What Does Bible Study Mean To Be A Christian In Today's World?

This Bible study is designed for a group of students that will convene every Saturday evening for sixty minutes. The students will range in age from thirteen to adulthood. The Bible Study is at Springville United Methodist Church in Marion, South Carolina. The class will assemble inside the fellowship hall.

All students will encounter the same text and issues at the same time and engage in critical dialogue. The Bible Study will thrive on oral debates of the most difficult questions about Jesus’ experiences. What does Jesus expect of us and what does it mean to be a Christian in today’s world? The Bible Study is designed to cultivate a critical and creative intellectual debate that students will be able to employ in the pursuit of meaningful

The narrative tells how the Messiah, Jesus, rejected by Israel, finally sends the disciples to preach his Gospel to the whole world. The McCarthur Study Bible records that, “The canonicity and Matthew authorship of this Gospel were unchallenged in the early church. Among the four Gospels, which are the only indisputable ones in the Church of God under heavens I have learned by tradition that the first was written by Matthew.” He was once a Publican, but afterwards an apostle of Jesus Christ, and it was prepared for the converts from

The New Testament books which included the Gospels were placed in varying orders in early manuscript. Matthew was always first. It was also the most quoted by the early church fathers. The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary indicates, “Sometime after 70 CE the Gospel of Mark arrived in the Matthean Community, was accepted as part of the community’s own sacred tradition, and it was used in its life and worship. Mark had been written in and for a Gentile Christian Community no longer living under the rule of Torah (Mark 7:1-23). Matthew’s Jewish – Christian Community carried on a mission to Gentiles and was open to the insights of Gentile Christianity. The narrative of Mark became a fundamental part of the Matthean Church’s way of telling the Jesus story, along with its characteristics emphasis: Jesus the miracle worker; Jesus the crucified and risen one; Jesus the inaugurator of the Gentile mission. If the Gospel of Mark was already associated with Peter, this strengthened the emphasis on Peter as the apostle, already present in the Matthean stream of tradition, and facilitating Mark’s acceptance as a normative Christian text for Matthean’s Church. Matthew did not merely “combine” Q and Mark. He made the Markan narrative basic, inserting his Q and M materials into the Markan story life, to which they were subordinated. Matthew is an elaboration of new interpretation of the Markan narrative, not of