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Podcast: The Bible as Literature
Episode: Don't Be Fooled by the Crowds
Description: People deal with the miracles and parables of Jesus as biblical vignettes that can be extracted from the gospels and presented on their own. Biblical scholars refer to these vignettes as "pericopes," literally, a section of the Bible that has been cut out and extracted from the narrative. The problem, of course, is that a section of the Bible, like a sentence or a single word, when taken out of context, loses its meaning. Nowhere is this more evident than in the healing of the Paralytic in Mark. If we hear the parable without the urgency and emphasis of...