Month: October 2020

The Synoptic Gospels are the three books of the New Testament. These tell the story of Jesus from his life, death and eventual resurrection. These three Gospels are Mark, Luke and Matthew. These are considered synoptic because they include similar if not the same stories. When comparing them in class we put them into columns and picked apart their similarities and differences. When it came to parts of the Gospel that are nit synoptic John was mentioned.  John came up as it does not line up with the other three Gospels in the same way.

In The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament, David Aune talks about the “synoptic problem”. This is the idea that the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are all connected in some way. There are similarities in the books that have led to this conclusion. Scholars have tried to dissect this idea and determine if the books were written by the same author, or which book was written first. In The New Testament: A Literary History, Gerd Theissen also discusses this idea. He talks about how there is a source “Q” which connects Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This source is explained in detail and by a drawing as well. All the books are connected when “Q” is included.

The Synoptic Gospels are the three Gospels that tell similar or even overlapping stories. These three Gospels are Matthew, Mark, and Luke. These are synoptic because they involve many of the same stories and could even be put into columns and picked apart with similarities and differences. John, however, is not a Synoptic Gospel due to the fact that most of this Gospel does not line up with the other three Gospels.

With the Synoptic Gospels there are a couple of questions that come about. Which one came first? Which stories are taken from other stories? Let’s just say that if the three Gospels were turned in for a writing assignment in a class, then the teacher would suspect some form of plagiarism. Each of the Gospels tell very similar stories. It would be like if you read an essay online and wanted to copy it, you would change a couple of words and sum up a few statements to avoid copying the essay. The Gospels each have similar stories, but with different details. But this makes sense. If three people were to see a car crash happen, each of them might have similar stories, but none of them would tell the exact same story. That’s how the Gospels work, they give us different views on the same story, like when interviewing witnesses at a car crash. However, the stories have too many details that are similar. That is why it is believed that the authors were dependent of each other. Certain details were most likely borrowed and taken from others, but sometimes that is necessary to tell a full story.

When we talked about Jesus’s birth and the differences in the gospels telling of it, I thought about the difference in nativity scenes all around the world. It may seem silly but the conversation makes me think about how many nativity scenes follow each gospels telling of the story and how many are completely wrong or blur different gospels together.

I also enjoyed learning about the possibility that Jesus was born in a cave, merely because it is a funny scene to imagine. When we talked about the fact of the roman calendars incorrectness in identifying the year Jesus was born brought me back to an idea I’ve had the whole semester, what year did Mary and Joseph think it was when he was born and were they on the Roman 12 month calendar. Further down the rabbit hole when was that calendar accepted worldwide and what did the process look like.

The infancy story of Jesus is one that I am very family with. In Catholic school we always had an Advent program, where we acted out the Christmas story of Jesus’ birth. I think the story is incredible, how he was born by the Virgin Mary in a stable. While reading the other blogs, I found what someone said very interesting: that the birth of Jesus is why they believe in the power of him, because why would a powerful king be so determined to kill a baby and to go as far as to kill all male babies under two years old? I really like that reasoning, because it shows just how important that little baby was.

Mark Allan Powell describes how historians evaluate the life of Jesus apart from religious interpretation. They do this by putting the Gospel’s through the same analysis as any other ancient writings about historical people. They also look at other ancient writings that are not from the Bible in order to gain new information. I think it is very good that historians do this, in order to show what can be deemed as reliable about Jesus in the Gospels.

Most of what we talked about in class I was familiar with. A few years back during a Christmas Eve service, our Pastor discussed what most people recall of the birth of Jesus Christ. It was interesting hearing what the story is in our head in comparison to the actual Scripture. He even spoke about how our nativity/manger scenes that are put up during Christmas are biblically wrong. It was interesting to go over this in class. When people ask me why I believe that Jesus Christ is the savior, I always tell them the birth of Jesus. Why would a powerful king want to kill a baby? What would cause a ruler to be feared over a two year old? He went as far as to kill any two year old. I think this really puts things into perspective when people try to tell me Jesus was just a normal person. What normal person., well a baby in this case, scares a leader that much?

In class we discussed the book of Psalms. As an individual that grew up going to church, Sunday school, etc. I never fully realized that these were actually songs. I’m not sure if I wasn’t paying attention during Sunday school (I tend to space off during church or fall asleep) or why I never picked up on it. You can easily read the passages as just passages. As mentioned in class and by a few other blog posts, it would be a very cool experience to see how these passages were sang or how they were chanted. I was also very surprised with how many Psalms are in popular music. It never occurred to me that these lyrics were actually Biblical and some of these songs I know! I never knew how much the Bible even influences music.

Gospel directly translates to “good news”. There are four known accounts of the Gospel within the New Testament: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These four are considered to be the four earliest written Gospels, all of which focus on the life of Jesus. The general consensus of Biblical scholars is that the Gospel of Mark was written first and Matthew and Luke used Mark to craft their own gospels.

One major question addressed by Biblical scholars is: are the gospels biographies? The quick answer is yes. While they do not match biographies written in our time, the gospels seem to follow the general outline of biographies from the time period. Biographies from the current times tend to focus a lot on a person’s youth. Whereas, the Biblical biographies do not focus on Jesus’ youth. Richard Burrage is a Biblical scholar who supports the fact that the gospels are biographies of the life of Jesus.

The Psalms are texts that were originally designed for singing. They also include information that indicates that they were set to melodies and were well known. The idea that many people sang Psalms together is not surprising, as this reflects many traditions of language and music in the Middle East. Many temples at the time had professional singers. It makes more sense that the Psalms are songs rather than poems because the change in pitch allowed for more interpretation than literary text. Psalms could be written about the coronation of kings, conflict, repentance, wisdom, or anything that Israel was dealing with as a community. Psalms help remind people that there is a variety of different stylistic literature within the Bible. The Psalms are also interesting because they are the only work within the Bible that are separated as they were meant to be read and not randomly separated hundreds of years after their writing.

For example, Psalm 22 is one that people often recognize because it contains the phrase “my God, my God why have you forsaken me?” This phrase was uttered by Jesus on the cross and it is likely that he was reciting from this psalm. Psalm 22 is one of the rare psalms that begins as lamentation and ends with confidence and trust in God.

Our study of suffering and meaning in the Bible focused heavily on the life of Job. God allowed Job to be tested by Satan because he was blameless and upright. Job’s oxen were stolen, his servants were murdered, his kids died, and illness was bestowed upon him. Job took all of this hardship with dignity and grace at first and continued to praise the Lord. He did however begin to curse the day of his birth and his friends joined in to console him in anger and defeat. God answered Job in anger. He asked questions of Job that only God would know how to answer and basically showed his power and knowledge over Job. Job’s fortunes were then restored two-fold.

In class today we talked about proverbs, wise sayings that you can apply to life. Some known proverbs in our lives are: don’t count your eggs before they hatch and God loves those who help themselves. We then talked about the book of Job and how it is essentially a philosophical thought experiment. Once Job’s friends arrive he tries to use language to undo his creation and God gets very angry with them. This does not seem like a historical story in the Bible, but rather it is a story to explain something that was happening at the time. It could have explained why tragedies occur in good people’s lives.