Word: gospels
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...basis on which many Christians establish their faith. Its piercing good sense, imaginative eloquence, the breathtaking stringency of his ethical demands and his simultaneous patience and compassion are crucial to the intimacy that so many establish with this long gone man. The 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...
...glance at one of the most interesting remains, there are a few surviving speeches of Jesus from the Gospel of the Hebrews and a post-Resurrection appearance from the same source that have the ring of authenticity. "Now the Lord...went to James [his brother] and appeared to him. For James had taken an oath that he would not eat bread...till that hour when he saw him risen from the dead...The Lord said, 'Bring a table and bread'...He took bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to James the Just and said...
...single text from Nag Hammadi--the Gospel of Thomas--has proved to be of widespread interest. Thomas offers no narrative report on Jesus or comment on his career, but it does offer a collection of isolated sayings. Many are versions of sayings already available in the four canonical Gospels. A few others are so striking as to be perhaps genuine. For instance, in Thomas, Jesus says, "He who is near me is near fire, but he who is far from me is far from the kingdom" and "Split the wood and I am there; lift up the stone...
Other Apocryphal fragments like the Gospel of Peter, and even the widely publicized and still suspect fragment from the Secret Gospel of Mark, may also contain scraps of genuine memory, but lacking complete originals, we have only the shakiest grounds for assessing their reliability. The disappointing fact seems to be that 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...
...face of all contradictions and confusions then, our reader might be asked to return to Mark, not only the oldest but the clearest Gospel, and to deduce the full story it means to tell. In its brevity and speed--some 12,000 words in English, a mere pamphlet--Mark implies a far more complicated process of human growth than its outline specifies...