Word: romanism
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...resemblance accidental? Some of the more left-leaning interpreters doubt it. They claim that as Luke's Nativity went on, it became more openly critical of the Roman system and supportive of the struggles of its poorer Palestinian subjects. Mary's Magnificat, for instance, reprises some of the more radical sentiments of the Hebrew Bible: "[God] hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree/ He hath filled the hungry with good things;/ and the rich he hath sent away empty...
Other scholars think this interpretation is significantly overdrawn, and suggest that the angel's language may be a straightforward homage to the Augustan official style. However anti-Roman the Gospels' undertones, they point out, they were certainly not offensive enough to prevent Constantine from eventually adopting Christianity as an official religion of his empire in A.D. 313 and exporting it around the world...
...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...