obscure the big picture. This sheds light on certain episodes in the New Testament, such as why Peter couldn’t grasp the notion of Jesus going up to Jerusalem to die. Peter believed Jesus was the messiah (the word for “anointed one” in Greek is christos, “christ”). When Jesus announced he was going to die in Jerusalem, Peter didn’t say, “I know—I read that in my Bible.” He couldn’t read it in his Bible because there was no single verse for the idea. Rather, the concept of a dying and rising messiah must be pieced together from a scattering of disparate fragments in the Old Testament that, each
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