New Testament

I'll just park this here for future reference.

Sometimes you see writers say that certain parts of the Bible are written in the "apocalyptic" style of writing.

Recognising the "genre" of part of the Bible can be very important when it comes to reading it properly. For instance, parables and historical narrative communicate in very different ways; you'd completely misread the gospels if you confused them.

Why Pentecost? Why did the Spirit come on the church on that day in particular?

It's a good question. Jesus ascended on a Thursday; the Spirit did not come for another 10 days. Why the wait? Jesus only said that they'd have to wait for "a few days", but 10 is longer than it might have been.

Perhaps it was just expedient. There would be multi-national crowds in Jerusalem over the Pentecost festival, making it a perfect time for them to hear the wonders of God in their own tongues.

Maybe.

I often tell people that we need to listen to the gospel writers whenever we read the gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke or John are teaching us something by recording the things they do. We need to let them do that. The words Jesus spoke within the gospels were spoken to other characters in the narrative, not to us directly. Our job is not to apply those words to us, but to ask what the gospel writer is wishing to communicate by recording those words in the setting they occur in.

A little while back, the Church of England's weekday lectionary spent some time in Hebrews 7 and Genesis 14. So it was, that I found myself trying to explain as simply as possible why the hard-to-pronounce character of Melchizedek is such good news to have in the Bible.