Word: lifes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...extreme, and their views of the nature of Jesus range from Mark's affirmation that he was the "beloved Son of God" to John's flat claim that Jesus was the Word, that eternal aspect of God who created the world and who has a continuing interest in the life of worldly creatures--ourselves above all. Nonetheless, the four together make a strong case for the urgency with which Jesus' early followers longed to preserve trustworthy records of a supremely important life, one lived in a particular place and time...
...reader happens to have spent his or her life, as I have, writing fictional and nonfictional stories of his own, he may soon find himself mulling his deductions from Mark and the other Gospels and producing a usefully expanded narrative. It will not, of course, be a narrative for which one can begin to claim spiritual, doctrinal or historical authority, but since restrained imagination--as it thinks its way into the lives of others--remains our strongest means of human understanding and compassion, such an expansion seems an honest reaction to the Gospels' limited provisions. My attempt is always...
...lieu of inventing a whole life of Jesus, I'll choose a few pregnant situations: the first from Matthew and Luke, the others largely from Mark--and then I'll examine them imaginatively but responsibly, adding a few glancing notes on my sources. It is, after all, a process with which Jesus himself would have been familiar--Haggadah and Midrash being traditional, and often narrative, expansions of Hebrew scripture...
When she hesitated, assuming that this was some evil joke, the voice spoke again: "You're free to refuse, and I'm free to tell you that should you accept, your life will last much longer than most, and long years of it will feel like no pain other humans know, not even your mother with the demon that ate her breast like bread...
Hamer had taken up his old life as a plasterer, and he lived with his toothless mother and a wife who loathed Judas the moment she knew he came from the old days--Hamer's wild days with Jesus, not so long ago, maybe 16 months. Hamer shut her up fast, and she cooked them a decent meal. Afterward Hamer took Judas out to the edge of the village, a plateau aimed at the distant Dead Sea. He said to Judas, "You know Jesus told me, early on, that he was born here--it's David's town, remember? Said...