Scot McKnight's blog

Some of you may have noticed, but out of Jerusalem there is coming news of an upcoming Dead Sea Scroll meeting, the 60th anniversary meeting. The headliner of this event is the discussion, by Israel Knohl (an adventurous sort), of a stone tablet. Knohl claims the text, as he reconstructs it, could indicate a pre-Jesus Jewish belief in a messiah's resurrection on the 3d day. The messiah is a so called Simon. Much ink will be spillt on this one; keep your eyes open.

The historical Jesus debate, as we have seen, has three (or four) phases: the old quest (Reimarus to Schweitzer), the no quest of Bultmann and the new quest following Bultmann, and then what Tom Wright dubbed the "third quest" of the present day, though there are plenty of "new" questers still around. What is the 3d Quest?

First, it is concerned with a more positive appropriation of the Gospels and a less skeptical approach to them.

More people say bad things about Bultmann than who have read him (1884-1976). Bultmann was escorted into the theological world in the day of Schweitzer's famous Quest. Bultmann, a faithful church-going organist-playing son of the Lutheran church, knew that one could jettison it all or dig under and behind the historical to find the existential and demythologized true faith. Marburg University, so I've been told, could not have found lecture halls big enough for Bultmann's lectures in his glory days.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), famous for being a missionary doctor in Africa (Out of My Life) and for his "reverence for life," had three earned doctorates -- music, theology, and medicine -- and it was his second one that got him in trouble with the religious authorities. When he sniffed the wind of opposition to his free-thinking about Jesus, he chose to spend his life in Africa in obscurity as he worked out his own ideas.

Go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders or any bookshop of fine taste and you will find a section on Jesus, and the books about Jesus make one subtle or not-so-subtle promise: the book will reveal who the real Jesus was and what the real Jesus was like. These books belong to what scholars call the “quest for the historical Jesus,” and most know that this Jesus is not the Jesus Christ of Christian faith but someone less, someone more human, someone far more Jewish, and someone many like to shove in the face of orthodox Christians who believe Jesus was Son of God.

... a book comes along and you make a decision about its importance. This book, you decide, ends the need for a dozen or so other books on your shelves. You go to your shelf, pick up those books, put them in your "To Sell" (or "To Give Away") stack, and put that one book on your shelf that replace the others. Yes, I've got such a book for you: