Word: godly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jesus to be understood? Did he stride out of the wilderness 2,000 years ago to preach a gentle message of peace and brotherhood? Or did he perhaps advocate some form of revolution? Or did he instead look for heavenly intervention to establish the kingdom of God? What did it mean for Jesus to be tempted by sin? When did he realize that his mission would end with death upon a cross? Did he view himself as the promised Messiah? Did he understand himself to be both God and man, and what imponderable struggles of the soul would that have...
...When Jesus said he was the "Son of God," he did not mean to be taken literally. New Testament language of this kind, as in referring to Jesus as the "Lamb" or "Word" of God, is metaphorical...
...that the Romans regularly rounded up dissidents and executed them without trial. Jesus may "accidentally" have been caught in one of these periodic sweeps, suggests the Rev. Burton Mack, a Presbyterian at the School of Theology at Claremont, Calif. "Maybe he was trying out one of his kingdom of God ideas in the company of some boisterous Galileans -- a bad idea at that time...
...with Roman and Hellenistic influences colliding with Jewish thought. The cultural upheaval, he argues, gave rise to questioning cynics, rather like the hippies of the '60s. He theorizes that Jesus' message was concerned with a general malaise that afflicted the land. When he spoke of the coming kingdom of God, he was not warning of the apocalypse but, in true Hellenistic fashion, urging more natural and just relationships among people of all social classes...
...stark contrast to the worldly reformer and sage is the notion of Jesus as a stern prophet who predicted the coming judgment of God. This Jesus, unlike the more secular versions, had a keen sense of his mission and knew that his death would fulfill it. He was clearly influenced by John the Baptist's preaching of repentance and perhaps by the apocalyptic warnings of the Essenes, the Jewish sect that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls...