The images of Jesus throughout history are as varied as the people who have embraced him-the Son of God, the Divine Word by whom the world was created, the Passover sacrifice on behalf of the people, the Suffering Servant who takes on the sins of the world, the new High Priest, or more recently, Jesus the intellectual genius, the liberator of the oppressed, or the feminist. Each group and generation sees in Jesus a reflection of itself.
that is the connection between these personae and the historical Jesus, the flesh-and-blood preacher of ancient Israel executed by the Romans? Not much, scholars have often said. "There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus," said Albert Schweitzer, a key figure in the early "quest for the historical Jesus." Yet, as we approach the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new pursuit for information about the historical Jesus is energizing scholars and lay people alike.
Christians are sometimes puzzled and hurt by the allergic reaction of many Jews to Jesus -- even to the mention of his name. But the energy is not really to Jesus the person, about whom Jews (like everyone else), know very little, but to his appropriation by the church and the oppression of Jews in his name.
Yet Jews have also been fascinated by Jesus. When Jews began to think about their own history, they had to consider him as part of it. Sporadic references to Jesus in the Talmud are less than complimentary. The host of nineteenth-century scholars who investigated Jesus included the Jewish historians Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger. The British Jew Claude Montefiore wrote a two-volume commentary on the Synoptic gospels in the early part of this century, and What A Jew Thinks about Jesus, published in 1935. The Lithuanian Jew Joseph Klausner wrote Jesus of Nazareth in Hebrew in 1922. Translated into several languages, it is still the best-know book on Jesus by a Jew and is quoted approvingly in John Meier's widely praised 1994 volume on Jesus. More recently, other Jews have written on Jesus, including Samuel Samuel, Geza Vermes, Jacob Neusner, and Paula Fredriksen.
Jewish writers typically separated Jesus the Jew from the Christianity that incorporated him, approving of the former but disliking the latter. They have often characterized him as simply another Jewish holy man, unexceptional beyond his later public-relations image, or so unlike Jewish expectations of a Messiah as to make his lack of acceptance by most early Jews utterly unsurprising. The present generation draws a bold line between Jesus the Jew and Christianity's picture of him. Just as earlier generations of scholars often separated Jesus from his Judaism, present-day scholars, Jewish and Christian, distance him from the Christianity that claimed him.
The last few years have seen an explosion of books on the historical Jesus.
A recent browse in my local seminary bookstore turned up seven books on Jesus published in 1994. The second volume of John Meier's trilogy on the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew, more than 1,000 pages in length, was already sold out. Last year, two scholars, a Jew and a Christian, packed an auditorium at Fordham University with their topic, "the Jewishness of Jesus" The April 1995 issue of Theology Today is devoted to this scholarly debate.
Popular works, such as Barbara Thiering's fanciful Jesus the Man or A.N. Wilson's idiosyncratic Jesus drew much publicity, but had no impact on the scholarly world. A number of Wilson's innovations are commonplace to scholars, and the speculative reconstructions Thiering and Wilson offer are not grounded in responsible methodology or common sense.
But even the more sober works have found a popular audience. Meier's book, even with its copious footnotes, is a case in point. John Dominic Crossan recently published Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, a more popular and readable version of his densely-packed scholarly work, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, but the original itself sold more than 50,000 copies. Marcus Borg, in frequent demand as a lecturer, recently published a popular work, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, which stems from his scholarly work, Jesus, A New Vision. Last year, HarperCollins and the Trinity Institute sponsored a discussion between Borg, Crossan, and another Jesus scholar, Burton Mack, that was broadcast to churches and colleges across the country.
Both the church and academia have gotten along successfully without the historical Jesus for centuries. The historical Jesus, the human being who walked the roads of ancient Israel, gathered disciples, and was executed by the Romans, is often contrasted with the "Christ of faith," a supra-historical figure whose presence in the world enlivens and nourishes Christian communities. The latter has always been far more important for most Christians.
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Did Jesus Exist?by MrAtheistChristian2,454 views
@TheSmithDorian "Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus" - Tacitus' Annals 15.44
You're wrong.
Conspiratardz 1 week ago
@Kesky16 B.
ii) .. for saying that Jesus didn't exist. Until very recently you would have faced serious social discrimination and have been ostracised for holding this view.
(iii) There is no conclusive evidence that he didn't exist.
iv) We accept the existence of other figures in ancient history without conclusive evidence for them.
I can't know for sure whether Jesus existed - nobody can. It's hard to prove that somebody existed 1900 yrs ago; it's even harder to prove that somebody didn't.
TheSmithDorian 2 months ago
@Kesky16
"he did write about what was generally believed to have happened to Jesus" - Possibly, but we're talking about what actually happened not what was believed to have happened. 1 Peter has no bearing on Paul and Acts which was written after Paul's letters only confirms that Paul (and the author of Acts) never met the earthly Jesus.
Note that Acts paints Paul as a prominent Jew living in Jerusalem around the time of Jesus but who never sees or meets Jesus. This is odd don't you think?
TheSmithDorian 2 months ago
@Kesky16 4.
..for all kinds of reasons. However, which apostles or followers are you talking about? The Bible says that Stephen (who wasn't an apostle) was stoned to death (Acts 6) and James (who was an apostle) was killed by Herod (Acts 12) - although it doesn't say that he knew it was going to happen or had any choiceabout it.
No other deaths are recorded in the Bible. In fact, Acts often shows Peter and Paul trying to avoid being killed rather than being willing to die a martyr's death.
TheSmithDorian 2 months ago
@Kesky16 3.
..done so, nobody at the time would have believed them to be true. Confirmation of Pilate's existence (which in any event is mentioned by Josephus and Tacitus) doesn't say anything about whether or not Jesus existed and I would have accepted that Pilate was real even without any confirmation of it.
"it is historically impossible the apostles and all of Jesus' followers would die to defend the existence of a fictitious figure"
It's not impossible - people do all kinds of crazy shit
TheSmithDorian 2 months ago
@Kesky16 2.
.. The other 3 gospel authors don't mention it either. It's the same for Matthew's account of the bodies of dead saints rising from their graves when Jesus dies on the cross. Mark says that Jesus died after passover but John says he died before; they could both be wrong but they can't both be right.
Re: Pilate - Their writers wanted the gospels to be believed. Accordingly they set the story in a real place (Jerusalem) and involved real people (Pilate). If they hadn't ..
TheSmithDorian 2 months ago