In some ways, the Gospels are like the text of a drama. If you've read the script of a play and then seen it performed, you realize how different a text can be interpreted when it is transferred from page to stage. All of the Gospels were originally read aloud to an audience that was intimately familiar with the background, and that gave the words immediacy, meaning, and vibrancy. In today's world, we are no longer privy to that scenery. In order to fully grasp the message of the gospels, we must bring that context to our minds' eyes as much as possible. What Was the World of Jesus?: A Journey for Curious Pilgrims seeks to provide the necessary scenery so that the Gospels can again be heard in a way that is closer to the experience of that original audience hearing them read aloud. Author Carl Roemer presents it in the form of a journey or pilgrimage, leading us on an adventure into a world that is very different from our own world. On this journey, we can encounter the story behind the story a background that opens up a fresh, new experience of the Gospels and shares the words and actions of Jesus as they were experienced by early Christians.
This study of the parables of Jesus grasps the character and person of the Jesus of history. Readers will experience him as a flesh and blood person intimately immersed in and engaged with his world and the people of his world.
This study of the miracles attributed to Jesus in the Gospels begins with a survey of the sciences, because in our present cultural context, materialism is the dominant approach to and understanding of our world, of history, and of our very selves. If the materialist's understanding is true, then there is no such thing as miracles, because every event must occur as the result of some previous material events. Contemporary biblical scholarship mostly approaches the miracle stories from a materialist point of view. It questions their historicity because they violate what has now become the entrenched modus operandi in our culture and society, operating with the idea that the universe is a closed nexus of cause and effect. The miracles are understood, then, as products of the community and not historical reports, although, according to this line of scholarship, they may be based on some vague recollection of Jesus's activity that somehow had healing effects. Modern science, however, as one scientist has put it, in climbing the mountain of knowledge, has reached its peak and found a theologian at the top. The sciences, in other words, have led to the implication that our universe has a creator and that the universe and the human genome have been designed.
The Beloved Son as Tantalizing Teacher is a contribution to the study of the “historical Jesus.” It is meant for anyone interested in Jesus as a person as well as part of the academic project of discovering his humanity and his place in history. To truly uncover him in this way, the facts of his Jewish historical context are foundational. The context is in terms of six dynamics or factors: the history of late antiquity of the Mediterranean world from Alexander to the destruction of the temple and how people in the land of Israel interacted with that history; Israel’s economic, social, religious, and political structures; and the ecology of the land of Jesus’ time. In particular we understand Jesus and the movement he initiated as part of other renewal movements of his time and place that arose to confront what most of his contemporaries perceived as the corrosion of Jewish society. So the Jewish people of the first century, living in their patrimonial land of Israel, were embroiled in a crisis that threatened to overwhelm the nation. The Beloved Son as Tantalizing Teacher sums up the situation, with the pithy phrase borrowed from one scholar, as a people whose “backs were against the wall.”
This study of the parables of Jesus grasps the character and person of the Jesus of history. Readers will experience him as a flesh and blood person intimately immersed in and engaged with his world and the people of his world.
In some ways, the Gospels are like the text of a drama. If youve read the script of a play and then seen it performed, you realize how different a text can be interpreted when it is transferred from page to stage. All of the Gospels were originally read aloud to an audience that was intimately familiar with the background, and that gave the words immediacy, meaning, and vibrancy. In todays world, we are no longer privy to that scenery. In order to fully grasp the message of the gospels, we must bring that context to our minds eyes as much as possible. What Was the World of Jesus?: A Journey for Curious Pilgrims seeks to provide the necessary scenery so that the Gospels can again be heard in a way that is closer to the experience of that original audience hearing them read aloud. Author Carl Roemer presents it in the form of a journey or pilgrimage, leading us on an adventure into a world that is very different from our own world. On this journey, we can encounter the story behind the storya background that opens up a fresh, new experience of the Gospels and shares the words and actions of Jesus as they were experienced by early Christians.
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