Loading...Here is an intriguing and mysterious fragment of an ancient Gospel (that is to say: the manuscript of this book was entirely lost, EXCEPT for this little bit that just happened to turn up). I’ll bet my bottom dollar (but none of my other dollars) that you will think it is a fragment of one of the Gospels of the New Testament. WRONG! It is a clever combination of various Gospel accounts into one narrative, a “Gospel Harmony.”
Scholars have long debated: is it a portion of the most famous ancient Gospel Harmony of them all, the massive work known as the Diatessaron (I’ll explain below), which we are desperate to get our hands on but probably never will? (It has been completely lost; no manuscripts survive).
Here’s the tiny fragment of the something we have,
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Hi, Bart,
1) What do you think Paul means when he talks of love in regards with Jesus? There is so much discussion of love in his texts.
2) What does the following passage mean? Romans 8:6-8 NRSV
“[6] To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
[7] For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot, [8] and those who are in the flesh cannot please God”
Is it a denial of the flesh/body and that one should only focus on the spirit and not on pleasures?
How can Paul *really know* all the things he’s saying? From where does he get this interpretation?
1) Depends which passage you mean.
2) It’s a common trope in ancient writings that if someone focuses on physical pleasure she/he cannot be well attuned to spiritual truths. It goes back to Plato (e.g., the Phaedrus) and probably further. Paul has a Jewish version of it. Paul has several bases for his knoweldge of the truth, in his own mind: the Torah, his revelation from Christ, his understanding of the implications of Christ’s resurrection, etc. I’ll be dealing with this topic at greater lengthy in the book I’m now starting to write, but in the meantime, you may want to read the six chapters I devote to Paul in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene.