Word: modernizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...among New Testament scholars for most of the 20th century to say that the Gospels are not what they claim to be: brief biographies. Yet their special claim would seem to be the preservation of reliable accounts of the career, teaching, death and resurrection of one extraordinary man. Many modern scholars, however, have tended to see them as propaganda, as campaign biographies--documents that contain fragments of actual history, but history so shaped and transformed by faith as to require caution in the reader who seeks firm fact...
...though, can also be a tease, something that is sought after but always just beyond reach. Take the physicist's concept of absolute zero, the absurdly chilly -459.67[degrees]F. This would be the temperature of an object so still that even its subatomic particles ceased to jiggle. But modern physics teaches that the subatomic jiggling never stops, and so absolute zero can never be attained...
Just take the great martial powers of modern times: the U.S., the Soviet Union, Germany, Britain, Japan, China and Israel. The age of America's expansion in the 19th century was marked by the low-tech coffeepot that was left on the fire until the brew inside had thickened into a blackish acid just right for tanning buffalo hides...
...earth, you can now get a perfect cappuccino on every block. And Germans have become as aggressive as Caspar Milquetoast. The Russians? Moscow has turned into latte land, and so the remnants of the Red Army cannot even overwhelm a bunch of bedraggled Chechens. Why does Israel, a modern-day democratic Sparta, talk withdrawal from Lebanon? Just count the espresso machines on Tel Aviv's Shenkin Street...
...great empires thus falter was explained by a 16th century Arab physician. Imbibe the brew, he warned, and "the body becomes a mere shadow of its former self. The heart and the guts are so weakened..." Or, in modern parlance, you polish either your gold-plated Melior or your M-16. You can't launch a Hellfire missile with a frappuccino in hand. Pleasure trumps prowess...