I have written a post in three parts that attempts to paint a picture of what we can know about the historical Jesus.
PART ONE – WHAT IS A MESSIAH?
This looks at the background to Jesus by examining the Jewish concept of a Messiah. I trace its origins to the development of monotheism and a double paradox that confronted the Jews. The first was the problem of evil: how could an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good God permit evil and suffering. The second was the position of the Jews themselves, a small subject to the whims of great empires. How could God permit the only nation that worshipped him to be ruled by pagans?
The idea of a Messiah developed as a response to these questions. However, Jews were divided about who or what the Messiah would be. Would he lost king who revived David’s dynasty, a priest, a prophet, an angel or some other semi-divine figure? Would his arrival simply herald a restoration of Israel’s independence or would it be a cosmic event that brought the world as we know it to an end?
Click here for Part One
PART TWO – OUR SOURCES
This looks at the historical-critical method and our biblical sources for the historical Jesus (Paul, Mark, Q, M, L and John) and extra-Biblical (mostly the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas). It examines the problems with these sources and the techniques scholars have developed to investigate what we can learn about Jesus from them.
Traditionally, people speak about three waves of the search for the historical Jesus: the first in the 19th century, the second from the 1950s and a third starting in the late 1970s. However, quite a lot of important work has been done in between and since these waves. Scholarly debate continues to rage, but there is some consensus about the outlines of our portrait of Jesus the man.
Click here for Part Two
PART THREE: THE HISTORICAL JESUS
This begins with three things we can be sure the early church wouldn’t have invented: Jesus coming from Nazareth, his baptism by John the Baptist and his crucifixion. I explain why all of them constitute major embarrassments that they wouldn’t have made up.
Next, I examine what we can know about the story of Jesus’ mission, his message and whether he thought he was the Messiah. I look at the reasons why he was neither a great ethical teacher nor a social reformer, before asking whether Jesus predicted his death and examining the reasons for his execution. Finally, I discuss the paradox of Jesus as one of the most important people in history and a complete failure in terms of the mission he set himself.
Click here for Part Three
Paul Clark 