Many Protestants have found this sort of devotion theologically problematic. Since Martin Luther — , there has been a reaction against an unimaginative and literalistic imitatio Christi such as that exhibited by Francis of Assisi. Some have condemned the notion of imitating the canonical Jesus as a purely human effort that, in the event, cannot be achieved. Others have argued that the idea fails to preserve Jesus' unique status as a savior whose accomplishments cannot be emulated: Despite such criticism, Jesus has remained a moral model for many, including many Protestants. More than one hundred years ago, C.
Sheldon's In His Steps , in which Jesus appears more like a modern American than an ancient Jew, was a best-seller. The title indicates the main theme. Today, socially concerned Christians continue to appeal to Jesus' ministry to unfortunates as precedent for their charitable causes. Liberation theologians argue that Jesus fought social and political injustice and that his followers should do likewise.
Others have supported women's causes by calling upon Jesus' supposed liberation of them. So the imitation of Christ continues to take various forms. Popular Christian jewelry worn in the West is inscribed with the question, "What would Jesus do? Jesus' status as divine makes his attributes those of God. This has meant, among other things, that Christians have conceived of God as compassionate. In the Gospels, Jesus is the "friend of tax collectors and sinners"; he heals the sick and infirm; he refuses to cast the first stone. In line with all this, the traditional images of the Pantokrator ruler of the universe have the exalted Jesus, as lord of the universe, lifting his right hand in the posture of blessing and holding a book with the words, "Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Similarly, much popular Protestant art has depicted Jesus as welcoming children. This is the same compassionate Jesus to whom the so-called Jesus Prayer of Orthodox spirituality — "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me a sinner" — is directed. If Jesus has often been the face of divine compassion, no less often has he been the face of divine judgment.
Jesus of Nazareth
Already the Gospels depict him as warning repeatedly of hell, and Matthew How such visions of judgment harmonize with the compassionate Christ is problematic. One thinks of Peter Paul Rubens 's — astounding painting of Saint Francis crouched around and protecting the world from a Jesus Christ who wants to attack it with thunderbolts. Here Francis must become the compassionate savior because Jesus is the threatening judge. The tension between the compassionate Jesus and the damning Jesus is such that many have thought the gospel portrait, which features both, cannot in this regard be historical.
Can it be that a mind that was profoundly enamored of the love of God and that counseled charity toward enemies concurrently accepted and even promoted the dismal idea of a divinely-imposed, unending agony? Anticipating some modern scholarship, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley — argued in his "Essay on Christianity" that the evangelists "impute sentiments to Jesus Christ which flatly contradict each other.
Perhaps the most distinctive image of Jesus and of Christian art, and certainly the most popular in the West, is that of Jesus being crucified. One of the earliest artistic evidences for Christianity is a crude graffito with inscription "Alexamenos worships his god" on the wall of a house in Rome on the Palatine Hill.
Reflecting the ancient world's abhorrence of crucifixion, it mocks the crucified Christ by giving him the head of a donkey. But, in accordance with Paul's paradoxical theology and his boasting in the crucified Christ, Christians transformed the ancient instrument of torture into the salvific instrument par excellence. The traditional icons of the crucifixion, which typically depict a serene and majestic Christ, even seeming to sleep, are on some level a response to the problem of evil.
While this has no satisfactory intellectual solution, Christians have found solace in the notion that God the Son has also suffered. Blaise Pascal — famously wrote that Christ is on the cross until the end of time. In our own day, the Holocaust haunts all reflection about Jesus' suffering. So the crucified Son reveals the reality of divine suffering.
The Son is abandoned, the Father grieves, and God paradoxically forsakes God. In this way the reality of human suffering is taken up into the Godhead, and Christians do not feel alone in their suffering. Jesus belongs not just to Christians but also, in one way or another, to other religions and even to those with no religion. Most traditional Jewish thought, reacting against Christian polemic and persecution, turned Jesus into a deceiver, a false prophet who practiced illicit magic see below.
Not all Jewish opinion, however, has been negative. Anticipating many modern Jewish thinkers, the Kairites, a non-Talmudic sect of the Middle Ages , claimed that Jesus was an authentic Jewish martyr whose identity Christianity distorted. More recently, some, downplaying Jesus' originality, have tried to reclaim him for Judaism by turning him into a Pharisee or Essene.
Martin Buber — spoke of Jesus as his "great brother," who has "a great place … in Israel's history of faith. Denying that Jesus was the Messiah, Lapide nonetheless expressed belief in Jesus' resurrection and acknowledged him as God's prophet to the Gentiles. Jesus was born of a virgin and lived without sin. He was a wise teacher and worked miracles. He was sentenced to be crucified but never was, instead ascending to heaven, from whence many Muslims expect him to return. Jesus is not, however, divine, and Islamic teaching has it that the Gospels are corrupt: Mahatma Gandhi — further found Jesus' teaching in the sermon on the mount, or rather that teaching as Lev Tolstoi — interpreted it, to be profoundly true; it is reported that Gandhi was fond of several Christian hymns about Jesus.
Martin Luther King Jr. Another twentieth-century Hindu, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan — , philosopher and president of India in the s, offered a sophisticated, philosophical interpretation of Jesus. Radhakrishnan maintained the superiority of his native Hinduism over Christianity by accepting the authenticity of Jesus' religious experience but distinguishing that experience from its interpretations, which were suggested to Jesus and his followers by their human traditions. One should differentiate Jesus' discovery of the universal self from his culturally determined conception of that discovery as a revelation from without.
Of the negative evaluations of Jesus, three are especially characteristic of modern times. The Grand Inquisitor in Fedor Dostoevskii's novel The Brothers Karamazov — speaks for many when he asserts that Jesus "judged humanity too highly," for "it was created weaker and lower than Christ thought. One cannot love one's enemies, or do away with anger, or turn the other cheek. His utopian ethic is just that — utopian: Friedrich Nietzsche — offered a different criticism. For him, certain teachings in the Gospels reflect a slave mentality that should be rejected.
If the unfortunate and oppressed turn the other cheek, this is only because, being without power, they can do nothing else; they are resigned in the face of their own oppression. So Jesus' nonviolence simply baptizes the status quo. The classical Marxist critique is related: Jesus' eschatological vision acquiesces to the evils of the present instead of demanding historical change.
The promises of future reward and warnings of future punishment devalue this world and discourage critical engagement with it. For seventeen hundred years the canonical Gospels were approached in two different ways. The dominant approach was that of the Christian church, which accepted the texts at face value.
The Gospels were thought historically accurate because divinely inspired and written by eyewitnesses or their friends. Occasionally there was recognition of inconcinnities. Augustine of Hippo — admitted that sometimes the evangelists pass on the same saying with different wording and that the frailty of memory could put the same events in different orders. John Calvin — went so far as to assert that the sermon on the mount is not the record of what Jesus said on one occasion but an artificial collection of things he said on various occasions.
For the most part, however, the Gospels were identified with history. The second approach before the modern period was that of Jewish polemic. This saw Jesus and his followers as deliberate deceivers note Mt. The medieval Toledoth Jesus attributes Jesus' miracles, which it does not deny, to magic. The Toledoth tends not to assert that this or that event never happened, but rather to dispute its Christian interpretation.
Matters began to change in the middle of the eighteenth century. Modern historical methods emerged out of the rebirth of learning in the Renaissance; the Protestant Reformation introduced critical analysis of traditional religious stories e. All of this encouraged the critical examination of the Gospels. The most important of the early critics was Hermann Samuel Reimarus — , a one-time German pastor much influenced by the English deists.
Unable to believe in miracles, he compiled objections to the Bible, including the Gospels. Reimarus may have been the first in the modern period — the third-century Greek philosopher Porphyry anticipated him in this — to distinguish between what Jesus himself said and what his disciples said he said. To the latter alone he attributed belief in the second coming and Jesus' atoning death.
Reimarus also argued that Jesus' kingdom was basically political and that his tomb was empty because the disciples stole the body. Reimarus's goal was to take Christianity, subtract the bad and unbelievable things from it, and hand the world a new and improved religion. Shying from controversy, Reimarus did not publish his own work, which did not appear until after his death, when the playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — edited and published it.
As Reimarus was rhetorically powerful, and as his rationalistic arguments had substance, his work generated support, as well as the predictable opposition. The next phase in research saw the proliferation of the so-called liberal lives of Jesus in Germany. Agreeing with Reimarus that miracles do not happen, but dissenting from much of his skepticism regarding the historicity of the Gospels, these liberal lives, like the old Jewish polemic, tended not to dispute the events in the Gospels but rather their supernatural explanations.
Instead, however, of invoking deliberate deception, as did the polemic, these critics thought in terms of misperception. Jesus did not walk on the water; he only appeared to do so when disciples on a boat saw him afar off on the shore. Jesus did not raise anyone from the dead; rather, some he prayed over recovered from comas, leading to that belief. Jesus' own resurrection was also simple misinterpretation. He did not die on the cross; he revived in the cool of the tomb. But his disciples, who were simple and superstitious, thought he had in fact died and come back to life.
This school of thought began to lose its popularity in middle of nineteenth century for several reasons. Most important was the critical work of the German historian and theologian, David Friedrich Strauss — , who disparaged the liberal lives, as well as the conservative harmonists. Like the liberals, Strauss disbelieved in miracles. Unlike the liberals, he believed the gospel narratives to be thoroughly unreliable and he dismissed John entirely. He considered them, although not Jesus himself, to be mythological, mostly the product of reflection upon the Old Testament narratives.
Illustrative for Strauss is the transfiguration, which is based upon the similar transfiguration of Moses in Exodus 24 and 34, as appears from the several motifs both share. In addition, the feeding of the five thousand is modeled upon 2 Kings 4: Strauss was able to pile up parallel after parallel and establish on a critical footing the intertextual nature of the Gospels. In doing this he was, from one point of view, just following Tertullian and Eusebius, church fathers who had also observed the parallels between the Testaments.
These earlier theologians were pursuing apologetical ends: Strauss used the very same parallels to show the mythological character of most of the tradition. Some who came after Strauss argued that he had not gone far enough, that Jesus was not a historical figure who attracted myths but was rather a myth himself, no more real than Zeus. The future was not, however, with such radicalism, which could never really explain Paul or Josephus's two references to Jesus. Far more lasting in their influence were Johannes Weiss — and Albert Schweitzer — , two German scholars who, more trusting of the synoptics than Strauss, argued that the historical Jesus was all about eschatology.
When Jesus said that the kingdom was at hand, he was announcing the imminence of the new world or utopian order compare Mk. His expectations were not fulfilled in Easter or Pentecost or the destruction of the temple in 70 ce. Jesus was rather a mistaken apocalyptic visionary, which is why his ethics are so unrealistic.
They are not for everyday life, but are instead an ethic of perfection designed for a world about to go out of existence. Most scholars since Schweitzer would concede that he and Weiss largely set the agenda. Most have thought that they were right to the extent that the traditions about Jesus are indeed full of eschatological themes. The debate has been to what extent those traditions go back to Jesus and whether Schweitzer's more or less literal interpretation of them is correct. Schweitzer himself tried to force a choice between eschatology and historicity. That is, he urged that, if the synoptics are reliable, then we must accept that Jesus was an eschatological prophet.
If, to the contrary, Jesus was not an eschatological prophet, then the synoptics are unreliable guides and we should resign ourselves to skepticism. Jeremias thought that, with the exception of the miracle stories, the synoptics are relatively reliable, and he agreed with Schweitzer that Jesus believed in a near consummation, expected his death to inaugurate the great tribulation, and hoped for his own resurrection as part of the general resurrection of the dead.
Not all accepted Schweitzer's dichotomy. While Rudolf Bultmann — , for instance, believed that Jesus was indeed an eschatological prophet, he was far more skeptical about the historicity of the synoptics than Schweitzer. Bultmann's views lie somewhere between Strauss's skepticism and Schweitzer's confidence. A form critic, Bultmann sought to isolate, classify, and evaluate the components of the Jesus tradition. Given that the order of events varies from gospel to gospel and that there is usually no logical connection between adjacent episodes, we cannot, Bultmann concluded, know the true order of events.
When one adds that the church, in Bultmann's view, contributed as much to the sayings attributed to Jesus as did Jesus himself, it was no longer possible to write a biography of Jesus, only to sketch an outline of his teachings within a rather bare narrative. Bultmann envisaged an oral stage during which various types of materials circulated.
He attempted to reconstruct the setting in life for these types, to determine whether they were used in polemic, apologetics, moral teaching, or proclamation. Bultmann's tendency was to suppose that if a unit was used in Christian polemic, then Christian polemic created it. Yet despite his skepticism, he remained convinced that Schweitzer was basically correct about Jesus' eschatology, which Bultmann interpreted in existential terms. Assuming moderns could no longer share ancient eschatological expectations, Bultmann asked how the language functioned and, in response, stressed that it brought people to decision in the face of the future.
Another scholar who rejected Schweitzer's dichotomy was C. Dodd — Although he accepted the basic synoptic portrait with the exception of Mark 13 and its parallels , he disagreed with Schweitzer regarding eschatology. Dodd famously urged that Jesus had a "realized eschatology. Further, Jesus expected vindication after death, which he variously spoke of as resurrection, the coming of the Son of man, and the rebuilding of the temple. But the church came to long for the future coming of the Son of man, now conceived of as Jesus' return. In this way eschatology ceased to be realized.
The change of outlook was such that the church eventually, and according to Dodd regrettably, made Revelation its canonical finale. Probably the most prominent of recent scholars to reject Schweitzer's dichotomy is John Dominic Crossan —. In his several books on Jesus he has argued that while most of the material Schweitzer used in his reconstruction of Jesus came from the church, we can still know a great deal about Jesus, who is very different from Schweitzer's vision of an eschatological visionary.
For Crossan, Jesus was indeed utopian, but what he envisaged was not a traditional eschatological scenario. Jesus was a Jewish peasant whose revolutionary social program is best preserved in aphorisms and parables. These depict a Cynic-like sage who welcomes outcasts as equals. Traditional eschatology — resurrection, last judgment, heaven, hell — and their attendant violence do not make an appearance. Crossan was one of the founding members of the Jesus Seminar, the other cofounder being Robert Funk —.
The Seminar is a loosely affiliated group of fewer than one hundred scholars who began, in the s, meeting twice a year to discuss and vote upon questions concerning the historical Jesus. The upshot of their work is the conclusion that approximately 18 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the synoptics go back to him or represent something that he said.
Among their other conclusions, which have generated much controversy, are these: A major achievement of the Jesus Seminar, whose conclusions represent only one group of scholars, has been to bring contemporary critical work to public notice. Many are now wont to divide the question for the historical Jesus into three stages. The first stage, it is claimed, was the nineteenth-century German endeavor so memorably reported by Schweitzer. The second was the "new quest" carried on in the s and s by some of Bultmann's students and a few others.
The "third quest" is the name now often attached to the labors of the present moment. This typology, which obscures much more than it illumines, will, one hopes, eventually fall into oblivion. One fundamental failing is that it dismisses with silence the period between the first quest and the new quest. Some have even called this the period of "no quest," which scarcely fits the facts. The typology is also problematic because most work of importance that went on during and after the s cannot be subsumed under the new quest, and because the third quest has no truly distinguishing features.
Instead of dividing post-Schweitzerian activities into chronological segments or different quests, it is more useful to lay aside the diachronic in favor of the synchronic, to abandon periodization for a typology that allows the classification of a book, whether from the s or the s, with those akin to it. One should lump together books that present Jesus as a liberal social reformer, those that present him as forerunner of Christian orthodoxy, those that reconstruct him as an eschatological Jewish prophet, those that liken him to a wisdom sage, those that regard him as having been a political revolutionary, and so on.
This is the best way to judge the progress of the discipline. The most striking fact about recent research is that it resents easy generalization precisely because of its pluralism. Contemporary work has no characteristic method, it has no body of shared conclusions, and it has no common set of historiographical or theological presuppositions.
Those who continue to speak of the third quest and delineate its distinctive features are engaging in an antiquated activity that needs to be deconstructed. The lists are all tendentious because the age of the easy generalization and the authentic consensus is over. The most important sources for Jesus are found in the New Testament — Paul and the synoptics and their sources, including Q , the hypothetical sayings source used by Matthew and Luke.
The Gospel of John is of less help, as are the various apocryphal gospels, although the Gospel of Thomas seems to contain some early and independent sayings of Jesus. Non-Christian sources — the Jewish historian Josephus, the Babylonian Talmud , the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, and others — do little more than confirm Jesus' existence and his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. Scholars disagree on the reliability of the extant sources and so they do not concur on how much we can know about the historical Jesus.
Discussions of method have led to no consensus. Many attempt to reconstruct Jesus by passing individual units through various criteria of authenticity. Such criteria are not particularly reliable. It seems safer to base one's major conclusions upon the larger patterns and themes that run throughout the various sources. It is probably in such patterns and themes, if anywhere, that the Jesus of history has been remembered.
Aside from Matthew 1 — 2 and Luke 1 — 2, first-century Christian writings have next to nothing to say about Jesus before his public ministry, and those two chapters are poor sources for history. Some agreements between Matthew 1 — 2 and Luke 1 — 2, however, preserve memory. Jesus' parents were named Mary and Joseph, and whether or not he was born in Bethlehem, he did later live in Nazareth Mt.
One can also plausibly defend Jesus' Davidic descent, his birth before the death of Herod the Great in 4 bce, and perhaps the possibility that Mary became pregnant before Joseph and Mary began to live together. John, who baptized Jesus, was an ascetic. The synoptics have him dwelling in the desert Mk. John's asceticism was part of a moral earnestness linked to belief in an imminent consummation: John the Baptist opposed the notion that all Israel has a place in the world to come.
More than a few Jews probably hoped that their descent from Abraham would, as long as they did not abandon the Torah, gain them entry into the world to come. John thought otherwise Mt. That Jesus submitted to John's baptism shows his essential agreement with him on many, if not most, matters. This is confirmed by his praise of the Baptist Mt. It is natural that Jesus was remembered as being, like John, a preacher of repentance, as being preoccupied with eschatology, and as being convinced that membership in the covenant guarantees nothing.
There is not even fundamental discontinuity in the matter of asceticism, for the missionary discourses depict a very harsh lifestyle Mt. Jesus himself was unmarried presumably Matthew He demanded the guarding of sexual desire Mt. Although the baptismal narratives convey the theology of the church, one need not doubt that Jesus did, in fact, submit to John's baptism. This is not the sort of event the early church would have invented.
It is, moreover, plausible that Jesus experienced his baptism as a prophetic call. This would explain why his public ministry was remembered as beginning shortly thereafter and why his followers narrated the event even though it involved Jesus submitting to John.
The accounts of Jesus' temptation also express the theology of the community. Even so, stories that do not reproduce history may convey it, and the temptation narratives highlight several themes that appear elsewhere in the sources. That Jesus overcomes Satan coheres with his being a successful exorcist.
That Jesus is, as the devil's challenges assume, a miracle worker, harmonizes with the rest of the tradition. That Jesus does not perform miracles on demand matches Mark 8: And that Jesus is a person of great faith who, in need, waits upon God, also matches the rest of the tradition see Mt. Because he was a teacher, Jesus had disciples.
Christ myth theory - Wikiquote
Not all scholars agree, however, that he gathered a select group of twelve. Doubt comes from the fact that they appear only once in Q Mt. Yet "the twelve" is already a fixed expression in 1 Corinthians Furthermore, Judas, who was, according to the Gospels, chosen by Jesus himself, was known as "one of the twelve" Mk. This is unlikely to be free invention. In selecting a group of twelve, Jesus' intent was probably the creation of a prophetic and eschatological symbol: Jesus presumably shared the expectation of the eschatological restoration of the twelve lost, or rather hidden, tribes.
In line with this, Matthew If the twelve functioned as an eschatological symbol of Israel's renewal, they also served, along with others, to spread Jesus' message. This is likely why we have reliable information about Jesus in the first place. Pre-Easter itinerants, according to Matthew Although we do not learn what specifically they were to say, their message cannot have differed much from that of Jesus. Certainly their other activities were imitative, for their purpose was to enlarge Jesus' influence. So their proclamation must have been his proclamation. In other words, recitation of the teaching of Jesus predates the church.
The traditional image of Jesus wandering around Galilee with twelve male disciples is mistaken. Not only were the twelve presumably part of a larger group, but Mark Notwithstanding its meager attestation in the extant sources, the existence of such a group is not a fiction. This may mean that they offered him financial support so Luke 8: But Mark also says that the women "followed" Jesus, and this implies that they were, like the twelve, "disciples.
Jesus lived within an eschatological scenario, which he thought of as already unfolding. He anticipated the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment Mt. He spoke in terms of rewards for the righteous and recompense for the wicked Mt. He prophesied trouble for the saints Mt. He envisaged a revised, second edition of earth with the earlier deficiencies corrected — paradise regained, heaven on earth. And he hoped all of this would transpire soon.
There is no evidence that Jesus shared the expectation of some that the Gentiles would suffer destruction at the end, and the existence of an early Christian mission to Gentiles confirms that he did not anticipate their annihilation. Jesus announced the beginning of God's reign in the present Mt. So eschatological expectations were being fulfilled: For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it" Mt.
Matters are similar in Matthew So once again Jesus' ministry fulfills an eschatological oracle. In this case, however, it is not the saving miracles of the end time that have entered the present, but the tribulation of the latter days. And in the Sabbath controversies he rejects the charge of being reckless. Jesus nowhere declares that the Sabbath has been abolished, as did some later Christians. Nor does he say that the true God did not institute the Sabbath.
Instead of attacking the Sabbath, Jesus teaches that one imperative can trump another, that human need can, in some cases, overrule Sabbath keeping, which, it is assumed, remains intact. There is nothing revolutionary in this: Jewish law certainly knew that Sabbath observance might be the lesser of two goods the law-observant Maccabees decided to take up arms on the Sabbath. If tradition remembers Jesus upholding the Torah, it also shows another side.
The question in Mark 3: Closely related is Matthew The radical rhetoric is tied to eschatology. The kingdom relativizes Moses' imperatives by trumping them when the two conflict. If, moreover, the kingdom is at hand, then the renewal of the world is nigh; and if the renewal of the world is nigh, then paradise is about to be restored; and if paradise is about to be restored, then concessions to sin are no longer needed. This is the implicit logic of Mark Because the last things will be as the first, and because, for Jesus, the last things have begun to come, so have the first. Jesus can therefore promulgate a prelapsarian ethic.
Insofar as the law contains concessions to the fall, it requires repair. That the coming of the kingdom impinges upon the law is explicit in Matthew Here Jesus distinguishes between the time of the law and the prophets on the one hand and the time of the kingdom on the other. This means that the time of the law has, in some sense, been superseded by the time of the eschatological kingdom. Jesus ministered to individuals with little social status.
In Mark , he heals demoniacs, paralytics, a leper, and blind men. It is the same in Q Mt. In Luke , Jesus takes the side of poor Lazarus, not the rich man Even when one takes into account that healers necessarily minister to the sick, that the well have no need of a physician, one comes away with the impression that Jesus had a special interest in those on the margins of society. Perhaps this was part and parcel of the great eschatological reversal, which would see the humble exalted. Yet Q also has him healing the son or servant of a centurion, a person of great authority, without demanding any change of life Mt.
So the tradition does not depict Jesus as engaging only those in the same socioeconomic circumstances but rather being expansive in his ministry and affections. Whether one explains the fact by appealing to divine intervention, parapsychology, or the psychosomatic phenomena of mass psychology, Jesus was known as a miracle worker during his own life.
Surely the hope of being healed or beholding miracles brought much of his audience to him. His opponents themselves conceded his abilities when they attributed his success to an allegiance with Beelzebul Mt. Although Jesus was a miracle worker, this does not guarantee the authenticity of any particular miracle story, and as they stand many of the stories are highly symbolic and vehicles of Christian theology.
The transfiguration narrative in Mark 9: The feeding of five thousand in Mark 6: The story of the widow of Nain in Luke 7: All this is typical. The tradition interprets the miracles of Jesus as signs of eschatological fulfillment, and this was the interpretation of Jesus himself. According to Matthew The defeat of Satan's realm is what happens in the latter days, so if Satan's realm is now being conquered, the latter days have arrived.
That Jesus was arrested, not the disciples, shows that he was from the beginning the center of the new movement. This is confirmed by the title on the cross: Pilate charges Jesus alone with being "the king of the Jews" Mk. Some regarded Jesus as a prophet Mk. In addition to taking on the role of the prophet of Isaiah 61, there is a good chance that Jesus, like the early church cf.
In reversing the commandment to love parents Mt. He also characterizes his own generation with language originally descriptive of Moses' generation cf. Bultmann distinguished between two kinds of history: Thus, the Crucifixion of the Christ was historic, in the sense that it was an event that transcends the "crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.
For Bultmann, the essence of faith transcends what can be historically known. One can never "know" as a matter of historical fact that "Christ is Lord. Bultmann took sharp issue with earlier biblical critics such as D. Strauss, who, like Bultmann, identified the mythical aspects of Christian faith but also rejected them outright because they were unscientific.
For example, Bultmann rejected the historicity of the Resurrection, but not its spiritual significance. For him, the Easter event is not something that happened to the Jesus of history, but something that happened to the disciples, who came to believe that Jesus had been resurrected. Moreover, the resurrected Jesus is indeed a living presence in the lives of Christians. Bultmann's approach was thus not to reject the mythical , but to reinterpret it in modern terms. To deal with this problem, Bultmann used the existentialist method of Heidegger, especially the categories of authentic vs.
In his view the "final judgment" it is not an event in history, but an event which takes place within the heart of each person as he or she responds to the call of God in each existential moment. Humans experience either Heaven or Hell in each moment, and faith means radical obedience to God in the present. For Bultmann, to be "saved" is not a matter of sacraments and creedal formulas so much as it is to base our existence on God, rather than merely getting by in the world.
True Christian freedom means following one's inner conscience, rather than conforming to oppressive or corrupt social order. One of the leading biblical critics of the twentieth century, Rudolf Bultmann's historical approach to the New Testament provided important new insights, enabling many to view the Bible through skeptical modern eyes while upholding faith in the most basic Christian message.
Virtually all New Testament scholars now use the form-critical tools that Bultmann pioneered, even those who do not go as far as he did in his demythologizing of Jesus. His existentialist approach to Christian theology emphasized living every moment as if it were the Final Judgment.
His personal example as a member of the Confessing Church in Germany further served to show that Christian faith is not merely a matter belief, but of following Christ's example of living in daily response to God. New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.
Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats. Gullotta, reviewing Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt , says he finds Carrier's arguments "problematic and unpersuasive", his use of Bayesian probabilities "unnecessarily complex" and criticizes Carrier's "lack of evidence, strained readings and troublesome assumptions.
Allegro advanced the theory that stories of early Christianity originated in a shamanistic Essene clandestine cult centered around the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Following Paul Vulliaud, Dubourg emphasized the importance of gematria in showing the coherence of his back-translated text.
He concludes that Paul is as mythical as Jesus. One Hundred Years Before Christ. A Study in Creative Mythology , argued that Jesus lived years before the accepted dates, and was a teacher of the Essenes. Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? The book has been negatively received by scholars, and also by Christ mythicists. Influenced by Massey and Higgins, Alvin Boyd Kuhn — argued an Egyptian etymology to the Bible that the gospels were symbolic rather than historic and that church leaders started to misinterpret the New Testament in the third century.
According to Harpur, in the second or third centuries the early church created the fictional impression of a literal and historic Jesus and then used forgery and violence to cover up the evidence. Price also wrote a negative review, saying that he did not agree that the Egyptian parallels were as forceful as Harpur thought. David Fitzgerald has self-published several works in defense of the Christ myth theory, including Nailed: Mything in Action , Vols. Ehrman notes that "the mythicists have become loud, and thanks to the Internet they've attracted more attention". According to Derek Murphy, the documentaries The God Who Wasn't There and Zeitgeist raised interest for the Christ myth theory with a larger audience and gave the topic a large coverage on the Internet.
According to Ehrman, mythicism has a growing appeal "because these deniers of Jesus are at the same time denouncers of religion". In modern scholarship, the Christ myth theory is a fringe theory and finds virtually no support from scholars. According to New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman, most people who study the historical period of Jesus believe that he did exist and do not write in support of the Christ myth theory.
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Maurice Casey , theologian and scholar of New Testament and early Christianity, stated that the belief among professors that Jesus existed is generally completely certain. According to Casey, the view that Jesus did not exist is "the view of extremists", "demonstrably false" and "professional scholars generally regard it as having been settled in serious scholarship long ago".
In his book Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels , classical historian and popular author Michael Grant concluded that "modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory". If we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned.
Joseph Hoffmann, who had created the Jesus Project , which included both mythicists and historicists to investigate the historicity of Jesus, wrote that an adherent to the Christ myth theory asked to set up a separate section of the project for those committed to the theory. Hoffmann felt that to be committed to mythicism signaled a lack of necessary skepticism and he noted that most members of the project did not reach the mythicist conclusion.
Critics of the Christ myth theory question the competence of its supporters. Few of these mythicists are actually scholars trained in ancient history, religion, biblical studies or any cognate field, let alone in the ancient languages generally thought to matter for those who want to say something with any degree of authority about a Jewish teacher who allegedly lived in first-century Palestine.
In a response, Thompson questioned the polemical nature of this qualification, pointing at his own academic standing and expertise. According to Thompson, Ehrman "has attributed to my book arguments and principles which I had never presented, certainly not that Jesus had never existed". Thompson questions Ehrman's qualifications in regard to Old Testamentical writings and research, as well as his competence to recognize the problems involved in "reiterated narrative" and "the historicity of a literary figure", stating that Ehrman had "thoroughly [ Maurice Casey has criticized the mythicists, pointing out their complete ignorance of how modern critical scholarship actually works.
He also criticizes mythicists for their frequent assumption that all modern scholars of religion are Protestant fundamentalists of the American variety, insisting that this assumption is not only totally inaccurate, but also exemplary of the mythicists' misconceptions about the ideas and attitudes of mainstream scholars.
Questioning the mainstream view appears to have consequences for one's job perspectives. These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to Few scholars have bothered to criticise Christ myth theories. Robert Van Voorst has written "Contemporary New Testament scholars have typically viewed Christ myth arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes, or often ignore them completely The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question. Maier , former Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University and current professor emeritus in the Department of History there has stated "Anyone who uses the argument that Jesus never existed is simply flaunting his ignorance.
In this book, Bart Ehrman surveys the arguments "mythicists" have made against the existence of Jesus since the idea was first mooted at the end of the 18th century. To the objection that there are no contemporary Roman records of Jesus' existence, Ehrman points out that such records exist for almost no one and there are mentions of Christ in several Roman works of history from only decades after the death of Jesus.
Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? The authors proposing such opinions might be competent, decent, honest individuals, but the views they present are demonstrably wrong Jesus is better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity. If 40 per cent believe in the Jesus myth, this is a sign that the Church has failed to communicate with the general public.
An Evangelical Response to the Cosmic Christ Idea , challenging the key ideas lying at the foundation of Harpur's thesis. Porter and Bedard conclude that there is sufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus and assert that Harpur is motivated to promote "universalistic spirituality". Since , several English-language documentaries have focused—at least in part—on the Christ myth theory:.
Rudolf Bultmann
The named notes after this sentence contain named references; to prevent errors, they are stored here before the notes-reflist. Per biblical criticism , studies of the Old and New Testaments are often independent of each other, largely due to the difficulty of any single scholar having a sufficient grasp of the many languages required or of the cultural background for the different periods in which texts had their origins. Cognate disciplines include but are not limited to archaeology, anthropology, folklore, linguistics, Oral Tradition studies, and historical and religious studies.
Arnal , pp. Niehoff , p. They all had stories about them set in human history on earth. Yet none of them ever actually existed. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For discussion of Jesus in a comparative mythological and religious context, see Jesus in comparative mythology. For the body of myths associated with Christianity, see Christian mythology. For the scholarly study of the life of Jesus, see Historical Jesus.
For analysis of information supporting the historical existence of Jesus, see Historicity of Jesus and Sources for the historicity of Jesus. For the debate over the validity of stories in the New Testament, see Historical reliability of the Gospels. The Resurrection of Christ by Carl Heinrich Bloch —some mythicists see this as a case of a dying-and-rising god.
Life in art Depiction Jesuism. Textual criticism , Historical criticism , Biblical hermeneutics , and Quest for the historical Jesus. Christology , Christian apologetics , Christian fundamentalism , Biblical literalism , and Evangelicalism. Pauline epistles and Authorship of the Pauline epistles. Origins of Christianity and Gnosticism.
Diversity in early Christian theology. Religious syncretism and Mytheme. Notes with nested refs. Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne eds. Eerdmans, , pp. Prometheus Books, , pp. The Question of Criteria Louisville. Previous Discussion and New Proposals Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, Neither God nor Man: Age of Reason Publications, , vii—viii. Christianity in the Making. The Bart Ehrman Blog. Retrieved November 2, Pagels , p. From there it could mean a group, school, or sect differentiated from others Acts 5: By extension, it could speak of a faction 1 Cor.
Doctrinal and social aspects were tightly bound. But in 2 Pet. The presence of heresy, therefore, is a contradiction both to apostolic teaching and Christian community. On the other hand, no theologian seems to be able to bring himself to admit that the question of the historicity of Jesus must be judged to be an open one. It appears to me that the theologians are not living up to their responsibility as scholars when they refuse to discuss the possibility that even the existence of the Jesus of the Gospels can be legitimately called into question.
Historicizing the Figure of Jesus, the Messiah: Bart Ehrman, Maurice Casey] the approach taken by the scholars agreeing with the consensus view is uncritically grounded in unjustified presuppositions, and sometimes appears as unprofessional and unscholarly The entire field of Jesus studies has thus been left without any valid method.
The truth may not rest in the middle. The truth may not rest with the majority. Every theory and individual argument must be evaluated on its own. But it should be examined anew a task I'll undertake in the next volume [i. On the Historicity of Jesus ]. Ehrman , pp. Robertson does not exclude the possibility of an historical Jesus. Robertson [], Christianity and Mythology , revised edition, p. The Jesus ben-Pandera of the Talmud may have led a movement round which the survivals of an ancient solar or other cult gradually clustered.
He is not the founder of anything that we can recognize as Christianity. He is a mere postulate of historical criticism—a dead leader of a lost cause, to whom sayings could be credited and round whom a legend could be written. Legend has coloured the historic data too much, and outside corroborative testimony is too slender They feel that the question of historicity has little importance [ Price , p.
The Traditional Christ-Myth Theory: Wells and Alvar Ellegard thought that the first Christians had in mind Jesus who had lived as a historical figure, just not of the recent past, much as the average Greek believed Hercules and Achilles really lived somewhere back there in the past. Bart Ehrman on G. There never was a Jesus of Nazareth.
Lecture given at the University of Arizona. Some now agree historicity agnosticism is warranted, including Arthur Droge professor of early Christianity at UCSD , Kurt Noll associate professor of religion at Brandon University , and Thomas Thompson renowned professor of theology, emeritus, at the University of Copenhagen.
Still others, like Philip Davies professor of biblical studies, emeritus, at the University of Sheffield , disagree with the hypothesis but admit it is respectable enough to deserve consideration. Ehrman , p. That is what this book will set out to demonstrate. I work further on this issue in my Messiah Myth of Here I argue that the synoptic gospels can hardly be used to establish the historicity of the figure of Jesus; for both the episodes and sayings with which the figure of Jesus is presented are stereotypical and have a history that reaches centuries earlier.
I have hardly shown that Jesus did not exist and did not claim to. As for the question of whether Jesus existed, the best answer is that any attempt to find a historical Jesus is a waste of time. The Bible and Interpretation. Retrieved January 29, Neither do the few mentions of Jesus by Roman writers in the early second century establish his existence.
How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels. He is even willing to entertain the possibility that there never was a historical Jesus. Jesus at the Vanishing Point — Son of Scripture: Was There No Historical Jesus? Traditional midrash often did this through entirely fictional creations, whose story elements served symbolic purposes, like morality tales. The Gospels Not History: Surely if a miracle-working prophet like the Jesus of the Gospels actually existed, it is argued, Paul and pagan contemporaries would have mentioned his feats and his teachings.
Instead, they argue, we find a virtual silence. Lataster a , p. Separating History from Myth , ed. Joseph Hoffmann Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, , p. Quite likely because the earliest Christians, perhaps Jewish, Samaritan, and Galilean sectarians like the Nasoreans or Essenes, did not understand their savior to have been a figure of mundane history at all, any more than the devotees of the cults of Attis, Hercules, Mithras, and Osiris did. Their gods, too, had died and risen in antiquity.
Indeed, the Pauline Christ was actually quite close to the sorts of divinities we find in ancient mystery religions. They never refer to a place of birth [ They do not refer to his trial before a Roman official, nor to Jerusalem as the place of execution. Prometheus, , The most extreme legendary-Jesus theorists, however—particularly the Christ myth theorists—deny this. According to the theory, Paul believed that Christ entered the world at some point in the distant past—or that he existed only in a transcendent mythical realm—and died to defeat evil powers and redeem humanity.
Only later was Jesus remythologized [i. The Origins and Development of Christology Wells b. The Traditional Christ-Myth Theory. Retrieved May 2, Dickson, John 24 December The irreligious assault on the historicity of Jesus". ABC Religion and Ethics. Retrieved 2 May The evidence just doesn't add up". Sources — Spotlight on the Evangelists ; Price , p. Journal of Higher Criticism. Retrieved September 2, The Amazing Colossal Apostle. The four Gospels and the one Gospel of Jesus Christ: Finding the Historical Christ. Christianity in the Making by James D.
Christianity in the Making , Volume 1 by James D. Jesus being a preexisting archangel: The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Prometheus , first published The End of Biblical Studies. Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science. University of Chicago Press, Bader, Christopher, et al.
American Piety in the 21st Century. Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, Seeing Through the Eyes of Jesus: Seeing through the eyes of Jesus: Retrieved January 24, Jesus and the Logic of History. Messiah Jesus — the evidence of history. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Hahn; Dave Scott, eds. Richard Bauckham , Jesus and the Eyewitnesses ". The Hermeneutic of Continuity: Christ, Kingdom, and Creation. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy eds.
In Search of Jesus: Insider and Outsider Images. Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. De Evangelische Jozua , Fortress, , first published Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma. The Messiah Formerly Known as Jesus. Baylor University Press, Harrison, William Sanford LaSor. Lutterworth, , first published Harvard University Press, Jesus Now and Then. The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus.