Word: evening
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...heart, the ethical teachings of Jesus are not markedly different from those of the earlier Jewish prophets, above all Isaiah. Jesus' emphasis on acceptance and mercy is especially strong, even to the point of demanding that his followers not resist evil. He insists that the unrepentant outlaws of the world will enter the reign of God before the righteous. Yet he demands that his hearers be "perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." His sense of the imminence of God's reign, and the change of heart it demands, is expressed in earlier Hebrew scripture, but only Jesus...
...paralysis of my legs and a nonstop assault of spinal pain, I've experienced no similar encounter. That fact tends to validate, for me, an objective core to the experience. If I manufactured one visionary self-consolation, why wouldn't I have repeated that solace in ensuing years of even worse trouble? In any case, to the surprise of my doctors, I've survived without apparent return of the cancer, and my life is more rewarding and productive than before that washing in Galilee. My lifelong sense that Jesus of Nazareth stood in a unique and redeeming relation...
There was initial hope that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 would throw light on the roots of Christianity. There was speculation that perhaps John the Baptist and even Jesus himself were members of the sect or closely related to it. The scrolls have already contributed to a fuller understanding of the textual history of Jewish scripture and the realities of 1st century Judaism--especially its variety of apocalyptic hopes and the absence of anything that might be called orthodoxy. However, they have shed no direct light on Jesus. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts, discovered by Egyptian farmers...
...curious reader can also find survivors in several modern editions of New Testament Apocrypha (from the Greek apokruphos, "hidden")--scraps of other Gospels, letters, apocalypses, acts of the apostles and other figures related to Jesus. Some of them offer occasionally striking, even comic, moments. There are numerous stories about the young Jesus, for instance--a sometimes amusing, sometimes dangerous superchild playmate. And there may be actual moments of history in the mostly fictional tales of the acts of John the Beloved, Peter, Paul and others...
Other Apocryphal fragments like the Gospel of Peter, and even the widely publicized and still suspect fragment from the Secret Gospel of Mark, may also contain scraps of genuine memory, but lacking complete originals, we have only the shakiest grounds for assessing their reliability. The disappointing fact seems to be that most of the surviving New Testament Apocrypha arose in legitimate attempts to comprehend realities about which the canonical Gospels are mute, and any dogged attempt to read them is apt to leave the reader with one prime reaction--those 2nd and 3rd century Christian editors who decided...