Mary's House, Ephesus, Turkey. John W. Martens, January 16, 2006.

In January 2014, I and some of my colleagues will be going to Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir, Turkey to speak about Jesus in the Christian tradition with Muslim theologians. This is not the first foray of the Muslim-Christian Dialogue center of the University of St. Thomas with symposia and conferences engaging Muslim scholars overseas. Terry Nichols, Mike Hollerich and Bernie Brady met with Muslim theologians in Qom, Iran this past summer and they had met previously with the Iranian theologians in Rome. The Turkish theologians have also visited St. Paul, Minnesota to discuss theological issues in the past.

My task for this upcoming conference is to present a paper on the New Testament picture(s) of Jesus, which I am busily working on right now so that it can be translated into Turkish for January.  My approach is going to be threefold. I will first present aspects of Jesus’ humanity from the Gospels, based on a certain number of passages so that we have concrete texts to discuss and not just ideas. Second, I will focus on Jesus’ death and resurrection. I will contend that it was the actual experience of the risen Lord that lead first-century Jews who were monotheists to reconsider the nature of Jesus as not just human but divine, though the actual nature of the relationship of Jesus to God the Father is not worked out systematically in the New Testament. Finally, I will concentrate on some passages which indicate that Jesus is not just spoken of as divine, but that Christian prayer and worship even in the New Testament is being offered to Jesus as divine being.

Here is a question for you: are there certain passages that you think are essential to consider? I will be choosing passages from throughout the New Testament, so the Gospels, Paul’s letters, the general epistles, Hebrews, Acts, Revelation, are all in the discussion. I must limit the number of passages I discuss, however, both in terms of presentation of my paper and the subsequent discussion. The passages will fall into one of these three categories: Jesus’ humanity; the resurrection as the turning point in consideration of Jesus as divine; Jesus’ divinity as seen in prayer and worship of the earliest Christians. What passages do you think are essential and must be considered in this conversation with Muslim theologians? I will not mention any passages that I am using or considering right now (though I admit it will be hard to skip John 1 or Philippians 2:5-11) because I would love to hear from you.

 

John W. Martens

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John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.