Jesus' Wife is Dead

Almost two months since my last post, this seemed to be an appropriate place to pick back up. Peter Williams of Tyndale House at Cambridge University writes about the latest on the manuscript of Jesus' alleged wife.

http://www.e-n.org.uk/6060-Jesus%27s-wife-found-dead.htm

Liberal Scholarship and Making Oneself God

As a hardcore Protestant, I don't often quote the Pope on this blog, but love rejoices with the truth regardless of where that truth is found. So I will give the truth its due.

"The common practice today is to measure the Bible against the so-called modern worldview, whose fundamental dogma is that God cannot act in history--that everything to do with God is to  be relegated to the domain of subjectivity. And so the Bible no longer speaks of God, the living God; no, now we alone speak and decide what God can do and what we will and should do. And the Antichrist, with an air of scholarly excellence, tells us that any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism. He wants to convince us that only his kind of exegesis the supposedly purely scientific kind, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times...The dispute about interpretation is ultimately a dispute about who God is...

We are dealing here with the vast question as to how we can and cannot know God, how we are related to God, and how we can lose him. The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him. For it already implies that we deny God as God by placing ourselves above him, by discarding the whole dimension of love, of interior listening, by no longer acknowledging as real anything but what we can experimentally test and grasp. To think like that is to make oneself God., And to do that is to abase not only God, but the world and oneself, too."

--Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth (2007 A.D.)

Jesus is Totalitarian

If you want a book surveying the life of Christ for late high schoolers and up, look no further than Robert Stein's Jesus the Messiah: A Survey of the Life of Christ. Stein taught New Testament and Hermeneutics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (he was the mentor of that Rob Plummer fellow I quoted last week). This work chronicles the life of Christ as presented in the Gospels, explaining the historical and cultural background and summarizing Jesus' teachings. It would also be good college prep reading, since Stein introduces you to (and refutes) liberal and unbelieving views of Jesus and the Gospels. Though technical at times, this book  is still quite accessible, and is a good historical resource for any Christian to have. (Look for more excerpts from it in the future.)

"The 'totalitarian' nature of Jesus' demand for allegiance must not be lost sight of or compromised. To require greater loyalty than that due to father or mother, wife or children (Luke 14:26) is to demand the kind of allegiance that only God can make. In light of all this, one cannot avoid the questions "Who is this who thinks that the world revolves around himself? A deranged egomaniac? A false prophet? Or can it be that this is indeed the King of kings and Lord of lords?"

Robert H. Stein, Jesus the Messiah: A Survey of the Life of Christ


http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Messiah-Survey-Life-Christ/dp/0830818847/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319765434&sr=1-3