Word: fatherly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...himself may feel what I cannot--that one must accept his final instruction to the disciples at the end of Matthew: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go then and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and see, I am with you all the days...
Even with the completion of the four canonical Gospels, Paul's interpretation of the Resurrection remains the fullest--in the silently cataclysmic event of Jesus' return to life, God the Father ratified and glorified the Son's chosen path and the redemptive agony to which Jesus had consented in his horrific death. Finally Paul asserts what seems, to many Christians and non-Christians alike, the hardest and truest test of all: "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is empty, and your faith is empty...
...promises he makes in the Gospel of John, in the resonant (and quite literal) King James translation, have strengthened endangered men and women from the terrors of Roman martyrdom till today--"Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you...that where I am, there ye may be also...
...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 expects to administer the reign...
...Miriam by the well. The suggestion that Jesus' childhood may have been dogged by the accusation of bastardy is perhaps implicit in his townspeople's question in Mark 6, "Isn't this Mary's son?" To be called one's mother's son, as opposed to one's father's, was often an implication of bastardy, or at least a sign that one's paternity was unknown, whether divine or not. Early opponents likewise suggested that Miriam had conceived Jesus with a Roman soldier, Panthera. His childhood may well have been clouded by questions about his paternity...