I know I haven't posted here in a minute but I'm about a month into Year 2 of Education for Ministry (the New Testament year), and this week's reading has genuinely shifted how I picture Jesus' world.

Our core text is Matthias Henze's Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus. His argument, in a nutshell: the "gap" between the Testaments is not a real blank in history—it's a hole in the Protestant Bible. Roughly 400 years (300s–100 BCE) of thriving Jewish literature just never made it into our canon, so we skip from Malachi in the 5th century BCE straight to Matthew in the 1st century CE.

That means the Judaism Jesus actually lived in was late Second Temple Judaism, not the world of the Old Testament as we usually picture it. The big religious topics Jesus debates—the messiah, demons, what happens after death, resurrection—are barely present in the OT. They exploded into the conversation during the gap years, in texts like 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

What surprised me most: the Dead Sea Scrolls are explicitly Jewish, never mention Jesus—and yet their language is strikingly close to the Gospels. Jesus didn't drop out of the sky with a new religion; he was an active participant in debates that were already centuries old.

I was also interested to find Enoch mentioned, which was interesting as well.

(Context: EfM = Education for Ministry, a 36-week lay theological formation program by the School of Theology at the University of the South.)