A glossary of terms

Tetragrammaton: The name of the Lord, literally. It refers to the four Hebrew letters used to denote God's name, often represented in English as YHWH or JHVH.

Decalogue: The Ten Commandments.

J-source, P-source, Q-source. These are terms made popular by the Jesus Seminar and other scholarly movements to determine who wrote what portions of the Bible. The J-source refers to portions of the Bible that use the Tetragrammaton; whereas the P-source refers to the "priestly" texts that use the word Elohim, which we translate as God.

The P-source is where we get the opening section of Genesis, in which Elohim creates the heavens and the earth, and stage by stage gives order and life to the earth, culminating in the creation of man. The account of Eden never uses Elohim, however, and refers consistently to YHWH. And so on, throughout the Tanakh.

The Q-source refers to a postulated compilation of the sayings of Jesus that Matthew and Luke used when embellishing Mark's gospel to create their own. Matthew and Luke attribute a lot of the same phrases and teachings  to Jesus, in more or less the same order, but not necessarily connected with the same events.

Parousia: The word's Greek root has to do with arrival or appearing. It's used academically as a reference to the Second Coming, which many first-century Christians expected would happen within their lifetimes, particularly when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.

Pelagian heresy: In a nutshell, it's a heresy that claims it is possible for men to please God and live a righteous life apart from Christ, simply by exercising free will.

Glossolalia: A fancy word for speaking in tongues under the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Not to be confused with charisma, which is the supernatural endowment of a believer by the Holy Spirit to perform miraculous signs.

Transubstantiation: A teaching held within the Catholic Church, but also within several mainline Protestant denominations, that Christ is physically present in the elements of the Eucharist, that when we take Communion the wine miraculously becomes his blood and the bread miraculously becomes his body. There are actual names for the different views on how this takes place -- for example, it becomes it in the stomach so we don't become sick or commit cannibalism; or it becomes it at the moment of consecration but in such a way that it becomes indistinguishable from unconsecrated bread and wine -- but I never bothered to learn those names.

Christological: Christology is the doctrines of Christ, such as his being entirely God and entirely man, and what that means.

Hermeneutics: a ten-dollar word that refers to how we approach the Bible when we study it. Do we take literally? Is it meant to be understood within its historical literary context?

synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. Those three gospels have a lot in common in terms of structure, narrative, sayings of Jesus and so on that suggest a common source.

The gospel of John has an entirely different structure, has an entirely different set of sayings it draws on, has a radically different focus than the other three, and is considered by some scholars to be from a different tradition entirely (perhaps even later since some of the phraseology appears to be written to correct Gnostic error).

Since Mark and Luke were both journeymen with Paul, and Matthew appears to be highly derivative from Mark as well, I suppose that makes some degree of sense.