Some Essays by Douglas Tennant

Douglas Tennant        RS 236 Paul: Life and Letters – Final Assignment: An Exercise in Pseudepigraphy Professor A. Witmer Letter of the Apostle Paul to the Assembly of Believers in Jesus at Troas Paul, an apostle, called as a slave of Jesus Christ, through whom we are all gifted with new life, and our brother Titus, to the assembly of saints in the church of God in Troas [1] , including our sister Olympia [2] and her brothers Carpus and Eutychus. Grace to you and peace from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ [3] . I give thanks to God for you, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and the manner in which you are built up in the spiritual gifts received from Jesus Christ our Lord. We keep you in our prayers always so that you may remain steadfast in the traditions of Christ that you were taught while I wintered with you not so long ago. We pray continually for you, asking of our God that you will remain worthy of the call of our Lord Jes...

Douglas Tennant B.Sc., B.A., CMMIII Professor Jeff Wilson RS 260 – The Study of Religion Wednesday October 21, 2009 An analysis of How Jesus Became Christian             I received Barrie Wilson’s How Jesus Became Christian as a gift in 2008. I was fascinated by his detailed analysis of biblical and Ebionite primary sources and his central thesis that there was a conscious cover-up by Paul to make Jesus appear/become a Pauline ‘Christian’ (Wilson 2). I had always wondered and struggled (sometimes out loud) with how the Jewish Jesus I learned about in Sunday school could actually have come to be known as a ‘Christian’ i.e. not Jewish. Concomitantly, how did I, as a Christian, i.e. not Jewish, come to worship someone who was born, lived and died a Jew? The analysis of this secondary text from my Christian tradition affords an opportunity to uniquely explore how Jesus became Christian.      ...

Douglas Tennant B.Sc., B.A., CMMIII,  Professor Jeff Wilson RS 260 – The Study of Religion Wednesday October 14, 2009 An analysis of Sikh Fundamentalism             I have recently been intrigued by the Sikh tradition and have been eager to expand my knowledge of it from a scholarly perspective. Wanting to learn about the fundamentals of Sikhism, my eye caught the article Sikh Fundamentalism by W.H. McLeod on the Kitchener Public Library religion and philosophy database collection. It was obvious from the abstract however, that the article was not just about the fundamentals of Sikhism but entailed a more scholarly secondary source style review of Sikh fundamentalism. Sikhism by Doris Jakobsh - University of Hawai'i Press 2012 The author and Sikh historian, William Hewat ("Hew") McLeod PhD., died July 20, 2009 with an extensive portfolio of academic and historical works about Sikhism to his credit (Ballan...

Douglas Tennant B.Sc., B.A., CMMIII Professor Jeff Wilson RS 260 – The Study of Religion Wednesday October 7, 2009 An analysis of The Gospel of Judas             I found The Gospel of Judas in a private bookstore in Orillia in 2007 and bought it for future reference. I had not given it a second thought or even leafed through it until this course assignment required us to analyse a text from our own tradition (Christian) but one with which we were not familiar. I had not read anything from this text until now for, as with several other religious texts, I was intimidated by both its potentially challenging theological and scholarly perspectives. I focused on pages 55-58 of the ancient manuscript that are translated from Coptic (Kasser 42). This portion of the text deals with a conversation between Jesus and Judas, and the highlight is the conclusion of the gospel where Judas betrays and hands Jesus over to the High Priest...