Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) Read Online Free PDF Page A

evangelists differ from each other.
    17
Parthenogenesis
(literally, “virginal conception”), or reproduction from an unfertilized ovum, is not unknown in nature, though scientists tell us it is impossible in the higher forms of life, such as mammals. But it is probably no more impossible than the exaltation of the humble.
    18 Luke does not use here
pandocheion
, the Greek word for “inn,” which he
does
use in the parable of the Good Samaritan, but
kataluma
, which means a “room (occupied by human beings).” Many contemporary scholars have questioned whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as both Matthew and Luke have it, or whether this is an assumption these two evangelists made because one of the Messianic prophecies (Micah 5:1) so predicts. But the questions about Bethlehem hardly constitute proof that Jesus was not born there.
    19 During the wedding reception at Cana, Mary asks Jesus, who has not yet declared himself publicly, to do something about the fact that the hosts have run out of wine. Jesus objects to her noodging (“Woman, my Time has not yet come”), but in the end he acts spectacularly to head off the bridal couple’s embarrassment (John 2:1–11).

III
The
Cosmic Christ
Paul’s Jesus

IV
The
Gentile Messiah
Luke’s Jesus

V
Drunk
in the
Morning Light
The People of the Way

Where Is Jesus?
    Jesus, returned to the Father, had sent the Spirit. Was Jesus, therefore, finished with them? Did his ascent into the inaccessibleheavens and the sending of the Spirit as his “replacement”mean that their contact with him was forever a thing of the past? Was he to be only a ghostly model to conjure in the mind but never to hold again in human arms? No; and this is not simply because Paul had taught them that Jesus was Lord of the Cosmos and they were his mystical Body. Such constructs are, in the last analysis, too cerebral to make a lasting difference in the ordinary lives of ordinary people like Prisca and Aquila.
    The appearances that followed on the discovery of the empty tomb had given them a taste of Jesus risen and exalted. The disciples had, in effect, just caught him midway through his ascension from the realms of the dead—on his way to the Father’s right hand. From time to time, long after Jesus’s ascension, unusual individuals, like Paul on the road to Damascus, would be privileged recipients of such “out of time” appearances, as they may be even to our day.
    But what of you and me, the less-than-privileged? What of folks like Prisca and Aquila, or tunic-making Dorcas and sleepy Eutychus, whom nobody would mistake for visionaries? Are we to be left only with faith?
    The answer lies in Matthew’s Gospel, which shows the public life of Jesus as getting under way with theSermon on the Mount (and the articulation of theBeatitudes) and closes the narration of this trajectory with a scene no less memorable, Jesus’s final sermon before his passion:
    “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will be seated on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be assembled before him and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left.
    “Then will the King say to those on his right, ‘Come, you blessed of my Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was a stranger and you took me in, naked and you clothed me, sick and you took care of me, imprisoned and you visited me.’
    “Then will the just reply to him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you to eat, or thirsty and give you to drink? When did we see you a stranger and take you in, naked and clothe you? When did we find you sick or imprisoned and go to visit you?’
    “Then will the King answer, ‘I tell you the truth: whatever you did for one of the