The Weekend That Changed the World:Â The Mystery of Jerusalems Empty Tomb

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Nor was he simply someone who had achieved enlightenment and wanted to pass on his way to his followers, or a role model for imitation or a martyr who had the courage to die for a cause. Thus, the stories in the Synoptic Gospels are a potent combination of realistic everyday detail—an oversize catch of fish in the Sea of Galilee, a hole cut through the roof of a village house to lower a paralytic inside for Jesus to touch and heal, a twelve-year-old girl raised from the dead, Jesus hungry and needing something to eat—and brief, searing confrontations with the far-larger-than-life physical presence of Jesus himself.

We are at once drawn into the geographical and historical world of Jesus and immersed in it, and suspended above it in the supernatural reality of Jesus himself. The story tells of a miraculous healing, but it is also about the sheer power that emanates from Jesus, the absolute authority of the man who is more than a man—and the mercy, too, of someone who immediately takes pity on the beggar, just as he will take pity on anyone who calls his name, even the lowliest sinner. The story of Bartimaeus thus operates on many levels. It is specific and realistic, a narrative written by someone who believed that the events in it actually occurred—and might have talked to someone who witnessed them firsthand.

This is not the meek and gentle Jesus of sentimental Christian hymns! But the story also has another plane: The anecdotal, strung-together, often disconnected nature of the individual Gospel stories also served another purpose: The Gospels were almost surely written to be read aloud to a community of Christian believers, probably at worship services.

Short, self-contained pericopes that could be read, then made the subject of preaching in church assemblies, made sense in the context of early Christian worship. This would also explain their focus on the immediacy of Jesus, the sense of his immanent presence, rather than on the biographical details about his family and his education and his progress toward power that a conventional Hellenistic narrative about a great man might contain. The earliest Christians were encouraged to see themselves in the people who had had those wondrous encounters with Jesus during his early ministry.

But where did these anecdotes come from? They were obviously favorite stories about Jesus that had been told and retold many times among early Christians before Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote them down. The stories themselves undoubtedly originated among the Galileans, Samaritans, and Judeans who had seen and heard Jesus during his ministry in the Holy Land.

And when those stories were retold, when Mark and Luke first heard them, there were probably older witnesses still alive who could augment the narratives. Matthew might have had his own personal recollections as one of the apostles. The stories were retold in different ways, depending on what the tellers and listeners were interested in. That typically resulted in three different versions of the same tale: In fact, Matthew has two beggars in Jericho, both anonymous.

There could have been many reasons for that. Two slightly different versions of the story might have been in circulation, each based on a different set of memories. Perhaps Peter, telling the story to Mark, remembered the story differently from Matthew. Or perhaps Matthew, Mark, and Luke all heard the story from different people, perhaps eyewitnesses, perhaps Matthew was an eyewitness himself. They would have had plenty of opportunity to both hear stories about Jesus and talk to people who had heard Jesus preach or had seen one or more of his miracles.

Only one story in all the Gospels is not a short anecdote, or even a sequence of short anecdotes, but rather, a sustained narrative that spans several chapters. Furthermore, their three accounts of the Passion are not only similar but are virtually identical, differing only in the smallest details.

Here and there, tiny details in the accounts of the three Synoptics diverge: But in all, the Passion story the Synoptics tell is remarkably uniform. It seems clear that the Passion stories are not just the most important part of the Synoptic Gospels but that they are the oldest part. You could not leave anything out: It was a hard thing for those early Christians to take in, because crucifixion, a humiliating form of execution meted out to the worst of traitors and felons in the Roman world, was a scandal to both Jews and pagans.

It is not surprising that Matthew, Mark, and Luke heard the same story, or very nearly the same story, from every witness to whom they talked. Three Passion stories made clear that Jesus was not simply a good man and wise teacher who had been accidentally executed. To the Synoptic authors, Jesus was the Son of God—all three used those very words—and he was killed because his bold claims to fulfill the Torah and the Jewish prophecies were regarded by both the Romans and certain Jewish leaders as a threat.

As we can tell from reading such first-century church fathers as Clement of Rome, even the very earliest Christians were familiar with more than one Gospel. So did personal letters; fragments of ancient correspondence have been dug up from the Egyptian desert that were written as far away as Asia Minor and Rome. The likelihood that Luke, a careful historian, read one or more of the other Synoptic Gospels before he started writing helps explain the most puzzling feature of the Synoptic Gospels: After all, Jesus undoubtedly said and did many more things than the Gospels record.

Often, the Greek words themselves in all three Gospels are mysteriously similar, down to the same verb form in many cases, suggesting that there is a literary relationship among them, not simply a matter of reliance on a common oral tradition or similar eyewitness accounts. The question of which Synoptic author wrote first, and which Synoptic author read which other Synoptic author, is called the Synoptic Problem.

The early Christians were not unaware of the Synoptic Problem.

One church father, Augustine of Hippo in northern Africa, writing around a. Out of that group, a majority believes that Matthew and Luke actually had copies of Mark in front of them, but they wrote their Gospels independently of each other. Those scholars believe that both Matthew and Luke relied on a combination of Mark and Q in writing their Gospels, along with a good deal of material that each had separately gathered elsewhere.

This theory accounts for the material that all three Synoptics have in common and also for the anecdotes that Matthew and Luke share with each other but not with Mark. Still other scholars hold a different theory: The upshot is that it is impossible to prove any of these theories on the scant information we have about the actual composition of the Gospels.

The Synoptic Problem is just that: In the end, we have to regard the appearance in the world of the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so tantalizingly similar in subject matter yet so strikingly different in tone and details, all three written within a few years of each other, as a wonderful mystery: We should remember that ancient writers were not like twenty-first-century college professors penning scholarly articles in their carrels, with piles of books and journal articles in front of them as their sources. Although the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are strikingly similar in content, each differs radically from the others in style, emphasis, and in its portrait of Jesus.

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Let us examine some of these similarities and differences, beginning with the Gospel of Mark. The earliest reference to Mark is a written account attributed to Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor around a. This is not implausible. The fisherman Peter undoubtedly needed a translator when he preached to the early Christians of Rome, who were probably Greek-speaking Jews. Greek was the international language of much of the Mediterranean world.

The Weekend That Changed the World: The Mystery of Jerusalem's Empty Tomb

It was for many their second language. Nonetheless, Mark, as the episode of the beggar Bartimaeus indicates, knew how to tell a gripping story, combining vivid dialogue with fast-paced action. He enjoyed supplying the names of his characters: He dotted his Gospel with precise and graphic details that are missing from the other two Synoptic accounts: But Mark is most intent on showing us that Jesus proclaims a new and divine kingdom, and is himself divine. He also aims to dramatize Jesus as the Lord of the end time. For that reason, Mark has traditionally been depicted in Christian art accompanied by a lion.

This leads most modern scholars to believe that Matthew, like Mark, originally wrote his Gospel in Greek. It commanded a status as the first book of the New Testament that it retains to this day. He is writing as a Jew for other Jews. Matthew is a systematizer. That is because Matthew is not as interested in drama as he is in teaching. He is definitely working in the rabbinic tradition. And there is a kind of rabbinic goal for that teaching: Jesus is the fulfillment of all those messianic prophecies.

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So do the Beatitudes, the list of the attributes of those who will inherit the kingdom. He compares it to a pearl of great price, to a tiny mustard seed that grows into a great plant, to a net thrown into the sea that brings up both good and bad fish. There is an admonitory element in all of this: Because Matthew has as his goal demonstrating that Jesus is Messiah and King, he begins his Gospel with a genealogy, modeled on the genealogies of the Hebrew patriarchs in the Book of Genesis that link Jesus to the royal house of David through his putative father, Joseph.

Much of what he teaches is good Jewish teaching—that his followers are to honor their father in heaven and love one another—but Jesus goes further, ultimately making enemies out of the Pharisees, the rabbis, whose values and teaching style have so much in common with his. Jesus boldly defines himself, not only as teacher of the Torah but as fulfillment of the Torah. Jesus is Immanuel God with us , he is the shekinah, the presence of God, and he is Divine Wisdom, present at the creation of the world in the Jewish scriptures and inspiration of prophets and wise men.

Using the holiest symbols of Judaism, Matthew, a Jew himself, shockingly places Jesus at the very center of Judaism as Messiah, king, and, finally, Lord, which in Jewish theology is a substitute for the name of God himself. Because of this portrayal of Jesus as a human being who is also divine, Matthew has traditionally been depicted in art accompanied by a winged man. Tradition holds that Luke was born in Antioch and perhaps, like Matthew, wrote his Gospel in that city. Whatever his formal training, he was clearly an educated, cosmopolitan man, at ease in the many countries to which he traveled.

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He wrote in an elegant, cultivated Greek with occasional literary allusions, and he consciously adopted different styles of writing to suit his subject matter. In the manner of other classical writers, he had a patron, Theophilus, to whom he dedicated both his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, the first history, or partial history, of the earliest church, which follows the Gospels in the New Testament. He probably had his Gospel published for sale in the Hellenistic book market. He wrote sparely and concisely to bring his characters to life in brief sketches.

Luke never seems slow reading. Although it is almost certain that Luke was a Gentile, he revered Judaism and knew its Scriptures very well in their Greek Septuagint version. We can imagine that Luke came to Christianity through his exposure to Judaism. But that, too, has received archeological confirmation, at least as far as its procedures were concerned.

During the s, excavations at desert caves near the Dead Sea unearthed a letter describing the journey that an early second-century Jewish woman named Babata had taken with her husband from their hometown south of the Dead Sea to Rabbat in what is now Jordan, to comply with a census order. Such censuses and property registrations that took years to complete were an annoying administrative feature of the Roman world, and arduous journeys for those obliged to register were common.

His informant on these matters could well have been Mary, and we can imagine the long conversations the two might have had together on Jerusalem evenings. Luke went so far as to make Mary the heroine of the first two chapters in his Gospel, telling the story largely from her point of view: Indeed, Mary is a personification of the people of Israel, awaiting their deliverance and finally receiving it in Jesus; in her long prayer in those chapters, the Magnificat, she carols: Luke was more than an historian, however; he was a supremely gifted storyteller. Luke also told of moving, real-life encounters with Jesus that are to be found in no other Gospel: Luke had a wry sense of irony and humor, too.

For that reason, Luke has been traditionally depicted in art accompanied by an ox, a victim of sacrifice. Using maps, drawings, and color photographs, Walker constructs a myriad of evocative detail that becomes, in the end, a compelling defense of the biblical account of the crucifixion and resurrection. Paperback , pages. The Mystery of Jerusalem's Empty Tomb. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. May 16, Allan Benson rated it it was amazing. I really enjoyed reading this book as I returned from Israel and the visiting the Garden tomb. Although published by the Garden Tomb, the author did a great job keeping an unbiased perspective. A number of strengths and weaknesses are presented for both sites. I Love the fact that the author keeps the main thing the main thing. Ultimately, the location is not that important, but rather the fact that Jesu I really enjoyed reading this book as I returned from Israel and the visiting the Garden tomb.

Ultimately, the location is not that important, but rather the fact that Jesus did rise from the dead. Jesus is alive today!

Interessante ma devo dire che mi aspettavo qualcosa di meglio. Sep 11, Terry Watson rated it really liked it. Fascinating account of what happened that first Easter weekend and where it took place. Oct 03, Joe Haack rated it it was amazing.

The Weekend That Changed the World: The Mystery of Jerusalem's Empty Tomb by Peter Walker

This book is a hidden gem. Loved this book, especially after having visited Jerusalem. Kyle Yawn rated it it was amazing Feb 01, Becky rated it really liked it Apr 04, Dan rated it liked it Sep 28, Don Candy rated it really liked it Oct 18, Dennis Ticen rated it really liked it Feb 22, Nicola Olsen rated it it was amazing Mar 05, Pastor Don rated it really liked it Sep 27, Emilio rated it it was amazing Sep 08, Lisa rated it it was amazing Mar 24, Evelyn Taylor rated it really liked it Dec 07, Melissa Labonte rated it it was amazing Jan 11, Clint added it Nov 21, Joshua Watt added it Apr 06, Darren Hamilton marked it as to-read Oct 28, John added it Mar 01,

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