Marginal Christianity

The Kingdom Announced Now John got himself into trouble with authorities. Mark tells us more about that later. He stopped preaching and went too meddling and fell afoul of political intrigue. His arrest was the green light for Jesus’ to go public. John’s work as forerunner and preparer of the people for God’s New Exodus was complete and the time was right for main event. So Jesus enters Galilee and announces “good news” that God was beginning the great and greatly-longed for New Exodus whereby he would rescue his people from their exile, return to them, rout their oppressors, rebuild the temple, and restore Israel to world leadership. And God would do this through Jesus of Nazareth, an unknown Galilean peasant. He was hardly the only claimant to lead   messianic revolts at this time in Palestine and he vied with four other major groups to define the nature and mission of God’s Abrahamic people, the people through whom God intended to bless the world (Gen.12:3). - Saddu...

Herma and Herman Neutics on the Gospels Why do we have four gospels rather than one? Apparently one gospel was not enough! You see, the gospels are more like portraits than photographs. When we treated them like photographs it made sense to try and blend them all together into in one mega-photo. Tatian, a second-century church leader, tried to do just that with his Diatessaron. We call it a harmony of the gospels. Problem is, you can't make everything in the gospels fit into one! Not without twisting some of the details and data out of shape. After many efforts at making this one mega-photo, we finally realized there are four gospels for a reason. And we started to read them more like portraits. Portraits attempt the capture the artist's view of the subject. His or her choices of background, use of color, attention to some details rather than others all matter to a portrait. Different artists will do all this differently and will produce an interpretation of the sub...

1.     An Inspired Bible does Not entail an inerrant Bible.   Inspiration tells us the Bible comes from God and reliably communicates his message to humanity. It does not dictate how God communicates his truth. Can God not use errors and idiots to speak his word to us? Asses and Assholes? Legends and myths? In other words, how God speaks his inspired word has to be determined inductively from the kinds of materials, sources, and speakers we find in it. Not deductively from a claim that if God is perfectly true, therefore his Word is perfectly true, true being understood as in a modernist historical and scientific sense (neither of which, ironically, were true of the times in which the Bible was written).    2.     The Gospels are NOT historical accounts that give us a chronological rehearsal of Jesus’ life and ministry.   Why do we have four gospels, then? And why do they not agree at numerous points? Were three or all fo...