The book’s introduction focuses on such materials, not uniformly neglected by scholars, but certainly not the focus of sufficient sustained and detailed attention.

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

In this paper, the Chaldean Arch-Priest (that being his official title) deplored the Catholic system of education among the Nestorians. But he’s also a theologian, once you see him as a metaphorical theologian rather than a conceptual theologian. He laments that Christians “too often understand Jesus as a simple man, telling simple tales to children. If the documentary did not include eyewitness accounts, interviews, and information from other sources, then the assassination could be reduced to a single sentence: A man in a warehouse shot another man in a passing car.

Bailey agrees that those four stages happened between when Jesus said or did something and when the stories became fixed in print in thecanon of the New Testament. But the new material Bailey offers, such as a survey of Arab Christian traditions suggesting the Magi were from Arabia (pp. When would an individual’s behavior in a story have been shocking, and when would hearers have filled in background assumptions that might have mitigated the shocking meaning? The latter unfortunately does not explicitly address the popular notion that abba means “daddy”, but nonetheless does communicate what clearly was the distinctive characteristic of Jesus’ use of abba as a way of addressing God: Aramaic-speaking Jews in the first century still used Hebrew for the purpose of prayer, and so Jesus was praying, and teaching his disciples to pray, in their own vernacular (p. Pretend that the Roman Catholic Church has amnesia and forgets 1500 years of everything said and done in Rome.

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

Those who teach and preach on the parables will do well to consult these chapters for meaningful insights from the culture of the Middle East in Jesus’ day. These chapters discuss the woman at the well, the Syro-Phoenicean woman, the woman caught in adultery, and the woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee. Bailey explains that the “all” refers to the quality of the hospitality that welcomed Mary, Joseph, Jesus…and the shepherds. Using insights from cultural anthropology and skilled exegesis, suddenly the Gospels come alive as the Middle Eastern stories that they are.

Our Christmas crèche sets remain as they are because ‘ox and ass before him bow, for he is in the manger now. In discussing the petition “Thy will be done on earth…” Bailey notes both the implicit possibility of God’s will not being done, and also that the viewpoint of the prayer suggests that Christianity’s concerns are not merely other-worldly (pp.