The Bible TI251 Fall 2020

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.

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.

I was never familiar with the infancy stories before. In sunday school not much was taught about baby Jesus. All that I knew was that Jesus was born by the virgin Mary on December 25. I knew that he was a carpenter, and that Jesus was actually Jewish. When it came to the stories of Jesus it was primarily focused on his journey of young adulthood. It is interesting to think of the Bible as a biography of Jesus. Primarily in the first few sections of Matthew. I was surprised to see that Herod would try to kill Jesus as an infant. I never knew this didn’t realize that even earlier on Herod saw Jesus as a threat. I never knew that the three wise men that visited Jesus when he was born were visited by an angel and were told to not report back to Herod. I always had the belief that that were sent by god to witness his birth. But from their his story jumps in my mind to his early adulthood. When I think of Jesus, I think of him as 20+ year old with a beard and long hair. Not as 6lb 8oz baby Jesus but this is also because his early adulthood is really when his journey of faith begins.

Everything in this class is new to me as I really don’t know anything about the Bible, but I was very interested in the fact that parts of the gospels are drastically different. I thought it was interesting that they differ in the stories that they both have, but also the fact that they have different stories in them. Based on the other reading it’s clear that they come together to tell a specific story about the life of Jesus. I would be kind of curious to hear more about what scholars and historians have to say, and also how it differs from what preachers and religious people have to say about them.