Hermeneutically speaking, the most interesting things about the Gospels is that a) they weren’t written BY Jesus, and b) there are four of them.
It became clear in our reading of Fee and Stuart and in our discussion, that the gospels themselves are examples of hermeneutics. Each author took the information about Jesus they had, and structured it in a new language in order to evangelize a new people group who had not met Jesus. As a result, each gospel has different themes and emphases. We learned:
- It’s important to understand the Jewish world that Jesus ministered in
- It’s important to study each gospel independently in order to determine the goals of the author, and what he is teaching about Jesus.
- We should recognize that accounts vary and they are often not chronological, but thematic.
We pointed out that Jesus’ imperatives DO apply to us today, but are imperatives that come out of our salvation, not to merit our salvation.
We ended with a rather juicy discussion of eschatoloy — not a topic most of us were accustomed to. But it was interesting to ponder the idea that Jesus brought the BEGINNING of the end of the old world, and that the New Testament is all about carrying out the “already but not yet” Kingdom of God.
