patty kirk

patty kirk lying down, getting up, sitting at home, walking down the road doing deuteronomy 6:7

Thursday, February 28, 2013

people everywhere

Me: Babe, d’you know what the Decapolis was?

Kris: No.

Me (surprised: Kris knows everything there is to know about history, modern or ancient, but, apparently, not this): I looked it up. It means The Ten Cities and refers to these ten cities in what would now be the Jordan area that amounted to the main Greek and Roman cities in that area in the early Common Era. That means the non-Semitic cities.

Kris: What about it?

Me: Well, it says in Matthew’s gospel that, when Jesus started going around healing, people from not only Galilee and Jerusalem and Judea followed him but also people from the Decapolis. That's Greeks and Romans. Right from the beginning. That's, like, people from far away.

(I went and got my Bible and showed him: “Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him” (Matthew 4:25 NIV).

Kris: Yes, we tend to think Jesus healed people to help them, but actually he did it so that  people everywhere would believe.

Me: But he told a lot of the people he healed not to tell anyone, so he couldn’t have healed them to spread the word.

Kris: No, he healed those ones out of compassion.

Me: Ah.

1 comment:

  1. What about it? - That makes it sound like if Kris doesn’t already know about it then it isn’t worth knowing. ;-)

    I thought A Case for Christ was a good book. One of the rationales he gives for why the Gospels are believable is that the Jewish community never attempted to refute Christian claims that Jesus performed amazing miracles. This is pretty significant since the Jews in general and Josephus in particular made a pretty through historical record of that time. Jesus' miracles were well known and undisputed.

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