Sublime

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.

The broad and general elements of the Gospels are imaged for us by the ancient nonbiblical authors of the first and early second centuries, and they are confirmed by the archaeological record.

tradition is the flow, the changing current, we, as Christians, live in.

John not only writes in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, but understands himself to be writing at the climax of the tradition, when all the eschatological oracles of the prophets are about to be finally fulfilled, and so he interprets and gathers them up in his own prophetic revelation. What makes him a Christian prophet is that he does

I am not sure I do accept God, or how God has been traditionally defined or understood.

therefore any Gentile who followed Jesus was counted a member of the covenant people, irrespective of adherence to Torah. But the key issue of Torah in Paul’s churches was the question of gentile admission, and thus of circumcision; and about that Jesus said not a word.