lineter sausage.

Carelessness, you may be an file of fire.

Welcome back to the Naked Bible Podcast.

In the last podcast episode, we continued our series on studying the Bible in light of

its various types of literature.

It's literary genres.

We're going to continue that effort in this episode and shift gears into the New Testament.

I'll be quoting from a couple of scholarly journal articles in this episode.

And so I've placed the references for those articles on the podcast website, www.nakedbiblepodcast.com

under the Bibliography and Resources tab by episode.

I want to look today at two familiar episodes in the life of Jesus, the incident where he

walks on the water and his disciples think they are seeing a ghost, and his appearances

to the disciples after his resurrection.

It may sound surprising, but the ancient world of which the New Testament was part actually

had many stories about ghosts and what scholars call post-mortem appearances of the dead.

As such, these sorts of stories, as scholars have collected and studied them, form genres.

And since they form genres, story types, so to speak, there are stock elements in each

of these genres that came to be expected by readers in the ancient world.

In other words, when someone wrote a ghost story, or a story about someone coming back from

the dead in the Greco-Roman period, there were expected components in those stories.

There was a way you wrote one if you were an effective writer and communicator.

Taking all that into consideration, New Testament scholars look at how the New Testament

...