The Gospel Truth : Rejecting The Miracles As They Embrace The Message, Scholars Seek The Historic Jesus
THE FIRST TIME I WENT LOOKING FOR the gospel truth, I got lost.
I was a 12-year-old altar boy, tremulously holding the heavy, red prayer book for Father O’Brien as he prepared to read aloud from the Gospel of Saint Matthew. For an altar boy, this was always a big moment, as close as you’d come to a co-starring role in the great mystery play of the Roman Catholic Mass. With your back to the congregation, you’d gently nestle the massive gilt-edged book against your heaving chest and hold it open for the priest who intoned the Gospel. For the next several minutes, you were little more than a glorified book stand, but it was impossible not to be gripped by the power of the words received under those circumstances. Father O’Brien’s softly ancient face was about two feet away from your own, and it always seemed that his words--the words of Jesus--were flaming arrows aimed straight at your imperfect heart. If, in a moment of shame, you glanced down at the book as the priest was reading, you’d see the words of Jesus printed in red, searing a crimson trail across the page.
One Sunday, the words of Matthew 18:21-22 seemed to speak to me with unusual clarity:
“Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord if my brother sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’
“Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven.’ ”
For me, it was the long-hoped-for chink in the armor of Christian charity. For the next several days, I carefully counted the schoolyard offenses committed against me, in silent anticipation of the 491st sin, the one which, according to the inerrant arithmetic of the New Testament, I didn’t have to forgive. For a while, I could hardly wait to dispense some real biblical justice, smite my enemy and cast him into the unquenchable fire, or at least into the big thorn bush behind school. But as it turned out, I lost heart in the count long before I got to 491. It seemed too small-minded, even then, to hold an eternal grudge against someone just because he butted in front of me in line.
My momentary view of Jesus, as a kind of Cosmic CPA in charge of Sin Counting, didn’t ring true with the portrait of the infinitely forgiving Jesus painted so luminously in other Gospel accounts. It was my first struggle with the words ascribed to Jesus, a hint that The Gospel Truth could be very different from what the words of the Gospel seemed to be saying literally.
In a considerably more learned fashion, New Testament scholars today are searching for their own Gospel Truths. During the past few years, scholars have taken a new look at the New Testament and early Christian scriptures, viewing them through the lenses of history, social anthropology and literary analysis. The study has led to a consensus among scholars that differences, possibly significant ones, exist between what the historical Jesus is likely to have said and done and what was recorded by his followers. Their goal, in biblical terms, is to separate the wheat from the chaff.
“For Christians today, I think the quest for the historical Jesus is part of being a 20th-Century believer as opposed to, say, a 13th-Century believer,” says Father John Meier, a Catholic priest and professor of New Testament studies at Catholic University of America in Washington and author of “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.”
“Every age has to somehow weld together the prevailing cultural mood with the message of Christianity. We live in a period marked by a historical consciousness and historical change. As a result, I don’t think that educated Christians have fully assimilated what their Christian commitment means if they have not probed the question of the historical Jesus.”
In the secular world of publishing, Jesus is now a hot item. A. N. Wilson’s “Jesus: A Life” speculates that Jesus was married, a scholar rather than a carpenter, who didn’t seek to overthrow Jewish law as much as try to make his contemporaries true to it. “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant,” by John Dominic Crossan, a former priest, paints Jesus as a savvy Jewish peasant preaching a gospel of social and economic equality, and Meier’s book seeks common ground in the often-contradictory conclusions reached by questers seeking the truth about Jesus.
For many Christians, this scholarly search can only tell part of the story. Archeological finds such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christian tracts unearthed in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 have given scholars a clearer picture of everyday life and customs in 1st-Century Palestine, and that information, along with sociology and semantics, may be a useful tool for chiseling a sharper picture of what Jesus said and did. But it cannot address Jesus’ larger significance for the millions of Christians who have searched for him, prayed to him and even died for him. Nevertheless, plenty of staunch Christians have affirmed the importance of the quest for the historical Jesus, adhering to Thomas Aquinas’ distinction between what can be uncovered by reason and what can be affirmed by faith.
“I think American theology has really been directionless for the past 30 years, and there’s a feeling that it’s now time to go back to basics,” says Stephen Patterson, a professor of New Testament studies at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis and a member of the Jesus Seminar, a Sonoma-based study group of about 150 scholars nationwide who debate and actually vote on the authenticity of various Gospel passages. “And for Christianity, going back to basics means going back to the words of Jesus.”
That, of course, is what some denominations believe they’ve always done--with no help from the scholars. “They’re a bunch of damn fools,” fumes the Rev. R. L. Hymers, pastor of Fundamentalist Bible Tabernacle in Los Angeles. “The work they do is pure guesswork. How do they know what Jesus said 2,000 years later any better than the Bible? It’s really a matter of whether you believe in God or not, and a lot of these professors come into it with a great deal of doubt about God.”
Other Christian denominations, while not insisting that every word of the Gospels is literally inerrant, nonetheless believe that the New Testament is an inspired document that faithfully records the life of Jesus. “While not everything in the Gospels may have come from the lips of the historical Jesus, we have confidence that Gospels are reliable in terms of faith,” says Father Michael Walsh, a professor of New Testament studies at St. John’s Catholic Seminary in Camarillo. “The Gospels record without error the truths necessary for our salvation.”
Yet since the Enlightenment, when the sciences broke free of church influence, scholars have struggled with the idea that the Bible is an imperfect document. Thomas Jefferson, America’s first great New Testament interpreter, took a pair of scissors to his King James Bible in 1819 and pasted into a blank notebook only the verses he thought came from the mouth of Jesus, leaving out material he sensed had been added by “very inferior minds.”
“It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Adams. (Jefferson’s work is currently available as “The Jefferson Bible,” published by Beacon Press.) In the late 19th Century, novelist Leo Tolstoy also produced his own version of the Gospels, and in the 20th Century, Albert Schweitzer’s “The Quest of the Historical Jesus” was an influential look at the history of the Jesus tradition. Today’s New Testament scholars pursue the same elusive Holy Grail.
AMONG THE NEW APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF JESUS, THE WORK OF the Jesus Seminar is perhaps the most audacious, not so much for its conclusions as its methods. Twice a year, Jesus Seminar scholars gather to debate and vote on the authenticity of Gospel passages. The scholars represent a cross section of top New Testament academics, many drawn from major universities and seminaries. There are believers and unbelievers, clergy and laity, Catholics, Protestants and several Jewish members. Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven (“Robocop,” “Total Recall,” “Basic Instinct”), who’s attended several sessions, says he’ll use the seminar’s findings in a film he plans to make about the life of Jesus.
After all the arguments about a particular biblical passage have been presented around a U-shaped table, each verse is put to a vote. Seminar members cast their votes by dropping one of four different-colored beads--red, pink, gray or black--into a voting box. A red bead signifies that a scholar believes there’s enough historical, literary, sociological and textual evidence to state that Jesus said the words in a particular passage attributed to him. A pink bead means that the scholar thinks Jesus probably said them; a gray bead, Jesus probably didn’t say them; a black bead, Jesus definitely didn’t. The votes are tabulated and averaged, and the results of the voting have been published in a series of books by Polebridge Press. In the books, each Gospel verse is printed in red, pink, gray or black, depending on how the scholars voted. This unusual mixture--part biblical scholarship, part network exit poll--makes some uneasy, including a few of the participants.
“Initially, there were some nervous titters when we voted,” admits Robert Funk, 66, a retired religious academic who founded the Jesus Seminar in 1985 as a kind of Jesus think tank. “We were like a bunch of school kids the first time we voted. Some of the scholars still don’t like the idea of voting in public, but we’ve formed a fine collegial group. A lot of the calls are close and produce heated debate.”
The heaviest opposition usually comes from brimstone-wielding critics outside the group. “I’ve had people call me a pawn of Satan or say I’m Satan himself,” the bushy-browed Funk says with a grin that’s more impish than satanic. Indeed, Funk, who was raised a Protestant and still considers himself a Christian (but not without a long explanation), seems to revel in presenting the often bone-dry conclusions of New Testament scholars as provocatively as possible in public. Rather than simply stating that Jesus was a charismatic figure who enjoyed the company of people and was enjoyed by others--something with which even the strictest fundamentalist would agree--Funk is fond of calling Jesus “something of a party animal.” For some, that lends Jesus too much of a “Wayne’s World” quality: Jesus as Totally Excellent Being. But Funk makes no apology for such rhetorical excesses. It’s time, he says, to drag New Testament scholarship out of the musty confines of academia and breathe some new life into it.
“Some people ask, ‘How can you determine the truth by voting?’ ” Funk says. “Well, of course you can’t. But the sciences all operate by voting, by reaching a consensus. Even the editorial panels that translate new editions of the Bible have to vote on controversies. But you never see the voting; you ‘re only allowed to see the results. With the Jesus Seminar, the public gets to see the voting. The fellows of the Jesus Seminar are like most academics: scared to death to come out with a judgment in public. This is a way of forcing them to tell the public what they know.”
So far, the seminar has published the results of two major studies--on the Gospel of St. Mark and one on the 60-odd parables attributed to Jesus in scriptures. Although it’s difficult to imagine a roomful of lifelong academics agreeing on anything, there has been surprising concurrence at the extremes: that is, the reddest of the red, or authentic passages, and the blackest of the black, or inauthentic passages.
Scholars strain each verse through a critical mesh to make their evaluations--looking at other oral and written evidence of the period, social and political practices of the day, anthropological and sociological evidence and literary and editorial clues buried in the original texts--before voting on the authenticity of a passage or parable. Jesus’ authentic parables, scholars say, bear an identifiable handprint. They are stories drawn from everyday life that surprise the listener, moral metaphors that often have no stated conclusion, so the listener is provoked into thought and action by their contemplation. Inauthentic parables, by contrast, usually leave little room for contemplation, are often harshly exclusionary and are sometimes stories already common in Roman and Jewish culture that were later adapted and put in the mouth of Jesus.
Jesus Seminar scholars believe that the Parable of the Leaven recounted in Matthew 13:33--”The kingdom of heaven is like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened”--best displays the qualities of an authentic parable of Jesus. Jesus uses the image of the leaven in a way that was probably shocking at the time. Judaism considered the leaven as a sign of corruption, while the absence of leaven was a symbol of holiness. The parable, the scholars concur, provides “a surprising reversal of expectations,” a distinctive feature of Jesus’ parables, with the “leaven representing the Kingdom of God.”
At the other extreme, the Jesus Seminar allotted the most black beads to the parable of the fish net in Matthew 13:47-50: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; when it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into the vessels but threw away the bad. So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.”
This parable, the scholars say, probably arose from the early Christian movement’s desire to mark off its social boundaries from the larger world, resulting in a parable marked by its preoccupation with separating the good from the bad. The fact that this separation takes place at the end of an age is a typical theme in Matthew, say scholars, reflecting an apocalyptic world view not espoused by Jesus. In addition, the parable bears a resemblance to an Aesop’s fable that would have been familiar to people of Jesus’ time. In the seminar’s view, the author of Matthew may have revised the fable “to suit his interest in the last judgment.”
In general, Jesus Seminar scholars have tended to view passages that portray Jesus as a loving, compassionate, but not-always-congenial teacher who cut against the social grain of his time as being authentic, while rejecting verses that paint Jesus as harshly condemnatory, apocalyptic or messianic or as a supernatural miracle worker. Rejected are most of the miracles attributed to Jesus (some healings and exorcisms remain) and any statement in which Jesus predicts his own crucifixion or resurrection. The Resurrection--for many Christians the cornerstone of their religion--is viewed by a majority of Jesus Seminar scholars as an inauthentic addition by later followers.
“The Resurrection accounts in the Gospels differ in details, but to say it didn’t happen would mean your faith is built on a fraud,” Walsh argues, echoing many mainstream Christian clerics. “With all of our scholarly pretensions about objectivity, I think people still tend to create the Jesus who’s most comfortable to us.”
Many seminar members insist that questioning the authenticity of certain portions of the Gospels isn’t meant as a refutation of Christianity. Calling a Gospel passage “inauthentic” doesn’t invalidate it any more than believing in evolution robs the six-day creation story in Genesis of its power and larger meaning. Indeed, some scholars have found that critical study of the Gospels has strengthened their faith. “I sense a lot of hunger among church congregations for some straight talk,” says seminar member Patterson, who also teaches adult education classes for the United Church of Christ. “When I sit down and talk to people, it’s the teachings of Jesus and the way he interacts with people that really gets them going. I think people sometimes have a harder time believing Jesus was a human being than believing he was divine.”
Some Christian clergy members anguish over the new critical studies of scripture, uncertain of how acutely to question what they consider sacred scripture. One pastor of a West L.A. Conservative Baptist church, who requested anonymity fearing that “some people in my congregation might not understand,” says that he finds more merit in the work of the Jesus Seminar and other scholars than he’s willing to admit from the pulpit. “But I do think some scholars have lost sight of the limitations of the historical-critical method,” the pastor says. “I think the writer of the Gospel of John, for example, probably put the sayings of Jesus in his own words. But I don’t think that he or any of the Gospel writers actually contradicted what Jesus said.” After a pause, he continues: “But I have to admit that I really wrestle with the whole issue, especially since so many fundamentalists insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible. Some of them really seem to fear the truth.”
“DO YOU THINK THAT JESUS HAD FOREknowledge of his crucifixion?”
A woman in the crowd poses the question to Stephen Mitchell--a poet, translator and scholar who last year published “The Gospel According to Jesus,” the author’s version of the authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus. At the question, a murmur ripples through the crowd of more than 100, then subsides in hushed anticipation. For what seems like a long time, there is only the fathomless silence that envelops great mysteries.
“No,” Mitchell says in a confident voice. “I don’t think Jesus prophesied his crucifixion, at least as he’s portrayed as doing in some Gospel accounts. But I do think Jesus sensed he was in great danger by the time he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, and that’s why I included that story in the book.”
The standing-room-only audience has packed a Berkeley bookstore annex to hear Mitchell discuss his book and spiritual quest for Jesus, displaying the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved these days for political sex scandals. More questions rain down on Mitchell: “Did Jesus speak in rhyme like today’s rap singers?” (probably not); “Did Jesus live for a time in India?” (almost definitely not); “Was Jesus worshiped as the Messiah during his lifetime?” (hard to know, but it’s an interesting question). There are still a dozen hands raised when the questioning comes to a close, and as the crowd files out the door, the sibilant “ S ‘ s “ in the name of Jesus can be heard above the hubbub. A few minutes later, at a book signing, a woman approaches Mitchell with tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Your book was incredibly healing for me,” the woman says, clasping the book like a life preserver. Mitchell bows his head in wordless empathy.
Countless authors have written about Jesus, but few seem to have plucked such a resonant chord with readers as the 49-year-old Mitchell. He has written critically acclaimed translations of the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, the Tao Te Ching and the Book of Job, in addition to his own poetry, and brings a poet’s ear to his task. Unlike some studies of Jesus that become bogged down in bloodless academic disputation, “The Gospel According to Jesus” is a work of heart.
The book contains Mitchell’s own version of the authentic Gospels, with the life and teachings of Jesus compressed into just 30 pages, along with accompanying notes, meditative commentaries and a selection of other authors’ writings about Jesus. Central to the book is Mitchell’s distinction between the loving, forgiving, light-filled Jesus described in many New Testament accounts and a narrow-minded, vindictive, messianic Jesus found elsewhere. (Mitchell cites Gospel accounts in which “Jesus” calls his enemies “a brood of vipers” (Matthew 12:34) and “snakes” (Matthew 23:33) and says that anyone who blasphemes the Holy Spirit can never have “forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin.” (Mark 3:29)) Much like Jefferson before him, Mitchell took a spiritual X-Acto knife to the Gospels, slicing out what he judged to be early church polemic. Gone are all references to Jesus as Messiah; gone, too, are the Resurrection and most of the miracles except for the healings. What’s left, Mitchell says, are the essential teachings of Jesus, a Gospel not about Jesus but of Jesus.
“I wasn’t so much searching for Jesus as uncovering the Jesus I already knew by heart,” Mitchell says. “It’s as though a great poem had been mixed with some very inferior work, and every 10 lines or so had to be selected.”
Public reaction to Mitchell’s insights into the life and words of Jesus has been predictably varied. Quite a few credit him with giving them back the Jesus they once felt they had to abandon. But several fundamentalist critics at public appearances have accused Mitchell of being part of a New Age Satanism, or of being the horned one himself. “His so-called scholarship is nothing new,” says the Rev. Warren Angel, interim pastor of Pilgrim Congregational Church in San Jose. “Like a lot of biblical scholars, he’s just deleting what he doesn’t believe in. I do believe in biblical criticism, but I start from the premise that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ. I have a hard time with someone coming along 2,000 years later and saying the Gospels are fraudulent.”
Mitchell didn’t expect to write a book about Jesus and escape controversy. “I had to feel in my bones that the book was as much a gift to people who hated and feared it as it was to people who were ready for it and could receive it,” he says.
Critics who would paint him as an arrogant nonbeliever will find his demeanor unsettling. Mitchell is no debunker; he’s far more interested in what can be affirmed about Jesus than what can be denied. He is is deferential, almost shy, quietly confident but not affixed to his opinions.
Mitchell seems at first to be an unlikely person to make strong statements about Christianity’s primary figure. Raised in a Reform Jewish family in Brooklyn, Mitchell first encountered the words of Jesus when he was 9 years old, attending a nominally Protestant private elementary.
“As part of the chapel service, the headmaster would read a passage from the Gospels,” Mitchell recalls in a soft tone in which one might remember a first love. “And something in those readings really touched my heart very deeply. I especially remember the parable of the prodigal son. At the time, I felt a conflict in loyalty. As a Jew, I felt I shouldn’t be attracted to this somehow. So the solution I reached as a 9-year-old kid was that during the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, I kept silent. That was my gesture toward my family.”
Like some of his contemporaries, Mitchell spent the late ‘60s and early ‘70s on a spiritual quest. Unlike others, he has made a life of that search. He attended Yale graduate school and majored in comparative literature, then embarked on a 14-year-long course in Zen training, during which he lived on about $3,000 a year. (When pressed, Mitchell describes his religious tradition today as “Judeo-Zen.”) His spiritual quest convinced him that the supreme teachings of all great religions, while differing in emphasis, are in complete harmony.
“What I found by following the path was the answer to Job’s questions and the key to Jesus’ descriptions of the Kingdom of God,” Mitchell says. “It’s a sense of absolute fulfillment, a completion of the heart that never leaves you, not for one single moment afterward.”
Mitchell’s Jesus is a luminous spiritual master who attained a divine awareness available to all--a Kingdom of Heaven within--but realized by only a handful of extraordinary individuals. (Along with Jesus, Mitchell would place at least Buddha and Lao-tzu, the writer of the Tao Te Ching, on about the same spiritual plane.) At the same time, Jesus remained human, Mitchell says, making his teachings more meaningful than words coming from a supernatural figure.
According to Mitchell, the detail of Jesus’ personal life that most informed his teaching was that he grew up as an illegitimate child. (Mitchell takes pains to note that it’s debatable whether Jesus was in fact born out of wedlock. What’s not debatable is that Jesus would have been perceived by the people of his day as illegitimate, and his mother’s pregnancy would have been a scandal.) In 1st-Century Jewish culture, illegitimacy was a lifelong stigma, a sin that could never be washed away.
Viewed in that light, Mitchell says, Jesus’ Gospel of forgiveness takes on added meaning. The forgiveness Jesus extends to the adulterous woman described in the Gospel of John matches the mercy he has already extended to his own mother and to the unloved parts of himself springing from the shame of illegitimacy.
Mitchell insists that his insights about Jesus are “nothing new” but draw on the work of such figures as Jefferson, Tolstoy and Nietzsche. He considers Jefferson’s insight to be particularly “dazzling,” especially for his time.
In general, Mitchell excises more material from the traditional Gospel than Jefferson did. Jefferson includes both Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount (the section that begins, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . ,” commonly known as the Beatitudes) and Luke’s account of a similar but shorter Sermon on the Plain. Mitchell believes, as do many scholars today, that they are different editorial compilations of the same oral teachings, and so Mitchell presents a composite version. In the process, Mitchell drops two of the Beatitudes found in the traditional New Testament in which the “meek” and the “persecuted” are singled out to be blessed.
“I dropped the blessing of the persecuted because I think that was added later to reflect the historical situation of the early church,” Mitchell says. “They found themselves persecuted and fleshed out the Beatitudes to reflect that. And ‘Blessed are the meek,’ I feel, reflects a very different attitude from Jesus. There’s a difference between meekness and humility. Jesus was certainly not meek.”
Some biblical scholars find such decisions maddeningly arbitrary and consider Mitchell to be something of an interloper in their field. “The major problem I have with (Mitchell’s book) is the methodology: There is none,” says author John Dominic Crossan, a professor of Biblical studies at De Paul University. “I like what he’s done, but it’s really no different than a fundamentalist saying, ‘Well, I like this part, so I’ll leave it in.’ Unless you come up with a method that has some integrity, then it’s a game we can all play.”
The charge that Mitchell’s paring of the Gospels is a subjective exercise disguised as scholarship seems to rankle him much more than any fundamentalist fulmination about his work. It’s the only time his deep umber eyes project anything but Judeo-Zen serenity.
“Some scholars snort and think that what I’m doing is very subjective, kind of making my own whim into rules of evidence,” Mitchell says, his tone sharpening. “But genuine spiritual training is a training of the intuition; it’s the opposite of subjective. It’s something that any mature person within different traditions can use and get to the same place. So I’m sure a great Sufi master or a great Zen master or Lao-tzu looking at the Gospels would see the same Gospels I see as genuine. Once the answer came to me, I felt it in my bones. I could see Jesus.”
And with that last thought, Mitchell’s eyes become placid pools again, a becalmed Sea of Galilee.
WHAT’S STRIKING ABOUT the search for gospel truths is how the same path can lead in so many directions. Fundamentalist and conservative Christians look for the truth in the words of the King James Bible, believing each word to be without error. Liberal Christians look for the truth in the spirit that runs through the Gospels, not in the literal details. Christians in the middle are still working it out. New Testament scholars see the truth only in what they believe they can verify through critical analysis.
A church full of believers may hear a Gospel account and be unmoved; an unbeliever may stumble upon Jesus’ message of forgiveness and have his heart changed forever. Thus, even many of the priests and ministers I talked to who strongly disagreed with many of the conclusions drawn by scholars were heartened to see people talking passionately about the Gospels, rather than passively receiving them. It does seem strange that a figure of Jesus’ historical importance, who nearly everyone would agree has influenced everything from the moral code of Western society to the way the year is written at the bottom of this page, is rarely a topic of conversation anytime other than Sunday morning.
The portraits of Jesus that have emerged in recent years are remarkably varied. Authors have cast him as a political revolutionary, a magician, a Jewish peasant unwittingly caught up in a social revolution, a charismatic prophet foretelling the end of the world and a great spiritual master who overcame the stigma of illegitimacy. It’s as though Jesus is being viewed not under a microscope but through a kaleidoscope. And yet these divergent paths all seem to converge on the same irreducible Gospel Truths. The Kingdom of God is within you. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Forgive everyone unconditionally.
I was particularly interested to hear that most scholars agree on the interpretation of the “seventy times seven” verse from Matthew that had troubled me as an altar boy. (The only point of contention is that some scholars have Jesus saying we should forgive others “seventy seven times,” or even “seven times seven times,” which in my youth would have seemed far too easy.) Seven, it turns out, appears often in the Old and New Testament as a symbol of completion. In Genesis, God creates the world in six days, and rests on the seventh; the Book of Proverbs describes wisdom and “her seven pillars;” the Book of Revelation is full of symbolic sevens: seven seals, seven golden candlesticks, seven spirits of God, seven angels, seven last plagues.
In the context in which it was written, forgiving one’s neighbor “seventy times seven” times meant offering unlimited, unconditional forgiveness. Rather than counting the offenses committed against me, I should have been fervently not counting them. Gospel errors are often as big as Gospel Truths.