Word: finaling
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...person who shares Jesus' belief in 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...
Whatever Jesus' final expectation, that reign did not arrive in his lifetime or in the lives of his earliest companions. Yet a majority of his followers continue to expect it. In the face of so long an uncertainty, how has his following not only endured but grown so hugely through two millenniums? And what can be expected of his long potent holding power over human imagination and hope in the near and distant future? If benign Christian institutions and the capacity to believe in a God who loves his creation should weaken fatally, if the artistic inspiration of the figure...
...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 on the final contents of the New Testament were, above all else, superb literary critics...
Jesus laughed--Peter's bluntness was a general source of laughter--and then he took a long wait to think. Finally, with his right hand, Jesus reached out and traced a plumb, straight line, perpendicular to the sky. Then he said, "Those 40 days I spent alone, starving by the Dead Sea, Satan himself showed up only three times. My worries were mainly snakes and rocks and no sign of water. But the final time I saw the Tempter, he came in the clothes and body of Joseph, the man who married my mother and raised...
Judas lasted on, entirely alone, through the Sabbath night and day after Jesus' death. He'd stood on the ground not 10 yards from the cross and heard his teacher's astounding final words--"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And he'd stayed for Jesus' final hoarse shout a moment later. Then Judas had found his way to the house of another old pupil, one whom Jesus had been forced to send home when he caught him tampering with children for the second time--Hamer from Bethlehem...