Have you started to think differently about how you read and understand the canonical Gospels? What are your new directions for studying them?
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This may sound strange, but what I've come out with is, 'This is all about Jesus.' There is some kind of paradigm shift going on in me which is seeing Jesus as what the Gospel and the Gospels are about in a new way.
Talking about a 'paradigm shift' in reading the Gospel/Gospels is very interesting, Ida. Can you put that in a context? What is it that effected this shift and how you used to see the Gospel/Gospels before this shift happened? Thanks again so much for allowing us all to meet in this communal space (both online conference and the forum) and share our reflections.
@Sameh Hanna I am not quite sure that I have identified the shift. Of course, I knew that the Gospels are all about Jesus, but my recent reading, especially of John, in this context, has directed me to the fact that what He SAID was mostly about Himself.
I suppose that I have previously read a lot of what He said - particularly in the synoptics - as teaching us about ourselves, about God, about the law etc. But I am now going to read all that as being more about how Jesus draws all that together in Himself than as teaching which could, in many cases, have been given by another rabbi. This is also the Muslim question: how much of Jesus' teaching and actions can we see as simply another prophet, in line with other teachers? The repeated Muslim use of the Gospels to discuss the divinity of Jesus has made me realise afresh that the questions are not about the validity of the Gospels but about the person of Jesus. It seems to me that how people judge the Gospels depends on what they think of Jesus, and not the other way round.
I have been undergoing a step-by-step shift for some years into reading the Gospels as a Jewish person (I am one of those half-Jewish Christians who for a long time refused to acknowledge my Jewishness). I have also been increasingly seeing the transfiguration as a key to the synoptics, and also to John in that he starts from 'we have beheld His glory'. They key question is the relationship between Jesus and the 'law and the prophets', and how the glory of the law and the prophets comes into fruition in the glory of Jesus (from which I guess it was derived in the first place'. I think that I shall be reading the Gospels as being soaked in the glory of Jesus in a whole new way. And I shall be seeing the glory of Jesus as the blossoming of the glory of the Torah in a whole new way.
@Ida Glaser , as you know, I have also been rediscovering my Jewish roots, which were largely hidden from my father and his siblings by my grandfather during the Shoah. My time in Jerusalem was further enriching in this regard. But what do you think it means to read the Gospels as a half-Jew, versus reading it as a Gentile (which I thought I was for most of my life)?
During the conference breakout rooms, David Coffey suggested that the starting point when comparing the Gospel and the Qur'an is going back to the text and leaving Christology and theology aside. I very much agree with that.
That was my approach in my previous project that closely examined the text of the Gospel of John and the Qur'an about certain descriptions of Jesus, such as what does it mean when the Qur'an rejects God begetting in light of John. I argued that the texts themselves do not actually disagree.
I think Coffey's suggestion of such an epistemic approach would be highly helpful as a starting point.
I took a break from the Gospels and returned to the Hebrew Bible, extra-biblical, and rabbinic literature for my current project on death and resurrection in the Qur'an, which I am now polishing.
However, my next project will come back to the Gospels. It will look into the Qur'anic accounts of the last 24 hours of Jesus in comparison with the Gospels account, from the Last Supper to Crucifixion. This includes the Farewell & High Priestly Prayer, especially the "Promise of the Spirit," in the Gospel of John and its eventuality in Acts. This one is still work-in-progress and I am learning more as I am researching the topic.