Conflict in the Miracle Stories

Conflict in the Miracle Stories
Author: Evert-Jan Vledder
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 277
Release: 1997-10-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567637158

Matthew's Gospel is a witness to conflicting interests. The leaders of Israel are part of the so-called 'retainer class', who pursue their own interests by promoting the interests of the Roman rulers. Jesus (and the Matthaean community), on the contrary, acts on behalf of the marginalized in society. Jesus challenges the underlying values of the leaders who, contrary to what is expected, do not forgive and act mercifully. The leaders try to resolve the conflict negatively by labelling Jesus as possessed by the devil. At the same time, the conflict spirals onward: the Matthaean community is called to act in the interests of the marginalized. It is Vledder's special contribution to Matthaean study that he brings to light the underlying dynamics of this conflict in a stimulating sociological study.

Conflict in the Miracle Stories

Conflict in the Miracle Stories
Author: Evert-Jan Vledder
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 277
Release: 1997-10-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1850756996

Matthew's Gospel is a witness to conflicting interests. The leaders of Israel are part of the so-called 'retainer class', who pursue their own interests by promoting the interests of the Roman rulers. Jesus (and the Matthaean community), on the contrary, acts on behalf of the marginalized in society. Jesus challenges the underlying values of the leaders who, contrary to what is expected, do not forgive and act mercifully. The leaders try to resolve the conflict negatively by labelling Jesus as possessed by the devil. At the same time, the conflict spirals onward: the Matthaean community is called to act in the interests of the marginalized. It is Vledder's special contribution to Matthaean study that he brings to light the underlying dynamics of this conflict in a stimulating sociological study.

Coping with Violence in the New Testament

Coping with Violence in the New Testament
Author: Pieter G.R. de Villiers
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2012-01-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004221042

The present publication aims to contribute to the recent scholarly debate about the interconnections between violence and monotheistic religions by analysing the role of violence in the New Testament as well as by offering some hermeneutical perspectives on violence as it is articulated in the earliest Christian writings.

A Century of Miracles

A Century of Miracles
Author: Harold Allen Drake
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199367418

The fourth century of our common era began and ended with a miracle: Constantine's famous Vision of the Cross at one end and Theodosius' victory bearing prayer at the other. In this book, historian H. A. Drake shows how miracles in this century forever altered the way Christians, pagans, and Jews understood themselves and each other.

Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century

Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century
Author: Michael Goodich
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1995-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226302954

As war, pestilence, and famine spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, so did reports of miracles, of hopeless victims wondrously saved from disaster. These "rescue miracles," recorded by over one hundred fourteenth-century cults, are the basis of Michael Goodich's account of the miraculous in everyday medieval life. Rescue miracles offer a wide range of voices rarely heard in medieval history, from women and children to peasants and urban artisans. They tell of salvation not just from the ravages of nature and war, but from the vagaries of a violent society—crime, unfair judicial practices, domestic squabbles, and communal or factional conflict. The stories speak to a collapse of confidence in decaying institutions, from the law to the market to feudal authority. Particularly, the miraculous escapes documented during the Hundred Years' War, the Italian communal wars, and other conflicts are vivid testimony to the end of aristocratic warfare and the growing victimization of noncombatants. Miracles, Goodich finds, represent the transcendent and unifying force of faith in a time of widespread distress and the hopeless conditions endured by the common people of the Middle Ages. Just as the lives of the saints, once dismissed as church propaganda, have become valuable to historians, so have rescue miracles, as evidence of an underlying medieval mentalite. This work expands our knowledge of that state of mind and the grim conditions that colored and shaped it.

God and Galileo

God and Galileo
Author: David L. Block
Publisher: Crossway
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2019-05-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1433562928

"A devastating attack upon the dominance of atheism in science today." Giovanni Fazio, Senior Physicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics The debate over the ultimate source of truth in our world often pits science against faith. In fact, some high-profile scientists today would have us abandon God entirely as a source of truth about the universe. In this book, two professional astronomers push back against this notion, arguing that the science of today is not in a position to pronounce on the existence of God—rather, our notion of truth must include both the physical and spiritual domains. Incorporating excerpts from a letter written in 1615 by famed astronomer Galileo Galilei, the authors explore the relationship between science and faith, critiquing atheistic and secular understandings of science while reminding believers that science is an important source of truth about the physical world that God created.

The Framework of the Story of Jesus

The Framework of the Story of Jesus
Author: Karl Ludwig Schmidt
Publisher: James Clarke & Company
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2023-05-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0227178866

Now available for the first time in English, Karl Ludwig Schmidt's The Framework of the Story of Jesus (Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu) has been a foundation of New Testament studies. Through meticulous analysis, Schmidt demonstrates that the Synoptic Gospels are collections of individual stories that circulated orally and independently in the earliest Christian communities. Schmidt shows persuasively how, in their oral forms, most of these traditions existed apart from any sequence or specific temporal or geographic location, and that the chronology and locations now evident in the Gospels were applied by the evangelists while collecting and recording the oral traditions. Across much of the twentieth century and even into the present day, Schmidt's thesis has undergirded Gospel interpretation. Yet as long as The Framework of the Story of Jesus remained untranslated, Schmidt's ideas have been open to neglect and misinterpretation among Anglophone scholars. Discussion of the Synoptic Gospels and broader New Testament study will be enriched by engagement with the evidence and argument as originally presented.

Jesus the Miracle Worker

Jesus the Miracle Worker
Author: Graham H. Twelftree
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 1999-05-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780830815968

Graham Twelftree extensively examines the miracles of each Gospel narrative. He weighs their historical reliability and considers the question of miracles and the modern mind.

Religion and Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

Religion and Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds
Author: Natasha Hodgson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-12-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429836007

This volume seeks to increase understanding of the origins, ideology, implementation, impact, and historiography of religion and conflict in the medieval and early modern periods. The chapters examine ideas about religion and conflict in the context of text and identity, church and state, civic environments, marriage, the parish, heresy, gender, dialogues, war and finance, and Holy War. The volume covers a wide chronological period, and the contributors investigate relationships between religion and conflict from the seventh to eighteenth centuries ranging from Byzantium to post-conquest Mexico. Religious expressions of conflict at a localised level are explored, including the use of language in legal and clerical contexts to influence social behaviours and the use of religion to legitimise the spiritual value of violence, rationalising the enforcement of social rules. The collection also examines spatial expressions of religious conflict both within urban environments and through travel and pilgrimage. With both written and visual sources being explored, this volume is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers of religion and military, political, social, legal, cultural, or intellectual conflict in medieval and early modern worlds.

Compassion and the Characterization of the Markan Jesus

Compassion and the Characterization of the Markan Jesus
Author: Jonathan Bryant
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2024-08-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004699104

Why does the Gospel of Mark make specific and repeated reference to the compassion of Jesus in the miracle stories? This volume discusses the function that compassion has in the Markan characterization of Jesus, particularly in how the terminology employed depicts Jesus as entering the suffering of others. In doing so, it underscores how this portrayal is exceptional among the stories of miracle workers in ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish literature. In Mark, this compassion toward the suffering other is a central feature of the kingdom of God, an attribute the Markan audience is challenged to emulate.