So anyway, I just finished that book Albert gave me, so I'll talk about it a little bit.
These are the main ideas of what I saw:
- The "quest for the historical Jesus," posited by so many influential Bible scholars, in which a "split" is posited between "The historical Jesus" and "The Jesus of faith" is misguided, un-factual, and unhistorical (this is on the same wavelength, I understand, as Pope Benedict's book [which I am about to read]).
- The real way to be historical is not to seek to understand the texts according to the mindset of twentieth-century (or any other century) modern skeptical inquiry but according to first-century Jewish eschatology.
- In order to understand the historical sense of the Gospels one should understand what first-century Jews expected about the Scriptures and what it meant to be a messiah rather than anachronistically assuming they had all the developments of later Christian theology (much less modern ideologies and categories of thinking).
Comments