Topic: News Items
This is a post from Scot McKnight's Blog, "Jesus Creed." If you can tape this show, or find the time to watch it, I would like to spend a little time ourselves discussing it since our church model is trying to leap the enlightenment wall as rediscover what Jesus really meant, and how the early church followed His "Way."Here is what Dr. McKnight posted this morning...
If you have a chance, I recommend each of you carve out tonight, from 7-9pm, to watch CNN. The show is called After Jesus: The First Christians, and it is an excellent and stimulating presentation of the first four centuries of the Christian faith. CNN kindly sent me an advanced copy and I have watched it in its entirety.
Tomorrow morning I would like to begin a conversation on this blog with those who watched the show. (It will also be replayed Friday Dec 22 at 10pm and 1am; Saturday Dec 23 and Sunday Dec 24 at 8pm and 12am.)
Here are some highlights and an indication of the shape and content of the program:
CNN interviewed Bart Ehrman, Claire Pfann, Amy-Jill Levine, Robin Griffith-Jones, Lawrence Schiffmann, Richard Freund, Marvin Meyer and Gerald O'Collins. Ehrman appears the most.
The visual images are brilliant, as always for CNN, and there are an abundance of graphics, icons, artwork, pictures, all done with lovely color and texture.
The emphasis, to be expected, is diversity in the first four centuries, with a solid segment devoted to the gnostic threat to orthodoxy.
I won't give away too much of my own view here, but the essential story line is one familiar to those who have engaged the public debate since Dan Brown's DaVinci Code and Bart Ehrman's numerous publications. In my estimation, the silencing of the voices of Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Athanasius is telling.
