Describing the creation of the Gospel accounts, the author outlines the Gospels from top to bottom to construct the thought of a now lost template that was used to write the accounts of the Christ. Renan also uses the influence of the persecution of Christians as an influencing factor in the writing of the Christ in a critical form.
Describing the creation of the Gospel accounts, the author outlines the Gospels from top to bottom to construct the thought of a now lost template that was used to write the accounts of the Christ. Renan also uses the influence of the persecution of Christians as an influencing factor in the writing of the Christ in a critical form.
Jesus asked no more profound question than this one that He posed to His disciples. He asks that same question of you today. But how can anyone know for certain who Jesus is when confronted with so many different views of Him? Is He: the good but powerless Jesus of world religions? the "less than fully God" Jesus of the cults of Christianity? the mystical and even sensual Jesus of Hollywood and popular media?
Most historical Jesus and Gospel scholars have supposed three hypotheses of unidirectionality: geographically, the more Judaeo-Palestinian, the earlier; modally, the more oral, the earlier; and linguistically, the more Aramaized, the earlier. These are based on the chronological assumption of'the earlier, the more original'. These four long-held hypotheses have been applied as authenticity criteria. However, this book proposes that linguistic milieus of 1st-century Palestine and the Roman Near East were bilingual in Greek and vernacular languages and that the earliest church in Jerusalem was a bilingual Christian community. The study of bilingualism blurs the lines between each of the temporal dichotomies. The bilingual approach undermines unidirectional assumptions prevalent among Gospels and Acts scholarship with regard to the major issues of source criticism, textual criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, literary criticism, the Synoptic Problem, the Historical Jesus, provenances of the Gospels and Acts, the development of Christological titles and the development of early Christianity. There is a need for New Testament studies to rethink the major issues from the perspective of the interdirectionality theory based on bilingualism.
This work had a large hand in shaping modern Biblical criticism. Using the German form of criticism in his own day Renan goes through the Gospels and examines the miracles and other aspects of the life of Jesus. Although the work denies the divinity of Christ, this documents role in shaping how we work with the Bible is significant.
The question of hermeneutics now dominates all disciplines of human knowledge and its construction. It has moved from a concentration on how to apply the results of research knowledge to considerations of the frameworks by which we conduct research as a meaningful exercise. The study of the Bible is not exempt from these developments. The essays in this collection amply testify to the breadth of frameworks that are now being applied to the Bible and the development of ethical awareness in the construction of knowledge. The reader will find engagements with the Bible informed by developments in science, law, ecology, feminism and linguistics. Key ethical issues about violence, fundamentalism, anti-semitism and patriarchy are directly addressed as inextricably involved in the interpretation of the Bible, on the understanding that both Bible and interpreter must be responsible and accountable in todays world. Critical analysis of the Bible is no different, even when there is a pre-disposition or confessional commitment to treat the bible as sacred scripture. Biblical research is inextricably affected by those epistemologies and ethical sensitivities that inform understanding and the search for meaning in our contemporary world.
The dawn of the new century brought lots of growth to the Christian community as persecution slowed down and the community was allowed to flourish like never before. This volume details out the reigns of two Roman emperors and how their influence impacted the ever growing Christian community in the Roman Empire.
