Professor LeDonne is trying out something new. He is offering an online course he calls Portraits of Jesus. To find out more information, click on this link HERE. This is the course description: In this course we will examine some of the different "Jesuses" who have emerged through the ages, including several interpretations of Jesus in historical studies, and several interpretations of Jesus from art and literature. This course will weave together three primary threads: 1) the Jesus of history; 2) ancient representations of Jesus; and 3) the various modern Jesuses who embody various symbols, ideologies, collective memories, and cultural identities. Through lecture and discussion, we will examine diverse portraits of Jesus in history, literature, art, song, and film throughout history.
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A viable historical solution to Earl Doherty’s “Jesus Puzzle” has taken place within the Guild of NT Studies, the only discipline capable, not only of identifying our primary Scriptural source of apostolic witness, but of appropriately interpreting this source. “Few are they who find it” even among well-attested NT scholars. Finding it, this historical solution, is “a task to which specialized knowledge in the areas of philology, form and redaction criticism. literary criticism, history of religions, and New Testament theology necessarily applies”. (Hans Dieter Betz). “Over the last two centuries, there gradually emerged a new access to Jesus, made available through historical research”, (James M. Robinson). Under the force of present historical methods and knowledge this new access was brought into a highly creditable understanding during the 1980’s.
Schubert Ogden: “We now know not only that none of the Old Testament writings is prophetic witness to (Jesus) in the sense in which the early church assumed them to be, but also that none of the writings of the New Testament is apostolic witness to Jesus as the early church itself understood apostolicity. The sufficient evidence for this point in the case of the New Testament writings is that all of them have been shown to depend on sources earlier than themselves, written or oral, and hence not to be the original and originating witness that the early church mistook them to be in judging them to be apostolic. [“the sufficient evidence” without the agonizing detail of what they do contain which supplies the grist for the blogosphere mythicists mill]. The witness of the apostles is still rightly taken to be the real “Christian” norm, even if we today have to locate this norm, not in the writings of the New Testament but in the earliest stratum of Scriptural witness accessible to us given our own methods of historical analysis and reconstruction.” Betz identifies this earliest stratum to be the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3-7:27). “This source presents us with an early form – deriving from (the Jerusalem Jesus Movement) which had direct links to the teaching of the historical Jesus and thus constituted an alternative to Gentile Christianity as known above all in the letters of Paul, the Gospels, as well as the later writings of the New Testament. (All are written in the context of imaging the Christ of faith, not the man Jesus). If the Sermon on the Mount represents a response to the teaching of Jesus critical of that of Gentile-Christianity, then it serves unmistakably to underline the well-known fact of how little we know of Jesus and his teaching. The reasons for our lack of knowledge cannot be overcome by an excess of good will (apologetics). The Gentile Christian authors of the Gospels transmitted to us only that part of the teaching of Jesus that they themselves understood, they handed on only that which they were able to translate into the thought categories of Gentile Christianity, and which the judged to be worthy of transmission.” (More to the point, they included no more than they felt to be sufficient to lend historical credence to their Pauline Christ of faith myth). This calls for a new reconstruction of post mortem Jesus traditions which takes account of the fact that there were two distinctly different Jesus traditions during the period 30 CE – 65 CE, each with its own opposing image of Jesus, before Christianity, before the Gospels. (I made this comment on the post, News From the Free-Thought Ghetto – The New Oxonian. Hoffmann commented: “Ed: Thank you so much for this – filled with wisdom and understanding, like Job!”.)
The class sounds very interesting.
April: Might you join Sistergirl with some comment? We have had some past exchanges, pro and con.
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