Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Gospels as propaganda

I've often talked about the Gospels as pieces of "propaganda" about Jesus, especially when introducing them in teaching or in media contexts. I find it helps to explain the concept of books about "good news". I always add a rider that this only works if we can get the negative associations of the word "propaganda" out of our minds. I've been doing some writing today and wanted again to use this term or perhaps something similar; I began to wonder what alternatives there might be. I clicked on the MS Word Thesaurus to find "misinformation, party line, half-truths, cant" listed as synonyms, so perhaps in future I need really to stress that rider about getting the negative associations out of our heads.

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