Tales from the New Testament
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Tales from the New Testament’
In The Copybook
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Tales from the New Testament’
In The Copybook
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Persian star-gazers hasten to Israel for the birth of a royal heir, but find that King Herod has had his fill of them.
According to Pliny the Elder (23-79), a Roman contemporary of St Paul, ‘magi’ were believed to be followers of Zoroaster, interpreters of dreams, worshippers of the stars and secret knowledge, not to mention conjurors and charlatans.
Three servants are engaged to invest their master’s money in the markets.
Jesus, now in Jerusalem, has been telling his disciples about the kingdom of heaven, perhaps better translated as ‘the reign of heaven’. He reminds them that this heavenly reign has begun and is getting wider, and that at some point in the future — he never says exactly when — God will require us to produce something to show for the errands he has sent us on, however small.
The Pharisees conspire to put Jesus in a seemingly impossible situation, by inviting him to take sides in the bitter politics of Jew and Roman.
The event described here is recorded at the start of the eighth chapter of St John’s Gospel. Two questions have nagged commentators: why some very early New Testament manuscripts missed it out, and what it was that Jesus wrote in the sandy ground. Neither question has been answered to the satisfaction of everyone, but the story is one of the most universally beloved in the Gospels.
An angel appeared to Mary in her home in Nazareth, and offered her the chance to be part of nothing less than the reopening of the doors of Paradise.
Lady Day, or the Feast of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary, is kept on March 25th each year, and celebrates the conception of Jesus Christ in the womb of his mother, a young woman named Mary from Nazareth in northern Israel. After Jesus died St John took her into his home, but tradition says that fellow evangelist St Luke, who left us this account, was also a lifelong friend and painted her first likeness.
A young man abandons the family farm and goes looking for happiness in the pleasures of the city.
Many Jews in first-century Judaea compromised with Roman ways, and even collaborated with the invading power. Those who came to regret their choices found in Jesus a firm yet gentle mentor, but others grumbled at the welcome he gave. “There is joy in the presence of the angels of God” Jesus reminded them “over one sinner that repenteth”, and he told them this tale.
While the owner is away, the men he has hired to tend his vineyard conspire to seize it for themselves.
In the Old Testament, Israel is frequently represented as a vineyard, a vineyard so mismanaged by God’s hired tenants that the grapes are small and sour: the shrivelled, acid fruit of corruption and injustice among Israel’s kings and high priests. God sent prophets to warn them; now he has sent his own son. What, Jesus asked his rapt audience, will the owner do when his tenants kill his son, too?
A Jewish man is left for dead by bandits, but help comes from a most unexpected quarter.
‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ is a commandment of the Law of Moses; but one lawyer wanted to know whom Jesus thought his neighbour was? Jesus, as was his wont, answered with a question of his own. When a man was left for dead in a notorious crime blackspot between Jerusalem and Jericho, which of three men proved to be his neighbour? Which of them did as he himself would be done by?