The Historical Jesus: Four Theses
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/2012/05/the-historical-jesus-four-theses/ May 6, 2012 By Michael F. Bird 0 Comments In light of the Anthony Le Donne saga , I thought I’d repost, “The Historical Jesus: Four Theses.” 1 . The Historical Jesus is not … a. The untheological Jesus. Our only access to Jesus is through the faith and theology of the early church. The Gospels contains a mixture of fact and faith, history and hermeneutic, authenticity and artistry. Jesus himself was theologically grounded and his message was about God (i.e., his message about God addressed the socio-political circumstances of Palestine and the position of Israel vis-a-vis God) . So we can expect to find theological matter (not abstract theology) in the historical Jesus and in the memory that Jesus himself generated. b. A fifth Gospel . The historical Jesus will always be a reconstructed Jesus by historians and makes no attempt to become the authorizing narrative o...