What the Gospels Tell Us about Who Jesus Is This clear, compact introduction surveys what the Gospels tell us about who Jesus is by exploring his teachings and actions in their contexts. Darrell Bock, a leading evangelical New Testament scholar who speaks and teaches around the world, and Benjamin Simpson treat the Gospels as reliable sources for a plausible portrait of Jesus. Condensing years of extensive study on the topic, this handy, readable textbook presents fresh ways to understand the Gospels, especially the Synoptics in comparison with John.
One of the most influential twentieth-century studies on the doctrine of Christ, this highly acclaimed work demonstrates Pannenberg's belief that at the heart of every Christian theology lies its teaching about Jesus Christ. The second edition, available for the first time in paperback, contains an Afterword in which the author reviews other theologians' responses to his thesis and methodology and shows the progression of his own interpretation.
Liberal attacks on the doctrine of the divinity of Christ have led evangelicals to rightly affirm the centrality of Jesus's divine nature for his person and work. At times, however, this defense of orthodoxy has led some to neglect Christ's full humanity. To counteract this oversight, theologian Bruce Ware takes readers back to the biblical text, where we meet a profoundly human Jesus who struggled with many of the same difficulties and limitations we face today. Like us, he grew in faith and wisdom, tested by every temptation common to man. And like us, he too received power for godliness through the Holy Spirit, and thus serves not only as the divine Lord to be worshiped, but also the supreme Human to be followed.
Mainstream biblical scholarship is far from achieving consensus in its ongoing attempt to separate the glorified Jesus of faith from the ever elusive Jesus of history. It remains to be seen how soon traditional academia will overcome its reluctance to take the plunge into the New Testament's final, uncharted territory: the theory that Christianity began with belief in a spiritual heavenly Son of God, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction, and that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed. . . The Gospels and Acts of the Apostles form one small portion of the early Christian documentary record. They reflect but one category of thought and witness to what that broad movement came to believe in. Modern scholars and believers alike view the world of early Christianity through the prism of this narrow handful of inbred writings, a chain of literary dependency and enlargement on the first one written, and it has distorted all that they see. The Gospels and Acts need to be put in their proper perspective, so that they no longer obscure a more clear-eyed view of what early Christianity constituted. That view can be found in everything from the New Testament epistles to the non-canonical documents, to the writings of the Gnostics and second century apologists. Until we allow ourselves to recognise what broader factors of the era brought the idea of a Jesus into being, and how he evolved over the first 150 years, the Western world will continue to live and perpetuate a fantasy. . . Earl Doherty, through his website and first book, "The Jesus Puzzle" is regarded by many as having given Jesus Mythicism its most legitimate and convincing expression in over a generation. This is a new and revised expansion of that work. The product of almost three decades of study, it presents a case of unprecedented depth and lucidity for the non-existence of an historical Jesus. (The original "The Jesus Puzzle" will continue to be available as a condensed version of that case). In this age of the Internet and the increased dissemination of knowledge and ideas across a wide public constituency, the true beginnings of one of the world s major religions may finally be ready to emerge.
This study of the fourth gospel by John the Apostle lays out the case for Jesus' dynamic nature as the God/Man and the various reactions people had when confronted by this amazing reality.
The orderliness of the universe and the existence of human beings already provides some reason for believing that there is a God - as argued in Richard Swinburne's earlier book Is There a God ? Swinburne now claims that it is probable that the main Christian doctrines about the nature of God and his actions in the world are true. In virtue of his omnipotence and perfect goodness, God must be a Trinity, live a human life in order to share our suffering, and found a church which would enable him to tell all humans about this. It is also quite probable that he would provide his human life as an atonement for our wrongdoing, teach us how we should live and tell us his plans for our future after death. Among founders of religions, Jesus satisfies uniquely well the requirement of living the sort of human life which God would need to have lived. But to give us adequate reason to believe that Jesus was God, God would need to put his 'signature' on the life of Jesus by an act which he alone could do, for example raise him from the dead. There is adequate historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. The church which he founded gave plausible interpretations of his basic message. Therefore Christian doctrines are probably true.
