![]() ![]() Then, Vermes shows where Jesus fit into this panoply of religious ferment which he certainly didn't start, but was a part of. That is, Vermes lays out what the ancient Jews of the time considered valid modes of argument. He, Vermes, not Jesus, discusses the schools of Judaism that Jesus was exposed to, and also discusses the groups of preachers who were known then, as well as what standards they used to validify Biblical interpretation. I learned not only more about what Jesus actually promulgated, as opposed to what the Apostles wrote a century or more later, and also as opposed to the interpretations of Christians of all stripes, but also how Vermes went about determining Jesus' beliefs. Will you like this? If you can get past the heavy style and you are interested in Jesus the man, yes. Books like The Mind in the Cave, for instance, which deals with arcane topics like the nature of consciousness are engaging reads. I've read enough scholarly research to know that is not necessary. Unfortunately, the writing is dry and scholarly in tone, no verve, no rhythm, no flowing sentences. Will you li I gave this 4 stars because of the subject matter and evidently careful scholarship, although since I'm hardly a Jesus scholar, I may be more impressed by the scholarship than is warranted. Whatever the reason, the past 20 years have stocked our shelves with good books on Jesus.I gave this 4 stars because of the subject matter and evidently careful scholarship, although since I'm hardly a Jesus scholar, I may be more impressed by the scholarship than is warranted. Was it simply the “historical Jesus hoopla” stirred up by Bob Funk and the Jesus Seminar? Or were there deeper issues at play in North American culture that served to attune people once again to questions of history, of roots? He has been resurrected in the pages of biblical scholarship. Yet today the historical Jesus lives again. ![]() Historical approaches to the Bible were washed up-even suspect. 2 The field of New Testament studies was flooded with redaction-critical studies on the Gospels, literary criticism and biblical theology. If students were assigned anything to read on the subject, it was usually Gunther Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth from the 1950s 1 or even Albert Schweitzer’s classic tome The Quest of the Historical Jesus, originally published in 1906. By 1975, it was clear that scholars had very little to say about him. Thirty years ago, the historical Jesus was dead. ![]()
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