opinions and musings

  Welcome to the sixth installment of my series on the gospels.   In this post we will explore the Lord’s Prayer, which is part of the double tradition.   First a little review:   we’ve noted that the four canonical gospels were all composed in the first century, but were done so anonymously.   The names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not associated with the gospels till around 150 CE (common era). The synoptic gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke share much of the same material, but the gospel of John is very different both in style and content.   Here is a table summarizing what we have discovered about the synoptic gospels: Name of Gospel Date of Publication Sources % Of Marks Content repeated Mark 65 CE Oral and possibly some written traditions - Luke 80 CE Mark, Q and L 50 Matthew 85 CE Mark, Q and M...

Continuing our study, we will now consider the Gospel of John and the Letter to the Hebrews, both written in the 90's. In Proverbs 8 we read that Wisdom “ was beside Him [God] , as a master workman .” The idea of the “master workman” or craftsman has an interesting parallel in Greek philosophy among the Stoics.   They proposed around 300 BC that the supreme God was transcendent and unknowable by humans, but that a second god, called the Craftsman, was the creator of the material world and the revealer of the supreme God to humanity. Another term for this “second god” in Stoic philosophy was the Greek word Logos , meaning “idea”, “word” or “reason”. This second god, the Logos, mediated the truth of the supreme transcendent God to humanity. Philo, a Jewish philosopher who lived from 50 BC to 25 AD in Alexandria, Egypt combined the ideas of the Stoics with the Septuagint.   The Septuagint was the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures.  It is what we Ch...