Read­ing Time: 2 minutes Intro­duc­tion When exactly was Jesus born? Pop­u­lar belief puts his birth on Decem­ber 25^th in the year 1 AD. The Gos­pels would have been the sources for the date of the birth of Jesus, but this seems not to be their interest. The Chris­ti­an (New) Test­a­ment gives no date or year for Jesus’ birth.  Mark the earli­est Gos­pel (writ­ten about 65–70 AD), begins with the bap­tism of an adult Jesus.  This sug­gests that the interest of the earli­est Chris­ti­ans was on the mis­sion of the Messiah…

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Read­ing Time: 2 minutes Intro­duc­tion Today is the last Sunday of Advent. Con­sequently, it is the last week before the Christ­mas cel­eb­ra­tions.  Since Christ-mass con­cerns the birth of Jesus, the choice of this Sunday Gos­pel is appro­pri­ate. The read­er is presen­ted with the mys­tery of the con­cep­tion of Jesus, whose birth will be cel­eb­rated next week Sunday, that is, on Christ­mas day.  Mary’s Pre­sumed Unfaith­ful­ness As stated above, accord­ing to the Hebrew Bible and in keep­ing to Jew­ish cul­ture, the Jew­ish weed­ing was pre­ceded by a peri­od of engage­ment called…

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Read­ing Time: 2 minutes Intro­duc­tion         In his book “The Quest for the Mes­si­ah”, J. Paint­er explores the seeth­ing and con­fused expect­a­tions of the first cen­tury and why John con­sider these so sig­ni­fic­ant and import­ant for any under­stand­ing of human life in the world. John places the search for the mes­si­ah at the incep­tion of the Gos­pel (cf. John 1:19–51). In John 1:19–20, the search for the mes­si­ah is clearly indic­ated. Here also, we find for the first time the Jew­ish term maµsûia gen­er­ally trans­lit­er­ated mes­si­as and nor­mally trans­lated in…

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Read­ing Time: 3 minutes Intro­duc­tion         Happy new month and wel­come to the month of Decem­ber, the month of the inaug­ur­a­tion of sal­va­tion! The gen­er­al mes­sage of the First Sunday of Advent was Jesus’ invit­a­tion to his dis­ciples and to all believ­ers to stay awake, to avoid being taken by sur­prise as in the day of Noah. In the reflec­tion of Last Sunday, I did say that “in the Scrip­tur­al under­stand­ing, being watch­ful implies not just mere care­ful­ness and alert­ness, but being just and right­eous. It is equi­val­ent to the…

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