The Death of the Messiah: Introduction
Unfortunately, I need to once again state the obvious: this is a Christian Reflection, written for other Christians, other people of faith who may wish to better understand this aspect of Christianity, and for others, seekers and the curious, who may wish to know about the Christian understanding of the events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christ. The Reflection is a statement of belief. It is kerygma, proclamation. If you come here with an open heart and an intention to be tolerant of the beliefs of others, all beliefs, all religions, or none at all, you are in the right place. If not, this post is not for you.
This is the first of a series of four Lenten Reflections on the Death of the Messiah, in other words, on the Passion of Jesus, the Christ. The series is the result of research I did to help ordinary Christians better understand the meaning of the Death of Jesus.
It is my conviction that our understanding of Christ's Passion has been warped badly by well meaning scholars and pastors who have sought to simplify the reality of His death. Simplification is often a good thing. But when simplification leads to confusion and false understandings of what the Bible says, then it ceases to be useful.
I feel strongly that we need to understand the Cross of Christ as God has taught it, not as we might like to hear it. Therefore, four times during Lent, with our focus clearly on the death of Jesus on Good Friday, we will look at the events immediately preceding Jesus' death and at his crucifixion. This Reflection and the next constitute an overview of all four Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus.
The final two Reflections will be a more detailed look at two of the four accounts, those of Mark and Luke. We will not look at Matthew and John in that detail; but the contrasts between Mark and Luke are clear enough that you will be able to understand that, like these two Gospel accounts, they will also be quite different in their understanding of the Passion, so that when you read them for yourselves you will not be surprised to find that to be true.
"Teaching” Reflections like these demand more of you than a little skim of the text. You will need to read rather carefully so that you can form your own opinions as to what is meant. In fact, there are no simple answers.
Jesus’ death was not simple. But his death, when viewed in the light of his subsequent resurrection, is the most important event in Christian faith. Christian salvation literally depends on it. And so Christians certainly need to understand it. Most importantly, Christians need to understand what the Bible says about it, not what we might have heard that it says, or what we might wish that it says.
So I am inviting you to some hard work this Lent, to a true Lenten “discipline,” in the best sense of that word. And I promise you that if you will pay attention the reward will be great, for you will have a far better grasp on this event that Christians believe is the pivotal event in human history.
I chose the series title, The Death of the Messiah, in honor of the magnificent, unparalleled, work of the same name be Raymond Brown. His book, The Death of the Messiah is universally recognized as the most significant contribution to understanding the death of Jesus in the history of the church. That monumental work is over 1800 pages long. Obviously, we can only glean the highlights in a short series of reflections, but I need to acknowledge that Raymond Brown has greatly influenced my own thinking on this issue.
We will be looking at a very small segment of the Bible: the passion and crucifixion of Jesus, through four very different sets of eyes: those of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. What we probably don't realize, however, is that most of us have created yet a fifth set of eyes, our own. This fifth set of eyes is the one by which we have filtered what we know from those four very different accounts into one that we believe fits what happened to Jesus in the brief time from Gethesemane to the grave.
We may even think that all four Gospel accounts of the death of the Messiah are essentially the same, and that our understanding of what happened to Jesus and how he approached his death is based on one account. But none of that is true.
The accounts of his death are not the same in key ways; and the Jesus depicted in each of those accounts is quite different from the others. The four gospels vary substantially, both as to what the Gospel writers say happened, and as to the theological twist that each individual writer gives to the story.
For some that may be jarring, disquieting, and they may not even want to hear it. Christians naturally want to "harmonize" the four accounts, make them into a homogenous unit, with no loose ends. Attempts at "harmonizing the Gospels" have been made from the beginning of Christianity. None have been successful.
When we seek to harmonize the gospel accounts then we fall victim to believing what we want to believe rather than what the Bible clearly tells us. We, quite naturally, I think, would prefer one set of so-called "facts" to the rather differing narratives we read in the Bible.
We are like a good detective called to take the statements of four witnesses to an accident at an intersection, each standing at very different places, and while all saw the same thing, none of the four eye witnesses agree on what they saw.
The early church struggled with this problem for many years. But, and this is very important, the church, from the beginning, believed that the divinely revealed scriptures, even while often differing in detail, were the work of God, processed through the minds and hands of man, yes, but nevertheless divinely inspired by God.
And, for over 1600 years, the church has said that, regardless of their lack of harmony, the four Gospel accounts of Jesus were intended to give us different pictures of Jesus; and that, therefore, all were true in the eyes of faith. The church has consistently held that no one account of his life, death and resurrection could capture all the facets of his life and death.
Therefore, while many individuals have tried to harmonize the Gospels through the centuries, the church has never encouraged these attempts, which is precisely why we have four Gospels and not one. The church has been far more content than most individuals to allow the Gospels to stand as they are, seeing them as four different, divinely inspired ways of viewing the same events.
And that is the tack we shall take in this series. The truth is that the Gospels, and the death of Jesus as reported in them, cannot be harmonized. They are different, both in substance and in theological outlook. For instance, the Jesus described in Matthew and Mark is a far different Jesus than the one described in John, in almost every way imaginable.
Now, you have two choices as I tell you this. You can say that they all cannot be true and insist on harmonizing them, force fitting them into your own pre-conceived ideas of what you think went on, or at least what you think should have gone on.
Or, you can look at the Gospels as they stand and see what God is trying to tell us about the death of Jesus through the divinely inspired work of these four stories. Raymond Brown decided to do the latter: to look at each Gospel separately and to then attempt to discern God's message from the differing texts. That is what I shall be doing in this series, using Dr. Brown as our guide.
What we shall find when we are finished is that Jesus was and is a far more complicated being than we previously thought; and that the writers of the Gospels had to struggle with that fact. And they also had to struggle with the fact that they wrote far after the event took place. All of the Gospel writers wrote long after the fact.
Jesus died about 30 AD. The earliest Gospel, Mark, was written at least 30 years later but, most likely, about 40 years later, around 70 AD. Luke was likely written about the mid-80s AD, over 50 years after the death of Christ. Matthew was probably written sometime between 80 and 100 AD, 50 to 70 years after the death of Jesus.
The date of the writing of the Gospel according to John is harder to pin down, but, in any case was not before 75 AD or much later than 100 AD, that is, 45 to 70 years after the death of the Messiah. In other words, if they were writing today, they would be writing about something that happened somewhere between 1910 and 1980!
There was no intention to write the Gospels immediately after Jesus died. The whole point of writing the Gospels at all was that Jesus did not return as quickly as expected and the stories were starting to get confused, sometimes deliberately, as they were verbally passed down year after year.
The original eye-witnesses were dying off, or already dead. Many false oral gospels were springing up in the widely dispersed church. Luke makes this most clear in the preface to his Gospel where he tells us that he is writing it to set the record straight.
Each of the four gospels in the Bible was intended for the Christian community in which the writer resided. There is no evidence that the writer thought that he was writing to the church universal. Each writer's resources were slightly different.
Mark, the earliest written, wrote primarily from the oral tradition, that is, from the verbal stories of Jesus told in his community by its leaders. There is no evidence that he had any written materials to edit, although that is possible.
Matthew, writing quite a bit later, relied heavily on Mark's gospel, often word for word. It is clear that Matthew edited and adapted from Mark. But he wrote a much longer Gospel, adding items from his own tradition, the oral tradition in his community.
Matthew also added early Christian "apologetics", in other words, defenses of the faith made by early church leaders against accusations and threats from the Jewish leaders and the Romans. He adds, for instance, scenes about the death of Judas, about Pilate washing his hands of the whole affair, about the dream of Pilate's wife, and he places guards at the tomb.
Both Matthew and Luke seem to have shared ideas from a written source that we no longer have any record of. That source is simply called "Q" for the German word, "quelle" which means "source" in English. We know this because both Matthew and Luke have identical word for word accounts in their Gospels that are unknown to Mark or John. In addition, both Matthew and Luke drew from their own oral, and perhaps partially written, traditions.
John's Gospel is radically different than the others, so different that while the other three are called "synoptic," that is, they can be "viewed together," John's is called simply "the fourth Gospel." There is no evidence that John relied on any of the other three Gospels in the composition of his Gospel, although it is likely that he had access to Mark's and, perhaps, the other two as well.
But John, even more than the other three Gospel writers, was consciously and very intentionally writing a theology of the Christ, and his emphasis is on discerning who Jesus was, what Jesus' relationship to the Father was, and on what Jesus said and tried to teach us as that relates to God's intention for Jesus here on earth.
Jesus' ministry in John is three years long, not one or one and a half as in the other Gospels; three Passover feasts are celebrated during his ministry, not one, and he makes three trips between Galilee and Jerusalem, not one. In fact, in John most of Jesus' ministry is said to be concentrated in Judea and Jerusalem, not in Galilee as in the other Gospels.
The chronology of the trial and crucifixion is quite different as well, including saying that the Friday of the crucifixion was not the Passover, but the day of Preparation for Passover, thus John has no Passover meal in the upper room (which becomes the first Eucharist in the other Gospels), but rather an ordinary supper after which he washes the feet of the disciples and proceeds to make several lengthy speeches to the disciples, speeches the other Gospels know nothing about. And there are many other differences about the last days of Jesus in John's Gospel.
But, as different as these Gospel narratives are, we must be clear about one vitally important truth that people, particularly critics of the Gospels, do not seem to understand. None of the Gospel writers were trying to write history. All were writing documents of faith, kerygma, proclamation, filtered through the eyes of faith. They were writing theology, not history.
History as we know it today, based on careful gathering of the physical facts, was not on the agenda of these writers. History writing as we know it was simply unknown to the writers of the Gospels. They wrote to tell us the Good News of Jesus, not to nail down the precise facts of his life.
Theirs was a labor of love, of revelation, of faith. They were not trying to write a nice text book that could be adopted for use in a college history course. Please, please, try to get that fact into your understanding. It will save you enormous heartburn in the future.
So, where does this leave us? Well, if you believe as I do, that the Bible is not just another book; that it is something more than, say, the writings of Shakespeare, or Plato, or Martin Luther; if you believe that the writers of the Bible were divinely inspired, anointed by the Holy Spirit, as I do, to write what they wrote, then, with me, you must conclude that the differences in the four Gospel accounts of the death of the Messiah were intentional. And the differences will, I believe, never be reconciled by us, or by anyone else.
But I believe that God gave us four Gospels, not one, on purpose. And I believe s/he expects us to read all four of them and to learn from them, content to let them be for us what they are: divinely inspired books for educating us about the great mystery that is our God, and about his/her Son, Jesus Christ.
We will, later in this series, explore two of these Gospel accounts in some detail. We will note some of the places where the Gospels do not agree on the details. Where that is the case we will try to see if we can determine why that is, or if it makes any difference at all.
But that will not be, and should not be, the primary focus of this Lenten series. The primary focus will be to allow us to see the Jesus that each writer saw, the Jesus that the Holy Spirit inspired them to write about, the Jesus that we need to know, but, in Philip Yancey's term, who, in fact, may be "the Jesus we never knew".
The next Reflection will spend some time looking at why it is good that we have four different portrayals of the death of the Messiah! God didn't give us four different Gospel accounts by accident.
God bless you all.
Monte
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Pawed!
Monte
Monte
Would you say that the mark of a "mature" (I don't know what other word to use, even though I know this is not the one I want) Christian is the ability to hold four different viewpoints in one's head and accept that they're all true?
That seems to me a Christianity that I would be more comfortable with, and I thank you for an essay that has opened my eyes to things I had not previously seen.
You are correct in warning that it takes some work to get through these posts. I am usually glad when I take the time to give them the consideration they deserve. Really remarkable work, Monte.
If you want to add a non-theological dimension to the equation, I found very early on that, when talking to witnesses to an event, no two will agree on the details. It's therefore necessary to piece together what happened from a variety of sources in an attempt to create a coherent account.
When you couple that with the time element you describe, the job of creating said accurate account becomes even more difficult.
Then, when four (or more) people are writing about the same event, none will agree, although all will -- or should -- overlap.
Such is the case with M,M,L and J. And, as you point out, each has his own inspiration....
Why it is so hard for some to grasp that four witness accounts (because that is ALL we have to go on, there was no video tape of it) could be "true" to each witness who saw or heard some things that the others did not hear or see, or who remembered a different sequence of events, could still be telling the truth, eludes me.
Then add in that they were writing mostly from oral story telling decades after the fact and I would find it very immature to argue that these kinds of disparities could not happen, that, somehow, "God would not allow it."
I am a voracious reader of histories and biographies. And routinely there will be another book on a President or on an event that happened 50 to 100 years ago and the book will be touted as the "definitive" history or biography. That is utter nonsense. Even when the writer is trying to report "the facts" in as capable way as possible some will elude the writer, and his/her own biases will be in the writing no matter how much he thinks they are not.
So, yes, I think it is a sign of maturation when we read accounts of events and realize and accept that we are getting part of the objective reality, not all of it. This is particularly true of the Gospel writers who NEVER claimed that they were writing history. They were telling a story of Good News, a theology, a kerygma, proclamation, about Jesus.
Yes, being able "to hold four different viewpoints in one's head and accept that they're all true" would be, to me, a sign of a mature Christian.
Monte
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Jim: yes, it is grossly unfair to the Gospels, or to any literature that does not claim to be historical "fact" as history.
And, ironically, it is also unfair to any "historian" to assume that the history that historian is trying to write will be the only "true" account. Yet we constantly will do that. Stepping back from such nonsense now and then can give us a much better handle on what we are reading and what it means.
I know that these Reflections are not easy, particularly for those who are not well versed in scripture or theology. And what I am writing is about as "clear" as it is ever going to get.
There are those who try to say that Christianity is "easy." They try to sell a simplified, dumbed down, watered down version. Then they add all the prosperity preaching and feel good pap to the mix and sell it. But that is such an enormous lie.
Christianity and the study of the faith is not easy. It is not easy to be a Christian and accept that we understand but a fraction of what there is to know. I don't know a tenth of what there is to know. But we can, if we are willing, be life long students, and lift the veil off of many of the poorly taught, and therefore poorly understood, aspects of the faith.
Thank you for understanding that. But I have come to expect that kind of insight from you. I read it in your own writing.
===================================
Monte
And I want to be clear that well over 95% of the Gospel stories do "overlap." There are some places, though, where they do not, where, for example, they get the stream of events quite differently. When that happens then it is important to look at those difference and try to ascertain if that makes any real difference at all to what the writer is trying to say more generally.
Lets take an example completely unrelated to the Passion story. If we look at Genesis we see that in one place Noah is said to have taken two pair of each animal into the ark. In another place it says that he took 7 pairs of clean animals into the ark.
That is because Genesis is a redaction of different sources of the same story. We now know, thanks to a lot of hard work by Biblical scholars, that there are at least four main texts from which the redactor worked, and we call them J,D, E, and P. And there may be more.
So, back to the animals on the ark. Does it make the slightest difference in the point that the redactor was trying to make, that God was trying to make, which is that God was heart sick of the way people were sinning and abusing his gift of life, and that he was going to wipe it all out and start over with Noah and his family? No is the answer. Two pair or 7 pair or 177 pairs would not affect the theological point at all.
So it is with the Gospels. As we continue this study we will see that in most of the cases the differences are irrelevant to the main message.
Monte
Bless you, Cathy. You have been and continue to be a wonderful friend who encourages and enjoys these explorations that go a bit deeper into our spiritual mine to find out what more we can know about our faith.
Monte
The Bible was never meant to be the subject of a forensic analysis.
I'm enjoying these Lenten posts....
CB
Or, maybe this will be right up her alley. I never know what people who are scripture readers will think of my more liberal reflections as opposed to the more literal ones which are the prevailing ones in the more conservative churches. I'm not much of a Biblical literalist, as you already know.
Monte
Monte
I guess one stumbling block for me has always been when divine inspiration stops. It must have continued through the writers and the initial compilers, Catholics suggest it continues down to Jerome and other translators of the Gospels. Does it continue today? Is there a role for non-canonical material from the Gospel era (Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Thomas and other apocrypha) for Christians? Or are we restricted to the texts assembled in the 4th century?
The canon as we know it was pretty well finalized by Nicaea, but even before the 4th century and to the present day there are a number of deuterocanonical books that are included in reference and study Bibles here in the US. Parts of those books are considered canonical in the various Catholic and Orthodox denominations, and all of them are considered canonical by at least some recognized church denominations. Some of them are also canonical for most Jews.
I personally consider them canonical because their exclusion in the 4th century was strictly a political dispute, and had nothing to do with their authenticity. However, neither of the denominations I am accredited in consider them so. That has not stopped me from preaching from those texts.
As to whether or not divine inspiration continues beyond the 4th century no solid theologian would argue that God died in the 4th century so divine inspiration is recognized to continue. The UCC likes to say that "God is still speaking." I like to say that "God isn't done with us yet."
But it would be highly unlikely that the Apocryphal Gospels from the early years of the faith would ever now be added to the canon. The arguments against that are the same ones that were against them back then, and the ones that are now newly resurrected are clearly not orthodox Christian thinking. To believe that the protectors of the orthodox canon would allow gnostic or other ideas considered anathma to become part of the canon is to not understand the passion behind the status quo in this area.
That, of course, doesn't stop those books from being studied in church or considered as evidence of the many facets of Christianity that emerged in the post apostolic period. I would have no problem doing that but I would be clear that the students understood that they were not canonical books.
I do not personally consider any of those books to be remotely canonical, and I have a pretty open mind on the subject. But, for many reasons, they do not impress me as likely candidates for the canon. They do not read like divinely inspired works to me, but that is a personal opinion.
As to there some day being other, more modern, books included in the canon, that is unlikely.
More likely is doing something like Joseph Smith did and the Mormons continued: set up a church outside of Christian orthodoxy and over time gain legitimacy in the eyes of the general public, if not in the eyes of most of orthodox Christianity.
Some would say that Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, and more lately, Scientology, have done exactly that in the more recent past.
I hope that helps a bit. If you have further questions, please ask them here, or feel free to send me a PM.
Thanks much!
Monte
Almost all of the major theological ideas in the Bible do not come from lists of propositions. They all come from narrative, from story. It is the story that is at the heart of faith. And those who come to have a faith that runs deep are those who own the story, not the lists of this and that. You know that which is why the Passion stories resonate with you.
If I could say just one thing to new Christians or to seekers it would be: Own the Story. It is your story. You are the heir to the story and it is your history, your family story. Once you own the story so much just falls into place.
Borg's book is a masterpiece. I am impressed that you read it and enjoyed it. Too many people started it and gave up. It is not the sort of a book that reveals its excellence in the first 50 pages. If you have a sound bite mind it would not speak to you. You don't and it did. Good on you.
Thanks again, Faith. I hope you get as much out of the coming Reflections in the series.
Monte
But, and this is as likely as me flying to Mars, were it to be discovered and there were other parts of it that are not in Matthew and Luke there would be huge arguments over whether those previously unknown parts should be added to the canon. And that fight could go on for decades or even centuries.
And, as I noted in my reply to Bursa, the gnostic gospels and other apocryphal writings that are not already in the recognized dueterocanonical books (the identified apocryphal writings since before Nicea) it is highly unlikely that they would ever achieve canonical status.
So while it is clear that God is still revealing God's self to us and therefore the canon is technically "open" the truth is that the minds of the guardians of the canon, the traditionalists in the church and in the academic world, it is for all practical purposes closed.
I use some of the apocryphal writings in my teachings but do not consider them canonical either. They are useful for showing how other Christians at that time did use other writings as scripture.
Monte
Following up on FLW's question and your response---to what extent do you see the ability to grasp the 4 points of view as being simultaneously holy---as a talent that can be taught?
My humble opinion is that in general---one either gets that or they don't. It's a talent of connectedness or belief or even strategic. And the extent one can actually learn that talent is limited.
Where it DOES happen---where one CAN learn---depends entirely on the dialogue of around teachings like you've created here.
Bless you for this!
Roger
I sought faith for over 50 years by trying to get from the facts to faith. I thought that if I just learned enough that in that learning faith would come. So through decades of being a dedicated lay man in the church and reading all I could get my hands on, and then getting my first post graduate Masters of Divinity and all the study that three years entailed I was still unable to move from the facts to faith. But by the time I started working on my Doctor of Theology degree and before I got it I learned I had it backwards.
I learned that from the writings of St. Anslem who wrote simply that religion was "faith seeking understanding." First comes faith, then, and only then, will you be able to seek true understanding. First comes that "leap of faith."
Without it you will continue, in the case of the four differing Gospel accounts of Jesus, to see four differing account that bother the dickens out of you. Because you will feel that each is incomplete and inadequate, and that it is impossible, therefore, to trust them.
But once you have faith you will read them through the hermeneutic of faith and see them as revelation from God to us. And you will see that the theology is in the story itself, not in the dissection of the text. With the eyes of faith you will see that the Gospels are four very different, and very true, accounts of the same events, the same Jesus, as told by other eyes and ears of faith. Each is complete in itself and offers the truth as it has been handed down to each.
Each Gospel is as true as God wanted it to be to the writer, and to those who believe what he wrote. That God offered different vision to each Gospel writer will not surprise you because you know in your heart that even to you God offers to you the vision that you personally need, not what someone else might need.
In essence, you become an "insider" able to speak and read the narrative that expresses the essence of the faith, be it written by John, or Mark, or Luke, or Matthew.
So yes, if you have faith you can learn much, but without it you will just see words and partial things that you mistake for history, and other partial things that are trivial to the faithful, but very unnerving to one who tries to read them as a form of history, or theological propositions, or moral cookbooks, all of which they are not.
Monte
What language do you use when you read the Bible for this type of analysis? Do you feel the message comes across differently in translation than in the original language(s)? (I'm sure it must). I know that for me, reading the Torah in Hebrew is completely different than reading it in translation - it has an immediacy and relevance that is completely missing in English. How does the issue of differing translations fit in?
My Hebrew is pitiful so I rely on translations when I study the Hebrew Scriptures in the Bible.
My koine Greek was very good for a while but suffers now from lack of use. I can still parse my way through the Greek New Testament with the good dictionary in the back of that book, but mostly I rely on a Greek/Emglish interlineary Bible where each Greek word and sentence has the literal English translation below it.
A literal word for word translation is for me hopelessly awkward and I spend far too much time trying to be sure how it would translate into everyday modern English rather than trying to understand the meaning for me as a person of faith.
Fortunately, when I was a reasonably good reader of koine Greek I read through the book of John in Greek in detail until I understood as well as I was ever going to what the author was saying. Then I compared the Greek text to several modern English texts: KJV, NKJV, RSV, REV, JB, NAS, NES, NIV, ASV, NRSV and several others, including soft translations and paraphrases like TEV, CEV, Phillips, the Message, and such.
Based on that comparison I concluded that, for me, the best translation in modern English, was the NRSV, New Revised Standard Version, which is a near literal translation (close as possible to a word for word translation) that includes the most recent analysis and changes in the Greek text, based on the latest uncovered Greek manuscripts, and which includes the highly respected Masoretic Text for the Hebrew portion (Old Testament) of the Bible.
The NRSV is therefore the text that I am most comfortable with, that I compare to the Greek when I struggle with passages, etc.
Almost all of the commentaries that I consider the top echelon of scholarship work from the NRSV and it is by far the version most used in the mainline and liberal seminaries. Most New Testament scholarship today is based on the United Bible Societies Third Edition Greek New Testament which is now word for word compatible with the 26th Edition Nelson-Aland text. And, in turn, that is the text that the translators of the New Testament in the NRSV used. Almost all of the Translators of the NRSV were also members of the committees that saw to the unification of the Greek New Testament.
The Greek New Testament that I mention above, and a copy of the entire NRSV Bible, are at my right hand as I write this, even as they have been for 18 years now. They are both rather shop worn and underlined, noted with Greek equivalent words, highlighted and dog eared. Like old friends they have gotten worn down with use, much as has their owner.
Monte
Monte
Blessings,
Monte
I have for a long time viewed the different gospels as different viewpoints that do not need to be reconciled. Each person sees events in their own way. Like the story of Rashomon, there will be an account of events for each person who was there or viewed it, etc. This doesn't make anyone's account not believable or not valuable. It should give us more depth and understanding.
I'm sure that I will be back to re-read this. I value your teaching very much.
Monte
God bless,
Monte
Monte
Monte
I'm looking forward to reading this whole series! It's like going to church but without the part where you get pegged to usher. (Although Geo used to like "dumping" the leftover communal wine, which never quite made it to the sink...)
(We have had big rainstorms this week! No sun! Hail! Lightning! No riding yet! But soon! Wildflowers! Sunshine! Open passes! I am ready to ride, even if it's just down to the local donut shop!)
Hope you do get to ride. Weather here has been the coldest in a decade. Tomorrow through the weekend is supposed to be the warmest since October! Temps is the 50s. So I hope to get out a bit each day.
Monte
Theirs was a labor of love, of revelation, of faith. They were not trying to write a nice text book that could be adopted for use in a college history course. Please, please, try to get that fact into your understanding. It will save you enormous heartburn in the future.
This clarifies a lot of the mystery. Excellent work, Monte. Just excellent. Off to part two!
Monte
I've actually never merged them, myself. I'm more of a 'pick the one you like best' kinda girl. But I can't wait to read the rest of them and see what can be learned from looking at this from four vantage points instead of merging them all into one.
rated.
And my apologies for the late comment. I've been trying to catch up here and there, but something always seems to get in the way. Nothin like a nice, lazy Sunday to sip some joe and peruse OS.
God bless,
Monte