Author: ijordan

The book of Revelation gives its name to a category of literature that signifies a vision of heavenly things. The book of Revelation is John’s vision of the end of human history as we know it. It begins a new reality in the kingdom of God. Generally, people view Revelation as an apoplectic story, however, it does not necessarily reference the end of the world.

Revelation could be placed into three categories: an apocalypse, prophecy, and a letter. Apocalyptic stories typically contain symbolism, heavenly journies, and angels. Revelation can be categorized as a prophecy as it is telling of what will happen in the future. It can also be categorized as a letter because it is written to a specific group of people. Revelation is written as one letter to seven different churches however, each of them is singled out at one time within the story.

Revelation is about the future, however, it is not determined whose future it is referencing. It could only be the future of these specific churches or it could be the future of all of Christianity. It also references the present. People have many different approaches to interpreting the book of Revelation.

In today’s class, we focused on the letter of James. According to the Bible, Jesus did not have brothers and sisters, so reference to James the brother of Jesus is more figurative. The use of the word “brother” is meant to reference either cousin or they could be half-brothers and sisters from his father’s side. James’ real name was Jacob and it was changed to James in the translation of the Bible.

James plays a leadership role in the Jerusalem church, who comes to know Paul. Paul was one of the earliest sources of Jesus, although he was not an eyewitness. This, however, is not surprising for the time as there were no pictures of people, not seeing someone was not an indication that they did not exist. Josephus mentions James the brother of Jesus with this specific title and also Paul mentions him in this way. These examples make it seem possible that he could have been a biological brother to Jesus or some form of a family member.

I was not in class on November 5 for personal reasons, so I will be talking about some class notes from the previous class I attended in which we talked about the synoptic gospels because this is a topic that I am greatly interested in.

We began by addressing why we need to explain how the gospels overlap. From a literary perspective, understanding how the gospels overlap allows one to see how the author takes an earlier text and rearranges it. It also allows us to get a clearer sense of the author’s creativity and allows the reader to gain more context.

The synoptic gospels overlap greatly. Some problems that arise when trying to explain which of the gospels came first are as follows. Luke using Matthew to write his gospel seems unlikely because the information in Matthew is nicely laid out and easy to follow and the information in Luke is scattered throughout the book. The overwhelming consensus is that Matthew and Luke used Mark’s gospel, so therefore Mark was the earliest gospel written. However, it is also understood that Matthew and Luke did not know of each other’s gospels. Some people explain the synoptic gospels by adding in a fourth source, Q, which all of the gospels depend on. Some people claim that source Q was a collection of Jesus’ teachings, but not gospel.

The gospel of John is distinctive from the rest. It references the beloved disciple and the end refers to another party reading this gospel and supporting it. It describes events such as dialogue with Nicodemus and the wedding in Cana. It also has a different setting, in Jerusalem rather than Galilee. It takes on a different chronology of visits to Jerusalem and cleansing the temple at the start of public ministry. It also has a very distinct language and style from the other gospels.

We began the lecture by talking about Jesus and politics. Jesus’ historical life ended with a political execution, a crucifixion, which was typically used for people who rejected imperial authority. Typically, people who were crucified were defiant slaves or people who gathered a following. Mark was defined as the earliest gospel and he defined “kingdom” as a political term. Jesus wanted to use the kingdom of God for a political purpose while on earth. In all of the gospels, but especially Mark Jesus used political means. He preplanned his entry to Jerusalem on a doney, which symbolized peace. He also referred to the temple as a ‘den of robbers’.

We then talked in the lecture about the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount was the first of Jesus’ five long speeches outlined in the gospel of Matthew. It is a controversial speech because at face value it seems to claim that followers of Jesus should still obey the entirety of the law. However, it removes itself from several parts of the law.

We then began to address ways in which the gospels differ. Mark comments that Jesus declares all food clean, whereas Matthew says nothing of the sort. Also, in Mark Jesus told his followers to pray that tribulation did not overtake them and in Matthew, the Sabbath is mentioned in this passage and still meant to be followed by Matthew’s readers.  One of the major differences in the gospels is the characterization of Jesus and the rhetorical devices. Matthew characterizes Jesus as the embodiment of Jewish wisdom, whereas John portrays Jesus as the Passover Lamb. Mark portrays the theme of fear through repetition and Matthew portrays Jesus’ presence through his placement at the beginning and end of the book.

I enjoyed getting to learn about the similarities and differences of the Bible and how they are interrelated through the readings for class.

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.

Monotheism is defined as “the doctrine or belief that there is only one God”. I always assumed that the Bible was a monotheistic work, as Christianity only worships one God, however after class today I am not sure. According to our first reading, monolatry is defined as “the belief that there are more deities but only one is to be worshipped”. I did not think this was a good word to describe the Bible, but as I did more research I learned that the Bible may be more of a monolatrous work than a monotheistic one. The Bible insists that only Yahweh is to be worshipped, no other god. Simply saying this phrase assumes the existence of other gods, it just claims the superiority of God as the one who deserves worship.

In class, we talked a lot about prophets. First, we tried to think of any people in today’s world that are similar to the prophets of Biblical times. Some people compared prophets to scientists, who foretell the future through research, or social justice figures, who are listened to by some and hated by others. After that discussion, we began to think about monotheism in the Bible. Prophets played a major role in the development of monotheism. The people of the Bible were not monotheistic, they worshipped many deities and were under the impression that gods were meant to specialize. It took prophets coming to earth and teaching these people to change their minds about monotheism and even the prophets were ineffective in convincing the people to change their ways and become monotheistic.

In class today, we talked about the prophets and we tried to come up with our own definition of a prophet. The class defined a prophet as someone sent by God to preach his word or someone who predicts the future. This seems to be a pretty good definition based on the readings for today’s class. “How Capitalism Echoes the Bible,” said that the prophet Samuel warned people about the consequences of demanding for a king to rule over them, he predicted the future and tried to convince them to not ask God for a king, and yet they did anyway. The kings that Samuel tried to convince them not to get ended up expropriating the men, imposing heavy taxes on harvests, and breaking up the tribal structure of Israel. “Walking with Justice” brought up an idea I had never thought about prophets despite learning about them for so long. I never thought about the dangers of the job of a prophet. Many prophets told of controversial topics that could have made powerful people very angry. For example, Isaiah and Micah stood up to rich people who stole inheritance from the poor and Elijah prophesized that Jezebel and Ahab would die because of their treatment of Naboth. I think in defining a prophet our class should have recognized the danger of their job, as it takes a lot of courage to stand up to the powerful people and follow God’s word despite the worldly repercussions.

In class, we talked about how very often the Bible has many tellings of the same story. Usually, these stories are told in different ways to accentuate a different part of the story than previously told. However, in other books of the Bible, some stories are completely left out. For example, the book of Chronicles completely ignores Saul’s kingship and the story of David and Bathsheba. This is intentional as Chronicles is meant to tell of the rebuilding and the return to the promised land. It purposefully leaves out some of the negative things. Chronicles does a very good job of making characters previously mentioned in other books into role models and giving clear messages. I never thought about different books of the Bible in this way. Whenever I considered missing information within stories of the Bible I always assumed that the author of that book did not think that story was important enough to include. However, it makes much more sense that authors of the Bible would repeat stories told in different ways to give off different messages and portray characters in a different light. It is also important to remember that the Bible was not written to be one long narrative, but it was compiled a collection of separate books, so it makes sense that some stories do not contain the same details that others do.