Jesus Victory of God V2: Christian Origins And The Question Of God

The hypothesis must be explored as a hypothesis. Its vindication will come, like that of all hypotheses, in its inclusion of the data without distortion; in its essential simplicity of…

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when Israel’s god acts, it will be upon Israel herself that the judgment will fall. Why does she look at the speck in her neighbour’s eye, when there is a plank in her own?39 If she is blind herself, how can she be the light of the world?40 If the light in her is darkness, how great that darkness is.

With the mesocosmic level there can be no problem in principle; all agree that the serious task of historical reconstruction, applied to first-century Palestine, is the essential setting for any study of Jesus.

When he returned, it would not be to a modern-style middle-class suburb where everybody (in theory at least) minded their own business, but to a peasant village which thrived on narrative. Not mere gossip, either: the community would order its life and thought by telling and retelling important events which had made them who they were.

The ritual seems to have had both an atoning and a purificatory function; so is the point that the sinner is being purged of sin, or that the cultic impurity created by the presence of the impure person, or the sinner, is being removed from the sacred precincts?139 The path of wisdom may well be to retain both emphases. In both cases, though for di

Someone who is telling strangely familiar stories and meaning the wrong things by them will land up in trouble.

The fact that he was not arrested sooner was due to his itinerant style, and to his concentration on villages rather than major cities, not to anything bland or unprovocative about the content of his message.

To tell all sides that their vision for the nation is wrong, and to act as if one has glimpsed, and is implementing, a different vision, is to invite trouble.

Jesus, like the founder(s) of the Essenes, and like John the Baptist, apparently envisaged that, scattered about Palestine, there would be small groups of people loyal to himself, who would get together to encourage one another, and would act as members of a family, sharing some sort of common life and, in particular, exercising mutual forgiveness.

A third possibility, sometimes adopted, is to take certain well-known and highly controversial passages and to attempt an exegesis based on each verse by itself, working eventually towards some kind of synthesis. This, which can look fine to begin with, actually puts the cart before the horse. It is unhelpful simply to begin with tough, gritty apho