Word: john
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Editor's note: In a riveting exercise in biblical scholarship and storytelling, Reynolds Price translated the Greek texts of Mark and John, then wrote his own narrative in Three Gospels (1996). We asked Price, a prolific novelist (Kate Vaiden, the trilogy A Great Circle, Roxanna Slade and the forthcoming children's novel A Perfect Friend), to take another look at episodes in Jesus' life and craft a new Gospel based on the historical evidence and his reading of the Bible. He adds a chapter in which his erudition and imagination take a leap into an unexplored moment after Christ...
...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...
There was initial hope that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 would throw light on the roots of Christianity. There was speculation that perhaps John the Baptist and even Jesus himself were members of the sect or closely related to it. The scrolls have already contributed to a fuller understanding of the textual history of Jewish scripture and the realities of 1st century Judaism--especially its variety of apocalyptic hopes and the absence of anything that might be called orthodoxy. However, they have shed no direct light on Jesus. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts, discovered by Egyptian farmers...
...only substantial biographical sources are the New Testament Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, brief documents written in colloquial Greek late in the generation of those who knew Jesus first- or secondhand. By the end of the 2nd century, these four had become the basic canonical texts of the mainline Christianity of Rome and the Middle East...
...other figures related to Jesus. Some of them offer occasionally striking, even comic, moments. There are numerous stories about the young Jesus, for instance--a sometimes amusing, sometimes dangerous superchild playmate. And there may be actual moments of history in the mostly fictional tales of the acts of John the Beloved, Peter, Paul and others...