Month: October 2020

As a woman growing up in the church, I have always wondered what my specific role is. The Old Testament surely sets up women with a confusing life, with fully subservient and abused wives in the early patriarchy, then praise in Psalms and Proverbs. The New Testament isn’t much clearer, with women being featured, but with little information on them and a lot of information about their husbands. In writing my controversial topics essay, I learned a lot about the Scriptures that are commonly used to promote quiet women in the church, but these aren’t universally accepted as genuine letters of Paul. Usually, Paul praised women for what they did to help the church, through volunteering and funding.  I like to think that the early church shunned the gender expectations of the time, because I believe that the death of Christ makes us all forgiven and all equal. Everyone has their own way of interpreting the Bible, and I’m glad many people make efforts to understand the women that were underrepresented in the early forms of the Bible. Furthering the lack of inclusion for anyone is far from what the church is about, and using that information to supplement the Bible’s information is very helpful to all kinds of readers.

Women throughout history have been oppressed. These women have been silenced and are still being silenced from even within the Bible and society. When thinking of women in the bible the first two names that i can think of are Eve, and Mary  (the mother of Jesus). These women play very important roles within the Christian religious beliefs. When looking at Eve you realize she was made from Adam, and Adam was created in Gods image. In addition while looking at the story of Adam and Eve it is Eve’s failure of grabbing the forbidden fruit. However while talking about it in class Eve hadn’t been created until after the rules. Does this make her mistake the fault of Adam. Mary on the other hand is very important and highly mentioned as she is the mother of our savior Jesus. Although throughout her story with Jesus Mary struggle as she sees all that her son is put through.Women in the Bible have important stories within the Gospel but are either unnamed or not called by their actually name but from where they are from. The emphasizes the idea that women in the Bible receive a lot less attention than the male characters receive.

Women have been silenced and are still being silenced from the Bible and in society. There are many stories about women in the Bible, but these are usually short and do not get the attention that the Biblical stories with male characters get. Some of the stories do not even contain the names of the women. These stories are not to be discounted from the impact of the ministry of Jesus. While the women did not hold a place in society as men did, they are still to be accounted for. An instance of the silencing of women in the Bible is that women and children were not counted with the men in the story of the loaves and fish or anytime Jesus taught to a large crowd. Because these women were not counted as people in the Bible, this mentality has bled into our current thinking of women. I think that there are instances that we try to rationalize such as not covering the story about the woman because her name was not mentioned, or she did not occur in many places in the Bible. It is in those instances that you can think about how we have knowledge about the history of women and how they fit in the ancient society. By using the existing knowledge of ancient societies and the role of women we can conjecture what would have occurred in these stories. We know enough about human nature and ancient societies, why can’t we think outside of the box and bring the experiences of women to light in the Bible? Or if it is a struggle to focus on one story of the women, compare the stories, and look on a deeper level to how they might have felt based on your own experiences.

When I think about women in the Bible, the first woman I think of is Eve. It always bothered me how Eve was made from Adam. I wonder if how women are portrayed in the Bible is the reason there is so much misogyny in the world today. With a book like the Bible being passed around from generation to generation, it is no wonder women are still treated the way they are today. Reading the Old Testament for the first time, all I could think about was how objectified women were in the chapters I was reading. The constant use of women as objects to be given away was shocking. There were several stories of men giving away their “virgin daughters” as payment. Since this is occurs so much in the Bible, it makes me wonder the affect it has on people who read the Bible everyday.

Women have been around for a long time. One of the very first characters introduced to us in the Bible was a woman. Woman play important roles in the Bible. Some are leaders or advisors, and others are mothers. Though the Bible seems to focus on its male characters, there are many women characters who get overlooked for the things they have done.

We can start at the very beginning: Eve. Eve was important not so much for her accomplishments, but for her mistakes. Eve had the initial sin, which impacted everyone in her wake. Another important woman in the Old Testament was Sarah, the Wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac. She was an advisor to Abraham, and raised her son well, which cannot be overlooked. Another important mother was Jochebed, Moses’ mother. She saved his life by sending him down the Nile. Just imagine how things would have played out if Moses had been killed.

There are few female characters in the New Testament, but arguably the most important female character exists here. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was chosen to be the mother of a Savior. She raised her son as such, and watched him die, and rise. If there was no Mary, there would be no Jesus. Another important mother is Elizabeth, who was the mother of John the Baptist. She was once barren, but her strength and love in God allowed for her to bear a child. Her child grew up to be a prophet, and she played a large role in that. For this reason,

Growing up in church, the dichotomy between the “Gospels” and the “Synoptic Gospels” was never emphasized. I had no idea who wrote what beyond the names on the front of the book. My church just said they were divinely inspired and they were all eyewitnesses and called it a day. You can imagine how surprised I was when I found out there’s a whole diagram for the sources of Gospel writings. The JEDP sources were mind-blowing to me, and the Q source was the icing on the cake. The idea that the authors may not entirely be just Mark or just Matthew is still pretty novel to me (who knows why I thought it was just a bunch of modern Bibles copied from a piece of scroll that Mark wrote and hid away, ask my church). This makes me wonder why churches don’t do more contextualization in terms of culture or history of how we got the books in our hands. Who translated, copied, and edited the sources is becoming much more important to how I understand the Bible, which was never ever mentioned in my church services. The divide between academic study and everyday Bible study is very steep (in my own experience) and becoming increasingly evident as well.

It was kind of difficult to really do a lot of deeper thinking in regards to the Gospels and how they may be related. It’s hard to provide insight when the most knowledgeable experts in the whole world took such a long time to come up with a strong chronological order.

I enjoyed the discussion about the Gospel of John more. I like how there seems to be more misunderstanding and consensus in John, the inconsistency adds a weird layer of beauty and meaning if that makes sense.  Because of this, even though I’d say my knowledge of the Gospels is still limited, I’d say that John is also my favorite. I also like John’s usage of the word “Father” as I think it’s important for readers conceptualization of the Holy Trinity.

I found this section of class to be particularly interesting. I knew that there were many shared parts of the Bible but never knew they were almost exact copies. I found the reading about Q to be helpful in explaining how information was shared. I really liked the science/theory behind how scholars figure out which book was written first and how Luke and Matthew “copied” information from Mark. It amazes me how much research and work is put into figuring out which gospel was written first. I wouldn’t even know where to start when trying to figure out the order of gospels.

I thought the class discussion about the differences in the Gospels was interesting. I didn’t realize how much scholarly research and content there was about the differences and similarities between the Gospels. I think it’s very interesting the ways like discussed in class, guessing which one came first using context. I never would have thought that I would have to think about how to figure out what writing came first. It is also interesting how some small differences in single words could possibly even change the meaning of the Gospels. It seems kind of similar to the idea of how the Bible should be interpreted, whether it should be literal or in context.

The Gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap in some of their stories and John is different from these. The stories that do overlap have some sort of connection between all of them. It is assumed that the authors wrote the Gospels separate from each other. The big question posed is why does it matter that we compare these Gospels? By putting these in conversation with one another, it allows us to see what the author valued and how they saw some events as opposed to the other disciples. This is parallels to the comparison between the story of a victim and the story of the perpetrator. On one hand the victim sees the event as a big deal, and they remember the details vividly. The perpetrator does not see the importance of the event and will downplay it to try and normalize their actions. How they present their story shows what they want to highlight and what they want the audience to understand about the event. The authors of the Gospels write in the same way. They have their own theme that they want to highlight so the audience understands what the big takeaways from Jesus’ time on Earth propagates the will of God.