Friday, September 9, 2011

9/8: Matthew 1 and 2, Symbols, Geography Matters (Gates of Hell)

Tony Campolo: "Birthday Parties for Prostitutes":


After debriefing last class's "historical world" field trip, we agreed that "GEOGRAPHY MATTERS."
So before beginning our journey through Matthew 1 and 2, we followed up on that theme with a VanDer Laan video which gave a graphic example of how Jesus was intentional in WHERE he taught WHAT , taking the disciples far out of his way (not) just so he could have the right backdrop or  object lesson.

The video took us to the "gates of hell" at Caserea Phillip. the video is not online, but  a 5-page summary slideshow of it is here.
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Then we introduced some more symbols, adding to those found on the post for  9/1.
We'll define the new ones that we covered in class below:



 
#5)Intercalation  (Sandwiching)



'Intercalation" is a "sandwiching" technique. where a story/theme is told/repeated at the beginning and ened of a section, suggesting that if a different story appears in between, it too is related thematically.  We looked at  this outline of Mark 11:

 A)CURSING OF FIG FREE
B)CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE
A)CURSING OF THE FIG TREE
#8) Subversion of Empire:
This picture calls to mind Herod (as a representative and agent of the Roman Empirw)'s Herodian fortress (left) and Jesus' manger (right), as per the "Shadow of Herod" video we watched on, and you can re-watch here).  We'll find Jesus subversion of empire as an ongoing theme in Matthew .




#13: Double Paste:
This represents hitting the "CONTROL V" button, "pasting" two scriptures together, or "splicing" two scriptures into one new one.  Classic example is Jesus in the temple tantrum.
ISAIAH 56:6-8 + JEREMIAH 7:11=MARK 11:16


#14  Prophecy:

t is helpful to think of prophecy as:

a).not just
fore-telling (predicting the future)

but

forth-telling  (telling forth truth)


b)often having multiple applications and fulfillments, to different "contemporary worlds" and across time.
We'll  used this diagram to illustrate:



-Who wasI mmanuel?
-Who does "out of Egypt, I have called my son" refer to ?



It's BOTH/AND>>hmmm 

#15 : 6  Degrees of Separation:



"A documentary on networks, social and otherwise"
" (part 1):
 

Parts 2, 3,  4 , 5, (not 6)  are also online
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Kraybill, in  your  "Upside Down Kingdom," book, says,
"The Kingdom of God is a collectivity--a network of persons....more than a series of
individualized email connectionslinking the King to each subject...[It] infuses the web of relationships, binding King and citizens togeter" -Kraybill (emphases mine)








Check out  New Testament Social Networks
by clicking here.  To see chart below, click it, then click again to enlarge:

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See also a preview of the book.

"Thy Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks," by Dwight J. Friesen




Do you and I have any surprising common Facebook friends?  Click here to find out


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Then we began looking at Matthew 1 and 2, putting some of these symbols to work:

-Jesus geneology (we noted it was the same word as "genesis"),
  • not just women, 
  • but 5 (hmm, remember that number)  women,
  • and 5 women who had a "shady reputation".

That's no accident; we decided that  one way to answer "Who is Jesus in  Matthew?" is
"One who includes all types, even outcasts, in his family,  Very centered set, and we are only in Chapter 1.  (:
Please be familiar with this crucial point, by re-reading Hauer and Young, p, 270, 2nd full paragraph


We had fun as three students assembled a manger scene..
But then we noticed that the  text

  • Nowhere says there were three
  • Nowhere says they were wise
  • Nowhere says they were men (:

But most importantly, we know from Luke, they didn't come to the manger when Jesus was a baby, but to the house when he was a child..

We'll continue examinng our Christmas folklore next time (:

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

9/6: Who is Jesus To Me?/Campus "Historical World:" field trip

Well, our literal field trip was fun, but it has two serious intentions, deeply related to the class.

1)To model what it was like for Jesus and the disciples to have a common "historical world," common memory, etc, knowing that "geography matters."

2)To let you know more of my story, and how I have come to answer the "Who is Jesus to me?" question

I know which story seemed to be your favorite..(:

But here's a pic that will recall a sadder story:

Here's more pics.




For next time, read

--Matthew Chapters 1 and 2
--Hauer and Young, Chapter 11, and then a few pages from Chapter 12 (pp, 269-172, the "Matthew: Higher Righteousness" section.

Monday, September 5, 2011

9/1:Impressions of Matthew, First 4 Literary Devices, Set Theory, "The Rabbi"

Great job on your impressions/outline of Mathew!
For fun, and fir some serious detoxing of false ways to answer the main question of the class, we watched this:

  • We introduced our first four "Literary devices":
    An "inclusio"  or "inclusion"
    Ever notice Matthew starts with "His name will be called Emmanuel, which means 'God with us.'
    And ends...very last sentence...with "I will be with you."?

    No accident.
    And neither is the midpoint and message of the gospel: "I will be with you" (18:20).
    In Jesus, God is with us.
    Jesus is the With-Us God.

    That's an INCLUSIO.
    You knew God was with us in Christ.. But now you see it as you look at Matthew structurally..
    Links with more info:
    A parallelism or :reprise:
    ometimes a repetition can be called parallelism..Here is a 5fold  structural parallelism in Matthew:



    "Jesus is the new Moses."



    Matthew could have said that,   or even said that five times..but instead he embedded thematically five times in the literary structure/fabric of his book;

    It is no accident that 5 times Matthew offers an almost identical sentence to close off his five teaching blocks..

                            "When Jesus had finished saying these things, he moved on..."
    ..shows up in


    1. 7:28
    2. 11:1
    3. 13:53
    4. 19:1
    5. 26:1



    See  page 269  of your Hauer/Young textbook (the three paragraphs underneath the "Higher Righteousness" section)  for more on this..
    There is huge  signicance of fiveteaching blocks in Matthew, how they are identified, and what they likely symbolize.

    Why 5?


    Jewish people reading Matthew would say
    "Oh, I get it.  Matthew is trying to tell us  (5 times, no less( that Jesus is the New Moses (or the fulfillment of Moses)!" 
    Why? The answer has to to with the obvious intentionality of the5 "teaching blocks" in Matthew..Five being a hugely significant  number for Jews...it's the number of books in the Torah, AKA the Five Books of Moses, AKA The  Pentateuch "(Five Books in One.") .  Moses=5ness.

    More "New Moses" symbolism in Matthew:


     BTW: Note an inclusio in that the first and last teachings happen on a mountain..hmmmm
    Chiasm(definition) ).. once you are attuned to seeing them in Scripture (and most ancient literature) it seems they are everywhere.

    Sometimes they are.
    Who can argue that "the first shall belast/
    the last shall be first" is a chiasm?
    A-B-B-A, X pattern.


    (and this one, because it's in Matthew [20:16], will be important
    for our class.
    But often the chiasm is wide enough to spotlight and intended embedded theme in between the endpoints.

    And to really help us get what the Spirit is saying...structurally.




    People remember how to perform a piece of music by using musical notations on scale. A similar solution to the problem of remembering how to perform a piece of dance has been solved with the use of Labonotation. In antiquity, it seems most written documents were intended to be read aloud, hence to be performed. The purpose of writing was to facilitate remembering how the document went when one read it aloud. But how did one make paragraphs or mark off units in a document read aloud? It seems that the main way to mark off a unit was to use repetition of words and/or phrases at the beginning and end of a unit, either alone (as in Matt 5:3, 10,"...for theirs is teh kingdom of heaven) or in parallel bracketing fashion (as John 1:18). The Greeks called such parallel brackets a chiasm, after one half of the letter "chi" (our 'X"), thus ">."-Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John, p. 295, emphasis mine.. a free read online here.
    See also:


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    Intertextuality (Hyperlinking):
    One of Chris Harrison's projects is called "Visualizing the Bible":


    "Christoph Römhild sent me his interesting biblical cross-references data set. This lead to the first of three visualizations. Intrigued by the complexity of the Bible, I derived a new data set by parsing the King James Bible and extracting people and places. One of the resulting visualizations is a biblical social network. The other visualization shows how people and places are distributed throughout the text."  Chris Harrison-

    But why should I tell you when I can show you?:


    "The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in color between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc - the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect." .More info about this chart, and charts of the Bible as a social network  here.

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 We watched "the Rabbi" video, summary and slideshow here


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Homework help:



By  9/8, have read Matt 1-3 and Hauer/Young, Chapter 11 and pp 269-272