The Masks of Christ by Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince

Author:Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince [PICKNETT, LYNN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little Brown
Published: 2008-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Jesus’ legacy

Besides memories of the miracles and his teaching, Jesus is said to have left another sort of legacy: he taught one prayer and performed two acts on which Christian sacraments were modelled, baptism and the Eucharist, the mystical communion with him through the symbolic - or, in the case of Catholic transubstantiation, believed to be the actual - eating of his body and drinking of his blood that is still at the heart of Christian worship. Based on his discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark, Morton Smith has proposed a third ritual, a secret nocturnal ceremony in which his closest disciples were ‘taught the mystery of the Kingdom of God’.

The Lord’s Prayer is supposed to encapsulate the essentials of Jesus’ teaching, and is special to Christians because it is the only one that he personally taught his disciples. However, it may not have originated with Jesus at all.

The prayer itself comes from Q, since it is found in Matthew and Luke - although in entirely different contexts - but no other gospels. (So Mark and John knew nothing about it - very odd for such an apparently crucial part of Jesus’ teaching.) Almost the full text of the familiar prayer is in Matthew, as part of the Sermon on the Mount, allegedly Jesus’ lengthy discourse but which was, in reality, a convenient device for inserting a compilation of his sayings into the Gospel.60

Luke has a shorter version, with only seven of the ten lines, missing out the parts about the Father’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven and the plea to be delivered from evil.61 But it is in a different context, happening ‘one day . . . in a certain place’ when one of the disciples asks Jesus, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, the same as John taught his disciples.’ This is the literal translation that preserves the same ambiguity as in the original Greek.62 It could be read either as a request for Jesus to teach them a prayer because the Baptist did it for his disciples, or for Jesus to teach them the same prayer that John taught.

Both Matthew and Luke took this from Q, but without an original copy of that book it is impossible to determine which has retained the original context and which has changed it. But some scholars - for example James D. Tabor63 - accept Luke’s reading and conclude that the Lord’s Prayer came from the Baptist. Given John’s influence over Jesus, this would hardly be surprising.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.