Death of Jesus

¶ … Death of Jesus - Use of Dramatic License by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Historically there has been a constant heated debate about the degree to which the environment, culture and propriety of the early Christian church may have had on scripture.

For some that answer has of coarse been to say it is all a fable to sell books, and on the other end of the spectrum the answer is that each word regardless of the stylistic literary tools used to string it to another word the collective words of the bible are the literal words of God, period. Kenneth Woodward contends that Father Raymond E.

Brown in his book, The Death of the Messiah chastises modern believers and non-believers alike for either rejecting the Gospels out-of-hand because they are not a work of pure historical accounting or assuming that the Gospels received no influence from the environment in which they were written and are an unquestionable literal accounting of God's word. Brown believes as many other moderates do that the truth lies somewhere in the middle and according to Woodward he backs up his belief in moderation with compelling arguments.

Without actually reading what Woodward describes as, "an exhaustive, 1,608-page commentary on the last days of Jesus" (Woodward 49-50) it would be nearly impossible to know if this is the entire message of the document. Yet, Woodward collects and commentates a very effective contextual theory of Brown's bottom line. "One can believe the that the Scriptures are the word of God without thinking that God chose to communicate only in historical accounts." (Brown quoted by Woodward 53).

Woodward expresses that Brown contends the Gospels to be, I a sense rather dramatic representations of oral history that proved persuasive tools to engage early Christians in their beliefs and to basically keep them interested in the gospels. It might be interesting to understand that it was believed in the very early church almost as it is today that the apocalypse was eminent and would surely occur within the very generation in which they were living.

This may have caused the need for an early revival, for lack of a better description.

Brown expresses that if their persuasiveness had been otherwise; "Their work would not have moved so many people -- artists and simple folk alike -- for so many centuries." The meaning of each passion story, he insists, cannot be separated from the author's powerful narrative effects," Woodward summarizes that Brown's view is that, "each Evangelist was a master of composition, arranging his material to sustain a story line revealing how" God's plan for the world was achieved through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, his son on earth.

(Woodward 50) The idea that if they had not been so persuasive the story would not have been as effective as it has been proven and would have been lost is an example of the use of the Rhetorical approach to explaining the devices of the bible.

Woodward explains that Brown uses the differences in the way in which each of the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, John, Luke express the story of Jesus' death not as proof of inaccuracies, and therefore proof of falsehoods but as proof that there was not only a need for the differences of expression, given the differences of audiences and times but that these differences prove the mastery of the journalistic ideal each author was trying to convey.

Brown breaks down the comparative ways in which the individual Evangelists expressed the Gospel and gives at least a small hint as to the context of the need for such a representation. A few of the examples that Woodward uses to express this point of Brown's are: Marks very human portrayal of Jesus on the Mount of Olives first asking God to spare him the fate that his followers refuse to share.

The time of Mark gave need for people to see Jesus as very human as they risked rejecting Martyrdom out-of-hand. He also discusses Luke's telling of the healing, by Jesus of the ear of a servant who was maimed in an act of rash revenge by one of Jesus' followers after a pronouncement of Jesus' guilt. Luke consistently portrays Jesus as a constant and loving healer.

Additionally, he sites John's Gospel telling that some of the Jewish officials probably believed Jesus an arrogant blasphemer and a quote from Brown later in Woodward's article explains in a very modern way just what might be the case, "Like the prophet Jeremiah, he writes, Jesus was widely seen as a "disturber of the religious structures of his time. "Were Jesus to appear today, Brown declares, he would be arrested and tried again.

"Most of those finding him guilty would identify themselves as Christians," he writes, "and think they were rejecting an imposter." (53) Woodward is expressing Brown's opinion of a common held truth about the time into which Jesus was born and preached, the culture was very rigid and designed around legalistic functions of the Old Testament and Jesus balked at some of the laws that the culture found imperative to the success of the spiritually correct life.

In the modern world if a man as persuasive as Jesus were to come to earth.