Paper, Scissors, Rock
Encountering the Historical Jesus
Jim wonders why history involving Jesus matters.
My book group has been reading about the historical Jesus, a hot topic in both scholarship and the larger world of Christian belief. We are now tackling The Historical Jesus: Five Views. Five scholars will state their opinions concerning findings (or lack thereof) about the historical Jesus and the other four will comment on them. I am looking forward to those discussions. But the book starts off with a 45-page overview of the various “quests” for the historical Jesus, a very helpful orientation to this scholarship. It is generally accepted that there have been three quests for the historical Jesus according to Beilby and Eddy. The first spans writings from 1778 to 1906. It ended with the publishing of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the …
Jim McGown
9:50 am on Monday, August 22, 2011
Archaeology is certainly challenging a lot of historical material in the Hebrew Bible. While I was not aware that the very existence of David and Solomon is being questioned, the two hour Nova feature, "The Bible's Buried Secrets: Beyond Fact or Fiction," raises many questions about the settlement of the "Promised Land." Though the authors of the Hebrew Bible were not using modern historiographic… more ›