New Testament students have not always been well served by study of the historical Jesus, which tends to segregate Jesus from his significance vis-à-vis Israel’s scriptures and God’s agenda as this is developed among the New Testament writers in the living context of a faith community’s memory. The witness of scripture does in fact help us remember Jesus well. From beginning to end, the Bible tells the story of God putting God’s family back together. Its plot develops in multiple, sometimes competing, ways. It exhibits the full range of human emotions and, perhaps surprisingly, it claims that these are also God’s emotions. But on every page, we hear the call of a God whose family has chosen an early inheritance instead of an intimate relationship. That God – pictured as a parent, often a father – beckons God’s children, inviting them to return and to sit at the table, clothed by mercy and affirmed as God’s very family.

Gods Mysteries and Paradoxes: Looking through the Glass Darkly is a book about paradoxes and how they were actually created by God to bring unique enlightenment but also to confound the so-called earthly wisdom. Paradoxes also keep believers humble by showing them that Gods ways are not always mans ways. For this is what the high and lofty One sayshe who lives forever, whose name is holy; I live in a high and holy place but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite (Isaiah 57: 15). This book introduces the reader to the ancient idea of The Divine Paradox written by Hermes Tristmegistus (thrice great) in The Divine Pylander. An additional book, Corpus Hermeticum, was translated by Marsilo Ficino during the early Renaissance and helps frame the philosophical paradox of nature versus faith. This book, along with other fragments written by Hermes Trismegistus, was translated in the early 1400s and caused a rebirth of its teachings during the Renaissance. Modern secret societies and the occult are using much of the same knowledge to deceive people in the world today. Evidence shows Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and the Knights Templar possessed ancient knowledge and from it gave rise to secret organizations and societies operating today, including the Illuminati, Freemasons, and modern occultists.

How did the Gospel of Mark come to exist? And how was the memory of Jesus shaped by the experiences of the earliest Christians? For centuries, biblical scholars examined texts as history, literature, theology, or even as story. Curiously absent, however, has been attention to processes of collective memory in the creation of biblical texts. Drawing on modern explorations of social memory, Sandra Huebenthal presents a model for reading biblical texts as collective memories. She demonstrates that the Gospel of Mark is a text evolving from collective narrative memory based on recollections of Jesus’s life and teachings. Huebenthal investigates the principles and structures of how groups remember and how their memory is structured and presented. In the case of Mark’s Gospel, this includes examining which image of Jesus, as well as which authorial self-image, this text as memory constructs. Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory serves less as a key to unlock questions about the historical Jesus and more as an examination of memory about him within a particular community, providing a new and important framework for interpreting the earliest canonical gospel in context.

Questioning Christian teaching and the problem of evil, this book examines the origins of Christian belief, claiming that the Roman Church abandoned its spiritual mission in pursuit of power. The underlying message is one of hope, for anyone interested in regaining a sense of spiritual purpose.

This book, The Faith of Jesus, is intended to hopefully enlighten us of what it means to follow and be as Jesus; Yes, to be as Jesus: to experience His life as a man, living in a Heavenly realm, in communion and fellowship with His Heavenly Father. And by His Father's Spirit, to lead and empower Him, to reveal to mankind the reality of our Heavenly Father's love to us: not only to and in us, but through us, as His children, as His ambassadors, to lead others to our Heavenly Father through our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ.

Seeing Through a Glass Darkly offers a rich tableau of intertwined characters, beginning with concentration camp survivors Joseph and Hannah, and Jacob, who is smuggled out of Germany to America by Christians. As they each discover Jesus, a teenage orphan, Ethan, is saved by another character, Mike. Meanwhile, Jacob finds himself in a risky situation with a wealthy man, Mr. Freeman. Jacob calls out to God for help. When God is in charge of lives, things begin to change dramatically. Mr. Freeman and his wife adopt Ethan, and Mike and Millie are married and become keepers of David's House, a homeless shelter. When a frightening, mysterious call comes in to David's House, Millie discovers a little blonde girl in the alley. Mystery surrounds the girl as Mike and Millie notice her regal ways and a song she sings in a foreign language. Who is she, and why was she in the alley? Where is her mother? Is she the missing Polish princess who may be the legal heir to the throne? All of these questions are answered with a surprise twist. God takes all of our pain, our hurt, our out of control lives and He creates wonderful things for us - if we ask Him.

This volume is the fourth in a set of volumes, which together explore current approaches to the study of scripture in the Gospels. Thomas R. Hatina's latest edited collection begins with an introduction surveying methodological approaches used in the study of how scriptural allusions, quotations, and references function in John, with subsequent essays grouped into four categories that represent the breadth of current interpretive interests. The contributors begin with historical-critical approaches, before moving to rhetorical and linguistic approaches, literary approaches, and finally social memory approaches. Each study contains not only recent research on the function of scripture in John, but also an explanation of the approach taken, making the collection an ideal resource for both scholars and students who are interested in the complexities of interpretation in John's context as well as our own.