Sublime

In the Gospels, Jesus encourages and nurtures women in numerous countercultural ways, again with one exception: he does not choose any to form part of his closest circle of twelve apostles.

Nevertheless, despite all these remarkable “advances” over his culture, Jesus never promotes full-fledged egalitarianism. Notwithstanding romantic portraits that paint him and his disciples as a company of equals,60 the Gospels unequivocally depict Jesus as an authority figure instructing others on how to live. He has an inner core of his three

When Jesus called the twelve disciples (His spiritual children) their primary calling was to “be with him”. (Mark 3v14).

We should not be surprised, then—though many in the church down through the years would be very surprised to hear this—that the early Christians understood their vocation as Jesus’s followers to include, as a central and load-bearing element, their own suffering, misunderstanding, and likely death.

and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. When Pilate, upon

Whereas Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written during the first century, the alternative gospels were not written until the first half of the second century.

If, however, we follow either Meyer or Sanders, and see Jesus’ aim as the restoration, in some sense, of Israel, beginning with the highly symbolic call of twelve disciples, then the apparently peculiar idea of Jesus ‘founding’ a community designed to outlast his death gives way to a more nuanced, and perfectly credible, first-century Jewish one:

As modern-day disciples, we also have a responsibility to share Jesus with others. As dads and husbands, that starts with our families. But it doesn’t stop there. The Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) challenges us to minister around the world. For some that means becoming a missionary. For others, it means sharing with our neighbors or

In not one case do we hear of any group, after the death of its leader, claiming that he was in any sense alive again, and that therefore Israel’s expectation had in some strange way actually come true. History therefore spotlights the question: what happened to make Jesus’ followers, from the very start, articulate such a claim and work out its