and he himself. I remember as a teenager with growing consciousness of the Church, a video that played at the time Gordon B. Hinckley became President of the Church. With his disarming humor, I instinctively liked him, and as I learned more about him, I added a large measure of respect. Note, then, the reaction of his daughter to his call as an apostle.

“I was aware of the human weaknesses my parents displayed, and so Dad’s call came as a little crisis of faith for me. I thought, ‘How could the Lord call somebody like my dad who’s so average and sometimes lacking?’ At the dinner table that first afternoon while we were getting over the shock of what had happened, I said, using an expression I had heard Dad use in referring to missionaries, ‘Well, I guess the Lord is just going to have to work with what he’s got.’”- Sheri Dew, Go Forward With Faith, 198.

 

(I thought I remembered actually seeing her comments spoken in this video, shown around General Conference in the 90s. This is part 1.)

Now, I grant that, unlike Jesus, President Hinckley was neither sinless nor perfect. But what does it mean for Jesus to have been both of those things? I’ve heard people suggest (usually without much thought), that it means Jesus was The Best At Everything, that he never made any mistakes; If he played basketball, he would have never missed a shot, and his cabinets would have been the best cabinets around, from the very first day he ever touched a lathe or ball. Human mistakes made from learning and growing are not necessarily sinful, though. The idea that Jesus’ perfection entailed that he was the Best At Everything from Day 1, I think, denies both his humanity and the scriptures which talk about him learning and growing.

Jesus was not Superman. Many today, including some devout Christians, see him as a kind of Christian version of the movie character, able to do whatever he wanted, to ‘zap’ reality into any shape he liked. In the movies, Superman looks like an ordinary human being, but really he isn’t. Underneath the disguise he is all-powerful, a kind of computer-age super-magician. That’s not the picture of Jesus we get in the New Testament.- NT Wright, Luke for Everyone

Jesus continues, responding to the peoples’ objection, with two Old Testament stories which infuriate them further.
“there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” (Luk 4:25-27 NRS)

Elijah was sent to help a widow—but not a Jewish one. Elisha healed one solitary leper—and the leper was the commander of the enemy army. That’s what did it. That’s what drove them to fury. Israel’s God was rescuing the wrong people. The earlier part of Jesus’ address must have been hammering home the same point. His hearers were, after all, waiting for God to liberate Israel from pagan enemies. In several Jewish texts of the time, we find a longing that God would condemn the wicked nations, would pour out wrath and destruction on them. Instead, Jesus is pointing out that when the great prophets were active, it wasn’t Israel who benefited, but only the pagans. That’s like someone in Britain or France during the Second World War speaking of God’s healing and restoration for Adolf Hitler. It’s not what people wanted to hear. -NT Wright, Luke for Everyone

Jesus escapes the wrath of his hometown, and moves on elsewhere.

Tidbits:

Missionaries and others have a perennial interest in dusting of feet, mentioned in these chapters.

If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town. (Mat 10:14-15 NRSV)

Dan Belnap edited a book for the Religious Studies Center at BYU on ritual, and his own paper is “’Those Who Receive You Not’: The Rite of Wiping Dust Off the Feet”

Lastly, as always, you can support this site and my research by making Amazon purchases through this link, or the Support My Research links at the bottom of the About page. You can get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader.

This week I read from the assigned passages in Luke, beginning with Jesus’ visit to the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. These segments of Luke represents a shift from his source in Mark in a variety of ways, two of which are significant for my purposes. First, I read the passage as a whole, then I will return and focus specifically on the content of the passage from which Jesus reads.

 

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Today I focus on Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, in John 3.

Nicodemus was a “leader of the Jews” which strongly suggests he was a member of “the” Sanhedrin (Gr. synhedrion or “council”).

The sanhedrin in Jerusalem, as it appears in the gospels, Josephus, and rabbinic literature, has been understood alternately as the high priests’ political council, the highest legislative body in Jewish Palestine, the supreme judicial court, the grand jury for important cases, the council of the Pharisaic school, and the final court of appeals in deciding halakic questions. Even the number of assemblies properly called “the sanhedrin” has been debated….The confusion concerning the number and character of the sanhedrin(s) is related to uncertainty about the structure and leadership of 1st century Jewish society in Palestine.- ABD, “Sanhedrin”

What do we know about Nicodemus?

Nicodemus is portrayed as a Pharisee who was also part of the ruling class in Judea (3:1), presumably a member of the Sanhedrin. John 19:39 implies that he was quite wealthy, and in 3:10 Jesus addresses him as the preeminent teacher of Israel. The above, combined with the fact that “rulers” and “Pharisees” are distinguished elsewhere in the gospel (cf. 7:48; 12:42), suggests that Nicodemus was a prominent figure within the governing group.- ABD, “Nicodemus”

John tends to like binaries, like good and evil, light and dark, day and night. Notably, when Nicodemus comes to speak with Jesus, it’s specifically said to be night. Some have read this negatively, to indicate that Nicodemus was evil or a coward.

Though Nicodemus is often portrayed as timid, Robinson (1985: 284) is probably correct in seeing him as quite courageous. Most likely, Nicodemus came by night, not out of fear, but to avoid the crowds that would have interrupted his interview with Jesus. His reaction to the council’s desire to arrest Jesus was boldly calculated to bring out the irony of their lawless act at the very moment in which they were ridiculing the lawless behavior of the “crowd” (7:49–51). And he certainly showed more courage at the Cross than did the absent Disciples of Jesus.- Ibid.

Nicodemus, apparently sincere, addresses Jesus respectfully. And then comes a conversation that is confusing to him, as well as us. Jesus says he must be born “again” or more literally “from above,” and Nicodemus doesn’t get it. Jesus expands on the idea… and we don’t know how the conversation ends. The scene fades out as Jesus talks. Does Nicodemus become a follower or disciple? Scholars differ.

Two points on being born again.
First, in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, there’s a bit of wordplay here, because the common word for “wind” is the same as “spirit,” Gr. pneuma (like pneumatic) and Hebrew ru’ach (that final -ch is guttural like loch). The text here says “the pneuma pneumas where it wants to, and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the pneuma.”

Second, N.T Wright expounds on the rebirth.-

I have lost my birth certificate….
But, of course, the one thing that a birth certificate isn’t needed for is to prove that a birth took place. Here I am, a human being; obviously I must have been born. The fact that at the moment I can’t officially prove when and where is a minor detail.
When Christians discuss the ‘new birth’, the ‘second birth’ or the ‘birth from above’, they often forget this. Some people experience their entry into Christian faith as a huge, tumultuous event, with a dramatic build-up, a painful moment of decision and then tidal waves of relief, joy, exhilaration, forgiveness and love. They are then easily tempted—and there are movements of thought within Western culture which make this temptation all the more powerful—to think that this moment itself is the centre of what it means to be a Christian, as though what God wanted was simply to give people a single wonderful spiritual experience, to be remembered ever afterwards with a warm glow.
But that’s a bit like someone framing their birth certificate, hanging it on the wall, and insisting on showing it to everyone who comes into the house. What matters for most purposes is not that once upon a time you were born— though of course sometimes it matters that you can prove when and where you were born. What matters is that you are alive now, and that your present life, day by day and moment by moment, is showing evidence of health and strength and purpose. Physical birth is often painful and difficult, for the baby as well as for the mother. But you don’t spend your life talking about what a difficult birth you had, unless for some tragic reason it has left you with medical problems. You get on with being the person you now are.
So when Jesus talks to Nicodemus about the new birth, and when John highlights this conversation by making it the first of several in-depth discussions Jesus has in this gospel, we shouldn’t suppose that this means that we should spend all our time thinking about the moment of our own spiritual birth. It matters that it happened, of course. Sadly, there are many, inside the church as well as outside, whose present state suggests that one ought to go back to examine whether in fact a real spiritual birth took place at all. But where there are signs of life it’s more important to feed and nurture it than to spend much time going over and over what happened at the moment of birth.- Tom Wright, John For Everyone

(This is a great “popular” 18-volume NT commentary by Wright, which I picked up on Logos when it first came out.)

In other words, Wright says, while your spiritual rebirth is important, it’s the new and changed life you live after that rebirth that really matters.

Jesus continues into 3:16, perhaps the most frequently memorized and quoted verse of the New Testament- “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…” We should not understand this “so” as “so much” but as “in this way” e.g. “Here’s how God loved the world; he gave his only begotten son…”

Tidbit–

John 4:24 has sometimes been a point of contention, as the KJV says that “God is a spirit” and other translations read “God is spirit…” This is contrasted with the LDS doctrine in D&C 130:22 (1843) which says that “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.” We can approach this two ways. We can opt for “line upon line”, that the NT reflects a belief in a disembodied god, because it hadn’t been revealed or made clear yet. After all, line-upon-line is probably what accounts for the potentially problematic statement in the Lectures on Faith c. 1835 (not written by Joseph Smith, btw), which contrasted the Father as a “personage of spirit” with the Son as a “a personage of tabernacle, made or fashioned like unto man, or being in the form and likeness of man.”

On the other hand, Israelites, early Christianity, and Judaism did not make a binary distinction or contrast between “spiritual vs physical”, and certainly thought God was embodied. Describing God as “spirit” does not, then, render him non-physical except through imposing a modern and popular distinction that doesn’t apply.  (I can dig up some references and reading if you’d like, otherwise see this further LDS discussion from FAIR here, here, and here. Cf. somewhere in How Wide the Divide.)

Lastly, as always, you can support this site and my research by making Amazon purchases through this link, or the Support My Research links at the bottom of the About page. You can get updates by email whenever a post goes up (subscription box on the right). If you friend me on Facebook, please drop me a note telling me you’re a reader.

Introduction

One of the pericope assigned this week is the story of the first disciples in the Gospel of John, the third and fourth days of the first week of Jesus’ mortal ministry, in imitation of the preparation for the giving of the Law in Exodus 19 and Pentecost (1:35-51). Immediately before this section, on days one and two, two important things happen. First, John is accosted by representatives of Jewish leadership who wonder why he is baptizing. After denying that he is any of the traditional Jewish eschatological figures, John indicates that he baptizes in preparation for the coming of someone who is greater than himself – indeed, he baptizes precisely to reveal this particular person (vv. 19-28; 31). This is his fundamental role as a witness to the Light that is coming into the world.

Second, John reports that he did baptize Jesus and that as he did so he saw that the Spirit descended on Jesus and remained. This is important because Jesus will eventually pass the Spirit to his disciples. John further fulfills his obligation as a witness by indicating that he understands that Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (v. 29). This is the only time Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God, an odd designation since the sacrifice of lambs was not a sin offering, so perhaps the metaphor is really getting at the idea of reconciliation with God. In any case, the word “sin” is singular, indicating that the world really has only one sin, a failure to believe. One way to understand this is that Jesus takes away that sin by revealing the Father, which in turn discloses the darkness and false sense of life in which the world exists and prepares the way for its redemption.

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