BIB 300: "Jesus and the Christian Community": Follow up posts from 9/4 Class Session (Sinai and Prep for Amos Assignment)

Great class session today...and let me say again, you exceeded expectations with your "Jesus and My World" Assignments!

1)The funny opening "devotional" from Colbert (interviewing the congressman about the Ten Commandments)
turned out to have several helpful serious points about the "literary world" of today's topic (Moses on Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments). Here it is:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Better Know a District - Lynn Westmoreland Update

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

2010 Election

Fox News

2)We introduced a new (and final) set to "set theory":
the fuzzy set (see week post for the other two).
Here below is some help on Fuzzy Sets (these readings will help, but if you missed class today, you may want to talk to a classmate about some of the biblical and other examples to get a handle on this):

new nets: bounded sets, fuzzy sets, or centered-sets?

We also noted that sometimes a "centered set" seems to have a moving center....especially if it's Jesus. Guess which center dot is bigger in this diagram at right>....

..

Optical illusion of the center: It is the blue point of left which is in the center.

<Guess which dot here at this diagram is the center..

...Then click this title to read more:

centered sets with moving center

3)We also introduced a new "literary world" device today, one that was helpful for studying the Mount Sinai account.
You can call it:
"intertexuality,"

or

"hyperlinking"...

or as Vander Laan called it in our video today, "story shaping story."

You can also visualize it via this Chris Harrison chart "Visualizing the Bible" that we showed (or tried to show) in class. You can see how the "cross-references" or hyperlinks work out by clicking here, but the basic idea is that this timeline of the Bible is created by color-coded arcs that appear wherever one story shapes or references another story elsewhere in the Bible (note some arcs or "bows" of the rainbow are shorter than others...this shows the distance from beginning of Bible to end).

4)The video for today is not online (though available as episode 4 on this DVD),
but some of the connections/intertexting that was done between Old Testament (Passover/Exodus/Ten Commandments) and New Testament (Pentecost) are drawn out in this brief article.

You'll probably never forget how important (and funny) the simple scriptural phrase "And Moses went up to God," now that you have seen re-enacted the all-morning climb...by an elderly man!

5) You will need to know (for test) why Jewish people reading Matthew would say "Oh, I get it. Matthew is trying to tell us that Jesus is the New Moses (or the fulfillment of Moses)!" The answer has to to with the obvious intentionality of the 5 "teaching blocks" in Matthew..Five being a hugely significant number for Jews...it's the number of books in the Torah, AKA the Five Books of Moses, AKA The Pentateuch "(Five Books in One.") See page 269 of Hauer and Young (if you have a different edition than the class edition, it's the section called "Matthew: A Higher Righteousness" in the chapter called " The Proclaimer Becomes the Proclaimed.")

6) HOMEWORK: next Tuesday, your first "Three Worlds" Assignment is due.
This first one is to be a page of notes (not a formal research paper, but notes or outline as if you were to make a class presentation; do cite your sources, but no big deal on format: APA etc You can write this in legible handwriting, Word Doc or Google Doc...or present it on power point or video.). Choose a section of the book of Amos (read it all...or listen to it on audio or podast here that makes sense for you. It can be short (We have by now seen a couple examples where even one verse or sentence is loaded with meaning) or
a bit longer (maybe a paragraph or chapter, but remember chapter divisions in the Bible are not always the best marker of when a unit/story/section begins or ends). but it should represent one literary unit or story. Then choose to study and research EITHER the literary world OR historical
world of that passage.

I forgot to mention this in class, but you should include information in your textbooks (definitely Hauer/Young and Grimsrud, but maybe also Kraybill (use index) that relate (info about the
"Three Worlds" theory, or about the book of Amos),
Other possible resources, available online by clicking the title (or part number) below (or finding in library), would (you do not have to use any of these, but these are among the most helpful bits) include the below:
(NOTE:after clicking these links, sometimes you;'ll need to click again to magnify)