Comments on: New Testament Gospel Doctrine Lesson #3

By: Sara

Sara — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 16:37:54 +0000

Thank you Julie!

By: Julie M. Smith

Julie M. Smith — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 14:34:09 +0000

Sara, try here:

http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/author/jim-f/

By: Sara

Sara — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 04:12:29 +0000

Julie- thank you so much for your thoughts- I am always looking for great insight into scriptures we’ve read many times. Could you or someone else point me in the right direction to find the lesson material by Jim F that Chadwick is referring to? Many thanks!

By: Julie M. Smith

Julie M. Smith — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 18:16:52 +0000

Chadwick, thanks, I really appreciate it.

I’ll be posting on Tuesdays, but if you really need it early, drop me an email [my first name AT timesandseasons DOT org] and I can get them to you. I’ve got a bunch already written, so it’s no trouble.

By: Chadwick

Chadwick — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 17:22:12 +0000

Julie:

I’ve been following this blog for almost 10 years now, though I rarely comment on anything. I was called in December to be the gospel doctrine teacher for my ward and have found these pieces, along with the pieces from Jim F in 2011 to be extremely useful to our discussions. In particular in yesterday’s lesson I more or less stole your material and I have never in my life seen a group of Saints so interested and engaged in a topic. We came nowhere close to getting through the material thanks to this supplemental material. So thank you so much! It probably didn’t hurt that my ward hosted celebrities yesterday, the missionary mom Dawn Armstrong and her family were in our ward yesterday (from Meet the Mormons), and she in particular found me after the meeting and mentioned that the lesson blew her away.

Please don’t stop with these and, if possible, release them sooner in the week so I have more time to prepare!

Thanks again.

By: Walter van Beek

Walter van Beek — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 08:37:10 +0000

I think you are right, it is unsolvable. Also, quite unimportant (unless one has a Bethlehem-axe to grind). Same holds for the date.

By: Julie M. Smith

Julie M. Smith — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 23:42:57 +0000

Walter, one of the advantages of thinking that Mark is the One True Gospel is that I don’t have to worry about where Jesus was born. :)

In all (or, at least, a little more) seriousness, I tend to be so focused on literary questions that I devote very little attention to historical ones–they just don’t interest me because of their ultimate unsolvability. I really have no opinion.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 20:27:59 +0000

Hi there, greetings from Europe. I’m also teaching the Sunday School class, and last week I used the example of the dual visit of the angel. Thanks for your posts. By the way I think the magi were more into astronomy than astrology, also that they could be from anywhere in the former Achaemenid Empire, from the current Syra to China (by the way Christian Chinese believe the magi came from China). They probably were acquainted with Jewish religion, but they were not Jewish scripture scholars as the Herod advisers who told them about the Bethlehem scripture. But anyways… Jewish vs. Gentiles… maybe a false dichotomy? Kevin Barney, thanks for the links.

By: Walter van Beek

Walter van Beek — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 19:38:33 +0000

Julie

A small question: do you think Jesus was born in Bethlehem or in Nazareth? Of course, the latter option does not detract from your interpretation of Matthew, on the contrary (though it does makes a discussion on the magi-provenance rather obsolete). I prefer the Nazareth option, and you know I am not alone.

Walter van Beek

By: Frank Pellett

Frank Pellett — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 17:30:26 +0000

It’s probably wild conjecture and easily refuted and dismissed, but I’d occasionally wondered if there was a connection between the Magi and China’s Journey to the West (which was written in the 16th century and believed to be about a real monk in the 6th century, but stories echo in time).

That’s the thing about this story; it lends itself extremely well to ex-Biblical interpretation. Why not 12 wise men? Why not women? How far East can they come from?

By: Julie M. Smith

Julie M. Smith — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 17:28:37 +0000

Hey! Remember that joke I made in comment #11 about arguing over Mary’s tunic? Apparently, The Onion saw that:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-archaeological-find-suggests-mary-magdalene-wa,37775/

(To be fair, I was thinking of Jesus’ mom, not Mary Magdalene, but still.)

By: Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 16:56:28 +0000

I agree that Matthew is upsetting his audience’s stereotypes by presenting devoted astrologers and apathetic scribes. I continue to disagree that this would require they be gentiles. In fact for an audience contemporary with Matthew, the contrast is heightened if the magi are viewed as apostate/unorthodox rather than just foreign.
At this point in the argument conceding that the magi could be racially Jewish, that they would worship the Messiah/King of Israel, and that they would accept the authority of the scribes identification of the place of His birth, but that the magi are still not Jews smacks of the no true Scotsman fallacy. I find that particular definition of Jew hard to defend when divination has been accepted by Jews as tolerable if not orthodox at different points in their history, I am not part of the ancient community trying to maintain boundaries and exclude the magi, and the majority of modern Jews would sooner exclude the magi for worshiping Christ than for engaging in astrology or being from the east.

By: Clean Cut

Clean Cut — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 16:29:22 +0000

This is awesome, Julie. Thanks.

By: Julie M. Smith

Julie M. Smith — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 14:46:32 +0000

I’ll add: while I think there was an older trend in scholarship to emphasize that we ultimately cannot know whether the wise men are supposed to be Jewish or pagan or whatever, the more recent consensus is summed up by Eugene Boring: “The magi are Gentiles in the extreme, characters who could
not be more remote from the Jewish citizens of Jerusalem in heritage and worldview.” If someone wants to argue that Matthew’s wise men were racially Jewish but culturally/religiously pagan, I suppose I wouldn’t argue, but that is ultimately irrelevant: Matthew’s point is that the worldview/knowledge/skills/info of these wise men is superior to Jewish learning. Matthew isn’t making a racial argument.

I suspect that most of the effort to argue that the wise men were Jewish stems from discomfort that “magicians” or “astrologers” would be presented as “good guys” in the scriptures. (I accidentally found a squirrely article online once arguing that astrology was useful for Christians per Matthew 2, so I suppose I can understand the fear of opening the floodgate.) But the discontinuity is precisely Matthew’s point, as I explain in the OP.

By: Julie M. Smith

Julie M. Smith — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 14:33:30 +0000

Hedgehog, of course someone of a Jewish background could become one of them, but at that point you have to ask if you can still rightly call them Jewish (if you are using the term to refer to their religious commitments and not ethnicity/heritage) since the meaning of the word is “pagan priest” or “magician” or “sorcerer” or similar. The rabbinical tradition states that Jews must avoid them.

It’s kind of like if a Mormon became a shaman. You could argue that Mormons can be shamans because you knew this one Mormon who became a shaman, but at that point, should they really be considered Mormon anymore? And I don’t think that the Daniel story can be used to argue the point since he’s not exactly in control of his own circumstances and chooses to retain his identity, so it’s not analogous to anything that might have happened to Matthew’s wise men.