Historical Jesus

“Excavating Jesus” proved to be a unique blend of ground as gospel, as self-claimed in its introduction. However, after the engaging introduction, filled with facts and fun quips from the authors, the reader was pulled away from the goal of excavating Jesus and towards a textual representation of first century history that no longer focused on the historical Jesus but rather the historical Christian. Written by John Dominic Crossan, an Irish-American Catholic religious scholar, and Johnathan…

Shifting towards examining the film through a historically critical perspective, it is arguable that if it had been created with an outlook of the Gospels as historical texts, rather than sacred scripture, a majority of elements would be characterized differently. In case, many components of the film are questionable in their historical accuracy. Further, scholars generally agree that the authors of the Gospels were not eyewitnesses to encompassing events throughout, but rather were part an…

There are only two stories in the New Testament that recount the birth of Jesus as the most extraordinary event of history, Jesus birth was the cause of worship, for God dwelled with us. At first glance it can be determined that the two gospels present Jesus childhood in different ways, in fact Saint Matthew does not present with details the childhood of Jesus. Saint Matthew presents a genealogy of all the descendants of Jesus. Matthew places fourteen generations from Abraham and David, another…

Who is Jesus the Christ? As my seven and five year old children would say, Jesus is God’s son. Oh, if only it were that simple of an answer. This is a question that every Christian, when they are being honest, struggles to answer their entire life. I have experienced moments of certainty when faced with this question, only to succumb to insecurity once more. For instance, my first experience of rejecting Jesus came to me after reading Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code in the early 2000’s. My sudden…

. In order to find the historical Jesus, there are few sources that align with the oldest layer of literature that can be used to interpret the historical Jesus. One of these sources is the Quelle Gospel. Quelle is the german word for source, and is often abbreviated as the Q Gospel. This gospel is imbedded in both Matthew and Luke. Whenever Matthew and Luke both agree on something, but it is not mentioned in Mark, that means it is from another source, the Q gospel. This gospel doesn't really…

Jesus Christ: a celestial, heavenly figure shrouded in our contemporary culture as a peaceful prophet whose sole purpose was divine salvation. This representation of Jesus that has permeated throughout history is entirely wrong in Aslan’s perspective. Aslan portrays Jesus as a politically conscious revolutionary who in fact supported violence to a certain extent. Now when Aslan’s critically detested words entered my mind, like most self-proclaimed critics, I mocked this man for his asininity.…

in regards to the questions and the historical Jesus. I think some of the answers may have been different depending on who was asked, their upbringing, and religion. I realized that some of the questions could be quite difficult to answer if you didn’t have time to study the questions because individuals do not always look deeply into certain aspects of their faith until being prodded. When asked who is Jesus and why was he born? He answered, saying that Jesus is God and came to reconcile the…

The search for historical Jesus is a difficult one. As mentioned in the video "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians," there is no written information about Jesus at the time that he lived, the written information we have is after the time of Jesus’ life and we do not know who the author(s) are. I believe that you have to integrate the historical, and archeology, findings with the messages in the Bible; you cannot ignore solid evidence. As we have learned in this class you must take into…

narration about Jesus’ life and works, which makes it open to interpretation. Everyone has their own concept for Jesus’ ideals of his powers. The only source for historical Jesus is found in the four gospels. While the four gospels have similarities, they also contradict each other. They were also released years after Jesus’ death, and they are not first-hand accounts. The quest to find historical Jesus, requires us to strip the primary resources and look for other evidences for Jesus The…

As Christians, we know that the information we have about Jesus is indeed reliable. However, can we prove that the information is reliable through presentable evidence? Of course we can, we just need to look at the provided evidence at all angles. The New Testament is one of the most historically accurate documentations every discovered. There are thousands of original manuscripts of the New Testament that date back to the early second century. The accuracy of the New Testament is about 99.9%,…