Reblog: The Myth of the Dying Messiah

Simon J. Joseph, Ph.D. writes in his blog,

Did any pre-Christian Jews expect a messiah to suffer and die for their sins? If there was such a thing, Jesus' first followers didn't seem to know anything about it. That's because there was no such ancient Jewish prophecy. Those who "see" evidence of a suffering-and-dying messiah in pre-Christian Jewish texts and traditions are reading this motif into the Scriptures with the eyes of faith.

This goes along with what we have been seeing in our discussions of the Markan gospel.

Read the rest of the blog entry here.

Reblog: The Gospel of Mark as a Manifesto of Political and Religious Defiance

Christian Piatt writes in his blog at Patheos Progressive Christian Channel:

“All human laws bow at the feet of the authority of God, which is not a rule of law, but rather a subversive, paradigm-shifting ‘from the bottom, up’ rule of love and compassion for others, first and foremost. Period.”

Read the entire post at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christianpiatt/2015/02/the-gospel-of-mark-as-a-manifesto-of-political-and-religious-defiance/

Back from break

I’ve been away for a few weeks, which explains why it’s been quiet here. A new post on the next section from Mark should be up after this coming Saturday. In the meantime, if you’re interested, here is the sermon I preached at the Lutheran church today. It was on the Loaves and Fishes, something that we will be getting to in a few chapters during our travel through Mark.

Reblog: Saved from What?

Here is a blog article I found today that bears relevance to our discussions in Mark. It has to do with rethinking what “salvation” means in the Gospels in light of what the word meant to its original audience.

Saved from What? by Dr. Craig Evan Anderson, Ph.D.

Salvation is central to Christianity. Yet, despite the fact that salvation is central to Christian existence, few people seem to understand it.

Perhaps we should expect non-Christians to misunderstand salvation, which most do. But this misunderstanding certainly isn’t limited to non-Christians. Christians themselves often don’t seem to understand the Bible’s concept of salvation.

Christians readily claim that they are “saved.” However, the natural follow-up question to this is: They are saved from what?

As obvious as that follow-up question should be, it does not get asked nearly as often as it should. Consequently, some really weird ideas seem to surround the pop-Christian notion of salvation.

Read more…