Will Vaus

Today we are beginning a journey through the earliest Gospel written about Jesus, the Gospel of Mark. That title is not part of the original text. But this book came to be called the Gospel of Mark because the early church believed it was written by John Mark, a traveling companion of Paul who was also related to the Apostle Peter. If John Mark was the nephew of Peter, he may also have met Jesus as a young boy. We will consider this further when we get to the end of this Gospel.  Scholars date Mark to a time shortly before, or possibly just after AD 70. Mark is a fast-paced narrative, full of action and intrigue. One almost gets the sense in reading this Gospel that the author barely had time to write down these events because there were still so many exciting things happening in the early church. So, let’s dive into the reading of this Gospel for ourselves. Listen for God’s word to you from Mark 1:1-8…  The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, a...

Is the resurrection just a nice story? In other words, did the bodily resurrection of Jesus really take place in space-time history or is it just an inspiring tale?  In the twentieth century, the belief became popular that Jesus rose spiritually but not bodily from the grave, making of the Gospels a nice story, a myth. There is a book by two New Testament scholars, N. T. Wright and Marcus Borg, entitled: “The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions”. In the section on the resurrection, Marcus Borg argued for the spiritual resurrection of Jesus. He wrote, “Indeed, this seems to me to be the central meaning of Easter. Beginning with Easter, the early movement continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after his death, but in a radically new way. After Easter, his followers experienced him as a spiritual reality, no longer as a person of flesh and blood, limited in time and space, as Jesus of Nazareth had been.”  The key question here is: Does the New Testament present the resurre...