Word: gospels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though blacks have immortalized the blues and keened their sorrows in spirituals, they have also been immersed in the spirit of evangelical joy. The American black is steeped in Christian fervor, and though he may profess secular aims and agnostic convictions he is also a creature of the Gospel. Part of his being "rocks church" at an invisible but perpetual revival meeting. Some of the songs and dances in Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope comment very seriously on the social injustices still visited on the heirs of slavery, but the inner jubilation that ignites...
...does not quite happen that way in real life, of course. Even in Wallace's overblown novel, the "Gospel According to James" turns out to be a possible forgery. But just as the source of the Nile was an irresistible magnet for 19th century explorers, the sources of the four Gospels that relate the life of Jesus remain irresistible lures to 20th century biblical scholars, and every so often some patient scriptural sleuth turns up another important piece of evidence. Recently, a Roman Catholic scholar arrived at a finding that could turn out to be this century...
Though most liberal scripture scholars consider Mark the first Gospel (TIME, Dec. 27), the earliest extant Gospel manuscript now known dates from A.D. 135, a full century after Christ's death. New Testament scholarship in modern times has therefore assumed that the Gospels were later compilations of stories about Jesus, drawn from several sources and including both pious legend and at least some philosophy and social ethics that developed after his death...
...Gospel of Mark that existed before A.D. 50-and could have been written as early as A.D. 35-would be a firsthand and possibly an eyewitness report. For the ordinary believer, it would mean that the stories of Jesus' words and actions are more likely to be accurate historical descriptions than just a core of truth embroidered through years of retelling. Jesus' teachings on the indissolubility of marriage (Mark 10: 9) would, for instance, carry more weight if it could be shown that they had not been filtered through the prism of a Hellenistic church in a Roman...
Thigh Bone. So far, however, the man who has linked the scrolls fragment to the Gospel of Mark makes no such extravagant claims for his theory. Spanish Jesuit Josó O'Callaghan, 49, a highly regarded papyrologist at Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute, offers his finding in the current issue of the institute's quarterly, Biblica, only as a hypothesis. The most important fragment he has studied is a jagged, thumbnail-sized piece of papyrus containing only 17 letters, which cut vertically across five lines of text. His technique for identifying it and other fragments-a standard...