What is your reaction or response to the Quest for the Historical Jesus?

I read this article before but i was really having a hard time to understand since once of the factor too is Englosh is my second language. I also want to know what everybody else's idea about this

Do you have a link to the article?

i really dont have that article no more. But i came across this book and I just basically want to hear what everybody think about that topic

That is a big topic, with many angles. It would help if you could reference the article or the specific book. It might help others to comment.

However I will take a stab.

The historical Jesus could be considered as the person who can be recovered by the standards of historical research. I think there is very little that can be determined by that standard. The gospels and Paul are the only sources that are available, and they are primarily religious writings, approaching Jesus from a faith perspective.

Very little can be known of the historical Jesus. We can gather information about 1st century society and balance that information with what is provided in the NT sources.

Personally, I do not focus much on historical Jesus scholarship, as such.

Educated Western people find it harder to believe that Jesus was God, than that he was a man. So they sometimes focus on the latter, calling it the "historical Jesus," while setting aside the far more significant issue.

No historical Pinnochio for me, thanks.

>5 paradoxosalpha: That's an interesting take on it, paradoxosalpha.

My understanding of the quest for the historical Jesus is that we mostly focus on the theological Jesus. Most of what we know about Jesus is seen through the lens of Christianity, Jesus the Christ. Thus there is some interest in trying to work out who the historical man Jesus was separate from the accrued layers of Christianity. One book I usually recommend is Albert Nolan's Jesus Before Christianity.

I think the "quest for the historical Jesus" more often than not represents an attempt to avoid having to engage in Spirit-driven dialectical conversation with the Risen Christ in the context of our contemporary world and culture, here and now. As such, one could understand it as a type of idolatry.

By trying to determine what we would or would not hear if we were able to travel via TARDIS to the times and places at which Yeshua bar Yosef would have taught, I think we "empty out" Christianity and the empty shell which is left is little more than a cult of personality. The attempt to recover some type of uncorrupted pre-Pauline Gospel message can quickly develop into its own type of fundamentalism when it becomes little more than a search for rules and principles to follow handed down by a millenia-old source, something which could trump scripture and tradition and reason alike, a set of unquestionable "right" answers which are extrinsic to us and can be followed blindly without the need for real critical thinking and spiritual evolution.

My bias is to think that Chalcedonian Christology presents us with the antidote to this type of fundamentalism, as well as the more traditional kind. Worship of the Word-Made-Flesh, who is of one being with God the Parent and God the Spirit, who is eternally begotten from God the Parent, who is made incarnate by the power of God the Spirit, who is both fully human AND fully divine, who has two natures in the unity of a single person: this, I think, is about as far removed from a cult of personality as it is possible to get.

Following a Chalcedonian-Christological Jesus means more than simply following the ethical principles the historical Jesus would have exemplified in his life, then (even if we did have a reliable mechanism for extrapolating those principles apart from the post-Pauline Christian tradition, which we don't). We don't just follow Jesus. We worship Christ. More importantly, we are part of Christ's Body--"Christ has no hands on Earth but ours" (St. Teresa de Avilla)--and motivated by Christ's Spirit.

We have the holy Scriptures, which contain all that is necessary for salvation. We have the holy Tradition of the saints who have come before us. We have holy Reason since we are a reflection of God's own image.

How are these not sufficient?

>7 cjbanning: cjbanning, I think you present the worst case scenario. I see no inherent and necessary contradiction between our quest for the Risen Christ and an attempt to understand better the man Jesus; they can be interdependent and mutually beneficial. However I agree with you about the potential dangers.

I would like very much to know more of the historical Jesus, but I do not think it can be found. We have the Jesus of faith found in scripture and experienced in community and in belief. We also cannot find much of the historical Paul, although with Paul there are the first hand sources in the letters.

That does not mean that we cannot understand what is available from historical approaches, which can enhance the faith experience.

I gather that the amount of firm information about the historical Jesus, if any, is rather slim, perhaps vanishingly so, and not without controversy even when there are possible historical traces.

Then again, how much of what was written in the relevant period has survived to the present?

Unless some sort of lucky find or hitherto unsuspected documents turn up, it seems as if there wouldn't be much of a basis for historical knowledge either way.

Bart Ehrman has written, “whatever else you might think about the books of the Bible— whether you believe in them or not, whether you consider them inspired or not— they are still books. That is, they were written by people in historical circumstances and contexts and precisely in light of those circumstances and contexts. There is no God-given way of interpreting God-given literature, even if such literature exists. It is still literature. And it has to be interpreted as literature is interpreted. There is no special hermeneutic handed down from above to direct the reading of these books as opposed to all others. Their authors were human authors (whether or not they were inspired); they wrote in human languages and in human contexts; their books are recognizable as human books, written according to the rhetorical conventions of their historical period. They are human and historical, whatever else you may think about them, and to treat them differently is to mistreat them and to misunderstand them”.

Ehrman, Bart D. (2012-03-20). Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (pp. 71-72). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

> 11

Biblical texts are "historical" in the sense of having an origin in particular historical circumstances. They are (mostly) not "histories" in terms of belonging to the genre identified with Herodotus, al-Masudi, and Gibbon.