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2022, "Jesus’s Interpretation of the Torah." Pages 400–413 in The Jesus Handbook. Edited by Jens Schröter and Christine Jacobi. Translated by Robert Brawley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
An authoritative handbook on Jesus, his world, the outcomes of his life, and the quests to locate him in history. The Jesus Handbook is an indispensable reference work featuring essays from an international team of renowned scholars on the significance and meaning of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Rooted in historical-critical methodology, it emphasizes a diversity of perspectives and provides a spectrum of possible interpretations rather than a single unified portrait of Jesus. The Handbook's dozens of authors-Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Protestant-all remain committed to the principle of interpreting the life of Jesus in context, while also giving due diligence to the implications of archaeological evidence and recent discourses in the hermeneutics of history. After an introduction that lays out the considerations of the task at hand, the authors survey the history of Jesus research and take a close look at the historical material itself-textual and otherwise. From this foundation, the Handbook then details the life of Jesus before at last exploring the reception and effects of Jesus's life after his death, especially in the first centuries CE. With this wealth of information available in a single volume, scholars and students of the New Testament and early Christianity-and anyone interested in the search for the historical Jesus-will find The Jesus Handbook to be a resource that they return to time and again for both its breadth and depth.
The Jewish Quarterly Review
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity2000 •
In our own time, many fine works have endeavored to extricate the “historical” Jesus from the Gospelic context of church image and message. The results have been mostly snippets of insight stitched together to accomplish a patchwork portrait that is always impressionistic, and usually colored by the bias of its author. Recent “historical” theories that Jesus was a political rebel causing social disturbances, or was a religious revisionist discarding Torah law, once again fill the literary ether with intuitive fantasy rather than fact. As remarkable a claim as it may seem, my new book, A Documented Biography of Jesus Before Christianity (anticipated release, summer 2015) now presents a profoundly different Jesus than Christians or Jews have met before, trapped in a drama that should deeply move all of us. On the technical side, my method shares nothing with Bultmann’s two-source critical approach--or with the contrarian criteria establishing Geza Vermes’ “Jewish” Jesus. Rather, it depends on hypothesizing historicity of specific events excavated from beneath strata of Christianizing theology if their occurrence illuminates other hitherto obscure scriptural passages. I have labelled my approach, “The method of precipitous insight.” To wit: If an insight into an event in the Gospels is capable of dramatically clarifying thematic and linguistic uncertainties found elsewhere in the text, the insight, called “precipitous,” is elevated to the level of hypothesis. As hypothesis, it may be “tested” by its predicted consequences. If, for example, it links to other text, creating further pronounced insight, the exponential increase in clarity is likely an advance toward a unified theory. Finding the historical core in the Gospels’ “midrashim” The use of “lesson-legends” to amplify and interpret religious truths was a deeply-rooted literary technique of the ancient rabbis. Such legends embellished and dramatized episodes described in the Torah (giving them an extra aura of divine intention) and authoring them was a standard practice in Jesus’ era. The Hebrew name for them, midrashim, meant made-up stories which interpret the meaning of presumed actual events. In the early centuries of our era, such dramatic, theological enhancement through legends was never created from “whole cloth,” but consisted of fancifully embroidering events considered historical, with their imaginative elaboration built on the supposed actual occurrences. Therefore, one may say, a midrash always had at its core an event regarded by its author as historically true. Christianity’s most famous candidates include: Jesus being born from a virgin, his healing incurable diseases, turning water to wine; Jesus contemplating the adulteress brought before him for judgment, his temptation by satan on the Jerusalem precipice, walking on water, calming the storm, feeding thousands from a small basket of food, and giving Peter the keys to the coming Kingdom of God. Additionally, Jesus’ own words were often cloaked in interpretive “midrashic” embellishment, and they too must be the subject of close scrutiny and re-translation in order to unearth what he actually said, and reach the New Testament’s historical stratum. When, like oysters, the Christianizing shells are opened for inspection, the startling drama of Jesus’ life emerges as the “pearls” of history are strung together. The reader should be aware that midrashic analysis is not the same as searching out a natural explanation for seeming miracles. For example, others have suggested that the “miracle of feeding a multitude from a few loaves” may be explained by a storage facility for baked goods to which Jesus had access. Attempting to reduce the “miracles” to mundane episodes by guessing at “plausible explanations” is a false step obfuscating what actually occurred. To speculate in such a manner is to further gloss and conceal the interconnected sequence of unfolding occurrences, burying the actual history beneath the description. The midrashim, it should be stated, differ from parables--meshalim-- which do not have a historical core. Meshalim--are short stories with a lesson meant to interpret or explain a higher moral truth, generally embodied in a scriptural passage. They are familiar to us as the Gospels’ “parables.”
Novum Testamentum
Jesus Research: An International Perspective, The First Princeton-Prague Symposium on Jesus Research, Novum Testamentum 53/1 (2011), 101-1042011 •
Theology Today
What You See is What You Get: Context and Content in Current Research on the Historical Jesus1995 •
Journal for the Study of the New Testament
The Narratives of the Gospels and the Historical Jesus: Current Debates, Prior Debates, and the Goal of Historical Jesus Research2016 •
The article argues that current debates over method in historical Jesus studies reveal two competing ‘models’ for how to use the gospel tradition in order to approach the historical Jesus. These models differ over their treatments of the narrative frameworks of the gospels and, concomitantly, their views of the development of the Jesus tradition. A first model, inspired by form criticism and still advocated today, attempts to attain a historical Jesus ‘behind’ the interpretations of early Christians. A second model, inspired by advances in historiography and memory theory, posits a historical Jesus who is ultimately unattainable, but can be hypothesized on the basis of the interpretations of the early Christians, and as part of a larger process of accounting for how and why early Christians came to view Jesus in the ways that they did. Advocating the latter approach to the historical Jesus and responding to previous criticism, this article argues further that these two models are methodologically and epistemologically incompatible. It therefore challenges the suggestion that one can affirm the goals of the second model while maintaining the methods of the first model. Keywords
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The Evangelical quarterly
The Prophet Jesus and the Renewal of Israel: Moving beyond a diversionary debate Richard Horsley Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. vi + 161 pp. pb. $20, ISBN 978-0-8028-6807-72014 •
1999 •
Journal of Gospels and Acts Research
Review of The Jesus Handbook by Jens Schröter and Christine Jacobi (eds.) JGAR 7 20232023 •
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
James Carleton Paget - Review : “Jésus dans le Talmud et la littérature rabbinique ancienne” (Thierry Murcia, Turnhout, Brepols, 2014), The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 67, 1 (2016), p. 146-148.2016 •
Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus
Presuppositions and Procedures in the Study of the ‘Historical Jesus’: Or, Why I Decided Not to be a ‘Historical Jesus’ Scholar2005 •
2014 •
Reviews in Religion & Theology
The Quest to Digest Jesus: Recent Books on the Historical Jesus2000 •