Words on the Word
Gospels
Restoration in the Wilderness
I heard a good joke today. Good by my standards, anyway, which not all who know my humor will wholly trust. Question: “What do John the Baptist and Kermit the Frog have in common?” Answer: “Well, besides their affinity for water, they both share a middle name of the.” That made me think again about my … Continue reading
Weekly Greekly Lectionary Confectionery
If your church uses a fixed Sunday lectionary, I found a great blog for you this week. Looking at the Greek (and English translation) of the Gospel reading each week, Left Behind and Loving It is a help to preachers (and parishioners) who want to explore the text in depth. The Greek is there, but knowledge … Continue reading
Jesus Makes a Pun in the Synagogue
Jesus makes a pun in Luke 4. I’m not the first one to notice this, but it stood out to me as I read my way through Luke 4:14-21 this past week. I’m preaching on the passage at my church tomorrow. Jesus enters the synagogue at his hometown of Nazareth in Galilee and opens the Isaiah scroll … Continue reading
Faith and healing in the Gospel of Mark: a brief reflection
Faith is closely connected with healing in Mark. Jesus heals the paralytic on the basis of the faith of his friends (and of the paralytic himself, too?) in 2:5. Mark 5:34, 7:29, 10:52 feature similar healings where the faith of the healed seems to be at least a partial basis for Jesus’ healing. At the … Continue reading
Amazed by Jesus
Amazement is a common crowd reaction to Jesus’ teaching and to his miraculous powers of healing and exorcism in the Gospel of Mark. Mark uses the Greek words ἐκπλήσσω, θαμβέω, ἐξίστημι, θαυμάζω to depict others’ amazement at Jesus. In Mark 1:22 the people are “amazed by his teaching.” In 1:27, they reiterate their amazement at his … Continue reading
Why did Jesus tell the disciples not to tell anyone about him?
Why did Jesus sometimes tell people not to tell others about who he was, or about how he healed them? This passage from Mark 8:27-30 (NIV) looks almost anti-evangelistic: Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?” They replied, “Some … Continue reading
frameworks (How to Navigate the New Testament): a review
Why the book frameworks? Author Eric Larson says, frameworks, quite simply, is a book about Bible navigation and context, material that’s designed to build your confidence in your ability to negotiate the text and understand it. Think of it as a guidebook, a Bible companion, written for anyone who would like to have a personal biblical … Continue reading
A wife for Jesus?
Did Jesus have a wife? Does it matter? In the last two days I’ve seen about 50 Facebook status updates from friends and groups I follow, each with their own take on the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” papyrus that Harvard Professor Karen L. King recently announced. (Nerdy grammatical excursus: King has titled the papyrus with Jesus’s, … Continue reading
What kind of Messiah was Jesus?
What kind of Messiah was Jesus? Recently for a seminary class I had to describe the difference between “the Maccabean hope in a Messiah and Jesus’ fulfillment of that hope.” Maccabean hope on first glance would appear to be a hope in military power. This poem at the beginning of 1 Maccabees 3, for example, … Continue reading
Would Mark’s Jesus have us handle snakes and drink poison? (part 2 of 2) (BibleWorks 9 review, concluded)
The Gospel of Mark has a couple of possible (disputed) endings. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the options for how to understand Mark’s closing chapter. It is the so-called longer ending of Mark that has Jesus appearing to some of his followers and talking about their picking up snakes and drinking poison. … Continue reading
