Word: backgrounder
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...party are likely to emerge in a powerful position. Many observers believe al-Yawer has the potential to become what the new Iraq sorely lacks: a moderate Sunni leader who can unite disgruntled Sunnis without alienating the majority Shi'ites. "He has a lot of strengths--a tribal background, a modern attitude, youth," says Iyad al-Samarrai, secretary-general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni political group. "He will be an important political figure in Iraq for a long time." Juan Cole, an Iraq expert at the University of Michigan, says, "He's the great white hope...
...Mormon?" Reid lets slip that he once got into a fistfight with his father-in-law-to-be, an observant Jew who opposed the marriage for religious reasons, and I realize how perfect both portraits are. Reid's story is Twainian, a western desert tall tale, and his background is as brutal and hardscrabble as Jackson's. "I guess it's no secret that both my parents drank heavily," he finally says. "I didn't learn my family values in Searchlight," he adds, referring to the tiny Nevada mining town where his father committed suicide and his mother washed laundry...
...brief lines, making the Annunciation proper just one in a sequence of such dreams and concentrating less on additional information about the event than on a series of citations regarding the prophecies the birth will fulfill. Scholars see this as an excellent indicator of Matthew's background and audience. A Jew living in a primarily Jewish community (either in Galilee or what is now Lebanon), he was brought up, like most of his neighbors, on the Jewish Scriptures (which Christians now know as the Old Testament). Making someone called Joseph a recipient of prophetic dreams would evoke an earlier dreamer...
...human intercourse that vividly marked many Greek and Roman myths, is one of the most rancorous areas of the new scholarship. Brown found no merit in it. "Every line of Matthew's infancy narrative echoes Old Testament themes," he argued. "Are we to think that he accepted all that background but then violated horrendously the stern Old Testament [rule] that God was not a male who mated with women?" Other scholars claim that Luke especially might have been familiar with pagan models closer to the spiritual interaction that today's Christianity believes marked Jesus' conception...
...Testament book Numbers alluding to David's messianic status--"A star shall come out of Jacob and a [king] shall rise out of Israel." By making the star the object of the non-Jewish Magi's curiosity, Matthew showed that if he lacked Luke's detailed pagan background, he at least had some knowledge that stellar displays had meaning to non-Jews as well. In fact, stars were associated with the founding of Rome and the fall of Jerusalem, plus the birth of the usual suspects: Alexander the Great and Julius and Augustus Caesar. Even Herod reportedly...