male children under age two to be killed. But Joseph was warned by an angel and took Mary and the child to Egypt until Herod’s death, where upon he brought the family back and settled in the town of Nazareth, in Galilee according to the Gospel of Matthew (2:1). Jesus was conceived by a miracle of the Holy Spirit before the couple had any sexual relationship. Mary was a young, poor female and had all the characteristics that would make her deemed unusable by God for any major task in her time. But
The Gospel of Matthew wrote about Jesus Christ as the King of his kingdom. Written to Jews before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70, the evangelist uses the various prophets from the Hebrew Old Testament. A key feature of Matthew’s Gospel, therefore, is to understand the prophets of the Old Testament to interpret this synoptic gospel. King Jesus preached about the kingdom of God. The prophet Daniel told his audience that God will set up a new kingdom that will (Daniel 2:44).
Nevertheless, from the earliest days of Christianity this passage has been understood to point directly to Jesus, for reasons that can be plainly seen. For starters, we know that Jesus was a descendent of David. In the very first verse of the Gospel of Matthew he is referred to as “Jesus the Messiah, the son of David.” Elsewhere in the Gospels Jesus is often directly addressed as Son of David, such as in the account of blind Bartimaeus who says to him in Mark 10:47, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on
Reparation or recompense, identified as atonement, is a concept interspersed throughout the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation. Atonement, which means “to set as one” or “to reconcile,” has two different emphases according to Jewish and Christian theology. Reginald H. Fuller in his summary of V. Taylor’s book Jesus and His Sacrifice said that the Jewish perception of atonement as found in the Old Testament focuses more on external or personal factors, while Christian theologians believe
near what the Bible reveals as the seven years leading up to the final war. Jesus declares in Matthew 24:21, “There will be great distress, unequaled from the
The dispute over the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law is one that has likely generated exegetic debate for centuries. Although it would be tempting to reduce the conflict of literalist interpretation and radicalization as a split between Jewish and Christian tradition, a deeper reading into the foundation of this dispute yields a more comprehensive analysis of the argument. In the three synoptic gospels, and in the book of John, Christ teaches that laws were not put in place solely
HOW GOOD ARE YOU? INTRODUCTION The question, "How good are you?" can be an extremely provocative one. Therefore, it may necessitate the answering of several other questions, prior to answering this one. Some probable questions may be: What is meant by the word “good”? According to whose standards is "good" measured? Is “good” rated in terms of degrees? How can anyone know the answer to that question? In other words, before one attempts to answer that question, more information would be needed
Jesus fed the crowd of five thousand people in the gospel of Mark, “Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men” (New Oxford Annotated Bible, Mark. 6.44), meaning that the crowd was comprised entirely of men. However, in the gospel of Matthew, the story is slightly different: “And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children” (Matt. 14.21). However, despite the various differences in representation of women in the gospels, what I found most interesting was that
The death of Matt Shepard produced a profound impact on the community of Laramie and the entire state. This tragedy provoked numerous discussions and drew the attention of the public to the position of gay and lesbian community at large and individual representatives of the homosexual community in particular. At the same time, the general public was basically concerned on the death of Matt Shepard rather than on the problem of the homosexual community of Laramie. In such a situation, Beth Loffreda
This passage, taken from G. K. Chesterton in his book “Orthodoxy,” is as follows: “Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament, I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of