Yeshu | Followers of Jesus

The Calling of God

This is a Gospel in the sense of an ancient Life, or of a modern historical novel about the life of an actual historical figure. The title can be read in two ways and that is on purpose. I wrote it in 1998, before getting a degree in Theology.

Following Jesus

Retelling the story in the present tense and in the first person perspective of a fully human Jesus was a deeply spiritual experience. Jesus became like us so that we might become like him. It helped me to understand who God is calling all of us. Jesus said: "You will do the things that I have done, and even greater things" (John 14:12). Really?

Following the gospel writers

Retelling the story of Jesus is like following in the footsteps of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Reading up on ancient biography and retelling the Gospel myself helped me to understand what kind of decisions they had to make. Which sources do I include, and how do I appreciate and treat each different source? How free am I to fill in the gaps with stories about Jesus? Can I use narratives from the Hebrew Bible as a model? What is my perspective that I want to share with my readers? How do I structure the narrative accordingly? What happens with me during writing and (re)reading?

Choices I made

In the process of researching and writing, I made the following choices:

I describe Jesus as fully human. Paul writes that he 'emptied himself' to born human (Philippians 2:7), and the Letter to the Hebrews states that he had to learn through his suffering how to follow the calling of God within him (Hebrews 5:8-9).
I assume that an intensely religious Jew like Jesus would be using the Jewish scriptures to help him make sense of his experiences (see also my Psychological Analyses and the Historical Jesus). You could characterize my approach as 'radical incarnation.'
I rewrite the mostly familiar stories in the present tense and in first person voice from Jesus' perspective. With this style, I hope to give the readers the opportunity to put themself in Jesus position as he discovers his calling.
I try to use as much as possible from Mark, Matthew, Luke and John that fits into a coherent narrative, and supplement this from other sources to flesh out the narrative where needed.
In order to do that, I need to follow the combined storyline of Mark, Luke and John, as Matthew reorders Mark's narrative symbolically. There is also a surprising correlation between the several journeys to Jerusalem in John and the references in Luke's that indicate that his lengthy 'journey' is in fact a composite of several journeys (see the background section in the chapter on John from A very New Testament).
Luke, and to a lesser extent Mark and the Jewish historian Josephus, seems to have a different chronology than Matthew, dating the birth to the census of Quirinius in 6CE rather than before the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE. I follow Nikos Kokkinos in his analysis that Mark 6 refers to Philip the Tetrarch who died in 33/34 CE. This also allows me to position Jesus' story in a specific historical context.
Given the way each of the gospel writers worked, I will need to expand Jesus' speech when taken from Mark, Matthew and Luke, but cut back when taken from John in order to make the dialogue resemble the historical Jesus more.