Word: man
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been fashionable among New Testament scholars for most of the 20th century to say that the Gospels are not what they claim to be: brief biographies. Yet their special claim would seem to be the preservation of reliable accounts of the career, teaching, death and resurrection of one extraordinary man. Many modern scholars, however, have tended to see them as propaganda, as campaign biographies--documents that contain fragments of actual history, but history so shaped and transformed by faith as to require caution in the reader who seeks firm fact...
...slit-eyed world of a country village, the boy's mother Miriam conceived him mysteriously. Promised in marriage to Yosef the builder, she found herself pregnant without explanation--she had known no man, not intimately. Steeped in the malice of small-town talk, she knew not to tell the story she believed--God's archangel Gabriel had visited her at the village well one early-spring morning as she lifted her jar to climb back home...
...looked very much like an actual man, a lot like her elder brother Amos, who had been her favorite but had died in agony with a breathing demon--tuberculosis--when she was nine. The angel had Amos' startling eyes, a light brown, but his voice plainly said, "I'm Gabriel, from God, to ask if you'll agree to let him make on you his only...
...said, "Those 40 days I spent alone, starving by the Dead Sea, Satan himself showed up only three times. My worries were mainly snakes and rocks and no sign of water. But the final time I saw the Tempter, he came in the clothes and body of Joseph, the man who married my mother and raised me--not a bad man but hard on us all. Joseph had died just before I went to join the Baptist, and his last words to me were 'Stay gone, fool!' But though I watched him suck his last breath, here he came...
...whole stretch of days in Jerusalem had gone badly wrong--the ass that went lame while bearing him toward the "triumphal entry," the vicious eyes and mouths around him through the Temple debates he sought so hungrily, and then his wild-eyed one-man assault on the money changers and lamb-and-dove merchants. Physically speaking, he'd done enough damage to last five minutes; but in terms of challenging the Temple mob, he'd laid the last straw on a big camel's back...