Word: mayes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...person who shares Jesus' belief in himself may feel what I cannot--that one must accept his final instruction to the disciples at the end of Matthew: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go then and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and see, I am with you all the days...
...direct light on Jesus. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts, discovered by Egyptian farmers in 1945, also proved of interest chiefly to students of the swarm of theologies that proliferated in early Christianity. The chance that they contain reliable historical information about Jesus is slender, though they hint tantalizingly that Jesus may have been more liberal in his views of women and sexuality than later church fathers allowed...
...from the Greek apokruphos, "hidden")--scraps of other Gospels, letters, apocalypses, acts of the apostles and 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...
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...
...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...