Sublime

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

Thus we must ask: why and how did the early disciples, shattered as they had been by the crucifixion of their master, regroup and go out to face persecution for declaring that in him the hope of Israel had quite literally come to life?

We must begin where Sanders ends: with eschatology. The main issue between Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries was his claim that the moment had come, that their god was even now inaugurating his kingdom, and that this—this praxis, these stories, this person—was the mode and means of its inauguration. Thus far, Sanders; and in my view rightly.

Since most historical characters worth studying are so because they held mindsets that formed significant variations on the parent worldview, this latter move will always be risky. (The Queen sacrifice may after all have taken place, obedient to some extraordinary new strategy.

Within the church, the challenge of the skeptics put the church on the defensive. Was Jesus really divine? The eighteenth-century church was concerned to prove that he was. This resulted in a reading of the gospels looking for the wrong thing.

Once we get the goal right (the new creation, not just “heaven”) and the human problem properly diagnosed (idolatry and the corruption of vocation, not just “sin”), the larger biblical vision of Jesus’s death begins to come into view.

Lost through sin, the gifts of Word and Spirit that made humans the image of God at their creation would need to be restored to humanity by Christ in some new way that improves upon the original situation that permitted their loss.

faith is a “stance” we take toward the world.

The Seminar announced to its public that the real Jesus was innocent of the wicked apocalypticism with which so many Christians, not least in the conservative American churches against which American academics react so strongly, had for so long associated him.