Word: gospels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...these explanations share the premise that the events in the Bible actually took place. A parallel line of argument holds that the Bible is made up simply of legends crafted by the Gospel writers to serve a political agenda in the early days of the church. Modern archaeology has given contemporary scholars a much richer sense of the Galilean world, the social tensions around Jesus and the political challenges his followers encountered after his Crucifixion...
...chief purveyor of this political revisionism is ex-priest John Dominic Crossan, a professor of biblical studies at Catholic DePaul University. In Crossan's view, the Gospel accounts are parables about power and authority in the new church. "[Israel] was an occupied country with a lot of poverty, malnutrition and sickness,'' he says. "Jesus was 'healing' people ideologically, saying the Kingdom of God is against this system. It's not your fault you're sick and overworked. Take command of your body and your destiny...
...Testament scholars from this school point out that the Gospel writers made a crucial distinction between flesh and spirit. "They were talking not about the resurrection of the flesh but about the resurrection of Christ's selfhood, his essence," says Jackson Carroll, a professor of religion and society at Duke Divinity School. "The authors of the New Testament had experiences with an extraordinary person and extraordinary events, and they were trying to find ways to talk about all that. They weren't writing scientific history; they were writing faith history...
...written long after the Crucifixion occurred, and so reflects the agenda and faith of the second generation of Christians, not events as experienced by the original apostles. That whole approach is undercut by the purported discovery announced in January of what would be the oldest manuscript of a Gospel, which dates to A.D. 70, when many eyewitnesses would have been around to protest any inaccuracies...
...original (which in the 1967 movie version managed to bleach even the streets of Manhattan) has been racially integrated. A black woman (Lillias White as Miss Jones, the boss's formidable secretary) broadens the "brotherhood" in the last big song, The Brotherhood of Man, turning it into a rousing gospel number. These small touches enhance the show's charm. If blacks were kept out of corporate boardrooms in 1961, such injustices can now be symbolically amended; this nostalgic production recalls a fairer era than the one we lived through...