Word: matthew
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...person who shares Jesus' belief in himself may feel what I cannot--that one must accept his final instruction to the disciples at the end of Matthew: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go then and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and see, I am with you all the days...
...only substantial biographical sources are the New Testament Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, brief documents written in colloquial Greek late in the generation of those who knew Jesus first- or secondhand. By the end of the 2nd century, these four had become the basic canonical texts of the mainline Christianity of Rome and the Middle East...
...lieu of inventing a whole life of Jesus, I'll choose a few pregnant situations: the first from Matthew and Luke, the others largely from Mark--and then I'll examine them imaginatively but responsibly, adding a few glancing notes on my sources. It is, after all, a process with which Jesus himself would have been familiar--Haggadah and Midrash being traditional, and often narrative, expansions of Hebrew scripture...
...Matthew and Luke give detailed descriptions of the tempting offers that Satan made to Jesus in the desert. Since Mark mentions 40 days in the desert but gives no specifics, I've imagined that it was then that Jesus began to believe--from the content of his vision at baptism--that God was a gentler kind of father than he proved...
...from the apostle Paul, who mentions that the risen Jesus appeared "to the Twelve," not the Eleven. None of the canonical Gospels, however, follow Paul's lead; yet the variety of their Resurrection stories is both convincing and unnerving. Most of them have a grainy credibility; at least one (Matthew's) seems generic and manufactured. Paul's account, in I Corinthians 15, was written some 25 years after Jesus' death and precedes Mark by perhaps a decade...