On the "historical Jesus" topic, here's an old article I really liked:
"Who Do Men Say That I Am?" theatlantic.com
A couple excerpts, it's a long article:
One does not need to plunge very deeply or for very long into
the modern literature on Jesus, particularly the modern Catholic
literature, in order to sense that something has changed
profoundly. Consider one recent but basic Catholic text, A
Christological Catechism, by Joseph A. Fitzmyer, a leading
biblical scholar. Did Jesus claim to be God? Fitzmyer replies:
"The Gospels have not so presented that claim.... It is
impossible to imagine how such a statement would have been
understood." What about the Resurrection of Jesus? "The New
Testament never presents the resurrection of Jesus as a
resuscitation, i.e., a return to his former mode of terrestrial
existence." The so- called virgin birth? "New Testament data
for this question are not unambiguous." The historical reliability
of the Gospels? "The only answer which can be given to this
question is meager indeed." Fitzmyer's full responses to some
twenty important questions about Jesus are closely reasoned
and supported by many pages of careful exposition, but the
statements I have pulled out of his book suffice to establish the
tone of things.
I do not know how much, but I suspect very little, of the
content of A Christological Catechism would today strike
non- fundamentalist theologians, which is to say most Christian
theologians, as controversial or even avant-garde. Fitzmyer's
book bears the imprimatur of the vicar general of the
Archdiocese of Washington. It is used in seminaries. And it
affirms, as a matter of faith, all the beliefs essential to
Christianity. But Fitzmyer's answers lack the brevity and the
certainty, the Thomistic elegance and the sometimes cinematic
splendor, of the answers that I learned as a child in parochial
school, of the vaguely more sophisticated answers I received at
subsequent times in my education, and of the answers that,
frankly, one still hears from the pulpit. Living a Christian life,
whatever that may mean, and difficult as it may be, probably
has not been made progressively harder over the centuries. But
defining how a Christian should understand Jesus has.
A very central, very interesting thing that many seem to agree on, :
The fundamental fact about the young Jesus -- indeed, about
Jesus at any age -- is that he was, as Geza Vermes recently
observed, "a Jew and not a Christian." Vermes is a
distinguished Jewish historian at Oxford University and an
expert on the Dead Sea scrolls. He notes that Jesus was raised
in Galilee and spent almost all of his life there (far, in those
days, from the religious niceties of Jerusalem), where a sturdy if
unsophisticated kind of Judaism was practiced. Jesus was
circumcised as a Jew, lived as a Jew, prayed as a Jew,
performed Jewish rituals, and spoke in Aramaic to his fellow
Jews in terms that they and he would understand. All of this is
presented frankly in the Gospels, though Christian scholars for
centuries were not disposed to make very much of it. Jesus
was inextricably a part of the early- first-century Jewish world.
Then as now the Jewish world was large and diverse. Some
eight million Jews inhabited the Roman empire, accounting for
as many as ten percent of those who rendered unto Caesar.
Specifically on the (allegedly indisputable ) matter of the Resurrection, there is this:
There are no eyewitness accounts in the Gospels of the
Resurrection, and certainly nothing to justify the common
portrayal of that event in devotional art: as the great boulder
rolls away, Jesus, clad in a winding sheet, blazes forth in glory
from his grave. What one does find in some of the Gospels are
divergent accounts of various people visiting Jesus's tomb and
finding it empty These are thought by Schillebeeckx and others
to reflect an ancient pilgrimage tradition. In the decades
between the death of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels,
Christians visiting Jerusalem were shown an "empty tomb" as a
devotional aid; the empty-tomb tradition was then incorporated
into the Gospel texts. Far from being a proof of the
Resurrection, the stories of an empty tomb reflect the practice
of people who already believed.
Later on in the Gospels there are similarly divergent accounts
of appearances by Jesus to one or more of the disciples. These
cannot be taken at face value either. The idea of an
appearance is probably not meant to convey an actual sighting
but rather to suggest something more along the lines of a
recognition. This is the sense it has in the epistles, when Paul
describes his blinding on the road to Damascus, his vision of
Jesus, and his subsequent conversion. It is clear from the
context that what Paul really experiences is a "voice," a word
that survives today with a full complement of notoriously
ineffable connotations. It may very well be, as Schillebeeckx
suggests, that the evangelists, writing after Paul, used Paul's
description of his encounter (with a "risen" Jesus) as a model
for their own descriptions of what transpired in the aftermath of
the Crucifixion. |
