Migration in Christianity. Events of Migration in the New Testament

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Theology - Miscellaneous, , course: Private Research, language: English, abstract: As a participant of the course "People and faiths on the move" at the Ecumenical Institute Bossey in July 2016, the author of this paper was inspired by the message of the course, which focused on migration, to write down this perspective on migration within Christianity with focus on the time of the New Testament and particularly just before and immediately after the life of Jesus Christ. In looking at the issue of how people have moved from place to place over the years in search of either a means of survival or a god, this theme anchors strongly on how we can better view some religious experiences of today. It can be seen clearly that there is surely no one faith that does not have in its structure some issues regarding migration. It is either some members of the faith or some items that had been forced to leave or willingly left a certain place to another for some reasons. It is worth noting that the way we will treat the issue of migration here may remain unsatisfactory to others since this paper will also dare into the spiritual dimension of migration. Migration therefore would be viewed here bearing in mind the three angles, being: internal, external and spiritual migrations. This paper does not desire to view Migration only as a movement from one country to the other but also as a movement within the same national territory and as involving both physical movement and spiritual journeys too. In this way, it would be clearer to see certain features of migration in the New Testament. This paper also tries to highlight some aspects of migration in the remaining two Abrahamic faiths, Islam and Judaism, which means that the focus will be on Christianity and allusions will be made to Islam and Judaism. Judaism and Christianity have a lot common on the issue which will be discussed already at the beginning of this paper. Islam will be examined very briefly at the end. It must be emphasized here that the various topics chosen are open to critical discussion for the purpose of achieving a better result -- Take some time to read this work and make constructive criticism so that academic work can triumph.