Consider This - The Story of a Story

In my last post I blogged about my excitement over The New Perspective on Mary and Martha by Mary Stromer Hanson. I have been wanting to write their story for over a decade. Not least to explore the reason why "Jesus wept." but because I have always felt there is more to these women, to this family, than is obvious from first glance. Why did Jesus love them so much? Why did he keep going back to Bethany (apart from the fact that it was so conveniently close to Jerusalem)?

For years I have been reading tomes on life in biblical times.
- Phoenix: Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ (1959) by Henri Daniel-Rops, a short 453 pages translated from the French
- Mary and Martha: Women in the World of Jesus (2002) by Satoko Yamaguchi
- Sketches of Jewish Social Life (1994) by Alfred Edershem
- The Jewish World: 365 Days from the Collections of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2004)
- Food at the Time of the Bible: From Adam's Apple to the Last Supper by Miriam Feinberg Vamosh
- Daily Life at the Time of Jesus by Miriam Feinberg Vamosh
- Women at the Time of the Bible by Miriam Feinberg Vamosh
- The Red Tent (1997) by Anita Diamant - a fictional tale based on Joseph's sister Dinah

and more recently academic and narrative accounts of Mary & Martha.
- Martha and Mary: Saving the Sisters from Bethany (2008) by Patty Froese Ntihemuka
- Lazarus, Mary and Martha: Social-Scientific Approaches to the Gospel of John (2006) by Philip F. Esler & Ronald Piper
- The Family Which Jesus Loved: Or, the History of Martha, and Mary, and Lazarus. in Seventeen Lectures. (1870) by James Haldane Stewart

Not to mention I've photocopied all four gospels from the Bible on different coloured paper and used Annals of the World by James Ussher to timeline all the events in Jesus' life. Matthew was pink, Mark was blue, Luke was green and John was yellow. The resulting chart is HUGE and I would need a large hall to lay it out. But it is also rather interesting in that most of the earlier part is pink, blue and green (and they overlap A LOT). The last 6 days are mostly yellow.

[Actually, thanks to Hanson, who does a lovely narrative analysis of John's gospel, I have a much greater appreciation for the literary genius that John was. I never realised that the first half of John's gospel leads up to Lazarus's death and revivification and the last half is Jesus heading towards the cross. The first half are the signs of who Jesus is and last half is Jesus walking towards living that out.]

From this I have picked the instances where Mary, Martha and Lazarus have interacted and possibly could have interacted with Jesus.

SO much information is paralising.

I have procrastinated from starting my own narrative for weeks. I had something there already from 2011 but it was dreadful and not really anything I wanted to keep (except the first chapter - which just lays it all out for me in terms of story, potential growth and themes - YAY!).

Therefore, today I have a plan.
STAGE 1: Using the Biblical events and characters I will write the story of this remarkable family and their growth from beginning to end.

Later stages will be layers of making the life more authentic to the time of Jesus, weaving bible verses and Hebrew into the narrative and building in the themes I want to explore. SO MUCH to do. But I had to start somewhere.

So, STAGE 1 here we come - story time. Stephen King in his amazing On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft describes it as writing "with the door closed". So the door shall be closed for some time. I had intended to do this book as a PhD or something, but I don't think that is really possible. There are academic aspects, but I don't know, I think it would be too multidisciplinary for a Uni to cope with - Bible studies, literary analysis, narrative.

And, hopefully blogging the process may keep me accountable AND I'll know what process I went through for that inevitable question - "How did you write this book?"
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Published on March 13, 2017 19:13 Tags: layers, mary-martha, phd, process, writing
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Consider This

Lynda A. Calder
Read about the exploits of an Emerging Writer and insights into writing.
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