#synoptic gospels

[unsolicited-opinions]

I have tried to share the Gospel with Jews but many of them are not receptive and some of them even acted offended. Why are they so opposed to Christ?

It took me a minute to remember that almost nobody I know irl knows I'm on Tumblr...so this can't be a friend trolling me.

I think this question may be sincere, so I'm going to treat it that way.

Anon, Judaism isn't what you have been taught to believe it is.

Let's get apophatic

Judaism is not a broken and incomplete prequel to your own religion

Judaism is not proto-Christianity and has no Jesus-shaped hole.

There's nothing missing from Judaism. It doesn't need or want original sin, blood atonement, tests of faith, or eternal hell.

Jews are not waiting around for you to rescue them with your gospels. We've heard your good news many times.

Jews are not spiritually lost, incomplete, chained to the law, or trudging through some 'Old Testament' swamp hoping a Christian will come along and throw us a rope.

Judaism didn't freeze and die out in the Bronze Age.

Judaism didn't end with Isaiah, it didn't die in the desert, in exile, in captivity, or in the diaspora. It kept going through the destruction of the Second Temple, through the Mishnah, through the Talmud, through centuries of rabbinic debate, mysticism, legal thought, and lived tradition.

This idea you have that others should be grateful to hear your good news...and your hurt feelings when you don't get the response you hope for...?

That's because winning new converts to your faith was never actually the point of this exercise.

Now let's talk a bit about what Judaism is

Jews who practice Judaism have a full, coherent, spiritually rich tradition. You can tell that's true by the way that Christianity and Islam both based their own faiths on cribbing from ours.

This isn't an opinion, Anon. Read any serious Christian historian on the history of Christianity.

Judaism is a living thing which is much, much older and more enduring than whatever your preferred flavor of Protestantism might be. Again, this is not opinion, this is fact.

The Good News you're eager to share has historically been very dangerous to us. We're rightly wary about the intentions of people attempting to push it upon us. If you don't understand that, i urge you to address the chasm of your ignorance of your own faith.

Jesus is neither the problem nor the solution for Jews, he's simply not the point.

The God of the Jews does not:

Create humans as sick and wrong...

Command humans to be well despite creating them sick...

Sacrifice himself to himself...

...In order to spare humans from the sinfulness...

...with which he himself created them

Jewish theology isn't perfect (no theology is), but it is much more internally consistent and reasoned than any of the Christianities I've studied...and it does not have the dim Christian view of human nature. It does not use the promise of eternal reward or the threat of eternal punishment to coax or frighten people into social compliance.

Across history, more Jews have chosen death than baptism and that should tell you something. We've been asked, cajoled, and threatened with dispossession, violence, and death to trade our integrity for the supposed salvation we don't believe in many times before...and we said no.

We'll keep saying no.

Even secular Jews like me reject Christianity because it doesn't make sense to us.

We might embrace materialist reason, silence, humanism, or maybe one of the non-theistic forms of Buddhist practice, but we're not going to embrace any ideology requiring us to swallow the premise that we're broken and need to be saved by a religion which has actively, deliberately misinterpreted and persecuted us for most of the last 2,000 years.

Your failure to understand this context is further evidence that you don't know or understand the history of your own faith.

While you're solving that problem, please read a book about comparative religious studies.

Huston Smith's The World's Religions is an easy read and a great primer from a devout Christian on how to learn about the faith traditions of others. You could also watch this series Smith made with Bill Moyers (another devout Christian...a Baptist pastor, if I recall correctly).

For an amazingly educated, articulate, Christian take on the Hebrew Bible (which is the polite term Christians should use rather than 'old testament') try reading Episcopal Archbishop John Shelby Spong's Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy.

It may surprise you to learn that I have read the synoptic gospels at least a dozen times and feel the same affection for them that I feel for The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha or the Tao Te Ching.

I really appreciate the teachings of the Jesus of the synoptic gospels.

It's his fandom (starting with Paul) which I find largely toxic.

The Christians I love, those with whom I speak openly about religion, who have remained friends for decades (including clergy and devout Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians) are the ones who learned enough about Jewish history to stop trying to cram Jewishness into the box Christianity invented for its own purposes.

Jews and Judaism don't fit in that box because it isn't ours.

Jews are unwilling to cut off parts of themselves in order to assume a box-fitting shape you find more pleasing and flattering to your own faith and worldview.

If you're lucky, the Jew you approach to evangelize will be someone like me who is more familiar with both Hebrew Bible and your own synoptic gospels than you are, and who will patiently explain your factual, logical, and rhetorical errors to you...but when you encounter Jews with less patience who respond with hostility?

That's on you, and the sense of rejection you feel is the whole blessed point of the exercise.

But your evangelism bothers me less than how careless and unthoughtful you are about your own religion.

My ancestors and family were persecuted by Christians for their faith, but I have read the gospels of your savior and his church with an open mind and an open heart. I have taken them seriously and considered them carefully and deeply. I've discussed them with devout Christians, learned a great deal from those discussions, and have expressed my appreciation of those texts, the Jesus contained therein, and the beautiful way that some Christians make their God's omnibenevolence the center of their faith.

I'd bet everything I own that you haven't ever seriously studied anyone else's religion.

I desperately wish that even a tiny fraction of Christians would do as Smith and Spong have done and return the courtesy to the Jewish people, texts, and ideas from which their faith was born, but you, like most Christians, know next to nothing about the religion in which Jesus was born, in which he lived, and in which he died.

When you've fixed that - when you've spent a fraction of the time learning about Judaism that I've spent earnestly learning about your religion? C'mon back and I'll listen to your arguments with an open mind and engage with you to your heart's content.

Until then, you'd be wise to keep those arguments and your evangelism far, far away from Jews. Each attempt just widens the chasm between us.

Condescending to us about our faith when you know nothing about it (and seemingly precious little about your own) demeans us both and is unworthy of either faith tradition.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

+

His disciples said to Him, "When will the Kingdom come?" Jesus said, "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."

—Gospel of Thomas v 113. Above: the original text (c 60-100 CE). The text bears parallels to Luke and other synoptic gospels, yet it is far earlier than any surviving synoptic text.

[Robert Scott Horton]

[indizombie]

Whatever else capitalism may be, it is first and foremost a system for producing as much private wealth as possible by squandering as much as possible of humanity’s common inheritance of the goods of creation. But Christ condemned not only an unhealthy preoccupation with riches, but the getting and keeping of riches as such. The most obvious example of this, found in all three synoptic Gospels, is the story of the rich young ruler, and of Christ’s remark about the camel and the needle’s eye.

David Bentley Hart, 'What Lies Beyond Capitalism? A Christian Exploration', Plough

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The Synoptic Gospels — A Historian's Perspective

The synoptic gospels are 3 accounts of Jesus' life and death. They are so similar in parts, that scholars believe that there was a bit of copying going on.

You find the same basic story in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Sometimes, within the basic story, you have exact accounts in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There are verbatim agreements: you’ll have the same story, word-for-word agreement.

The only explanation as to why you can have this word- for-word agreement, in the opinion of most scholars, is that one of these Gospels is being used as a source for the other two. In other words, there must be copying going on.

I sometimes have difficulty convincing my students that if you have three accounts of the same event that are in the same words, somebody has to be copying somebody else.

The way I try to convince these 19- and 20-year- olds of his is, I do this little exercise where I come into class a couple of minutes late to make sure everybody’s there; I fiddle around in front of the class; I turn on the overhead projector; I put down my briefcase; I roll up my sleeves; and I do a few other things.

Then I ask everybody in the class to write down everything they’ve seen me do in the last three minutes. The students, all 400 of them, write down what they’ve just seen me do.

Then, I collect four of the papers and say, “Now, I want you all to do a synoptic comparison. I’m going to read what each of these sources has to say, and I want to know whether you have a single sentence that is exactly like someone else’s.”

In all of my years of doing this—15, 16 years of doing this—I’ve never had anybody with two sentences exactly the same.

So I ask my students, “What would you think would happen if I took up two of these pieces of paper and I had two paragraphs that were verbatim, the same, exactly alike?”

I typically get the answer, “Well, somebody copied off from someone else.” Exactly, somebody copied from someone else.

Then I will ask, “Now imagine we didn’t do the writing part of this exercise today. Suppose we waited 30 or 40 years, and, instead of asking you to write down what happened that day in class, I asked friends of yours that you had told about what had happened in class. If I then got two accounts that were exactly the same, what would you assume had happened?”

There’s always some wise guy in the back row that raises his hand and says, “It’s a miracle.” Right. Well, those are the two options, actually: it’s either a miracle, or else somebody’s copying somebody else.

What If It’s a Miracle?

If you explain the similarities on the basis of a miracle, then you have trouble explaining the discrepancies.

People don’t typically notice the discrepancies among the Gospels because of the way they are read. The way people read the Gospels is they read Matthew, it’s about the life and death of Jesus; then they read Mark, and it sounds a lot like Matthew sounded; then they read Luke, and that sounds a lot like Matthew and Mark sounded.

When you read them this way, vertically, one at a time, they all sound very much alike. Yet when you read them horizontally— one story in Matthew, then the same story in Mark, and the same story in Luke—you begin to notice discrepancies that are very hard to reconcile with one another.

What scholars think today is that Mark was the first Gospel written, and that Matthew and Luke both had access to Mark, and used Mark as one of their sources. Matthew and Luke had other sources available to them as well.

[..]

The Gospel of John does not contain most of the stories found in the synoptic Gospels. For example, in John there’s no account of Jesus actually being baptized. There’s no account of his birth either. There’s no account of him going to the wilderness to be tempted by the Devil. Jesus never tells a parable in the Gospel of John. Jesus never casts out a demon in the Gospel of John. Jesus does not go up to the Mount of Transfiguration in the Gospel of John. Jesus does not have his last supper, in which he gives out the bread and the wine and says, “This is my body, this is my blood,” in the Gospel of John. Jesus is not put on trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin in the Gospel of John.

There are wide-ranging differences where John doesn’t have the same stories as the synoptics. John has a different set of stories; it has a different set of miracles, including the first miracle in the Gospel of John where Jesus turns the water into wine. John has many dialogues betweenJesus and someone else that are found only in John.

For example, there is Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus in chapter 3, or with the Samaritan women in chapter 4. Many of Jesus’ sayings are found in John, only in John.

The term “Gospel” comes from the Old English word for “good news.” These books do not claim to be objective histories; they claim to be proclamations of good news. In other words, these books are not historically accurate accounts of things that Jesus said and did. These are books that are proclaiming information about Jesus that is meant to provide information needed for salvation. These books are the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Most Xtians don’t seem to know that the “bio” genre as accurate historical record is only a recent phenomenon of the last couple of hundred years. The historical purpose of biographies was to provide stories and legends to create inspirational characters, not to verifiably document the subject. This makes sense when you notice that the bible is written in the third person, and includes stories when he was alone or with “Satan.”

“Jesus” is a historical figure in the same way Odysseus and Paul Bunyan are historical figures, and Slender Man and the Hanako-san will be in the future. 

The bible is a sales brochure for an imaginary product. Like an ad for a time-share that claims you won’t regret it.

[liddychen]

A Level RS studying - always difficult to start but once begun is very difficult to stop 😂

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Genuine and Counterfeit

by F. B. Meyer

Matthew 13:34-43

Throughout the Synoptic Gospels-Matthew, Mark, and Luke-a consistent distinction is made between the outer ranks of the people, or disciples, and the inner circle of Apostles. May we not emphasize the same distinction still? We have among us many who are clearly disciples. They cannot as yet formulate or endorse the full creed of the Church, but if they are true to their convictions and follow the gleam, the Master will bring them to the decision of Peter, Matthew 16:16.

This world is God's field.

All the good in it has reached it through Jesus Christ. Fundamentally there are but two classes, for the disciple belongs to Christ, though He has not yet come into the perfect light. Notice that the people who cause stumbling are placed with those who do iniquity, and each class is thrown on the rubbish heap. Ponder the despair with which we shall view wasted opportunities, as we look back on them from eternity-weeping for softer natures, and wailing for weaker ones. Let us not trifle away the golden chances of life!

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

[wisdomfish]

At the time they [they synoptic gospels] were written or may be supposed to have been written, there were eyewitnesses and their testimony was not completely disregarded. . . . This means that the gospels must be regarded as largely reliable witnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Robert Grant, Historical Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 302

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.

Luke 6:24-25