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Class Prep
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The Stories of Jesus
- Today's focus is the stories of Jesus—not only the things he did and said, but what his followers thought he himself meant. Of course, none of the primary readings you'll study today were actually written during Jesus' life. Instead, they were written decades later, sometimes by people who never actually met Jesus the man. But the authors have come to believe certain things about him, and we want to probe those meanings today.
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- The journal question for today asks you to revisit the question of theodicy, or God's justice, through the story of Jesus. Jewish tradition held two notions deeply: that God is merciful and that God is just. Messianic hope captured this, imagining a leader who would restore both.
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- But does Jesus do this? Jesus is mocked as a fake king and executed by the "justice" of his day, making the justice and power of God look awfully weak. This begs the question, is God merciful OR is God just? Can God be both at the same time? Or do you share a common Christian view that Jesus represents God's mercy and only the Old Testament God exacts justice?
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- Come to class prepared to discuss and expand on the following two questions from the primary texts and from the reading in Bible Babel:
- Narrate the major events of Jesus' life and discuss three of his teachings in the Sermon on the Mount (Gospel of Matthew).
- What does Jesus mean—that is, what are the implications of Jesus—for Paul, Matthew, John and Hebrews? (In class, we will frame this question in terms of six "Christologies" or ways of speaking about Jesus as Christ.) How is his significance performed in the eucharist (a.k.a. Last Supper, Holy Communion)?
- In addition, begin to put these Christian interpretations of Jesus in dialogue with what we learned about the central religious beliefs of Judaism, namely Sinai and Zion:
- How do Jesus' teachings correspond to or contrast to the role of "Sinai" in Jewish belief and practice? In Christian imagination, how does Jesus himself replace features of the cosmic mountain Zion and its Temple?
- This kind of cumulative, comparative question will be typical for the midterm exam in two weeks.
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- Define for yourself the following terms:
- incarnation
- evangelist
- disciple
- synoptic gospels
- deutero-Pauline letters
- catholic epistles
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- Assigned Readings
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- Primary: Mark 1:1–3:6, 8–9; 14:1–16:8; Matthew 1–5; John 1:1-18; Hebrews 4:14–5:10; Romans 5:12-19
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- Secondary: Swenson, Bible Babel, review 19-21; read 30, 113-27, 150-60
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- Slides from Lecture
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- Further Reading
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- Bockmuehl, Markus, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Jesus, Cambridge Companions to Religion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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- Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ, 2d ed. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2000. [our library has the original 1988 edition]
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- White, L. Michael. Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite. New York: HarperOne, 2010.
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- Links
- From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians - a 1998 PBS program that traces the many faces of Jesus and the stories told about him. You can watch the program on their website and read further background information.
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- Sources
- Photographs:
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