 |
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Men's Bible Study The Men’s Bible Study Group meets on Thursday evenings in the Church Library at 7:30 PM. We welcome new members at any time and announce when we are starting a new course selection for a natural “start-up”. We are eclectic in our course material. In the past we have covered topics such as in-depth studies of various books of the Bible, studies based on the modern Christian man in society and a lengthy video assisted study on “Defending your Faith” (perhaps better described as “How to explain your Faith to Others”).
A new course will start in early September 2006 as we examine the historical facts about Jesus, based on various ancient sources. This will be a 24 week course with video lectures presented by Bart Ehrman, followed by group discussion. You do not need to be a theological whiz-kid to enjoy participation in this group; just bring an earnest desire to learn more about our Christian heritage. We welcome all men, there is no requirement to be a Church member and we have had participants from youth in their late teens up to contributors in their 70’s. For more information; please call Rodger Shaulis at (330) 562 - 5683. We welcome you to join us any Thursday evening. Note: This course will meet in the Harris Study, instead of the library, due to the availability of the DVD player. Course Scope: From the late Roman Empire, through the Middle Ages, down to the Reformation, and into our own day, no institution has wielded such economic, political and cultural power as the Christian church. And behind it all stands Jesus, a man who continues to be worshiped throughout the world, by over a billion people today. Jesus of Nazareth is undoubtedly the most important figure in the history of Western civilization. Everyone who has even the faintest knowledge of Jesus has an opinion about him, and these opinions vary widely - not only among lay people but even among historical scholars who have given their lives to the task of reconstructing what Jesus was really like, what he really said and did. This course is designed to explain why it has proved so difficult to know about the man behind the myth and see what kinds of conclusions modern scholars have drawn about him. The course will be taught from a strictly historical perspective; no particular theological beliefs will be either affirmed or denied. The course will begin with a discussion of the four Gospels of the New Testament, which everyone agrees are our principal sources of knowledge about Jesus. But these books were not written as dispassionate histories for impartial observers. In addition, it appears that their authors were not eyewitnesses to the events they narrate but were writing several decades later, telling stories that they had heard - stories that had been in circulation year after year among the followers of Jesus. The first step, then, will be to determine what kinds of books the Gospels are and to ascertain how reliable their information about Jesus is. Apart from their worth as religious documents of faith, we will examine how the Gospels are useful to historians who want to know what really happened. As we will see, the Gospels create challenges for scholars who want to know about the words and deeds of Jesus. After explicating some of these difficulties, we will consider other sources that are available, including other Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament but that nonetheless purport to narrate the life and teachings of Jesus. In addition, we will examine all the references to Jesus in every other ancient Jewish and Roman source. After reviewing the available sources, we will examine the criteria that scholars have devised for getting behind the stories told about Jesus to ascertain what he was really like. Once we have a handle on how to approach our sources of information, we will consider the historical context of Jesus' life; our assumption is that if we fail to situate Jesus in his context, we will take him out of context and, therefore, misunderstand him. After discussing the political, social, and cultural history of first-century Palestine, we will proceed to the second major part of the course, a scholarly reconstruction of Jesus' actual words and deeds. There we will see that the earliest sources at our disposal, including the Gospel of Mark and the lost Gospel of Q (one of the sources used by both Matthew and Luke), are probably correct in portraying Jesus as a Jewish apocalypticist, one who anticipated that God was soon going to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the forces of evil and establish his kingdom here on earth. Specifically, Jesus proclaimed that a cosmic judge from heaven, called the Son of Man, was soon to appear and that people needed to repent, turn to God and adhere to his own teachings in preparation. Those who did so would be rewarded with God's kingdom; those who did not would be destroyed. The remaining lectures in the course will show how this apocalyptic message of Jesus affected his ethical teaching, his own activities and his final days. We will see that this proclamation caused a furor in Jerusalem when Jesus went there to celebrate the Passover feast at the end of his life. Fearing that his preaching might excite the mobs, the authorities in Jerusalem had him arrested and taken out of the way, handing him over to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who had him executed as a troublemaker. The course will end, then, by considering how Jesus' followers began to modify his message after they came to believe that he had been raised by God from the dead, as they transformed the religion of Jesus (i.e., the one he preached) into the religion about Jesus.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The Instructor of the Lectures Bart Ehrman is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With degrees from Wheaton College (B.A.) and Princeton Theological Seminary (M. Div. and Ph. D., magna cum laude), he taught at Rutgers for four years before moving to UNC in 1988. During his tenure at UNC, he has garnered numerous awards and prizes, including the Students' Undergraduate Teaching Award (1993), the Ruth and Philip Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement (1994), and now the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for excellence in teaching (1998). With a focus on early Christianity in its Greco-Roman environment and a special expertise in textual criticism of the New Testament, Professor Ehrman has published dozens of book reviews and over twenty scholarly articles for academic journals. He has authored or edited eight books, including Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford University press, 1999); The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford, 1997; 2nd ed., 1999); After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford, 1999); The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader (Oxford 1998); The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford, 1993); and The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research (Eerdmans, 1996). He is currently at work on a new Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press). Professor Ehrman is a popular lecturer, giving numerous talks each year for such groups as the Carolina Speakers Bureau, the UNC Program for the Humanities, the Biblical Archaeology Society, various local groups and select universities across the nation. He has served as the president of the Society of Biblical Literature, SE Region; book review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature; editor of the Scholar's Press Monograph Series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers; and co-editor of the E.J. Brill series New Testament Tools and Studies. Among his administrative responsibilities, Professor Ehrman has served on the executive committee of the Southeast Council for the Study of Religion and has chaired the New Testament textual criticism section of the Society of Biblical Religion, as well as serving as Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Religions Studies at UNC. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
