You may be wondering, how slowly or quickly we will go through the text of the gospels. Well, that's another great question. You can see from our first text that we are taking on 14 verses from the first chapter of John. That's probably going to be pretty typical. (You may also have noticed that I'm skipping a bit - don't worry, we'll come back to that - this is one small exception to the plan for going chronologically - I'm holding off on the stuff about John the Baptizer until later.)

Usually, we will try to cover a whole episode in the ministry of Jesus, or a whole parable, or teaching, in one session. Remember we are going for the historical story, and more important, the theological meaning, rather than the minute details. We will certainly take historical context into account, but we will not be pouring over maps or getting into things like whether or not there really was a cliff for the demon-possessed pigs to rush over. We will also not get bogged down in word studies, though I will be watching the Greek and filling you in on anything that you need to know. But this is not the kind of Bible study that spends an hour on one verse. It's also not the kind of Bible study where everyone gets to say what it means to them. The point is what it meant to the original authors and the original audience. Of course I will take any and all questions, so the more questions you ask, the longer it will take - but that's for a good reason and I love good questions!

We will also not get into any of the wacky theories that 20th century scholars built their careers on. This is about how the early Christians read the text, and so to be honest I will only be consulting modern commentaries in rare cases. But don't worry, I've done my homework over the course of my career, so I know what to look for and I won't leave out anything super important.

The point of our study is not to "harmonize," the gospels, per se, or reduce them to one gospel story, or even to smooth over differences between them. The differences allow us to see the specific perspectives and intentions of the four gospel writers. More important, the differences allow one gospel to help us interpret another – so while we are not “harmonizing,” we are comparing them with an assumption of a consistency of the story – they are all telling a story that really happened – and we do assume that two of them were eye-witnesses (though Matthew was not there right at the beginning). On the other hand, we have to be intentional about not filtering Jesus through Paul (or later perceptions of Paul) too much, - for example, Jesus does not teach anything like the reformation’s "sola fide" (see my video on that for more). So we're going to let Jesus speak for Jesus.

I call this in-depth, because we are not skipping anything - we will read every passage of the New Testament together, if you stick with me (except will not literally read all the way through the genealogies (lists of names) at the beginning of Matthew and Luke). The point is to reflect on the theological and christological meaning for the faith of the Church - This is what the early Christians cared about, so this is what we will focus on.

One final note - remember that the way Locals works is that until we have 50 supporters, we only get a half hour at a time for these live streams. So we'll with that for now, but please invite your friends so we can get up to 50 supporters and have a full hour for our times together.

In any case, I promise that we will go along fast enough that you won't get bored, but slow enough that you will learn something cool every week.

I can't wait to get started!

Jim