A Fresh Perspective

There is a great story in the book, Report to Greco , by Nikos Kazantzakis. When Nikos was young, his mother was very religious; she went to mass everyday. His father was anti-religious; sort of bitter toward religion, and Nikos was torn. When he was 19 years old he decided to spend the summer at a monastery located on one of the mountains in Greece . At this monastery there was a famous old monk called Father Makarios.  One day, Nikos asked Father Makarios, “Father Makarios, do you still wrestle with the Devil?” Father Makarios said, “No. I use to wrestle with the Devil all the time. But now I have grown old and tired, and the Devil has grown old and tired with me. So I leave him alone and he leaves me alone.” Nikos asked, “Then life is easy now?” Father Makarios responded, “Oh no. Life is much harder now. For now I wrestle with God.” Nikos exclaimed, “You wrestle with God and hope to win?” “No,” said Father Makarios, “I wrestle with God and hope to loose.”  These t...

The Cross at the Center (Mark 9:2-13; OT reading, 2 Kings 2:1-12) Thomas Tewell, the Pastor of Fifth Ave. Presbyterian Church in NY City, tells about visiting a large church in another part of the world. He said it was a great worship experience and he was blessed by the service, but as he looked around, on the inside, outside, in their church literature, he couldn’t find a cross. Afterwards, he went to see one of the pastors. He said, “I love your worship, I love what’s going on here. But I’m missing the cross. Is there a cross in here anywhere?” The pastor whispered to him, “The cross doesn’t market well in this culture, so we don’t say a lot about it.” That evening Pastor Tewell wrote in his journal, “Am I into marketing or ministry?” In the conversation down the mountain Jesus links mystical experience to costly discipleship. This brief glimpse of glory on the mountain of transfiguration is inseparably connected to Jesus’ suffering and death . In Luke’s version, the subje...

In Mark’s Gospel a leper comes to Jesus begging, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” The text says, “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’” The alternate reading says that Jesus was “moved with anger” (Mark 1:40-41).   This is an example of a variant in the manuscript tradition. We do not possess a single original manuscript of the New Testament (this is true of the Hebrew Bible as well). We have copies—copies of copies. The vast majority of manuscripts date from the ninth century and later. A smaller group of manuscripts date earlier. A few generally considered very reliable date from the fourth to the sixth centuries. We have a few papyrus manuscripts that date even earlier that contain portions of the New Testament, but many of these show evidence of having been copied without the greatest care.  It is the work of textual scholars to compare these manuscripts, rate their comparative value, ...