The Reliability of the Gospels, Darrell Bock, Free Master Class Saturday, 13 September

Our next FREE Forum Master Class will be with Darrell Bock on How Stupid Do You Have to Be to Believe in God?►bit.ly/4mUzRk7

***The Reliability of the Gospels and Their Picture of Jesus***

Many people question whether the New Testament Gospels can be trusted, given they were written decades after the events they portray and with some debate about whether we can know who wrote them. Does the combination of eyewitnesses, oral culture, tradition, and the floating nature of memory work well in an ancient setting that produced these four key books of the Bible? This class will consider how the Gospels emerged in an oral cultural context with a note about how the tradition worked, how the Gospels relate to each other (especially the relationship between the Synoptics and John), dealing with the differences between them, the role of cultural background, and finally a look at how the Gospels make a case for who Jesus is. There are five sections to this Master Class.

1. Minding the Gap between Event and Gospel

2. The Synoptics and John

3. Does Difference Equal Contradiction as Some Claim: Gist and Variation?

4. The Role of Cultural Scripts

5. How the Gospels Make the Case for Jesus (Reliability of the Key Events in Jesus’ Life)

Darrell L. Bock is Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas, as well as Executive Director of Cultural Engagement for the Hendricks Center for Christian Leadership there. An author or editor of about fifty books, his special fields of study involve hermeneutics, the use of the Old Testament in the New, Luke-Acts, the historical Jesus, Gospel studies, and the integration of theology and culture. It is this latter area that is the focus of his work at the Hendricks Center, where he is responsible for producing a web-based, weekly podcast on issues of God and culture called The Table and author of the recent book, Cultural Intelligence: Living for God in a Diverse, Pluralistic World. He is a graduate of the University of Texas (B.A.), Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.M.), and the University of Aberdeen (Ph.D.).

#gospelreliabilityevidence #historicalaccuracyofthegospels #whowasJesusinhistory #truthofgospelaccounts #understandingJesusthroughscripture #evaluatinggospelnarratives