[Insert stock sorry for not blogging mea culpa here.] At least I kept up with the reading.
So a lot happened. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, Lot's daughters got him drunk and got busy with him, and the cast for Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat was begotten. Jesus concluded the Sermon on the Mount and healed a lot of people. There's a strange episode where a bunch of swine charge into a lake and presumably drown, possessed by demons.
I'm finding the pace of this reading pretty enjoyable. It beats the snippets you usually get during worship by a lot. And when I was doing readings for my religious studies minor at IU, I was reading large quantities of scripture quickly, so I missed a lot of fine details while looking for larger themes.
Case in point - in the 11th chapter of Matthew, Jesus says this of his critics: "For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'"
The Bible is sorely lacking in dialog in the form modern readers would generally understand it, but this is one of those moments where it takes only a little imagination to picture this as a John Stewart bit. It pays to remember that Christians believe that Jesus is simultaneously fully divine and fully human. This is a very human moment.
So a lot happened. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, Lot's daughters got him drunk and got busy with him, and the cast for Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat was begotten. Jesus concluded the Sermon on the Mount and healed a lot of people. There's a strange episode where a bunch of swine charge into a lake and presumably drown, possessed by demons.
I'm finding the pace of this reading pretty enjoyable. It beats the snippets you usually get during worship by a lot. And when I was doing readings for my religious studies minor at IU, I was reading large quantities of scripture quickly, so I missed a lot of fine details while looking for larger themes.
Case in point - in the 11th chapter of Matthew, Jesus says this of his critics: "For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'"
The Bible is sorely lacking in dialog in the form modern readers would generally understand it, but this is one of those moments where it takes only a little imagination to picture this as a John Stewart bit. It pays to remember that Christians believe that Jesus is simultaneously fully divine and fully human. This is a very human moment.
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