“Out of 255 verses referencing emotion, one fifth (20%) are verses where Jesus teaches someone about how they ought to feel. Half of those references are about fear and/or anxiety.” - Don Johnson
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“Out of 255 verses referencing emotion, one fifth (20%) are verses where Jesus teaches someone about how they ought to feel. Half of those references are about fear and/or anxiety.” - Don Johnson
“I set out to read through the Gospels, noting down every mention of emotion that I could find. I came up with 255 verses…. The next step was to classify or arrange the references. I could do this manually, verse-by-verse in an Excel spreadsheet, but I thought ‘this is a perfect job for AI.’ And so it was.” - Don Johnson
“The accounts of Resurrection Sunday morning in scripture seem to indicate that the resurrection of Jesus bodily from the tomb was a surprise—to the women who went there, to the disciples, and to Jerusalem….
“The simple answer is that they probably didn’t. There were two groups of people. The Matthew account of the Triumphal Entry clearly delineates between the two.” - P&D
“But what might be surprising in all of this, if we are paying close attention, is that there were Pharisees who were followers of Jesus! …. With this in mind, I want us to go back to the gospels and look carefully at Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees.” - P&D
“Elizabeth Schrader Polczer … claims editors in the second century rewrote the story of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus to hide the original secret story written about Lazarus and only one sister, Mary, who she claims is Mary Magdalene.” - Darrell Post
“While dozens of commentaries have been published on each of the gospels since the year 2000, we recommend these below because they have stood the test of time in an ‘evergreen’ way.” - Christ Over All
“the Bethesda Pool is described as having five porticoes—a puzzling feature suggesting an unusual five-sided pool, which most scholars dismissed as an unhistorical literary creation.
“…there’s a whole lot more you can learn about someone by reading four stories of their life, rather than just one.” - P&D
Pastor, at some point this year you will be providing background context for the NT passage which you are about to preach, guiding your flock in properly visualizing the world of Jesus and the apostles, so that your people might better connect with the passage and also apply the background framework in their own studies. What will you teach them concerning the origin of the Gospels?
My goal in this article is to encourage you to pause and reflect on what will be said concerning the publication date of Matthew’s Gospel.