In her sermon last Sunday, Pastor Alison spoke a bit about the nature of Jesus's story in the Bible and the process by which the relevant texts were formed. There are four books in the Bible — or four gospels narratives — that tell the story of Jesus’s life through an ancient form of biography. These books — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — agree on many points, but they also have distinct perspectives and particular details that differ from each other and that cannot be reconciled. Some of the reasons for this are because these books were written by different authors, in different years, for different audiences, and using different sources.

In many cases, the differences were actually a result of intentional choices made by the gospel writers regarding how they wanted to present Jesus's story. Hearing this can be troubling for modern audiences with modern sensibilities around historical accuracy. But it's important for us to understand that ancient people did not have the same expectations. When it came to biography, they were more concerned with conveying the essence of a person (their essential characteristics and personality traits) than with conveying indisputable facts about the events of their life.

With this lens in mind, we can approach the differences and contradictions between the gospels not as a problem to be solved but, instead, as an invitation to dive deeper. To be curious about what the author was trying to help the original audience, and now us, to understand about Jesus and about God in particular. To ask ourselves, “What truth about Jesus (or about God) was this author trying to convey?”

To help you explore this topic further, we'd like to recommend an episode of The Bible for Normal People podcast with special guest Bart Ehrman (the New Testament scholar Alison quoted in her sermon). The details are included below:

Episode 263: Bart Ehrman – The Gospels & Historical Reliability
In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman joins Pete Enns and Jared Byas to discuss the historical reliability of the Gospels, highlighting the roles of oral tradition, authorial bias, and contradictions within the texts. Join them as they explore the following questions:

• What’s involved in the historical study of antiquity?
• What are we talking about when we’re talking about the question of the Gospels and their reliability? 
• Does having an eyewitness account guarantee accuracy?
• Do we have literary evidence of Jesus from the same time frame which is outside of the Scriptures?
• What examples from the ancient world do we have documenting other historical figures?
• Is there such a thing as an unbiased source?
• What do we mean when we ask whether the Gospels are reliable? Is that usually assumed to mean historically accurate?
• What is orality?
• What kind of assumptions are we prone to placing on the Gospels about their accuracy?
• If we don’t have outside sources to compare the Gospels to, then what has led scholars to their conclusions about the historical reliability of the Gospel traditions from within the Gospels themselves?
• How can we look at the Gospel contradictions as positive?

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Tweetables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.

• If you’ve got two sources and one borrowed from the other, then you actually don’t have two sources. You’ve got one source. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• Archaeology can tell us a lot. The problem with artifacts is that they don’t interpret themselves, right? So it’s also interpretation not just if you have a writing, but also if you have some kind of material remain. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• Sometimes people say that there’s lots of references to Jesus outside the Christian sources, the Gospels, and it’s actually not true. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• There’s no such thing as an unbiased source. If somebody decides to write something about someone, they’re doing it for a reason. And if they’ve got a reason, they’ve got a bias. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• It’s not that there are such things as unbiased sources. It’s that you have to compare sources with one another and to try and figure out what the biases are so you can get beneath them. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• If you’ve got two sources that flat out contradict each other, they both can’t be historically accurate. Either one is accurate and the other’s not, or they’re both inaccurate—but they both can’t be accurate historically. — @BartEhrman @theb4np
• You know, they’re called gospels. They’re not called histories. — @BartEhrman @theb4np

In her sermon this past Sunday, guest preacher Leah Martens (Lead Pastor at Haven Berkeley Faith Community) explored the meaning of Jesus's "Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector" (Luke 18:9-14) for our world today. 

Leah spoke about the ways that superficial readings of this passage (where we automatically identify ourselves as the "good guy" tax collector) have led us to miss the challenge of Jesus’s words for us today and have also contributed to antisemitic narratives (by promoting stereotypes about the Pharisees and Judaism as a whole). 

By diving deeper into the parable’s original context, Leah was able to illuminate the ways that this passage invites us to reject bounded-set mindsets in favor of centered-set approaches to life and faith; the ways that Jesus invites us to focus less on who is in vs. out, good vs. bad, and more on what will help us move toward alignment with the ways of the Divine.

If you appreciated Leah's exploration of this parable, then we think you’ll enjoy this book by Amy-Jill Levine: Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. Details are included below. Feel free to check out the copy from the River Lending Library!

Or, alternatively, you may enjoy this podcast episode from Amy-Jill Levine and The Bible for Normal People: "Episode 278: Amy-Jill Levine – Who Are the Pharisees Actually?"

About the Book
The renowned biblical scholar, author of The Misunderstood Jew, and general editor for The Jewish Annotated New Testament interweaves history and spiritual analysis to explore Jesus’ most popular teaching parables, exposing their misinterpretations and making them lively and relevant for modern readers.

Jesus was a skilled storyteller and perceptive teacher who used parables from everyday life to effectively convey his message and meaning. Life in first-century Palestine was very different from our world today, and many traditional interpretations of Jesus’ stories ignore this disparity and have often allowed anti-Semitism and misogyny to color their perspectives.

In this wise, entertaining, and educational book, Amy-Jill Levine offers a fresh, timely reinterpretation of Jesus’ narratives. In Short Stories by Jesus, she analyzes these “problems with parables,” taking readers back in time to understand how their original Jewish audience understood them. Levine reveals the parables’ connections to first-century economic and agricultural life, social customs and morality, Jewish scriptures and Roman culture. With this revitalized understanding, she interprets these moving stories for the contemporary reader, showing how the parables are not just about Jesus, but are also about us—and when read rightly, still challenge and provoke us two thousand years later.

About Amy-Jill Levine
Amy Jill Levine (“AJ”) is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, at Vanderbilt.

Her publications include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi; six children’s books (with Sandy Sasso); The Gospel of Luke (with Ben Witherington III, the first biblical commentary by a Jew and an Evangelical); The Jewish Annotated New Testament (co-edited with Marc Brettler), The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (with Marc Brettler), The Pharisees (co-edited with Joseph Sievers), and thirteen edited volumes of the Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature.

Along with Introduction to the Old Testament for the Teaching Company, her Beginner’s Guide series for Abingdon Press includes Sermon on the Mount, Light of the World, Entering the Passion of Jesus, The Difficult Words of Jesus, Witness at the Cross, and Signs and Wonders. The first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the first winner of the Seelisberg Prize for Jewish-Christian Relations, AJ describes herself as an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who works to counter biblical interpretations that exclude and oppress.

On Sunday, Maddie preached about what it means to be a community that doesn’t run on crisis mode. We looked at the ways urgency, pressure, and anxiety shape so much of our daily life, and how easily those patterns seep into our relationships, our work, and even our churches. Many of us know what it’s like to feel as if everything depends on us — as if the only way to keep things from falling apart is to push harder, say yes more often, and carry a weight that was never ours to begin with. The sermon invited us to imagine a different way of living together. We turned to the story of the Israelites in Exodus 16, newly freed from Pharaoh but still carrying the habits of slavery in their bodies. Instead of demanding more production or more effort, God meets them with manna — a daily provision that teaches them to live at a new pace. And we looked at Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, where he encourages early Christian communities to practice generosity not from guilt or fear, but from confidence in God’s abundance. In both stories, we see a God who leads people out of crisis and into trust, out of anxiety and into shared life. This week’s resources invite us deeper into those themes.

The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity
In this article, Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann offers a strikingly clear vision of the same dynamic we explored on Sunday. He describes how the Bible tells a story shaped by the generosity of God — a story where creation is blessed, where manna falls each morning, and where communities share what they have because grace keeps showing up. In contrast, he describes the “myth of scarcity,” the story our world tells us over and over again: that there is not enough, that we must compete, that security comes through hoarding, urgency, and control.

What I (Maddie) found most compelling is how Brueggemann connects these themes across the whole arc of Scripture. The manna story becomes part of a larger pattern: God continually inviting people to trust that there will be enough for today. And the early church’s practice of generosity becomes a quiet rebellion against the empire’s logic of fear. This is the same invitation we heard in the sermon — to live not as people driven by crisis but as people grounded in God’s abundance, able to give and receive without anxiety.

As you read, notice any places where the “myth of scarcity” feels familiar in your own life. Where do urgency, competition, or fear shape the way you move through the world? And what might it look like to lean into a different story this week?