Word: roman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...everyone acknowledges that major conclusions about Jesus' life are not based on forensic clues. There is no specific physical evidence for the key points of the story. There are the Christian testimonies, which begin with Paul in the 50s A.D. and are supported in part by a 1st century Roman reference to "Jesus, the so-called Christ," a "wise man" who "won over many of the Jews and also many of the Greeks," and who is described as crucified in accounts from the next century. Beyond such testimony, there are literary tools used to weigh plausibility. Were the Christian narratives...
...jumps out at close readers," he says, "is Matthew's and Luke's different roads to performing the vital theological task of their age: fitting key themes and symbols from Christianity's parent tradition, Judaism, into an emerging belief in Jesus and also working in ideas familiar to the Roman culture that surrounded them." Thus the Nativity stories provide a fascinating look at how each of the two men who agreed on so much--that Jesus was the Christ come among us and was crucified and resurrected and took away sin--could be inspired to begin his story in similar...
...being written about pagan leaders in the same period. In such sagas, a hero is not a hero unless his birth reflects the magnificence of his later achievements, and such super-nativities, originally attached to great figures from antiquity like Alexander the Great, were at that point bestowed upon Roman leaders within decades of their actual deaths. Was Luke selling out the Jewish tradition that had helped shape Jesus and Matthew? Hardly. He clearly cared about Judaism, paraphrasing frequently from the Scriptures and setting scenes of Jesus' later youth in the great Jewish temple. But by the time Luke wrote...
...born to a "virgin." (Isaiah's Hebrew actually talks of a "young girl"; Matthew was probably working from a Greek mistranslation.) Critics may also have alleged that Jesus' birth early in Mary's marriage to Joseph was the result of her committing adultery; much later Jewish sources named a Roman soldier called Panthera. Those accusations, some scholars believe, account for the verse in Matthew in which Joseph considers divorcing Mary before his dream angel allays his doubts. Related notions of Jesus' illegitimacy have never totally disappeared. Jane Schaberg, an iconoclastic feminist critic at the University of Detroit Mercy, has long...
This line of thought, with its possible implication that the Gospel writers imagined the Holy Spirit and Mary engaged in the kind of physical divine-human intercourse that vividly marked many Greek and Roman myths, is one of the most rancorous areas of the new scholarship. Brown found no merit in it. "Every line of Matthew's infancy narrative echoes Old Testament themes," he argued. "Are we to think that he accepted all that background but then violated horrendously the stern Old Testament [rule] that God was not a male who mated with women?" Other scholars claim that Luke especially...