It is always a pleasure when an article written for a popular audience (granted, the target audience of the New Yorker is fairly specific and homogeneous) gives you pause on a subject you thought you knew so much about…

Searching for Jesus in the Gospels : The New Yorker: “The deeper question is whether the uncertainty at the center mimics the plurality of possibilities essential to liberal debate, as the more open-minded theologians like to believe, or is an antique mystery in a story open only as the tomb is open, with a mystery left inside, never to be entirely explored or explained. With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants. Somebody seems to have hoped so, once.”

After four years of undergrad studies focusing on the “Early Jesus Movement,” two years at Yale studying art and archaeology surrounding the Jesus Movement, a year at University of South Carolina studying apocalypse literature and three years at Gardner-Webb University studying theology for a Divinity Degree, I still found pieces of this to be truly enlightening.

Go read.

I just wish my friend Dan Goodman was around to give me a smirk and say “well…” before launching into a balloon busting take on the article. At least I still have Thomas for that… both the person and that gospel.

And as Thomas frequently reminds me, there’s just something about the number 42.

Be passersby indeed.