De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

De heilige Lucas schildert de Madonna - St. Luke Painting the Virgin—Maarten van Heemskerck, Oil on Panel, 1532 The Acts of the Apostles  is the second book in a two-volume work comprising of the Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles. Acts begins with the words  “In my earlier work Theophilus, I dealt with everything Jesus had done and taught from the beginning, until the day he gave his instructions to the apostles he had chosen through the Holy Spirit, and was taken up to heaven”  (Acts 1:1) which implies that it is a continuation of the Gospel. Brown notes in  An Introduction to the New Testament  that the unity of the two volumes is  “maintained by the overwhelming majority of scholars, based on the continuity of style, thought and plan.”  (p.225). The title in Greek is Acts of Apostles and it falls into a genre of Hellenistic writing called  Praxeis , that is “deeds”, which often recounted histories of great men like Hannibal or A...

Welcome to this, the twenty-fifth of my reflections on the theology of the Sunday readings at Mass. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog. I sincerely hope that this reflection will inspire you. You might find that it answers a few questions you may have, but most of all I hope that it will show you how fantastic Sacred Scripture is and perhaps enable you to share some of my love and passion for the Bible as you begin to comprehend how layered and multi-faceted it is, and what a carefully considered part of the Mass the readings are. If you want to know how these posts came about, please read my first post in this series  here . I would like to think this regular blog would be a great help to anyone who reads at Mass, to enable them to foster a deeper understanding of the message they are trying to impart to the congregation. There are several different ways to read this post. I would suggest the first thing to do is to look at the relevant ...

St. Luke with his symbol, the winged ox on the Cathedral Portal at Sienna. I've been working hard on this week's exploration of Sunday's Scripture and reflecting on what's being said. This week we move away from the Gospel of Mark, with whom we have been travelling for a number of weeks, and take up Luke's narrative. We haven't had Luke since I started writing my reflections so I have written a short survey of the book as is my habit. Obviously, this sets one's mind racing in various directions. I remain fascinated with Scripture, especially it's extraordinary depth, and part of my prelim' notes how Luke shapes his account. I thought it might be useful to post a concise examination of how this theological shaping (which is evident in each of the Synoptics) effects the historic veracity of the Gospels.  It can be demonstrated that the Evangelists carefully chose their material and that they have varied their accounts to accentuate them...