2 Kings 3:24 – 27 presents pro­found the­o­log­i­cal and eth­i­cal chal­lenges as King Mesha’s human sac­ri­fice leads to the Israelite army’s retreat. This nar­ra­tive ques­tions mod­ern views on divine will and jus­tice, prompt­ing a crit­i­cal reassess­ment of ancient reli­gious prac­tices. Delve deep­er into these themes and crit­i­cal­ly explore the impli­ca­tions of this bib­li­cal passage.

The arti­cle crit­i­cal­ly exam­ines and ques­tion the inclu­sion of pri­vate remarks and logis­ti­cal details with­in a text con­sid­ered divine­ly inspired. By explor­ing the impli­ca­tions of these mun­dane ele­ments, we aim to chal­lenge the tra­di­tion­al under­stand­ing of ​“divine inspi­ra­tion” accord­ing to Chris­tians and the over­all rel­e­vance of 2 Tim­o­thy 4:9 – 13 with­in the text of the New Testament.

But the first of the four gospels, i.e., the Gospel accord­ing to Mark, appar­ent­ly did not receive Paul’s memo. And this is a very impor­tant point as we keep in mind that each of the gospels were ini­tial­ly divorced from each oth­er and were writ­ten in dif­fer­ent local­i­ties for dif­fer­ent audiences.

Instead of writ­ing a full-scale biog­ra­phy of Jesus of Nazareth, I want to focus on some aspects of the life and teach­ing of Jesus of Nazareth that are com­mon­ly over­looked by most Chris­tians. Any attempt to recon­struct the his­tor­i­cal Jesus (as dis­tinct from the incar­nate deity of eccle­si­as­ti­cal faith) needs to take into account all the recov­er­able data about Jesus, much of which has been ignored by many Chris­tians because of its’ embar­rass­ment to Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy. Jesus’ report­ed say­ings in the Gospels are fre­quent­ly sub­ject­ed to tor­tu­ous exe­ge­sis by fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to make them fit lat­er church tra­di­tion. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, the data has been crit­i­cal­ly exam­ined by none oth­er than Chris­t­ian schol­ars themselves.

The authors of the New Tes­ta­ment have often quot­ed pas­sages from the Old Tes­ta­ment, claim­ing such state­ments to be prophe­cies ful­filled in the per­son of Jesus Christ. The num­ber of such quot­ed pas­sages is actu­al­ly very high. Among the evan­ge­lists, Matthew is the one hav­ing made this phe­nom­e­non char­ac­ter­is­tic to his Gospel. The prophe­cy car­ries a very impor­tant place in the Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy. Every Chris­t­ian knows about the prophe­cies of the books of Psalms, Isa­iah, and Daniel relat­ed to the child­hood, life, mis­sion, and death of Jesus. To every Chris­t­ian, these prophe­cies are the clear evi­dence of the truth of Gospels and mis­sion of Jesus in gen­er­al. The prob­lem is that accord­ing to the Bible, there exists true prophe­cies as well as false ones. Hence the ques­tion aris­es on the nec­es­sary cri­te­ria to dis­tin­guish a false prophe­cy from a true one.