Middle East scholar Kenneth Bailey's books, lectures, and more invite Christians to strip away cultural mythologies and worship the real Jesus of the Middle East. A feature story exploring the life of Jesus through his own Middle-Eastern culture. By: Joan Huyser-Honig Tags: culture, middle east, parables, symposium 2013 Feature Story posted on May 7, 2008 Lccn 2007031449 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000251 Openlibrary_edition

Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the

Bailey says Middle Eastern Christians are the living inheritors of the cultural world of Jesus and Semitic languages. Yet they fell off the Christian radar screen after 451, when the Council of Chalcedonreaffirmed that Jesus is fully human and fully divine.As westerners, we tend to universalize our culture. Parables do speak to everyone, but we need to understand the Middle East context—or parables become ethics, not theology,” he said at the Calvin Symposium. The work will yield a rich harvest of information, pastoral support, and insight for all who read it. - Susan K. Hedahl But Bailey is not just a just telling you nifty insights -"Jesus wasn't born in a stable, but a house"- to impress your friends at parties. Bailey is teaching you how to read the Gospels. Understanding Middle Eastern village life helps Bailey ask fresh questions. He traces answers through early Christian commentaries, medieval Arabic, and Jewish literature.

Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes

The book is divided into six main sections, each containing several chapters each of which is focused on a particular passage from the Gospels. The introduction should not be skipped, since it emphasizes the importance of the unique perspective Bailey offers and the neglected sources he draws upon. Bailey draws heavily not only on his own experience of life in the Middle East, but also the neglected witness of Christian authors writing in Syriac and Arabic over the centuries. The insights that can be gleaned both from contemporary life in this part of the world, and from the Christians who lived there prior to the modern era (and in particular those who spoke Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the language Jesus himself spoke) are extremely important. So too is being aware of the poetic structures in which storytellers and writing authors expressed themselves. The book’s introduction focuses on such materials, not uniformly neglected by scholars, but certainly not the focus of sufficient sustained and detailed attention. At the very least, as far as the awareness of such matters among Christians and other readers of the New Testament more generally is concerned, these sources of knowledge about the cultural context of the New Testament are little known, and Bailey’s book, while certain to be of interest to New Testament scholars, presents matters in a manner accessible to a wider readership. While no book on Jesus and the Gospels can be perfect or final, writing any really good book on them places staggering demands on an interpreter. To name just seven: literary aptitude, linguistic competence, critical shrewdness, cultural sagacity, theological acumen, spiritual sensitivity, and hermeneutical sophistication. In this highly stimulating study Kenneth Bailey manages to reflect them all, and more besides, in part because he stands on the shoulders of Middle Eastern interpreters whom few in the West can even read. This book will sharpen historical understanding, improve much preaching and fuel new scholarship. It may shed as much new Licht vom Osten (‘light from the ancient East’) on Gospel passages as we have seen since Deissmann’s book by that title a century ago. And in all of this, Bailey keeps the cross and the message of his sources at the center where they belong.My intent is to contribute new perspectives from the Eastern tradition that have rarely, if ever, been considered outside the Arabic-speaking Christian world"

Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth Bailey - Waterstones

Arabic-speaking Christians—whom Bailey calls “the forgotten faithful”—have always understood Jesus as born in a house or a cave. Many Palestinian homes began as caves.A simple village home in the time of King David, up until the Second World War, in the Holy Land, had two rooms—one for guests, one for the family. The family room had an area, usually about four feet lower, for the family donkey, the family cow, and two or three sheep. They are brought in last thing at night and taken out and tied up in the courtyard first thing in the morning.