Word: marked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...Apocryphal Protogospel of James says the angel Gabriel first spoke to Miriam by the well. The suggestion that Jesus' childhood may have been dogged by the accusation of bastardy is perhaps implicit in his townspeople's question in Mark 6, "Isn't this Mary's son?" To be called one's mother's son, as opposed to one's father's, was often an implication of bastardy, or at least a sign that one's paternity was unknown, whether divine or not. Early opponents likewise suggested that Miriam had conceived Jesus with a Roman soldier, Panthera. His childhood may well...
Matthew and Luke give detailed descriptions of the tempting offers that Satan made to Jesus in the desert. Since Mark mentions 40 days in the desert but gives no specifics, I've imagined that it was then that Jesus began to believe--from the content of his vision at baptism--that God was a gentler kind of father than he proved...
...follow Paul's lead; yet the variety of their Resurrection stories is both convincing and unnerving. Most of them have a grainy credibility; at least one (Matthew's) seems generic and manufactured. Paul's account, in I Corinthians 15, was written some 25 years after Jesus' death and precedes Mark by perhaps a decade...