By George Clifford

Luke’s gospel ends with an unidentified force or actor carrying Jesus up into heaven (Luke 24:51); in John’s gospel, Jesus speaks of his impending ascension (John 20:17), and the book of Acts begins with a retelling of Jesus’ ascension (Acts 1:9). Based on those New Testament passages, the Church annually commemorates Jesus’ Ascension into heaven on the fortieth day after Easter. This year, the feast fell on May 1.

From a scientific perspective, the concept of Jesus’ ascension into heaven as depicted in Scripture is nonsensical. If Jesus ascended into heaven, then given the right information an aerospace engineer could calculate heaven’s direction, but not its distance, from earth. The accurate data needed for that calculation includes the geographic point at which the ascension occurred, the hour and minute, day of the year, and year in which the ascension occurred, Jesus’ trajectory into the sky, and the relative location of the solar system and universe within the cosmos at the time of the ascension.

Some might ridicule a literal reading, contending that heaven – the place where Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father – surrounds the cosmos, lying outside space and time. Yet the New Testament ascension narratives presume a flat, three-tiered cosmos consisting of heaven above, earth in the middle, and hell below. Before dismissing my claim that the New Testament presumes a three-story cosmology as wrong, remember the words of the Nicene Creed we Episcopalians (like many other Christians) often say at Holy Eucharist, “he [Jesus] ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” Those who have personally circumnavigated the world know that the earth is round. For others, video and photographic evidence from outer space provides convincing evidence that the earth is spherical. In other words, a basic presumption of the New Testament versions of the ascension is scientifically wrong.

Presupposing that one rejects a literal interpretation of Jesus’ ascension, what better options do twenty-first century Christians have for understanding Jesus’ ascension?

The first option, already mentioned, consists of spiritualizing the ascension, postulating the existence of a spiritual realm that lies outside the space-time continuum. Increasing numbers of people, however, find the idea of a supernatural deity, a deity who exists not only in but beyond the cosmos, unbelievable. Scholars and spiritual leaders like Bishops John A. T. Robinson (Honest to God) and John Spong (Jesus for the Non-Religious) have helpfully articulated why such a belief seems incompatible with other elements of our modern worldview.

A second option is to ignore Jesus’ ascension and hope that others do so as well, an approach that Ascension always falling on Thursday aids. After all, Christianity emphasizes God's presence not absence in the world. Historically, one of the important functions of the ascension was to explain Jesus’ physical absence to people who believed in a physically empty tomb and Jesus’ bodily resurrection. The New Testament specifies that Jesus appeared amongst his disciples for forty days after rising from the dead. When people stopped encountering Jesus, what had happened to him? Novelists and others have imaginatively answered that question, producing a wealth of material. Jesus went to India; he disappeared unknown among peasants elsewhere; etc. Those explanations typically undercut Christianity’s premise that Jesus was not resuscitated but resurrected, receiving a qualitatively new form of life. Thankfully, the feast of Pentecost quickly follows Ascension and ecclesial attention shifts from the absent Jesus to the now present Holy Spirit. This overly facile and dishonest option describes what many contemporary Christians do, especially in Churches without a liturgical calendar or lectionary that forces one to pay at least annual lip service to the ascension.

A third option, my preference, begins by acknowledging the theological difficulties that Jesus’ ascension poses and then re-examines the data. Biblical numerology provides a helpful starting point. The Bible – Old and New Testament alike – associates the number forty with a theologically significant period of extended duration. For example, rain fell for forty days and nights while Noah was in the ark (Genesis 7:4). The Israelites who fled Egypt ate manna for forty years (Exodus 16:35). Moses was forty when he visited his Israelite relatives (Acts 7:23) and then sojourned in the wilderness forty years before his experience of the burning bush (Acts 7:30). Moses spent forty days and nights on the mountain before receiving the Ten Commandments from God (Deuteronomy 9:11). Jesus fasted forty days and nights in the wilderness (Matthew 4:2). Perhaps the forty days the risen Jesus spent with his disciples points to an indefinite but considerable period of time following Jesus’ crucifixion in which the disciples experienced Jesus’ presence with them. They experienced Jesus in a new, radically different manner, a manner that the disciples did not know how to describe, a manner that transformed their despair over his death into the hope that built the Church. So the disciples grasped the metaphor of resurrection as a way to speak about their new experience of Jesus (see my earlier Episcopal Café essay, “Resurrection, Not Resuscitation”). In time, the disciples’ experiences of Jesus in this new way diminished in frequency and dimmed in intensity. Ascension became the accepted metaphor for explaining why that had happened.

Metaphors and other figures of speech are the only way in which humans can speak of God because our language, by definition, is human language and God is not human. Our perspective as humans is perhaps equally or even more limited than language. Twenty-first century Christians need offer no apologies for finding first century metaphors highly problematic. The first century metaphor of resurrection presumes a worldview in which gods often have or assume human form, an idea common to both the Greek and Roman pantheons. Similarly, the three-storied cosmos ascension presumes was intrinsic to the dominant first century worldview.

The note that I hear most clearly and loudly in the New Testament ascension narratives is that the disciples, post-resurrection, were utterly convinced that the Jesus story had not yet reached its end. They believed that God would write at least one more chapter in the Jesus story. Our Eucharistic prayers affirm this belief in a story for which the conclusion has yet to be written with some form of the proclamation that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”

The Rev. George Clifford, a retired priest in the Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years.

By Greg Jones

With the birth of our third girl this month, surprisingly early, we were able to experience the miracle of life at close hand again. We believe that the birth of a child is testimony to the Glory of God and a sign of God's marvelous handiwork in creation.

Seeing the hand of God in nature is hardly some new-fangled thing of course. John Calvin said that there is "by natural instinct, a sense of divinity." Indeed, Scripture itself proclaims that God may be perceived in nature. As the Psalmist says, "the heavens are telling the glory of God." Paul writes: "Since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made."

Life itself is a wondrous thing of course, and you don't even need to believe in God to agree. Popular author Richard Dawkins – a convinced atheist – upholds biology as the most complex and fascinating of all sciences. Before Dawkins, George Gaylord Simpson, the famous paleontologist and evolutionary scientist, argued that biology alone "stands at the center of all science, and it is here, in the field where all principles of all the sciences are embodied, that science can truly become unified." Simpson recognized, studied and reveled in the majesty of life in all its diversity – yet he didn't believe in God.

For Christians who believe in a particular story (that God is creator of all things visible and invisible who loves His Creation and especially His children – and who has become one with Creation through the incarnation – and who has faced all we face as mortal beings – and who has defeated death in resurrection) we must careful. For seeing God in nature is fine – but seeing nature as God is not.

Consider the Easter 'holiday' as it now exists in the English speaking world. Like Christmas, Easter has taken on a number of symbols which have a lot to do with fertility and nature – but not necessarily anything to do with God in Christ. The word Easter – first of all – derives from the name of a pagan goddess associated with the rising of the sun. In ancient Britain, the pre-Christian folks of Northumbria venerated this goddess ('Eastre') at the vernal equinox.

Yes, life is important – supremely so – whether one believes in Jesus Christ or not. For those of us who do, it is even more important that we make sure not to see life as the same as God or in the place of God. For those of us who believe, life is not God, but rather the gift of God. Life is not in the place of God, but is rather the place where God pours out his love most fully and completely. Life is not to be worshipped, but rather God who gives life is to be worshipped and adored.

In the Fourth Gospel 'life' is central to the Johannine vocabulary. More than any other book in the New Testament, John talks about 'life'. And it takes on a double meaning. The word 'life' means not only life as you and I normally speak of it. It refers to the indwelling presence of God in the universe – it refers to the presence of the living God in our midst – it refers to the fact that God is not the same as us, but God is with us, and in us, and around us. It refers not only to biological life – as amazing as that is – but also to eternal, spiritual, divine life. Quite plainly, it refers to Resurrection life – the life which includes but goes beyond fleshly life – and extends eternally in full communion with the God of all. Interestingly enough, the Greek word for resurrection does not appear in John's gospel very much. But, in its place, the Greek word for 'life' appears many times as a synonym for resurrection.

What I'm saying – what I've learned from John – is that Easter is not just about the miracle of natural life. It is not really about Spring, and fertility, and eggs, and hatchlings, and sweet little babies. No, it is about those things, and infinitely more. Easter – or Christian Passover – or the Feast of the Resurrection – is about the kind of new life that only Jesus Christ can offer. It is about resurrection life – eternal life – life beyond biology and its undeniable but limited majesty.

This Easter season – remember – that Christ died for you, and rose from the dead, and took on the fullest possible kind of life in his resurrection. It is that kind of life that you and I are called to share, and have begun to share, for when we died with Him in our baptism, we have been given that kind of life to put on – from now on and forever.

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones ("Greg") became a member of Christ's Body at St. Columba's in Washington, D.C.. He was educated at the University of North Carolina and the General Theological Seminary, where he is on the Board. Rector of St. Michael's Raleigh, and author of Beyond Da Vinci (Seabury Books, 2004), he blogs at fatherjones.com.

By Donald Schell

The Easter Gospels (like the Christmas Gospels) are shot through with fear. Why do angels keep telling us not to be afraid? Don’t they know there’s danger out there?

In the early darkness after San Francisco’s 1989 earthquake, my wife and I stood on the roof of our house looking out over the Marina district. Our son and daughter huddled against us. We were very quiet, and the city was in blackness. The power had failed. In the darkness we watched a five storey apartment building explode and collapse in on itself. Huge flames from the fire lit the dark evening. Just as in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, where wildfire destroyed much more of the city than the earthquake had, broken water lines rendered fire hydrants useless. Old photos of San Francisco’s ashes after 1906 haunted me.

We sighed our relief when an arc of water shot up from a fire truck. High-arching plumes sparkled red in the firelight. Generator-driven searchlights lit the building and the water. From our battery-powered emergency radio we heard that firefighters had run hoses from a fireboat ashore to a pumper truck. The newsman said this was what they’d done in 1906, but confidently claimed that this time the seawater would make it easy for the firefighters to beat the fire. We watched and listened. As the newscaster’s calm voice assured us the Marina fire was under control, the arc of water faltered and stopped. The searchlights went dark. Flames surged higher. For a few minutes the newsman talked on of other disaster response areas.

Abruptly he stopped what he was reporting; perhaps someone had handed him a note. We heard his tight, measured voice say, “The Marina fire appears to be out of control again.” Twice, then three times, we heard the same premature announcement and each time the resurgent fire’s threat felt bigger.

Our nine-year old son, until that moment the bravest and most stubbornly independent kid I’d ever known, leaned into me for safety and took my hand. “Dad, is the fire going to come this way?”

“I don’t know.” I answered. I didn’t know. It was a still evening, a moment of dead calm in our windy city. But the weather could change quickly. What else could I say? “We’ll watch after you’re in bed. If the fire stays out of control, mom and I will take turns, and if we even think it might spread and come this way, we’ll get us out of here.”

“Will the house burn down?”

“It could.”

We watched quietly for an hour as firefighters got the fireboat to truck connection working. Gradually with plenty of water, they really did contain the fire. We couldn’t see flames any longer, just a glow from where the building had been. It finally seemed safe enough to kiss the children good-night, to hope for another day, to sleep in the stillness and listen for the Spirit telling us that we were not alone.

In the long nightmare after 9/11 we didn’t know how to stand together as leaders’ voices told us how very alone we were, that our lives and homes and way of life were all in danger, that we could lose everything and needed to be afraid. To hold fear at bay, our country needed to unleash carpet bombing on Afghan and Iraqi villages, we sent over thousands of American troops and have now lost more Americans fighting the war than were killed in the terrorist attacks, and we’re not counting Iraqi dead. Our safety has been the rationale for using torture to gather intelligence of coming terror threats from all those frightening places outside our borders where people hate us and want to destroy our way of life.

By 2008 Franklin Roosevelt starts to sound like a theologian or a prophet, ‘We have nothing to fear except fear itself.’ In fact Roosevelt’s words make a decent summary of the Resurrection Gospel. The resurrected Jesus returns to deliver us from our double addiction to fear and to safety.

A day or so after 9/11, an Israeli friend who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area said several people asked him how he managed to make his commute across the Bay Bridge – didn’t he know that it might be the next target? My friend’s simple answer? “I grew up in Jerusalem.”

My friend had it right. After 9/11, I heard familiar Bible texts challenging us in a new way. They were inviting us all to grow up in Jerusalem. Jerusalem of two millennia ago, like today’s Jerusalem, was a loved holy place with constant threats, fears, and frequent experience of death. After 9/11, bald, brazen voices of the prophets assured the people that life was more than death, pillage and famine. The prophets spoke their hard comfort to people who had lost everything and wondered where God was, to frightened people who had survived imperial armies’ raping and murdering rage, to survivors who had seen their homes and fields burned, their livestock slaughtered and left to rot -- people who had lost everything and wondered where God was.

The prophets’ message was beyond politics. They saw the threat to their nation and called the people and rulers to justice, to care for the poor, to loving mercy and to walking humbly with God. Our leaders (like the royal leaders of ancient Israel) caution us that safety comes at an inevitable cost: in extraordinary times our historic commitments to freedom and human dignity demand holding prisoners indefinitely without charges and torturing suspects to protect us from terrorist threats. Then they assure us that without their leadership terrible things would have happened. It’s no stretch to hear biblical prophets (who rejected the power of chariots to keep people safe) jeering at metal detectors and border walls, just as they would have ridiculed President Clinton for insisting after the Oklahoma City bombing that we should, ‘tell the children of America that this will never happen again.’

Denial and wishful thinking aren’t what we need to hear. Angels and Jesus don’t tell us “Do not be afraid because nothing bad will ever happen again.” Our Easter Jesus appears to disciples hiding in a locked room in fear for their lives. After he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ the world was still dangerous, but Jesus sent his friends into that dangerous world to preach and share forgiveness. Like the prophets, like my friend who grew up in Jerusalem, like the disciples, can we listen for a simpler promise? God stands by people, unwaveringly faithful, still blessing life. Jesus says to his disciples, “I am with you always, to the end of the ages.”

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is Creative Director of All Saints Company, working for community development in congregational life focusing on sharing leadership, welcoming creativity, building community through music, and making liturgical architecture a win/win for building and congregation. He wrote My Father, My Daughter: Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago.

By Luiz Coelho

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.
1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no share with me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Jesus said to him, "One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you." For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, "Not all of you are clean."

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, `Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

“Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner...” This Bible passage has always been one of the most striking to me in my whole life. I recall not receiving communion several times, when I felt not able (or willing) to allow God to free myself from a certain sin, whether it was a personal one or even a collective one. And I know this might be a very countercultural behavior, especially at a time sin has been apparently forgotten by many, and confession has become a rare event in peoples' lives.

However, it is my firm belief that there is no other way of behaving with respect to the magnificent care expressed by Jesus on that night right before he was betrayed, than with utmost respect and awe for his unconditional love towards us.

Acts of love are usually enhanced by unpredictable circumstances under which they happen, and the events that happened on that Thursday night were no different from that. The first of them was the washing of the feet. I imagine how shocked the disciples were to see their master, the Messiah, humbly washing their feet. Yes, the one who had taught them so much, was acting as if he were a simple servant. What they did not know, however, was that Jesus, on that night, was teaching them the most important lesson of all... a new commandment that resumed and consolidated his message so far.

“Love one another as I love you.” The strength of such a commandment goes far beyond our typical understanding of love. Jesus' love is so deep that it reaches even the one who would betray him hours later. His humility is so impressive that he does not care to wash tired and dirty feet, probably full of wounds and scars. Are we really following Jesus' new commandment and this new vision of love? It is easy for us to say that we love our neighbor, and in fact, many of us repeat those verses every Sunday. It is easy to strike our chests and claim we have given a certain amount of our money to the local shelter, a hospice in Guatemala or even for the Millenium Development Goals, but would we be willing to leave the ease of modern life and share all we have with the miserable? Would we live a simple life and truly be brothers and sisters of those who have no more than rice and beans to eat? Would we go to the slums and proclaim the Gospel to those for whom life has become a source of constant pain? Would we reach those who we should hate (and who hate us), whomever they are, and yet tell them we love them as Jesus loves all of us?

No, we would not. During Lent, we were theoretically called to fast, and give up on simple things that are important to us. However, how many times have we caught ourselves complaining about how hard it is to do that. How many times have we almost failed? It is difficult, it is very difficult to leave our comfort zone and realize that, for many people around the globe, our lenten fast is much fancier than what they will have in their whole lives. Do we really care? Do we really manifest this love Jesus has commanded us to show?

The apex of this love is expressed in the simple meal Jesus shared with his disciples shortly after he washed their feet. More than a memorial supper of bread and wine, more than a simple act of thanksgiving, the institution of the Holy Eucharist became a way through which Jesus' disciples could recapitulate his final act of self giving love for humankind. By giving his body and blood, he offered himself in sacrifice for us, and made us part of his own body. He shared our pain, and even in spite of all the suffering that was about to come, he was still able to love unconditionally.

The Eucharist should mean more to us than a weekly ceremony. It is the spiritual food that nourishes us and prepares us truly to be Jesus' disciples. When we take part of Jesus' body and blood, we commit ourselves to follow him with all our heart, live according to his commandment and flood this world with Christ's love. The same meal he instituted that night is a continuous reminder that, even not being perfect, we ought to struggle to be worthy of such unconditional love.

Maundy Thursday, more than a simple ceremony or a light meal, is a calling. As we remember Jesus' last moments with his disciples before his arrest, we are called to be worthy of such a wondrous love. We are called to truly love all humankind, sacrificing our own selfish desires for the common good. We are called to go to the slums and proclaim Jesus' message to the outcasts of society. We are called to embrace our enemies and to love them with all our heart. We are called to love the sick, the hungry and the needy. We are called to make a difference, and show to the world what Christ's love is about.

Luiz Coelho, a seminarian from the Diocese of Rio de Janero, spends part of the year in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His Web site includes his art and his blog, Wandering Christian, on which he examines "Christianity in the third millennium, from a progressive, Latin American and Anglican point of view."

This is the third in an occasional series on non-canonical writings. Parts I and II are also available.

By Deirdre Good

The Gospel of Truth is a sermon on salvation. In the opening paragraph, a familiar term "gospel" is introduced rapturously and then explained as a discovery of a search for the Father: "The gospel of Truth is joy for those who have received from the Father of truth the grace of knowing him.." Those who embark on a search for the Father (re)discover their origins from the Father. This knowledge is a movement of creation but not separation, implicit in declaring the Son as the Father's name.

Composed by a brilliant orator, perhaps the second-century Valentinus himself, the sermon describes how the Savior effects in humanity a transformation from ignorance to knowledge. As in the case of the Epistle to the Hebrews, however, we know little of the author or the sermon's recipients. Most scholars assign this text in the Nag Hammadi Library to Valentinian Christianity since topics like "the Father," "aeons," "the Pleroma (fullness),"
"Deficiency," and "Rest" occur. The sermon describes the role of Error as a type of lower creator or Demiurge in contrast to which the author emphasizes truth as the spoken and written disclosure in which the Son is the Name of the Father

The text describes searching as both promise and ignorance. Ignorance generates agitation, fear, and its palpable effects: "agitation grew dense like a fog so that no one could see." In such a climate, personified Error grows powerful-- creating from matter a substance that shapes substitutes for the truth. Error's forms of forgetfulness and fear hold people captive and blind.

To overcome the fog of ignorance, forgetfulness must be annulled. The moment knowledge of one's true origins from the heavenly realm are regained (Valentinians believe such knowledge lies dormant in humanity) error ceases to exist as it has no root. As Savior, Jesus brings a way that is truth and knowledge to awaken within humanity awareness of its identity as children of God. The Savior does this as speech, in that the Word teaches; as Light, by enlightening the way; as fruit of the Father's knowledge, by being eaten and the result is joy; as book by publishing the Father's edict on the cross in being nailed to a tree, thus overcoming fear and offering life for many.

When Jesus calls them, the elect are brought back "into the Father, the Mother, Jesus of the infinite gentleness" (24,8), into the bosom which is the Holy Spirit. From a state of weary searching they attain a state of dynamic rest. The author plays with the external/internal dynamic of this search and muses out loud, "It is amazing that they were in the Father without knowing him, and that they were able to come forth by themselves, inasmuch as they were not able to perceive or recognize the one in whom they were" (22:27-34).

The Savior changes an external search for knowledge into recognition by the saved that the Father contains the movement from ignorance to knowledge. This transformation eventually collapses a distinction between external and internal spheres. Because the Savior has become incarnate and has died on the cross in the external (cosmic) sphere, it ceases to exist. Thus, what happens at the end of the process becomes what exists implicitly in the Father at the beginning. The rest attained by enlightened ones at the end is what was in the Father's thought from the beginning.

However, collapse of the material realm does not mean it is disparaged. References to the name of the Father being "on their heads" likely refers to baptism. A reference to Christ anointing "with the ointment" the "ones he brings back" alludes to an anointing ritual. Allusive references to sacraments fit within a sermon.

Towards the end of the sermon, hearers are exhorted to be concerned about the Father of the all and the true brothers. The Savior is a way for the lost, knowledge for those who were ignorant, a discovery for those who were searching and a support for those who were wavering. Listeners are to speak of the truth with searchers, strengthen the feet of those who stumble, feed the hungry, give rest to the weary and awaken those who sleep. Using imagery of an alluring fragrance, the children are drawn back to the Father. The sermon concludes with images of unity and rest.

The Gospel of Truth is a profound meditation on Jesus' saving function. It challenges our ideas that Valentinian Gnostics had no sacraments and that they were elites uninterested in the welfare of the community. Even if it isn't in the canon of the New Testament, if we let it speak for itself, we can experience something of the diverse voices of early Christianities in the period of Christian Origins.

Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. While she is an American citizen, she grew up in Kenya and loves marmite which may explain certain features of her blog, On Not Being a Sausage.

By Sam Candler

This week, I will be glad to remember the birthdays of Charles Darwin and Galileo Galilei, Darwin born on February 12 (1809), and Galileo born on February 15 (1564). It so happens that their birthdays occur during the Christian season of Lent this year. We all know how much controversy their work caused the Christian Church (and society!), but Christians should be forever grateful for their courage and their wisdom. In fact, Galileo, Darwin, and Lent have something in common.

Both Galileo and Darwin actually set out to be friends of the Christian Church. Educated in an Italian monastery, Galileo intended to join the Camaldolese Order of the Church; but his father had already decided that he would be a medical doctor. Galileo’s interests, of course, turned from medicine to mathematics and the natural world. With the use of the newly developed telescope, Galileo recorded wonders of the natural world – the stars and the heavens—that no one had ever seen. Of course, these were the observations and interpretations that would also change the world.

Galileo would finally be charged with heresy, for adopting the Copernican view that the earth revolved around the sun. After all, Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 all say something like "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "the sun rises and sets and returns to its place, etc." Was Galileo denying the Bible? Galileo apparently believed in some form of biblical inerrancy, but he struggled with interpretation. He wrote to a friend that the Bible should always be interpreted in the light of what science had shown to be true.

Charles Darwin, at one time, studied to become an Anglican priest. He, too, was in love with the natural world and was convinced at one time in the naturalist William Paley’s argument that design in nature proved the existence of God. Later Christians objected to several elements of On the Origin of Species; the book refuted the notion that creatures had been individually designed by God, it claimed that the Earth was much older than the literal biblical account, and in claiming a common ancestor for apes and human, it denied a certain uniqueness to humanity.

How strangely ironic that many in the Church should be blinded to the truth that these two gentlemen showed the world. For, in essence, both Galileo and Darwin were using science to claim that humankind is not at the center of everything. Our earth is not at the center of God’s creation, and our species is not at the center of God’s creation.

Isn’t this what Lent is supposed to teach us? “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” many of us heard on Ash Wednesday. Lent is supposed to remind us of humility. The opposite of humility is hubris, to be so self-obsessed as to think we are at the center of everything.

Galileo, Darwin, and Lent all teach us about truth and humility. A holy Lent is about acknowledging the truth of ourselves, and the truth of this beautiful world, no matter how uncomfortable that truth might be. A holy Lent is also about acknowledging our own humility. No matter who we are, we are not at the center of everything, and we are not at the beginning of everything. May God bless the memories of both Galileo and Darwin, and all who lead us in the paths of truth and humility this Lent.

The Very Rev. Sam Candler is dean of St. Philip's Cathedral in Atlanta. He helped start that city’s interfaith group, and leads regular community bible studies. He is also inspired by playing jazz piano, hunting, astronomy, and poetry. His sermons and reflections on “Good Faith and Common Good” can be found on the Cathedral web site.

By Deirdre Good

The author of 2 Peter admits that there are some things in the letters of Paul that are hard to understand. Perhaps the author had Paul's attitude to marriage in mind. Given the shortness of time, in I Cor 7 Paul commends the unmarried state without qualification to young and old, women and men alike, while in another place, (I Tim 2:15) he stipulates that a woman is subject to male authority and that she will be saved through childbearing.

To reconcile these opposing sentiments and others like them, scholars have come up with various solutions. Among the more creative is one by C. Wilfred Griggs, Professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University, who explains Joseph Smith's addition to the text after I Cor 7:29 (italics are mine and indicate additions):

"But I speak unto you who are called unto the ministry. For this I say brethren, the time that remaineth is but short, that ye shall be sent forth unto the ministry. Even they who have wives shall be as though they had none; for ye are called and chosen to do the Lord's work."

Paul is not condemning marriage in this chapter, Prof Griggs argues, but is advising missionaries who wish to become married that while they are on their missions (and the time for missionary work is short) they should be concerned with the work of the Lord and not with family or personal matters.

Other scholars, myself included, prefer not to add anything to Paul's words, however obscure and challenging they might seem. They propose that followers of Paul wrote several documents in his name after Paul's death, "clarifying" Paul. Among them are the Pastoral Epistles of 1&2 Timothy and Titus that apply Paul's teachings to late first and early second-century situations after his death. "Paul" of the Pastoral Epistles eschews celibacy, accepting and promoting instead hierarchical ideas about relations between men and women in so-called household codes. These household codes advocate a hierarchy of domestic arrangements that echo some Pauline statements but which are alien to others such as those proclaiming that life in Christ transforms sexual and ethnic distinctions (Gal 3:28). Paul's teaching commending the unmarried state for men and women reappears after Paul's death in the second-century Acts of Paul and Thecla. In this text not found in the New Testament, Paul preaches a version of the Sermon on the Mount blessing "those who keep the flesh chaste, for they shall become the temple of God." Thecla hears Paul's word of purity and renounces her engagement in favor of following Paul the itinerant missionary. She assumes this lifestyle for herself, becoming a role model for other Christian women.

The Acts of Paul and Thecla and the New Testament shed light on each other: the Corinthian community of saints proposes to embody holiness and to enact purity through renunciation of genital sexuality. Bodies are called temples of God and made holy by their relationship to Christ. Similarly, in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Paul exhorts hearers to forego patriarchal marriage for a lifestyle free of marriage to preach the gospel, showing mutual hospitality and a shared economy. Thecla's autonomy and self-determination came at a price: she lost home and protection and in the narrative is tried and condemned by a Roman court

Pauline tradition in the second-century seems to have bifurcated into two distinct interpretative streams originating from Paul's preaching and letters. The more conservative one found expansion and elaboration in the Pastoral Epistles of I and II Timothy and Titus. The other less hierarchical one advocating a celibate condition in which women and men exercised a particular freedom, fell out of mainstream favor as the time became patently less short. One cannot understand Paul's teaching on marriage without understanding how Pauline tradition was interpreted after his death. And one cannot understand Pauline tradition--on marriage or anything else--without taking into account all the literature that bears Paul's name. How the Pastoral Epistles came to be included in the New Testament and the Acts of Paul and Thecla excluded is in part answered by what we know of the development of the canon-the process of selecting which documents came to be regarded as authoritative as sacred scripture.

In the next few weeks, I will be posting pieces on a number of writings outside the New Testament that shed light on the period of Christian Origins. Why might anyone be interested in writings not included in the New Testament? I suggest several reasons: it took four centuries for the writings that make up the New Testament to be identified as canonical, that is as authoritative. If we want to understand the period of Christian Origins from an historical perspective, then we will do well to know about and even read some of these texts preserved or subsequently excluded by our ancestors in the Christian tradition. Christians today do not agree which texts are authoritative; do not subscribe to a single canon. Oxymoronic though it may seem, diversity of canons is a fact: the Roman Catholic's canon, for example, contains more ancient texts than the Protestant's. The Ethiopian canon of scripture encompasses the longest list of texts regarded as sacred scriptures. I do not propose to open a canon; I propose to open our minds to texts excluded from the canon, so that we may know something of the originality and diversity of early Christian writings in order to understand the richness and complexity of Christian tradition.

Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. While she is an American citizen, she grew up in Kenya and loves marmite which may explain certain features of her blog, On Not Being a Sausage.

By Cynthia Kittredge

At stake in many of the debates in the church and culture is the question of whether a woman can represent humanity. That issue lies behind the question, “Is America ready for a Woman President?” It hovers over many of the discussions around the still-contested issue of women in the priesthood and the episcopate. While some read the Gospel of John as the most exclusive of the gospels, in its own terms, it is the most radically inclusive. In the Fourth Gospel women do represent humanity and model ideal discipleship. One prime example is the well-known scene of the Anointing at Bethany, what might be properly named, the “Second-to-Last-Supper.”

One can imagine the structure of the gospel of John as a series of feasts, beginning with the wedding and continuing with the picnic in the wilderness. Nearer the time of Jesus’ leave-taking two dinners take place, a dinner at Bethany and a dinner at Jerusalem. In the final episode of the gospel, after it has ended once, Jesus appears again for a breakfast of bread and fish with Peter and the disciples. This gospel pictures intimacy and friendship as feasting with Jesus. These ordinary meals are revelatory. To continue to explore the idea of leadership in John, I want to give particular attention to one of these dinners, the dinner at Bethany in John 12:1-8 and its important parallels with the washing of feet dinner in John 13:1-17. The two meals reflect one another, as though mirror images. Both are suppers; both involve the actions of washing and wiping, interpreted as acts of love and self sacrifice. At both are gathered those whom Jesus loves. At each, impending death impinges on the celebration. Judas, the villain, is present. It is at the home of Mary and Martha. Martha is said to serve. The host is Mary.

Now the memorable action of this dinner is the anointing of Jesus by Mary. Because there are so many variations of the story of Jesus being anointed by a woman in the gospels and the stories bear family resemblances to one another, it is easy to get the stories mixed up. If one hears these stories all at once, it is harder to distinguish the special role of Mary here in this scene in John’s gospel. She is the host, not the uninvited intruder as in some versions of the story (Luke 7:36-50). Like Mark 14:3-9, her act is a critical recognition of Jesus, but unlike that story, she has a name, and it’s a very important name in John’s community. The community of the beloved disciple, whose traditions are written by John, cared that the woman who recognized Jesus before his passion be remembered not only with a name, but with an important name, that she be remembered as one of the significant disciples among those who established the community: Mary, sister of Martha, sister of Lazarus, the family whom Jesus loved. The text links this story to the story of the raising of Mary and Martha’s brother in John 11:2:

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. (John 11:1-2)

Mary has personified grief and love, in the episode before, when she weeps at her brother’s death and entreats, “Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died.” She weeps and Jesus weeps. The family partakes of this dinner in the wake of one grief and in the darkening shadow of another. Mary prepares to lose Jesus. She takes the perfume, anoints Jesus’ feet, wipes them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

The Christians of the Fourth Gospel not only told what she did in memory of her, as directed in Mark’s version, but they incorporated her act into the liturgical memory of the community. The details, the supper, the serving, the wiping, Judas, all parallel the last supper, and show how this community interpreted the anointing by Mary. She anticipated and enacted what Jesus was to command a few nights later. Mary, as one whom Jesus loved, did what the friends were taught to do by Jesus. It is the second-to-last supper, and Mary plays the role of Jesus, kneeling, wiping, pouring out substance of inestimable value. Mary is the host, the one who knows what is to come, the one who anticipates Jesus’ example of foot-washing and symbolically washes him.

It is unfortunate that during the history of interpretation, this story has become so muddled with the woman from the city who was a sinner in Luke 7:36-50 and the busy and lazy sisters, Mary and Martha, in Luke 10:38-42. When read in its place in the gospel of John, the story eloquently proclaims Mary’s authority and leadership in the memory of this community.

The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Briggs Kittredge is Associate Professor of New Testament at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest and author of Conversations with Scripture: The Gospel of John, Morehouse, 2007.

By Deirdre Good

Who knew that Christmas cards could be so subversive? In December last year, Simon Mayo engaged the Archbishop of Canterbury in a conversation that surprised many about Christmas card scenes. Asked about "the wise men with the gold, frankincense, and Myrrh - with one of the wise men normally being black and the other two being white, for some reason" the Archbishop responded, "Well Matthew's gospel doesn't tell us that there were three of them, doesn't tell us they were kings, doesn't tell us where they came from, it says they're astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire. That's all we're really told so, yes, 'the three kings with the one from Africa' - that's legend; it works quite well as legend." And this side of the pond, the Standing Committee of the Diocese of Fort Worth questions publicly the choice of Christmas card the Presiding Bishop sent to Bishop Iker on the grounds that its depiction of the Magi as three women of color "reinterprets scripture to exclude masculine images."

For a new book, I've been looking at depictions of biblical figures and themes in the Christian East and West. It will come as a surprise to no one that the Nativity is often portrayed. Given interest in how the Magi are represented, I thought I'd look at examples in the on-line collection of the British Library at www.imagesonline.bl.uk/index.asp. A goodly number appear on Christmas cards.

The BL describes their on-line collection thus: "Images Online gives you instant access to thousands of the greatest images from the British Library's collections which include manuscripts, rare books, musical texts and maps spanning almost 3000 years. The range of images available includes illustrations, drawings, paintings and photographs." Additions to the on-line collection are being made daily. You have to register to use their collections. Selecting "Religion and Belief" then "Christianity," I entered the terms "magi" in the search box. The result was 47 images, 44 of which are titled "Journey of the Magi, "Magi Before Herod," "Adoration of the Magi" or something similar. Three are nothing to do with the topic. By, the way, you get the same results by entering "wise men" in the search box.

Three of the 44 images are titled "The Three Magi." Now the titles have probably been given to the pieces of art by catalogers at the British Library sometimes on the basis of the text and sometimes not. I myself take the titles of pieces of art with a grain of salt. In the on-line collection of Jewish Art at the British Library for example, there are sometimes no descriptions of the images at all. Only the manuscript and its place of origin is identified. Of course, there are fewer images in this collection. But even to someone like me who has no training in art history, its obvious that Jewish illustrators in the Middle Ages are depicting biblical episodes. Why they haven't all been titled and classified in the same way as the collection "Christianity" is a mystery.

Back to images of the Magi. Of the 44 images under various titles, some images depict three Magi alone while others in the same category may be showing three Magi but since the Magi have large retinues and the paintings or illustrations are small, it is hard to tell exactly where a Magi ends and a member of the retinue begins, particularly if the Magi and their retinues are coming into the scene from one side or the other. After all, the focus of the depiction is Mary and Jesus. Other images show more than three Magi: some clearly four.

From this, we learn that on-line images of the Magi in Nativity scenes from the British Library's collection of Christian art depict them as three, four, or more figures, some or all of which may be black, or Armenian, or Persian, or a non-white ethnic group. I suppose if you were predisposed to see the Magi only as three white men, you could still do so but in that case you would have to ignore just under half of the 44 images.

We might ask why there are three or four or more Magi of different ethnic extraction at Jesus' birth? Because the text of Matthew's gospel, whence the story comes, identifies the Magi by a plural designation only. And this plurality permits Christian interpretation in art and tradition to reflect the fundamental ambiguity of the text: the masculine Greek plural "magoi" of Matthew 2:1 means only that the Magi are plural in number and that one of that number is a man. There might have been three or four or a hundred Magi at Jesus' birth in Matthew's account. And Christian tradition of the east and west elaborates this ambiguity by naming three or four or dozens of Magi, as Bruce Metzger explains in an article, "Names for the Nameless in the New Testament: A Study in the Growth of Christian Tradition", in Kyriakon. (Festschrift Johannes Quasten, ed. Patrick Granfield & Josef A. Jungmann, vol. I, Münster: Aschendorff, 1970, p.79-99.) Giving names to the Magi seems to have begun in the 6th Century CE.

Now this business of using a plural noun to describe a group of people including men and women can be seen elsewhere in Matthew. Jesus identifies a masculine plural group of his disciples as brother, sister and mother, that is, as kin: "For whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother" (12:49-50). Matthew counts only 5000 men in the Feeding of the Five Thousand (14:21) but Jesus may have reckoned differently.

The Magi are not explicitly masculine in Matthew. Diverse depictions of the Magi in Christian and Muslim art, tradition, and Christmas cards as three or four or more; as black, Persian or Eurasian, as male and female, accurately reflects the ambiguity of Matthew's scripture.

Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. She blogs at On Not Being a Sausage.

By Deirdre Good

Rowan Williams' book, Christ On Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement, published in 2000 has become a classic, as Alison Goodlad observed recently on the Web site of Ekklesia. It is a best seller, read throughout the Anglican Communion. I saw it recently as a Lent reading choice on the library table of the parish I attend in Maine during the summer.

Stanley Hauerwas has nothing but praise for the statement in it that "the hardest thing in the world is to be where we are." He commends this as an invitation to learn to live in ordinary time, in the confusion and complexity of the present in his new 2007 book The State of the University: Academic Knowledge and the Knowledge of God. Williams asks, he says, how can our ordinary lives express the truth that violence has been overwhelmed and silenced by Christ? Dramatic gestures will not make our lives more authentic. Instead we are called not just to speak the truth but to the more demanding task of hearing the truth in each other by overcoming distrust and so to work for peace.

"We constantly try to start from somewhere other than we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is there in the present moment." (Christ On Trial pp 85-6)

Williams' book discusses the trial scenes showing how, in each of the four gospels, the interrogation of Christ is reversed and the interrogator becomes, unsettlingly, the interrogated. In Mark's gospel, Jesus' declaration to the High Priest's question, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?" is an affirmation that overcomes all the secrecy of Mark's gospel about Jesus' identity: "I am," he says (14:62). Jesus' declaration at the trial and not earlier in the gospel means that he cannot be misunderstood as a wonderworker in competition with other sorts of power in the world. The one who says "I am" in the trial is neither wise nor holy nor admirable nor impressive. If we listen to Mark's Jesus as the voice of God it is we who are silenced.

In Matthew's gospel, Jesus' answer to the question about his identity, "I adjure you by the Living God, tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God" is "So you say" or "the words are your own" (26:64). Jesus' answer reverses the question: the High Priest has the language and the means to make sense of the world but no actual understanding of the words. That language in Matthew is the language of what Wisdom has done through human agents; it is a question to all who are religious insiders who cannot read this story although it is part of their/our tradition.

Each chapter includes references to poets, novelists, movies and writers. The chapter on Mark opens by noting that the mood of Pasolini's film, The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, best represents Mark's gospel. The chapter on Luke opens with the lines from Sydney Carter's song Knocking on the Window. Alison Goodlad astutely observes that Williams' approach to the trial narratives of the gospels indicates that they are not the starting point for his reflections but rather as points that distil "the understanding he has derived from other sources such as the gospel narratives as a whole, general scriptural reading, Christian tradition and reflection, and wisdom derived from poetry and fictional works."

This is most evident in his approach to Luke's gospel in which the words of Jesus to the council's questioning whether he is the Messiah, "If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I question you, you will not answer" (22:67) are construed as "I have nothing to say to you that you will be able to hear or to which you will be able to respond. Luke's Jesus places himself with those whose language cannot be heard." (Christ On Trial p. 54).

In this answer, we are told that Jesus indicates God's presence with those who do not have a voice and who are left out of our ways of organizing our own moral and social life. In a following section, "Allowing the Rights of Others," stories from those who have little or no experience of being insiders amplify Williams' approach to Luke. If we are unsettled by someone who cannot speak our language, by those who are mentally and physically impaired, for example, or by making space for children, then it is we who are on trial. In a subsequent section, "The threat of Jesus," Williams observes that Jesus' mistreatment in all the Gospel narratives including being beaten, flogged, and crowned with thorns is not surprising: he is beaten because he is powerless; his powerlessness is not in competition for the same space that his judges and captors are defending and he is thus a bigger threat than any rival because he calls into question the whole world of rivalry and defense.

The problem with this reading of Luke is that Jesus is never flogged or crowned with thorns in Luke's trial narrative. True, Pilate announces his intention to have Jesus chastised and released (23:16) but commentators note that this chastisement is a "minor beating" and not the flogging of which Matthew (27:26) and Mark (15:15) speak that is part of the sentence of crucifixion Jesus undergoes. But in Luke's narrative this chastisement is never carried out. Herod's soldiers treat Jesus with contempt and make a mockery (23:11) but Pilate in the next section views Herod's treatment of Jesus, including the putting on of a robe, as an indication of Jesus' innocence. The result of Jesus' being sent from Herod to Pilate is that they both became friends on that day with one another.

Of course, Luke's gospel does describe God's compassion for the socially and economically marginalized and its disquieting consequences for us but the trial narrative may not be the best place to locate this concern. Instead, Luke's account of Jesus' passion presents a Jesus in control of events where he would in general be passive: Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane is the agony of a heroic martyr not the anguish of Mark or Matthew; the arrest in Gethsemane includes Jesus' interruption and healing of the violent cutting off the ear of the High Priest's servant; the crucifixion scene includes Jesus' dialogue with the criminals on either side of him; Jesus' last words on the cross indicate confidence not abandonment: "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit."

I am not suggesting that this is the only or the right reading of Luke's trial narrative, only that it offers a disconcerting reading that takes more of that narrative into account. Jesus' words to the council are of a piece with Luke's portrait of Jesus' composure under duress. Jesus expects a negative response: the authorities will never believe and never answer. Neither here nor in response to an earlier question by what authority he does things like cleansing the temple (20:1-8), does Jesus cooperate. Indeed, Jesus' declarations in response to his interrogators may be the only weapon he has. But Jesus' answer, couched in the appearance of control, is a Lucan allusion to a larger narrative of healing and forgiveness from and around the Savior for the slave of the High Priest, for Herod and Pilate, for the criminal on the cross, and extending to those who seek to slaughter other martyrs like Stephen in Acts. Yet underneath Luke lies an alternative account in which the Spirit blows where it wills and Judas repents. What is perhaps uncomfortable for all of us is grappling with the implications of Luke's contrived stability.

Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. While she is an American citizen, she grew up in Kenya and loves marmite which may explain certain features of her blog, On Not Being a Sausage.

By Deirdre Good

Despite all attempts to make it so, the Bible really has very little interest in sexuality.

At the end of October, I went to a conference at The Jewish Theological Seminary to honor the work of Professor Tikva Frymer-Kensky, "For There Is Hope: Gender and the Hebrew Bible." One of her legacies is the books she wrote. In her 1992 book, In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth, she argues that since Israel's God incorporated all the character and functions of the female goddesses, gender disappears from biblical monotheism. Consequently, in the recitation of Genesis' creation narrative for example, humans need not be concerned about creation or continuity of fertility in the earth. Epitomized in the creative word, God has power over fertility, creation and reproduction. Israel's heroes, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson and Samuel are all born after divine action opens wombs that were closed. Stories of their birth convey the message that God alone can cause conception. As for gender, she argues that the Bible does not see men and women as being different in essence. They are socially unequal, and women are subordinate, "but they are not inferior in any intellectual or spiritual way." She sees the Bible's positive evaluation of women as one of the beneficial effects of Biblical monotheism, but she also notes negative effects of the Bible's removal of gender from the divine, particularly the fact that the Bible, and Judaism and Christianity in general, have so little to say about such important things as human sexuality and reproduction. "The Bible never really incorporates sexuality into its vision of humanity or its relationship with the divine," she writes.

Similarly, the New Testament says little about human sexuality. A Christian doctrine of marriage developed well after the time of the New Testament, namely, in the patristic and early medieval periods. Attempts to ground Christian definitions of the sacrament of marriage in Paul's counsel that marriage was safer than unconsidered celibacy (in I Cor 7), in the metaphor of the marriage of Christ and the Church in Ephesians 5 and in Jesus' prohibition of divorce (Mark 10:2-9; Matt 19:3-9 & 5:31-32; Luke 16:18) are made well after the time of the New Testament. These texts do not together or separately comprise a coherent statement on marriage nor were they intended to. Attempts to use, for example, Jesus' statements to uphold the sanctity of heterosexual marriage must heed one thing: Jesus' statements link marriage and divorce. Jesus never considers marriage apart from divorce. Even if Jesus' prohibition of divorce views it as a concession to human failure to live out marriage, divorce/marriage is a given in all three gospels.

Exhortations to practice acts of charity are far more prevalent in the Bible than injunctions to be fruitful and multiply.

If sexuality is marginal in biblical tradition and the Bible has no vision to help integrate human sexuality, and if a Christian theology of the sacrament of marriage is patristic and medieval, what might be the consequences for our contemporary debates about sexuality in the church and elsewhere? One is that since sexuality seems to be of no great concern to either God or Jesus according to the biblical record, we need to recognize this gap before we rush to fill it. Minding this gap helps us understand that while the Bible recognizes the power of the erotic (think of the biblical laws regulating sexual behavior and the statement in the Song of Songs "for love is stronger than death"), it is in fact the ideations, imaginations and fantasies of scholars and religious people that have created modern discourses about sexuality in ancient Israel or in the New Testament. Rather than promoting discourses that regulate and restrict human sexual behavior, we could affirm that a gap is a space into which we must put different discourses, and we can be intentional about what we are doing. Minding the gap helps us understand that we have no biblical mandate to argue on the basis of sexual practice for the exclusion of anyone from Christian communities or for the exclusion of ourselves from community with others. Precisely because of this gap we can afford inclusion to differently constituted families and households.

Deirdre Good is the author of Jesus' Family Values (2006) and a professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary in New York City. Her blog is On Not Being a Sausage.

By Roger Ferlo

Trick or treat?

Have you ever tried to read the book of Revelation, the whole thing, front to back? Go into a darkened room, light a few candles to read by and to set the atmosphere, give yourself an hour or two, and then read the whole thing aloud. It’s an unsettling experience, perfect for a Halloween night, particularly if you want to scare yourself. The images and obsessions of the book of Revelation have perhaps wreaked more havoc in people’s lives—created more strife, fomented more demonic fantasies, misled more people—than any other book in the Bible. To a hostile reader (and in the history of this book there have been many such readers) the book is absolute craziness—disjointed, inconsistent, violent, madly repetitive. That, you might say, is the trick part. But even its severest critics recognize the power of its cadences, the seductiveness of its symbols, the mad glories of its theophanies, the elemental resonance of its presiding myths. The dragon with the seven heads, the women clothed with the sun, the Lamb upon the throne, what the Dante scholar Peter Hawkins has called “the cubed jewel box” of the heavenly city—these are symbols that have shaped the religious imagination of the west for two thousand years. That’s the treat.

Like all texts with a claim to divine revelation, this one can be dangerous stuff—a seedbed of violence and ideological close-mindedness. To the credulous insider, these are no mere symbols. This book is a map of the future. It is propaganda for the elect. No detail is too trivial, no symbol too opaque for the believer who is determined to read his or her own agenda into this compendium of apocalyptic fantasies from an age long past. The book of Revelation has been used to justify all manner of things. Revolution and counter-revolution. Anti-Catholic polemic. Christian Zionism. Pietistic quietism. Sectarian violence. The book can be a happy hunting ground for bigots and fanatics, and the distortions of its purpose and its meaning are as rampant today as they were two millennia ago. One need only look at the marketing figures for the Left Behind series to be convinced of this book’s enduring and questionable power.

And yet it is the book of Revelation that supplies the readings for the feast of All Saints, the day for which Halloween was supposed to prepare us. Why invoke Revelation on a feast day like All Saints?

The association is not accidental. Passages from Revelation associated with the rites of All Saints Day (and also with the rite of Christian burial) no longer read like the mad fantasies of an obsessive paranoic or a divinely dictated plan for the future. Revelation is at its heart a book of consolation, a vision of comfort for a people persecuted and in distress. It is often hard for Americans to imagine what persecution might feel like—a life lived in fear and trembling, always on the run, always faithful, never sure. It’s the kind of life that the emperor Diocletian inflicted on the early Christians who wrote and preserved this book. They were the first saints of the church, brothers and sisters in the faith, risking all that they had for the sake of a name—the name of Christ that they knew was above all other names, including the name of the emperor himself. For Diocletian, what was at stake was a matter of state control, including control of the religious imagination. For Christians, what was at stake was control of their inmost identity. In putting on Christ in baptism they had been made citizens of a heavenly city, a city not made by human hands, and could do no other than act in the name of the Christ for whom they themselves were named, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

How these people suffered, how they recanted, how they died, how they escaped such persecution—of these matters very little is known to us. But in a book like this, we do know how they imagined their freedom, should it ever come. And even after two millennia, in this startling vision of God’s triumph contemporary Christians can catch a glimpse of their own fears and their own hopes. What these people saw was extraordinary. They were Jews become Christians in a Roman world, members of a heretical wing of a minority faith barely tolerated by a brutal empire. Yet what they saw and preached was a vision of universal brotherhood, a new heaven and a new earth, a holy city coming down from heaven, prepared (in that powerful apocalyptic marrying of things heavenly and earthly) as a bride adorned for her husband. “And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See I am making all things new.” No wonder they wrote all these things down, for in a world of shifting values and imperial terror, they knew that these words of consolation and promise were “trustworthy and true.”

In these parlous times, when innocents are tortured and immigrants demonized, you begin to hear these words in the way they were intended. They constitute the ancient cry of the persecuted and the dispossessed. Knowing what we know about torture and rendition, it’s hard to get these cadences out of your mind. To hear this reading on All Saints Day is to hear a summons to solidarity with all those suffer persecution and unjust imprisonment—whether in the farthest reaches of the first-century Roman empire or in the drug-ridden streets of an Brazilian slum or in the faceless corridors of a secret American prison. When a part of the body suffers—whether Christian or Muslim, Buddhist or Jew—all suffer. Whether we acknowledge it or not, their tribulation is ours. Who knows when it will come back to haunt us?

“Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” No tricks here.

[Adapted from an essay on Revelation 21:1-6, scheduled to appear in the new 12-volume John Knox/Westminster press commentary on the readings in the Revised Common Lectionary.]

The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. His books include Opening the Bible (Cowley 1997), Sensing God (Cowley 2001) and Heaven (Seabury 2007).

By Ann Fontaine

Last week the paternal side of my family gathered for an impromptu reunion. Brothers, sisters, cousins, kids and grandkids shared a potluck meal. We lined up the grandkids for the traditional photo. I noticed a change in the line from the generation of my children. The next generation of children chose to stand beside their first cousins rather than by height. At first my brothers and I said, “Oh, no, that is wrong,” but then realized that the second cousins were strangers to one another and a bit fearful.

Today as I look at the dozens of photos of the event I can see small gatherings of relatives sharing stories and edging closer to one another. The children are racing around the yard and playing with the toys getting to know each other in their way. A digital family album is emerging to go with the various print albums that are stored on our families’ bookshelves.

As part of this gathering our daughter added to her compendium of genealogical information. She along with one of my brothers and a cousin in Norway are trying to obtain stories as well as birth, marriage, and death dates. Family stories give us our identity.

My brothers and I are first generation children of immigrants. Our stories tell of leaving home to try new things. They tell of people starting out with no idea of what they will encounter but believing they will find a place to work and dream. The stories tell of trying things before having full information of the consequences. They also reveal that we were concerned with what others thought and how they acted as we tried to fit in and become part of the dominant culture. We lost our sense of being part of the “old country” as new generations were born here. We try to reconnect with those who stayed behind. These are just a few of the messages from our album.

It occurred to me that the Bible is like a family album. Images, stories, clippings, and mementos of encounters with a common story are gathered into its books. The Bible tells of encounters with the Holy and tries to make sense of Divine-Human relationships. The stories are saved to show future generations the way to live as a people of faith. They explore the questions of immortality, community, and the meaning of life. Like the family album we may have stories about the pictures and know the names of the people we are viewing but there is always a level that cannot be seen or understood because we were not there when the photo was taken or the event occurred.

When I read the Bible with this sort of lens - I stop arguing with it or trying using it as a template for life in God. When it contradicts itself, I can see that this is because there were different points of view about events, like when people are interviewed after a wreck and remember totally different versions of the same event.

For instance, Etienne Charpentier, in How to Read the New Testament, says, that the book of Revelation is like modern art, trying to convey ideas through metaphors, feelings, and images. It is not representational or photographic. When we try to apply scientific, rational principles to works of art we miss the point and end up analyzing the paint. We can easily fall into a paint by numbers version of a painting rather than the rich glowing depth of the artist’s offering.

So it is with the Bible. If we study it as our family album we can gain a sense of where we have come from and who we are being called to be as a people of God. We learn how people made choices, what they used as a basis for those choices. While their conclusions may differ from ours we can learn from the process that is revealed. We travel the same path of faith with very different landscapes but our beginnings and our endings come from the same source. Leaf through the pages, savor the stories, learn about your spiritual family.

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Greg Jones

William Stringfellow was a gay, chain-smoking, Harvard-trained New York City lawyer, who lived and worked among the poor of East Harlem in the last half of the 20th century.

In the late 60s, he was a radical supporter of the anti-war movement, an extreme critic of the Nixon administration, and a hands-on advocate for the poor and hated. He defended Bishop Pike in 1966 against charges of heresy. He supported and defended the first women to be irregularly ordained. He befriended the Berrigans in their anti-war protests.

To many, one might suppose Stringfellow was the classic 'liberal Episcopalian.' Yet, in much the way that Stanley Hauerwas rejects 'theological liberalism,' Stringfellow was not a theological liberal. Indeed, he was a misfit among liberals who shared much of his social justice vision. Walter Wink has said that Stringfellow, "seems to have come, theologically, out of nowhere." But he didn't come from nowhere. He came from the land of the Bible. It is quite evident that William Stringfellow lived, advocated and worked as he did based on his deep commitment to living under the Word of God in the Bible.

As such, alongside his social justice activism, Stringfellow was also a surprisingly bold critic of Mainline Protestantism's "virtual abandonment of the Word of God in the Bible" for a mess of modernistic philosophical porridge. His observation of things inside the establishment-friendly Episcopal Church, and other mainline churches in America, was that folk were neither "intimate with nor reliant upon the Word of God in the Bible, whether in preaching, in services in the sanctuaries, or in education and nurture. Yet it is the Word of God in the Bible that all Christians are particularly called to hear, witness, trust, honor and love."

According to Stringfellow, the curious abandonment of the Bible by the Church began as a Modern Western phenomenon, with the intellectualization and academic specialization of biblical study. In their exceeding zeal to be regarded as intellectual equals by a secular intelligentsia, Mainline Protestant clergy and faculty put 'objective scholarship' ahead of 'faithful engagement' with the Word of God in the Bible. In good modern rationalist fashion, they began to look at the Bible as a container of intellectual or philosophical propositions to be analyzed and understood – as if the Bible were no different than the writings of Marx, Plato or Buddha.

Stringfellow tells a funny story to illustrate how far the elephant of biblical indifference had gone into the Episcopal Church:

[In the early 1960's I served] on a commission of the Episcopal Church charged with articulating the scope of the total ministry of the Church in modern society. The commission numbered about forty persons, a few laity and the rest professional theologians, ecclesiastical authorities and clergy. The group met, in the course of a year and a half, three times for sessions of more than a week. The first conference, as I recall it, floundered in churchy shoptalk that anyone outside the Church would find exasperatingly irrelevant, largely incoherent or simply dull.

Toward the end of that meeting some of those present proposed it might be an edifying discipline for the group, in its future sessions, to undertake some concentrated study of the Bible. It was suggested that constant recourse to the Word of God in the Bible is as characteristic and significant a practice in the Christian life as the regular participation in the celebration of the Eucharist, which was a daily observance of this commission. Perhaps, it was argued, Bible study would enlighten the deliberations of the commission and, in any event, would not impede them. The proposal was rejected on the grounds, as one Bishop present put it, that "most of us have been to seminary and know what the Bible says: the problem now is to apply it to today's world." The Bishop's view was seconded (with undue enthusiasm, I thought at the time) by the Dean of one of the Episcopal seminaries as well as by the clergy bureaucrats from national headquarters who had, they explained, a program to design and administer.

[To me, the implication of the group's] decision not to engage in Bible study is that the Gospel, in its biblical embodiment, is of an essentially pedantic character – a static body of knowledge which, once systematically organized, taught and learned, has use ceremonially, sentimentally, nostalgically, and as a source from which deductions can be made to guide the religious practice and ethical conduct of contemporary Christians. If that is what the Bible is, then it is generically undistinguished from religious scripture of any sort and, for that matter, is of no more dignity than any secular ideology or philosophy. If that is what the Bible is, then it is a dead word and not the Living Word.

Such a view of the Bible authorizing, evidently, a merely academic use of the Bible, if pressed to its final logic, challenges the versatility and generosity of God's revelation of Himself in history and is a form of doubt deplored in James (Jas 1.5-8; 3.13-4.6) Yet, that very way of regarding the Bible is not only current among ecclesiastical authorities or seminary professionals, it has gained a wide acceptance in the last decade or so in programs of lay theological education in the several denominations and interdenominationally."

Stringfellow argued that Christians ought not primarily to think of the Bible as something to be dissected, figured out, and discussed as if it were a dead frog on a lab table – or an encyclopedia of ancient concepts. Rather, he argued that the Bible should be engaged with by living people in living ways – for in and of itself the Word of God is living and active.

Yes, to Stringfellow, the Bible is the Word of God, and as such is a thing not dead, but a Word militant, free and alive. Christians should be focused on living within the Word of God in the Bible in this world. Our primary vocation as Christians, therefore, regarding that Word of God, is to be open to it, to listen to it, and to live it – to live humanly and biblically as he would say. Yet this kind of open listening to the Word of God in the Bible – is the very thing we modern people are no longer very good at. Stringfellow says we can't listen to the Word of God in the Bible because we are not particularly good at listening to anything outside ourselves.

But this is the key for the faithful Church in Stringfellow's eyes. The single most significant thing a Christian must do is intend to be open to and to listen to the Word of God in the Bible. He says, "for that, a person must not merely desire to hear the Word of God but must also be free to hear the Word of God. This means becoming vulnerable to the Word and to the utterance of the Word in much the same way as one has to become vulnerable to another human being if one truly cares to know that other person and to hear his or her word."

Stringfellow explains that a person must come to the Bible quietly, eagerly, expectantly and ready to listen. "One must (as nearly as one can) confront the Bible naively," without preconceptions or baggage about it. The primary question of the seeker after God looking to encounter the Word of God in the Bible is – "what does this Word say?" "Not, what do I think? Not, do I agree? Not, is this relevant to my life and circumstances? But, straightforwardly, first of all, 'What is this word?'

At the same time, one must "approach the Bible realistically – rather than superstitiously – recognizing that access to the same Word of God that the Bible bespeaks" is given to us also in the event of Jesus Christ's incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection – the pivotal event of all human history – and in the incessant agitations of the Holy Spirit – and in the constitution of creation itself.

Stringfellow harshly criticizes Modernist literalism as a tendency which produces either an irrelevant Bible or a fundamentalist Christianity. Stringfellow would argue that the kind of Modern reductionism rampant among incredulous agnostics and credulous fundamentalists alike is false in that does not really engage with the living Word of God in the Bible. Moreover, this kind of biblical literalism is a denigration of the humanity of the reader or listener whose role in engaging the text is reduced to a passive one, and a flattening out of a text which is divinely multidimensional.

It is worth noting that Stringfellow admired Karl Barth, and Barth admired Stringfellow. Barth once said publicly of Stringfellow, "Listen to this man." For Stringfellow and Barth, despite their many differences, they both believed that theology ought to be no different than proclamation and witness to the Word of God. Stringfellow said,

"[This is what makes] Karl Barth such a threatening and unnerving figure among the professional theologians. ... For him to speak theologically is indistinguishable from confessing the Gospel."

By Will Scott

Scripture, Tradition and Reason, the Via Media, the three sources of authority in the Anglican/Episcopal tradition --- Hooker’s three legged stool. Yes, we Episcopalians are a complicated bunch. In recent years, I have become a strong advocate of knowing the good book, not only for defensive purposes but also for growth and inspiration. In the first week of seminary I still remember how Dean Martha Horne read that colorful collect from the Book of Common Prayer calling us to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the words of Holy Scripture --- so sensual and earthy, as though one was about to sip a fine wine or taste a nice piece of meat.

The truth is that we Episcopalians could stand to learn a thing or two from our evangelical Bible thumping brothers and sisters. Even when we know quite a bit about what’s upon those pages, we are bashful about sharing our knowledge in a way that communicates strength, agility and comfort with these strange stories in which our faith is rooted. This is not to say that our approach to scripture needs to lack sophistication or nuance, but rather than castigate literalists we would do well to engage the narrative and offer more varied interpretations that are accessible to all. There are likely lots of reasons why we Episcopalians are so often accused of not knowing the Bible, some of which are completely unfair, but as the late Tammy Faye Messner said, “if life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

Tammy Faye’s advice resonated particularly strongly for me about three years ago when I started my first parish position. The parish was located in Northern Virginia, and we worked in the shadow of a large, conservative mega-church. We weren’t a tiny church at all by Episcopal standards, but like many of our mainline neighbors, the parish I served as Associate Rector sometimes felt like a tiny fresh vegetable market next to a Super Wal-Mart. Almost everyone I spoke with in our congregation, it seemed, had been invited at some time or another to attend a Bible study at the mega church. I’m sure the offer was extended by concerned and well-meaning neighbors. Some attended, some refused the hospitality; others wished we had more to offer ourselves. When it came to Bible study, the mega church had a thousand different varieties, like the cereal aisle at the grocery store--- one for Dad, one for Mom, one for singles, one for people with green eyes, one for people with green eyes who want blue eyes, and so on. Our vegetable market church didn’t have quite the quantity or the variety, but with sincerity and commitment, we began hosting an assortment of discussion groups, many of which focused on Scripture.

One group read Acts of the Apostles, while another did an overview of the themes and stories of the Hebrew Bible, while another read through the gospel of Mark, then flipped back to Amos, and forward to the Book of Revelation. A group of young fathers wanted in on the Bible study bandwagon and so they started at the beginning reading the Book of Genesis. We hosted these gatherings at various times for accessibility and, having added further groups for parishioners interested in the arts and sciences, soon found ourselves with a busy calendar. Many of us were encountering the story of God’s Salvation for the first time, and all of us were deepened by our studies and conversations. Sometimes the groups were tiny, comprising just 4 to 8 people, but at other times the rooms were packed. Regardless of the size of the gathering or the nature of he texts we read, community was formed, prayers were offered and the Spirit of God was present-- “whenever two or three are gathered together.” I’m convinced that what made each of these gatherings so important was that despite some initial awkwardness, we opened the good book and discovered a feast (including lemonade). These gatherings helped fuel existing local and global service initiatives and inspire new ones as well.

This fall I encourage you to sign up for a Bible study if your church has one, and if it doesn’t, I encourage you to start one (or two or three). What has your experience with the Bible and the Episcopal Church been? If you were to attend a Bible study, which book would you most like to explore? What themes, characters or topics interest you the most? How have you learned from your Bible thumping brothers or sisters?

The Rev. Will Scott, is associate pastor at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Calif. Raised by a school teacher and a social worker in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, he is drawn to intentional community, the pursuit of global justice, and the church's witness for peace. He blogs occasionally at Yearns and Groans.

by Ann Fontaine

Is there life after death and if so what will it be? In a Woody Allen movie, a man (played by Allen) converts to Christianity. His mother screams and goes to her room. The father asks why he would want to do that. Allen’s character replies by asking his father, “Aren’t you worried about you know, ... after?" The father says, "No, I don’t worry, I will be dead!"

Philosophers and religions discuss death and afterlife extensively. Some religions do not profess any concept of life after death; others such as Christianity have extensive belief systems and writings on subject. I tend to agree with the father in the movie – “I will be dead.” All I can really do anything about is here and now.

Currently I am intrigued by the concept put forth in the trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. Note: The daemons in his trilogy are an externalized part of the human's spirit embodied in an animal form. A daemon is capable of shifting species to reflect the emotional state of their human companion until puberty when the daemon's identity become fixed.

Lyra, the heroine of the trilogy says, "When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you've seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons aren't just nothing now; they're part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they've gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They'll never vanish. They're just part of everything. And that's exactly what'll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again." (The Amber Spyglass, page 335)

"Even if it means oblivion... I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing, we'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass and a million leaves, we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was." (The Amber Spyglass, page 336)

"To know that after a spell in the dark we'll come out again to a sweet land like this, to be free of the sky like the birds, well, that's the greatest promise anyone could wish for." (The Amber Spyglass, page 532) 


Many funeral sermons talk of reunion with loved ones or life continuing in some improved version of what we know now. The Scriptures give a mixed message. The letters of Paul give some suggestions. Much of our imagery comes from Revelation with its metaphors of streets of gold and lakes of fire describing what awaits us. Some Christian denominations have a highly developed idea of afterlife and others leave it to the category of mystery. Some branches of Islam tell of living in gardens of pleasure. Most of Judaism does not have an afterlife theology. The most one can read in The Bible is that there will be some sort of ongoing life in God but even that is unclear. As I age and more and more friends die, it is comforting to imagine that I will be in an improved known life but I wonder. I think it more likely to be nothing like anything I know but I trust that it will be in the hands of God if it is anything at all.

What I do care about is life now, making the kingdom of God present in the world. As it says in the Lord’s Prayer, I pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven.” I care about leaving the world having contributed to making it a better place for all people. I hope that our children and grandchildren and their children will have a place to live on earth, that they will find meaningful lives, and contribute in their time.

Mary Oliver wrote in “When Death Comes” 


…When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

The people I look to are those who have not just visited with their time here on earth. They have delighted in their time here and brought joy as a primary gift to those around them. They have spent their days making space for others.

In the end I hope that death will be as Pullman describes it, "The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward, and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air... and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne." (The Amber Spyglass, page 382)

Philip Pullman web site -- http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pullman/
Movie website -- http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/ Fall 2007

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

The Rev. Ann Fontaine, Diocese of Wyoming, keeps the blogs Green Lent and what the tide brings in. She is the author of Streams of Mercy: a meditative commentary on the Bible.

By Deirdre Good

I'm always astonished that Christian folk don't esteem adoption more highly in the context of "family values." Adoption has been part of biblical traditions about the family for 5,000 years. Moses is thought to be the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter. Better to be an adopted Egyptian son than a birthright Hebrew slave. Paul uses the metaphor of adoption language several times in letters to describe the relationship of a new believer to God in baptism. Infused with the Spirit, new believers could make a claim on God in the cry, "Abba, Father!" In Galatians, Paul sees this claim moving a believer out of the bondage of slavery into the freedom of dependent childhood, since legally slaves could be manumitted through adoption. Jesus was adopted by Joseph, as the gospels make clear. When God declares at Jesus' baptism, "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well-pleased," it's not possible to determine whether God is announcing an existing relationship or creating a new one through a formula of adoption. Mark's gospel appropriates language of adoption from the Psalms (Ps. 2:7) to clarify the relationship of Jesus to God at the beginning of Jesus' ministry: as elect, chosen, beloved Son.

Jesus was a common name. To distinguish Jesus from others of that name, the gospels of the New Testament sometimes show individuals identifying Jesus by a place of origin, "Jesus of Nazareth," rather than by a father's name. When the gospels of Matthew and Luke do get around to discussing Jesus' parentage, the