Intro to NT Week 3 & 4

C.J. Wilson

C.J. Wilson

— 2 min read
Intro to NT Week 3 & 4

The third week of my course started with us returning to Wieliczka which has both made some aspects easier, and others more difficult. On the positives, I've found it less guilt inducing to work on my assignments or writing for myself rather than work (My haphazard routine of writing before my daughter wakes has restarted but of course depends on whether my daughter sleeps in or not). At the same time, with fewer people around, there's no assitance with our general housekeeping and child care.

So things are going about the same.

Submitting an assignment

I had held off submitting my first assignment as I wanted to make sure that I had done the task properly and to relook at it with fresh eyes. It helped that the assignment was listed as ungraded and so I felt able to perhaps upload in the wrong format. Sill this felt like a significant step and an really great achievement to make.

The Transfiguration

My second assignment has been to write a precis on the transfiguration. I've now probably read this passage about 50 times in the last two weeks, looked at the surrounding text at least 10 times and spend hours just thinking about what is going on here. While there have been passages which have caught me and made me think, I really don't think I've ever looked at a passage as deeply as this.

I've deliberately tried to avoid commentaries so that I can go through the process on my own, which I believe is the intended aim of this task, but I'm looking forward to looking through some afterwards and seeing what other people have seen in this passage.

One of the most significant things I've noticed is that this section fufils a real role in the bigger narrative. It seems like there was a specific reason Matthew writes about this and it appears at this point (and Luke writes a very different version based on his reason for writing).

In the past, I had looked at this section and seen it as a moment when Jesus reveals his glory and perhaps is comforted by Moses and Elijah before he goes to Jerusalem (based of Luke's version) but in Matthew I notice how this is evidence that Jesus is not just the Messiah but the Son of God and how this sign was given to the one who believed and not to the pharisees who demanded it.

Online only

My institute made the decision to move to online only my class and are sticking with this indefinitely at the moment but investigating the new Austrian regulations. I'm really curious to see how this will affect the course delivery. Although there are some online assignments in the moodle, a significant amount of the material which isn't online and was due to be face-to-face.

I'm sure more materials and assignments will be placed online and I saw a mention of zoom calls which could be very interesting, so I'm not worried but interested to see the format the rest of the materials take.

Interesting reads/ listen

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